Amentep

Cool. They are fun to watch but I'm surprised really there's so much interest in it.

You'd think so with the omnibus (?) collections they did, but they're difficult to find in my experience. I think the stores local to me got one volume.

I'm a bit ambivilent towards shooters - I'm not terribly good at them and really fast paced FPS sometimes trigger motion sickness (thank you, Far Cry 2) - would a non-shooter guy like Bioshock: Infinite? I've avoided the series because of that, but I've always liked the "look" of the games.

I wish Judge Dredd was better reprinted in the US. Maybe with IDW we'll see some decent reprints come along. Also wish I could get some Don Lawrence reprints without having to order from strange European countries*. *I think it was Denmark; the use of the € sign had me hightailing out of there, being the poor insensitive USAer I am, so I'm not 100% sure.** **Just kidding

Doesn't the second pretty much follow from the first?

The disconnect for me between ME2 and ME3 didn't destroy the game for me, but I felt like I was missing something (which since I don't have a way to get DLC, I was already feeling put out about). My experience with BSN is similar to Alan's, I remember the complaints about the NWN Official Campaign being rather loud (although many respected the fan creating game aspect of it). There was a lot of hate for Jade Empire in my time there. The fact it was on XBOX first, for it not being a medieval fantasy setting, for not being real-time with pause, for it being "racist" that a North American company was making a game set in "China", for picking character looks that were based off "chinese action film bad-guys with no understanding of Chinese culture", for putting "ninja" and "samurai" in a game set in "China", for creating a new language and more. It wasn't a pleasant time to be there and I was primarily a lurker. Mass Effect generated a lot of "Bioware is going to become a FPS company and ditch role-playing games" as I recall, too. I don't think any of the Bioware games haven't received a significant amount of flak; I think DAO did better in pre-release than many of the others. That said, it was the "Bethany should be romanceable" threads that ultimately made me abandon the forums even as a lurker. (As a side note, I don't mind DA2 being action-RPG oriented. I loved JE and ME. I think it would have made more sense to release it as a "Dragon Age: Sidestory" than as DA2 though because of the expectations).

I quit marvel after that whole Schism debacle in the X-Men turned into the Phoenix Five, the blundering stupidity of the characters was too much for me to maintain any suspension of disbelief. Would you recommend any of those for a now jaded ex-Marvel fan? Well I thought Hickman's Fantastic Four/FF was the best take on the group since Stan and Jack. But I know a lot of other people who can't connect to Hickman's writing, so I'm unsure. Avengers/New Avengers is just starting out, so its harder to say but I think its shaping up along the lines of the Fantastic Four/FF stuff. I skipped all of the crossover events of the past few years, though, to be honest so I don't have the same perspective either.

For me, though, that doesn't work since the end of the ME2 doesn't indicate that Sheppard is going back to work with the Alliance at all. I pretty much did not know what had happened between the end of ME2 and beginning of ME3 and nothing in the game really made it make sense (I went online to try and figure out what I was missing). Luckily the face import bug made my Sheppard look different so I pretended it was different character.

"And now, your highness, we will discuss the location of your hidden rebel base..."

To be fair, US society - in the form of "child advocates/protectors" prevented the medium from growing up in the 50s when it was expanding and tackling a variety of subjects. The publishers retreated to "safe" superhero, teen hi-jinks and funny animals. This fate was sealed when the distribution model in the US began going belly-up in the 70s and everyone moved to the direct market or died. It did leave room for independents (more than there had been in years in the shrinking mom & pop, spinner-rack days) but superhero comics are the bread and butter of the industry. If Image weren't doing SPAWN and WITCHBLADE they wouldn't be able to do WALKING DEAD, FATALE or SAGA. I enjoy a good superhero comic though (current highlight for me is Jonathan Hickman's Avengers and New Avengers; his Fantastic Four/FF was a brilliant take on that series). Besides the aforementioned FATALE, I've been enjoying Hickman's THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS (he has a way with strange alternate reality/sci-fi stuff) and THE SIXTH GUN of late.

You could name your barbarian "Norwegian Blue". He'd have beautiful plumage.

I bought PS:T last of all the IE games because the cover art didn't really appeal to me. Unlike IWD and BG2 (which I bought based on playing BG1), I picked PST off the shelf and ultimately put it back. The cover didn't appeal to me. I went back and read reviews then went and bought the game because postive reviews and by that point I'd enjoyed IWD and BG2. But that cover art really didn't do anything positive for me.

Seems to me that they could have given more than one area over to the market, for example, and increased the amount of locations. One of the quests has you looking for someone "shopping" in the market district for example. But there's really only three places they could be - Wade's, Wonders of Thedas or the market stalls out front. This could have been made more interesting by having the market split into two logical parts.

According to imdb she's only appeared in three films, all of them Japanese. Is there a story there? According to a newspaper article published in Japan in 1966 (and reprinted in Japanese Fantasy Film Journal) while making WATER CYBORG (the Japanse name of the film), Neal was a student at Sophia University. She had been a model since childhood (and perhaps had a current modeling contract in Japan) and had lived in the country previously for 2 years when younger. It wasn't unusual for films in Japan to cast US models (and US servicemen) as US characters. While Sonny Chiba is clearly the star, this film being a co-production had a lot of non-Japanese roles amid the heroes and villains since it was intended for a Japanese cinema release (on a matinee) and a US Television release (supposedly intended to be in 3 parts) and US Cinema release. None of the actors had the same degree of US recognition as Nick Adams in Invasion of the Astro-Monster/Godzilla vs Monster Zero or Robert Horton and Richard Jaeckel in The Green Slime, however, and are primarily thought to be individuals who were already in Japan at the time rather than imported actors. A lot of the same cast of this film ends up in THE X FROM OUTER SPACE, in fact, which was filmed around the same time.

While there were aspects of the buggy that I liked (I enjoyed humming the Moon Patrol theme while doing it too), ultimately the big drawback is that it consists of large swaths of nothing to do. This was replaced by the planet scanning which consisted of large swaths of nothing to do. Both would have been better by more focused use of the time. That said, I didn't hate either and actually always do as much as I can on both when I've played the games.

Awww, that's kinda sad. For some reason I didn't realize Stolen was the Cage film from last year.

Peggy Neal from the 1966 Sci-Fi/Horror/Action film THE TERROR BENEATH THE SEA (starring Sonny Chiba).

Maybe after leaving the area, all the corpses should be re-animated as the living dead. Giving you more reason to loot their body and carry all their stuff in the deep stash so they can't use that +7 Mace of Skull Bashing on you a second time around. And then giant carrion worms can get involved...

See - problem solved AND a useful reason to have a little used in console RPGs digging skill! Giant carrion worms - the gift that keeps on giving.

For me it was the guy from hell who hunted Cage that made the movie fun. Oh William Fitchner as The Acountant was uber-awesome, I'll agree. But Cage wasn't bad in it (neither was Amber Heard as the side-kick or Billy Burke as the villain).

Heh, just having finished my play through of DA:O, the bolded hit home for me. Denerim's supposed to be the New York or Los Angeles of Ferelden, so to speak. Crowds of people wherever you look. Instead, there's like a handful of folks standing around, but the place is otherwise deserted. If Assassin's Creed does one thing well, it's the atmosphere of the cities. They really do feel like actual cities full of people, rather than just an empty space. The weird thing about Denerim is that small backwood town Lothering appears to have more people in it simply by virtue of the blight refugees... Blight refugees that Denerim never, apparently, gets. But there are also other aspects - virtually no merchants? Virtually no people walking through? I tend to ignore these things - its a game after all (and not a game of DENERIM: THE FANTASY CITY SIMULATOR). But it does leave an oddness if you think too much about it.

Has Nic Cage been in any decent movie after 2000? I can't remember any. He's evolved into the Van Damme/Seagal of the 2000s. He was in Adaption in 2002. He did well in Kick-Ass in 2010 in a supporting role. But I prefer 2011's Drive Angry for its awesome over-the-top ridiculousness. Really fun film, IMO. I liked Snow White and The Huntsman, but I really felt like they didn't give the title character much to do. Stewart did the best she could with what they'd given her, but they hadn't given her a whole lot to work with. So that felt kind of odd. I watched THE LOSERS again, adaption of the Vertigo comic series. Never read the series, but the movie is actually pretty fun IMO with quite possibly the best "hissable" villain in modern films. If he had a mustache, I'm sure he'd have twirled it before running across ice floes. “That was a 'punch him in the face' nod, not a 'throw him off the roof' nod...It was at most a 'break his fingers' nod.”

Once a battle is over, a legion of high-speed 3 foot long carrion worms erupt from the ground devouring all of the corpses and dragging their bones underground to decorate carrion worm living rooms before the player can react. Problem solved!

I must have missed the initial public offering of stock in MCA...

Yeah, I was mostly spring boarding some thoughts I had based on what you wrote; I tend to give context to my thought so it wasn't really meant to be addressing your stuff directly. Consider me a tangent.