Pirandello

Alpha Protocol. The gameplay and premise of the game is something that really tickled my fancy. I was a field agent, so I was all silenced pistols and stealthy takedowns (which I had a lot of fun doing). However, the game does suffer when it comes to the AI (if they're in "search" mode, they always run towards wherever you're hiding), and the gunplay could use a bit of touching up as well. Another problem I had was that the game constantly threw my camera all over the place (usually accompanied with stuttering), so that was pretty annoying as well. Still, though, decent game, and I know they can make the second one a lot better if the project wasn't scrapped by Sega.

Taken (with Liam Neeson!):

Did a good article this time around. Japan and its obsession with English

Soylent Green (1973): Avatar (James Cameron):

I loved that in the first Starcraft, was so addicted that I never stopped playing it. There is a newer iteration in SC2, but I didn't like it as much as the original one.

My thoughts on technology advancement is that they are too slow. Or, actually, too slow in the fields that matter: medicine, communications, and space technologies. But, unfortunately, we are all very busy trying to perfect weapons of war to be concerned with anything else.

Uh-huh. http://kotaku.com/5736302/japanese-biggest-pornstar-to-become-chinas-biggest-popstar

Alpha Protocol. Needs moar faction warfarez, but otherwise, actually a VERY good game. It deserves a sequel, and a better one at that.

Judging by how able Bethesda's parent company was in acquiring id Software, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually did pick up the Gamebryo developers. It certainly would help facilitate streamlining the engine as they would literally have people who worked on the engine to help them with it, and not to mention that it'll make it their second "killer app" engine, right next to id's Tech 5.

Well, I've never actually put together a computer completely from scratch before. And I'd rather play it safe and follow instructions until I can do it by heart. And, yeah, I know first-hand how annoying putting the CPU cooler on is. I bought a new fan a few months back and it was a pain to install. It's a very quiet fan, though, I'm happy about that.

I look forward to the day where I can slap down $$$ for my own computer parts and say that I bought it with my own money. Putting it together, though, that's different. I know how to seat stuff and fiddle with the smaller wires in my computer, but my dad put together the system for the most part. I remember PC Gamer one issue, had a disc entirely dedicated on "How to Build Your Own Computer" complete with video walkthrough tutorial courtesy Logan Decker. I kept it somewhere for safekeeping knowing that I'd need it one day but I seem to have lost track of where the safebox was.

Note the absence of the word 'good'.

http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/25374/Japan+Coming+of+Age+Day.html Notice how one actually reports on actual Japanese culture, while the other... well... yeah.

That is stereotype of a weaboo. I generally avoid them as much as possible. I had one in my arts class in my senior year of high school. Listening to her speak wanted me to bring a shovel to the back of her head. On another note, I sort of crave an anime section to discuss specific animes instead of clumping them all up in this thread. But I suppose this is fine, too.

You are one lucky bastard. I envy you. Around when I was in high school, it was near the beginning of California's educational budget crisis. I already had a fascination with Japanese culture by then, but there weren't any language classes offered at my school. I think we would have had a Chinese teacher but the budget just didn't allow for it. They were already pink-slipping a lot of teachers and it just couldn't be done. In the end, it was either Spanish, German, or French. I took Spanish because my parents said it would "expand my horizons". I wanted to take German so I could have a cool language I could speak at home with my siblings (since I would teach it to them, too) that our parents wouldn't understand. Another nearby high school had Chinese and Japanese, and that was the newly-constructed one that the school district put a lot of time and money into as their pride and joy. And now I'm in college, as a CS major, so pretty much all of my time is spent on my required classes and breath courses so I literally have no time to take Japanese. I do have a friend at the dorm here who's self-teaching Japanese, so maybe I'll see if I can jump on the bandwagon with him.

I find my language rubbing off on the side of the UK a wee bit more than usual as of late. I watch too much BBC. Actually, now that I think about it, BBC is just about the only thing I watch these days next to Food/Travel/Discovery Network. Also, Donna Noble is a FAT UGLY COW (whether I'm talking about Catherine Tate is up to you to decide). That is all.

I think the UI for DA2 looks something horrid.

I just noticed that there seems to be an extreme rarity of translated anime in BluRay.

SWAT4 is drastically different from SWAT3. And you're right, it definitely would not swing well with the modern shooter crowd. It requires intense amounts of concentration most of the time. You don't even have to fire a shot and could already feel how tense things are. Naturally, I don't think modern shooter gamers like being unnerved and not firing their gun at everything that moves.

I never played the expansion pack, but it took what was good in the first game and improved on it. For one, in the expansion, the squad size was upped from 5 to 10. Suspects' unpredictability was also increased, since now they were allowed to pick up their guns and fire at your squad after feigning surrender (which could be nasty at times). The original game had co-op, but it was players only, and I could never get enough people online to do a co-op playthrough. TDM was loads of insanity, though.

Anybody ever play this game before? It's probably one of the best tactical squad shooters out there (where non-lethal is one of the keys to the game). Really exercises caution and patience, since going around spraying and praying will net you negative points in the mission (and thusly needing to start over again). You can cuff suspects after they stand down and collect weapons for evidence. The gameplay is great and so are the squad mechanics. It's really a shame they only give you 4 other guys but they get the job done. As noted earlier, there are quite a number of non-lethal weapons to choose from, like gas/pellet grenades, beanbag shotgun, pepperball paintgun, and my favorite: the taser. The first few missions are the easier ones, and then it shifts upward in difficulty by a lot, especially in the last mission when your squad is deployed ahead of the National Guard at a 5-star hotel because the well-armed and armored terrorists have set up bombs and the NG won't arrive in time to stop them. Also features some pretty disturbing levels as well, like the one where you have a warrant to storm a tenement slum where cultists inhabit, or getting a warrant to arrest a known serial killer (who's obsessed with women and masks).

I had whole grain pasta with a mix of alfredo/pomodoro sauce, with grilled chicken, feta cheese, and asparagus. Plus salad and breadsticks.

I didn't vote because I literally know jack-crap about Japanese geography. The sushi video was pretty nice, though. I didn't know eating at a sushi-ya had a lot of... custom to it. Then again, in America, we aren't particularly strapped with such customs. Seriously, though. I am of Chinese descent myself, and I could hardly believe how he literally drowned half the sushi in soy sauce. Even that's absurd by my standard.

It's mentioned by Mercer himself that he hears voices in his head telling him to kill people. Or consume them. Either one. It's the virus part of himself that conflicts with his humanity.