Gorth

Slight spoilers... The first three party members you pick up is a fighter, thief and sorcerer, covering the "basics" of a party. Which means, you can play just about anything you like and the only of the traditional base classes in short supply is clerics. You can pick up a druid and a paladin later for all your spiritual needs though. Generally just pick some class you would like to play, odds are there will be npcs covering other skill areas. Whatever else you do, make sure you are least play the game up untill the point of "the trial". Worth it just for the laugh. The forced companions and bad grind (piss poor design decisions like enemies spawning out of thin air) can be a bit of a joy killer.

Well, plotholes or not, I did enjoy large parts of the game despite a number of shortcomings. Lets face it, the game was based on the idea that it should be about companion missions and somebody somewhere needed to come up with a pretext why you should move from the start of the game to the end of the game. Since there is a law somewhere that states that modern games needs mini games and boss fights, they had to throw in that too, plus the mandatory big baddie at the end. Lets make it a human shaped baddie just for dramatic effect, people probably won't care too much about trivial details when getting to this point in the game. Nothing exceptional really, it being tried a tested formula, not only in Bioware games. Heck, a number of Obsidian games do it too, following those written and unwritten conventions. The difference is in the window dressing. My biggest plot complaint was, why the heck should I... *I* for effins sake, Sheppard II "Reaperslayer", the Chosen one, waste 50% of my precious time that I should have spent as "quality time" together with Yeoman Chambers in my bunk, saving the galaxy, be spent on doing geological surveys of random space rocks? Something any Cerberus clerk with a few graduate astro-geologists could do in the background

Well, yeah, I wouldn't have a problem with the Collectors being a small hit-and-run force were it not for the fact that several of the characters outright state that they'd have to target earth to complete their human reaper, something which, given Earth's defenses and the minute scale of the Collector force, seems an outright impossibility. Once again, this seems like an oversight, not an intentional feature - BioWare could very well prove me wrong in ME3, but that opens a whole new can of worms as to why everyone in ME2 (most importantly Shepard) seems to labor under the illusion that the Collectors somehow pose a legitimate threat to alliance space (rather than simply the fringe colonies). It seems the options here are that the Collectors are stupidly weak and could not have ever completed their plans, or that Shepard and everyone he works with are effectively braindead for the entirety of ME2. I'm honestly not sure which of these I dislike the least. I lean towards one or more oversights in coordinating the story. Just as a thought experiment, if we assume the Collectors are not acting on their own, but being manipulated by the reapers like sock puppets (assuming control), a possible use for the reaper they are building (the giant T2 robot), could be a fifth columnist infiltrator Reaper, something like Sovereigns replacement, which would be a completely different level of threat. We don't know if they intended to harvest all of humanity first or just enough to finish the current WIP reaper (and then possess a completely different magnitude of firepower). Yes. the story has too many holes to really connect the dots. Maybe some of the DLC/Comics ties up the loose ends better?

To be fair, the collectors do have one thing that makes them a seemingly formidable foe. They can do hit and run attacks at will, as without the navigational equipment, nobody can give chase through the relays. As a gamer, you know/suspect their strength (or lack of), but only after passing through the relay to their base can you confirm that they are indeed not a military threat in a conventional warfare scenario. Never mind what their covert activities may or may not amount to on a strategic level in conflict.

I exist, therefore I am! Existential crisis averted

I thought Spectres were just Jedi/Grey Wardens (mind you, I haven't played much of the first game)?

Inspired by somebody elses UFO: Enemy Unknown endeavours, I started a new game over the weekend. Things went fairly smoothly with only a few casualties... that is until I managed to catch my first large Alien ship on the ground. The Ethereals took control of half of my team and wiped out the other half in rapid succession. Complete "party wipe". Ah well, had accumulated quite a lot of money and had a spare team in a spare Skyranger, so the loss was managable if humiliating. Second team didn't fare much better when running into a Muton ship. I had forgotten how hard to kill (with laser rifles and rockets) those things are. Also forgot that they tend to not stay dead and will sometimes get back again, behind your lines >_ One squaddie and a tank survived. Squaddie got a promotion too. Time to go on a recruiting campaign. At least I got to keep all my guns and personal armour.

If they say that about ME2, no wonder I no longer feel like the target audience of the franchise Back to getting my butt kicked and dying unfairly and inexplicably in UFO Enemy Unknown.

Yeah, need to kill something... fast!...

Just for Gorgon (and apropos the elbow unit). cubit - A biblical unit of distance. It is the distance between a man's middle finger and his elbow. It is about 18 inches or 45 centimeters. A cubit is divided into 6 palms or 24 digits. Other funny units: barn - Those nuclear physicists are a funny bunch. They define a "barn" (yes, from the saying "as big as a barn") as a cross section of an atomic nucleus. It is 10-28 m2. This unit of measurement is used when these physicists/comedians need to quantify the scattering cross-section of particles. An outhouse is defined as 10-6 barn and a shed is 10-24 barns. klick - It's military-talk for kilometer. The term became popular in the 1960s among American soliders in Vietnam, though some believed it had been used as early as the 1950s by soldiers stationed in Germany. It probably came from the "k" and the "l" in "kilometer," but I suspect the soldiers thought it was cooler to say klick than kil-o-meh-tur. (Source) jerk - Ever feel a jerk of the car when you accelerate fast? Well, engineers define a jerk as a unit of the rate of change of acceleration. 1 jerk is equal to 0.3048 m/sec3. From this website

Danes used to have an 'Alen' (Ell), which was more than an elbow (an arms length = two elbows?) Danish units of measurement Ell as an old Germanic unit of measure.

I also haven't heard of it. It can't be that hyped. I thought I had heard the name before... Yahtzee takes on Nier

Worms. Addictive, fun and you can play a few rounds in 15-20 minutes. Gorth and his henchworms shall rule the tournament chart. Cry Havok and let lose the Worms in Paradise!

Wrong thread much?

Why replace it when they can own it? Mid last year, China had more than a trillion dollar worth of US bonds. It's probably only Japan who owns more of the public debt. That of course also means China has a vested interest in the US not going bankrupt.

You've picked the Hardcore forum mode? 'Worms' is still the best investment I've made in a game for a long time, Steam or otherwise. No silly DRM or Achievements, just sheer unapologetic violence that would put Tom & Jerry to shame.

It has a "Made in China" sticker on the back

Hehe, time to cut down on research expenses. Now I feel tempted to play this game again, although I've started new games before, I tend to drift towards X-Com 3. Maybe it is time to visit Cydonia again and visit some righteous retribution on the master brain

Do you have access to alien blaster technology yet? They make excellent "tin openers". One shot knocks a hole in the battleship, the second shot fired through the hole clears the way for the grunts

Maybe it really said "Like This", not "Lick This"?

Depends on the hardware. I once bought a card which gave me Soldier of Fortune II and one that came bundled with the original Unreal. They worked nicely. Anything else has been a bad joke, usually older non-upgradeable versions of media players, media makers or antivirus software. More in the nature of ad-ware than usable soft-ware.

There must be a reason though why game developer always use a game engine these days. Maybe they don't feel like constantly re-inventing the wheel? Making a game engine from scratch really only makes sense if you are interested in the tech aspects (or your game revolves around a particular new feature you want to introduce). If you are mostly concerned about the game design and content, it makes sense looking at what's already available. E.g. this thread about Fife (new homepage)

Trying to beat it or playing it for the very first time? A few tactical hints: Autofire is your friend when using automatic guns. So is using the button that reserves enough action points for an interrupt (overwatch) if your marines spot an alien. The ufopedia gives a few hints for some of the aliens as to what their weaknesses and strengths are (cyberdisks and those big twolegged ones). Proximity grenades are a great invention when you need to cover your back. There is nothing embarrassing in using smoke screens if caught out in the open

http://www.irontower...pic,2419.0.html I think I mentioned in another thread that there wasn't really anything I was "looking forward to". Maybe I should retract that statement. I hope this game gets a good release and a positive reception.

Just playing with the media tag. Noticed in the funny things thread that they seem to be working... Slade: Dizzy Mama http://youtu.be/WFo5Zay6t2A