Gorth

Fallout (which happened to be released before Black Isle was officially created)

Moved into my new place Saturday. New city, new state, new challenges My neck is a bit sore, but that is a combination of me not being used to carry 30kg of sportsbags and backpacks for 5km (I usually leave such stuff for military guys) and not having a bed to sleep on before Friday. No phone and internet yet either, which does suck a bit. That and not having a fridge or washing machine either. Ah well, 4 more days.

As somebody mentioned previously, it really is about control. Religion doesn't make people frothing lunatics, odds are they already were and some clever charismatic demagogue types will come along and find a way to channel the pent up rage. Instead of having an anarchistic, randomly lashing out mob, you get a directed, controlled anger lashing out at "designated" enemies of the mob. People feel more comfortable with "shared values" and hating the same things. If you want to solve the problem of fundamentalism and extremism, you first have to get to the bottom of the causes of peoples anger and do something about it first. Something a number of ex-leaders in North Africa realised too late. Some reasons are cultural, where medieval, tribal cultures feel their patriarchal (and often misogynistic) systems under threat by change, others are too many youths with too much spare time on their hands and probably dozens of other reasons.

The Soviet Union...

Plus, you would expect heavy resistance/obstacles from powerful lobbies, who have a vested interest in not finding cheap alternatives to current energy sources.

Just out of curiosity, have you read the two "heroes" books featuring Ludwig Schwartzhelm and Kurt Helborg? Same conundrum, except the protagonists are slightly different. The fight is over the empty elector seat in Averland (after the death of Marius 'The Mad' Leitdorf) and Helborg/Schwartzhelm is fighting to the death supporting the two opposing sides. All masterminded by a clever Slaanesh cultist who wants the province for herself Nothing like a bit of intrigue at court to get the blood flowing... quite literally.

Is DA2 all about the conflict between templars and mages? Honestly, that was the most boring part of DA1 and what made me lose most of my interest in the franchise even before DA2. It is just too much a poor mans Warhammer universe. Mages draw their power from the warp fade and unless properly trained and with disciplined minds risk possession by warp fade entities. Those with magic capability who refuses to live and study at the official College of Magic circles of magic will be branded renegades malificar and hunted down by the Templars of Sigmar and summarily executed. Warhammer just pulls it off so much better

Depending on how mod friendly/unfriendly the game turns out to be, I would expect custom weapons and nude mods to be among the first things to come out.

I haven't seen it, but the trailer makes it look just as bad as Independence Day Dicovererd that the pilot episode DVD of Caprica that I bought had a second disc in there with the pilot episode of something called 'Warehouse 13'. Never heard of it before, but looked kind of interesting in a twilight zone and x-files bastard child of way.

You won't say that when heavily armed Zen Buddhist guerillas starts the next insurgency somewhere...

And Kasumi is quite powerful too with her teleporting backstabbing. :D That sounds like the teleporting rogue in the DA2 demo.

A bit of Master of Orion 2. Experimenting with custom races that doesn't make sense from a "power gaming" perspective, yet not necessarily gimped either. Just trying fun combos. Cybernetic, sub terranean, less food producing Gorthaurians for the win When not playing that, I'm busy ridding the world of barbarians, purging them with Greek Fire as the Byzantine Empire in EUIII. National ideas focussing on religious intolerance and military elitism.

Watercooling is the way to go. So many nuclear reactors can't be wrong

Things that get me out of bed... Sore neck muscles during crunch time The realisation that you are late for a plane at the airport Sunday morning boredom Work Having a lot of fun with the OCBA (Thats the governments 'Office of Consumer and Business affairs') here in South Australia. Moving to Brisbane and expected to get my tenancy security bond back from the place I rented here. Turns out that some office clerk has decided to spice up his salary by embezzling the funds placed in their trust. Instead of doing the expected electronic funds transfer to my account, he decided that it wasn't possible (with some rather spurious claims) and issued a cheque. Guess what, he never sent the cheque, yet it was cashed in by "somebody, somewhere". He claims to have called me and I should have instructed him to divert the money (without any paperwork or signing any forms) to some address halfway out in the outback (where the cheque was cashed in). Doesn't take a genius to figure out what happened, he issued it to himself. Decided to Sic both the Ombudsman and the police on them... Ah well, it's only a few thousand dollars, but they are MY dollars dammit. I'm beginning to think Guarddog is right, governments are crooks, all of them

Unless that's all part of the dwarf origin, I guess I missed all of that somehow. I wasn't even able to get into the Senate chamber until the very end as I recall. Fuzzy Memory Disclaimer. You get bits and pieces along the way, leaving it up to you to piece the puzzle together. I was left with the impression that Harrowmont was the "conservative" force, being in favour of the caste based, isolationist society, yet looking like the "decent" short term option whereas Bhelen, being in love with a woman below his station is the "anarchist", trying to break down society in it's current form in order to get things the way he wants them, giving the short term impression of a lying, scheming villain. The beauty of it is, that long term and short term impressions aren't always the same. For me the best part of the game and beating the stupid Mage/Templar conflict by several miles

Dictator in Lederhosen: Those black leather trenchcoats just look more intimidating than lederhosen.

Lazy bastards, get a real job

The jellyfish species (sorry, forgot their name) nothing less than worships their crustacean overlords

Sorry, that just struck me as very familiar. Lock me in a room with real live people and I stare longingly at the exit after only a few hours. I generally hate intrusions into my privacy sphere. This place is nice and familiar and can be visited in both small and large doses at my own discretion. No companionship is forced upon me (hey, you taking notes Obsidian?). As Guarddog said, you get the width and breadth of international society, hearing views that you wouldn't believe existed. Between the surreal and the real, it's a great source of learning and entertainment in one nice package

Great to see somebody actually doing something non-violent for what they believe in for a change. Nice iniative

Lets get back to gaming news, new news, old news, strange news etc. More news to follow

Start of old thread End of old thread Erhh.. im Westen nichts Neues

It starts uninstalling itself without asking you?

I've only played Midwinter (not the sequel), haven't tried Thief and Deus Ex 'Elite' was probably the first game where I thought that here was something you couldn't do with 2D. Would I be nitpicking if I emphasized the "dropping 2d in favour of 3d" part, I.e. where 3 dimensions isn't really a requirement for the game mechanics, yet was chosen in order to pitch a game idea anyway?

One of the original arguments I remember for dropping 2d in favour of 3d (like 10-15 years ago) was that it was cheaper just to create a 3d model that the engine could render in real time rather than having a horde of "painters" providing the art assets. Ironically the result wasn't cheaper graphics, just more sparsely populated (streamlined?) environments. Since the word "cheaper" was thrown around, noone dared suggesting using 2d artwork based titles to a publisher because you get shown the exit right away. 3d or nothing. 3d became the new black and was marketed as the thing every young hopeful game should aspire to purchase in order to be a cool kid. At least that's how my (occasionally) fuzzy memory keeps repeating it back to me. So it went the way of the Dodo, The Space Sim, 4X Games, The Isometric Perspective and Turnbased Tactical Squad Combat game.