Mr. GOH!

Bought Shogun 2. Best purchase I've made all year.

So anyone interested in a TAY clan? I am currently a ronin samurai on multiplayer just looking for a clan to join up with. Edit: I adopted the TAY Steam group as my clan. We get a bonus to bow units.

That'd be pretty nifty. I am 100% down with joining a TAY clan for Shogun. I'm still exploring the game, but it looks like it'd be a blast in multiplayer. Steam ID is Mr. GOH! for anyone who wants to add me as a friend for some samurai battlin'.

Oh, don't get me wrong, the actual metacritic score is a huge deal to EA. They want flagship games to hit a 90. Anything below an 80 is a failure. But that's the aggregate score. Nobody gives half a shit about the user review section because it's completely worthless.

This whole brou-ha-ha over the Bioware employee submitting a user review to Metacritic is puzzling to me; who pays attention to Metacritic user reviews except enormous suckers and the remarkably cretinous?

I dunno. This "right" doesn't really seem like a fundamental right. I mean, it'd be essentially a right to unpublish a published work, which isn't a right in and of itself but something the creator of a work negotiates with its publisher. Politicians and job seekers will just have to deal with their past peccadilloes being online.

Dragon Age 2. Terrible endgame and woeful ending.

DA2 is severely flawed, but FFXIII features more nonsense, more awful characters, and less gameplay than DA2. The fact that FFXIII was a lump mof shit polished to impeccable shininess further heightens its terribadness. Also, while DA2's characters may not be the best, they do not provoke berserker rage at their nonsense gibberish/moan-y non-words/generally hateful existence. Please, folks, criticize DA2 all you want as it likely deserves such criticism. But that won't make FFXIII anything other than an interminable and pointless Z-grade anime with some bits where you might have to hit a button or two.

Kids on Xbox live who squeal or moan without end into the mic. Gamers who smoke and game at the same time constantly. It's just gross. Only applies when I'm around. General gamer ignorance. This is most likely a subset of my loathing for the unacceptable ignorance of humanity in general, which is in turn one of the cornerstones of my misanthropy. Gamers who like FFXIII. But gamers who like the story and characters in FFXIII are even worse. Gamers who think MGS or FF games feature interesting characters and deep explorations of philosophy. Note: these games may be better in Japanese, though I really doubt it. The casual sexism, homophobia and racism in videogames and exhibited by many gamers. Some of this is likely inartful trolling, but a lot of it is real. Finally, the word salad that passes for writing Brian Ashcraft often posts on Kotaku.

Holy Moley, there are honest-to-goodness boobs in New Vegas?!?!?! I was under the impression it was a sickening mixture of moobs, forumite penises and pictures of poop.

Lazy.

Hey, my negative reaction is tempered by the fact that DA2 is still a good Bioware RPG. Better than Jade Empire, at least.

Huh. I find Varric to be pretty neat. But I agree that Isabella just isn't that interesting (although I suspect that her being from Rivain will play into the Qunari quest lines at some point - maybe that will make her more compelling). I've only just gotten Merrill, but she doesn't seem to be a Vanille. But I suppose that could change. Fenris and Aveline are more interesting than II thought they'd be as well. But, yeah; the team isn't as interesting as DA:O's. I think so far my impression of DA2 is that it's a cheaply made knockoff of DA:O. I'm having fun and enjoying it, but I can't shake the feeling that it's missing a lot of the soul that makes some RPG's great. I can feel the decisions the dev team made to cut costs and development time while still being able to ship something that appears to be a well-made Bioware RPG on paper. In the execution, though, it just feels cheap.

I take issue with this viewpoint: it's not a choice. If it were a choice then I would choose to believe in God and seek forgiveness from Him for my sins and whatnot, because as people so often point out that is the "safer" option. However, regardless of how appealing a belief is, or how much I might truly want to believe it, I cannot will myself to belief something that just doesn't make any sense to me. Disclaimer: if my tone comes across as hostile I assure you that I do not mean it to be. Wait, it's the *safer* option? You're not falling for the fallacy of Pascal's Wager, are you? Because just choosing to believe in God A isn't safe if it's really God B who's running the show. Pascal's Wager assumes that Christianity is the only viable alternative to atheism, and that there aren;t a myriad of different Christianities whose doctrines are all at odds and would send the adherents of other doctrines to an afterlife of torment. People can believe whatever nonsense they want; I'm firmly of the opinion that the majority of foundational beliefs of any person are essentially arational (though atheism itself is rational). Pascal's Wager's blatant fallaciousness really gets my goat, though.

After playing some more DA2, I'm beginning to wonder about some of the design decisions, specifically the relentlessly recycled locations. I had thought that EA is very sensitive to reviews. Yet, the location recycling pretty much guarantees a reduced score. There are several other non-reviewer-friendly facets of DA2 that similarly puzzle me; Bioware and EA had to know DA2 would be dinged for a whole host of these sorts of issues and that nothing else about DA2 is transcendent enough to overcome these shortcomings. This is not a complaint about the game; I just wonder if someone at EA/Bioware dropped the ball or if there's some other internal policy change that led to these strange and sometimes frustrating decisions about how to build DA2.

See, and that's an interesting thing to do. My issue with it is that if they're going to experiment with trying to change things up so much, do it with a new franchise. I can't speak for everyone, but I liked DA:O for what it was, and I wanted more of that. I'm not saying that franchises need to stagnate, but I think that if you're going to make such fundamental changes then you need to either pick a new franchise, or at the very least do a reboot rather than a sequel. I dunno. DA:O's storytelling wasn't the strongest. It wasn't what I liekd most about DA:O by a loooooooooooooooooong shot. I'm much more miffed at Bioware for borking companion outfits than by the change in narrative style. I think it's wonderful and appropriate to experiment within the same series. I mean, it still feels like a Dragon Age game, just with a different approach to storytelling. In fact, I feel that this style has a lot of promise. If it lives up to even half of its promise, it'll be a far better narrative than DA:O's sort of generic "Save the Realm!" narrative.

I've played a couple hours of DA2 and I like it so far. Very minor spoilers. High Points: 1. Performance - I'm playing DA2 on my m11x and it runs on high settings like a charm. DA:O runs fairly well on High as well, but there could be problematic lag if I don't restart DA:O every hour or so. I'm guessing DA:O had a fairly severe unplugged memory leak while DA2 doesn't. I'm using the hi-res texture pack (which, ironically, I cannot use on my much beastier desktop because my desktop GPU only has 512 megs of VRAM and doesn't support DX11). 2. Graphics/art design - Characters look much better than they did in DA:O and the level art is much more interesting, at least in Kirkwall. 3. Voice Acting - It seems, I dunno, less stuffy than the acting in DA:O. The incidental characters are well-voiced, too. Flemeth even seems better acted by Katie Mulgrew. Just, well, points: 1. Combat - It's different. I'm playing a mage femHawke, and her basic staff attacks seem heftier than the mage's attacks in DA:O. She also attacks *much* faster; at my best count she attacks 3 times every two seconds. DA2 seems to throw more enemies at you per fight, but the lowliest mooks die a lot faster than in DA:O. Then again, most fights have included waves of enemies, so it's tough to tell when a particular fight is close to an end. 2. Difficulty - The jump between normal and hard and hard and nightmare seems much more significant. On nightmare my mage gets regularly destroyed by single hits from mid-tier mooks while on normal I never need to chug potions (which are not called poultices this time around), thank heavens. So far I've played on Hard and find that fights are tough, but winnable if I pay attention. 3. Mages - My mage doesn't seem nearly as overpowered as a DA:O mage of equivalent level (around level 5 right now). I think this is because the classes have been re-balanced; my mage still does a good bit of damage. Despite the generally faster battle flow, spell cooldown timers seem to have been substantially increased from DA:O. 4. Hawke - Hawke seems okay so far. I'm using mostly "good" conversation options and Hawke's responses generally fit with what I expect. She does have that Commander Shepard patronizing tone thing going on, though. 5. Time leaps - There's a lot of potential here. So far I've experienced one significant time leap. It's annoying that Hawke greets random NPC's as old friends while only referring to why Hawke and the NPC know each other in the vaguest of terms. It's stupid and jarring. I just may have strong personal aversion to references to off-screen events that sound important; it just seems like lazy writing. Low Points: 1. Art Design - When it's good, it's good. When it's bad, it's ugly as shit. The beginning Lothering location feels unfinished and unconnected to the world. The one location I've been to outside Kirkwall was bland. 2. Who am us, anyway? - After the first time jump, Hawke and sib are randomly given a quest that becomes the main quest. I found this jarring. It really made me wonder who Hawke my player character, is. I hope the rest of the game hangs together better. 3. Inventory - I still loathe not being able to customize my companions' armor. I hate that I get so much armor loot that my mage will never be able to use. I feel like it's all a waste. I mean, I have this set of Blood Dragon armor just taking up space because it's worthless to sell and my companions refuse to wear it. I guess I just like to play dress-up. I think I would mind this limitation a lot less if you were able to equip your sibling, at least. Bottom Line: This is more Dragon Age, sure. But rather than being the bastard child of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I'm beginning to feel like it's the bastard child of Dragon Age and Planescape: Torment (another game with very limited armor options, I'll admit). That is, DA2 is strongly focused on an overarching personal narrative rather than the accomplishment of a concrete goal from the get-go (such as: Destroy the archdemon; rescue Imoen and destroy Irenicus; get a waterchip for your Vault). Kirkwall has far less character than Sigil and so far the companions aren't as colorful. But I can clearly see that DA2 aspires to Torment's level of storytelling, and I admire it for that. It's a consolized and streamlined iteration of the DA franchise, true; but it also seems, so far, to be trying to weave a more ambitious and personal tale. I hope it succeeds.

Fingers and toes, mostly. Sometimes I can crack my neck, but I haven't been able to recently. I used to crack my back, too, but I haven't since developing some minor back problems.

Nerdiest thing I ever did was probably be the Gamemaster for Star Wars RPG and Call of Cthulhu RPG in high school. Nerdiest thing I do nowadays is either play video games or my collection of sci-fi/fantasy novels. Or maybe the various board game nights I attend, although we keep it to Risk and Avalon Hill games ratehr than WH40K, which I only played as a con attendee back in middle school.