Thursday Next

Even the independents can't be trusted. Turns out at least two 'independents' were fully paid up members of the Lib-Dems. Conning bastards. :-O Sons of a bitches!

It's a funny thing. In my part of the videogame business there are tonnes of women. But, I could count on one hand the number of girls I've met testing games. Again, a chicken and egg problem. With hardly any women in the industry the arrival of a genuine female means that she is instantly a nexus for attention. Whether it is the well meaning kind of "Oh you're a girl so you must be struggling to integrate." to the more negative, slobbering, "I can't wait till we all get drunk at the Christmas party so i can book myself a trip to HR." sort. Either way, it makes you stand out as being different. Much as I would hate for it to happen to me, I do honestly believe that forcing the number of women in the industry to be higher by the application of quotas would be an effective means of redressing the imbalance. Once having a number of girls in the office becomes the norm, the novelty wears off so that girls are not made to feel uncomfortable by default, so more games will be made by people who think like girls, and more girls will want to get into the industry... At least, that's what would happen in an ideal world.

I meant the people making them rather than the people playing them.

So far as the eye-candy thing goes, that cuts both ways. Inaccessible body image is a staple of modern media and is not tied to a single gender. Chris Redfield's arms are ridiculous for example. There are few "ugly" protagonists full stop. As to the role women actually play in games, they do tend to be the support role at best and a plot device at worst. We can all rattle off games with decent female leads, but the majority of games are still "save the girl", even Ico was a "drag the useless woman around the castle-em-up". To be honest, there are still plenty of issues with getting women in gaming in the real world. Perhaps when there are more of them, we'll have more balance in the games that are made?

No, but they all seem rather chummy with the Doc. Maybe he transported them there, or something wibbly wobbly happened?

No worries. I'll be mindful to spoiler tag anyway. It's no bother and if it saves a jonny-come-lately (like myself) from a spoiled experience then it's worthwhile.

Given the show occasionally features time travel appearing in 2020 and then later in Victorian times isn't exactly hard to achieve.

Well maybe you should. You also overlooked point one. RW hitting people with baseball bats was not subject to an official investigation by UK advertising authorities. In fact at the time RW was first revealed to be hitting people with baseball bats precisely balls all people knew about it. To be honest, I'd have thought ME3 endings are pretty much up there with "Rosebud is his sled" in this circle at least.

iirc there was an item you could equip in FFXIII-2 that let you kill enemies without going into the battle. I liked that feature.

Would she not have been recruited from the episode where they have the mining and wake up the lizard dudes underground and someone stays behind and such?

I voted for the two independents for exactly the reason Dean mentions. I do not think that the police should be directly tied to a political party. My first choice got in. I can only assume that I am the only person who actually voted.

Apologies, would have spoilered it myself but, (i) Statute of limitations on that game is long since passed especially given the amount of exposure the endings got, and (ii) as Ethan points out, the whole thread is spoilers-ville.

Haha....Ahahaha... AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!

I can swallow the jump from two to three since by this point I'm thinking that the Reapers were lending Cerberus a hand which would neatly explain how they went from ludicrously well funded terrorists to a galactic power. They weren't exactly that powerful either given that one Alliance Fleet took them to pieces. The highlights (and lowlights) for me were:

Keep them for as long as you are subbed. If you lapse and re-sub you keep what you already got while subbed. Anything your bought at a discount is yours to keep once you leave, as are some things like themes and avatars.

Finished my first full Shepard playthrough. Thought the end of 3 was great. Maybe playing them all together makes the ending feel more coherent? The lack of waiting has not allowed me to build it up and put it on some pedestal that is totally unrealistic? The fact that I was not involved in the community discussions means I do not feel as invested or entitled as those who felt that their input gave them some right of ownership over the franchise? Or maybe it's because it's been run down so much over the internet that my expectations were low. In any event. That was a great trilogy. Now I need something else to immerse myself in. The Witcher didn't really do it for me.

I think that EU is taking the same route as PS3 PS+ in that they will have two long term, big ticket releases and then rotate in other titles on a regular basis. Rather than the US content dump at the start of the month/quarter/whatever. Either way, both services will see parity to a certain degree. Edit: Incidentally, as is to be expected given the early life of the console, I own most of the free content, however, looking forward to some good freebies in the future.

Here is a TOTALLY UNRELATED link. http://www.technicolor.com/en/hi/home-entertainment/packaged-media-blu-ray-dvd/disc-distribution

Put the price up 20c then. No one will stop buying pizza because of a 20c price hike. No. One.

Cinematography? What they borrowed from cinema was the story for Vice City. This whole "not watching stuff" discipline is obviously a relatively recent thing, either that or the Housers spontaneously came up with a story that was pretty much exactly Scarface (+some Carlito's Way iirc) without any reference material whatsoever. Unless of course it's just TV that he is distancing himself from, in which case, that's an odd distinction to make imo, especially given the Miami Vice feeling of Vice City. Not criticising for doing satire, or parody or taking inspiration from films / TV by the way. Just odd that Houser of all people would suggest that he doesn't.

I like that in one of the books (think it is the 3rd or 4th) the author refers to the films via a characters dream. Nice bit of reverse 4th wall breaking sort of but not.

Boris Johnson is the best politician ever. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2012/nov/01/boris-johnson-lefty-tossers-video

I agree Dean. Politicians tend to answer the question they wanted/expected to get, rather than the one they were asked. He was obviously wanting/expecting to talk about gay marriage so that's the first place his brain went.

Creepy! I'd say that it's because as Ethan has pointed out many times he likes to play RPGs as women because he feels those are characters he can most closely associate with*, but given Kaiden is bi it could go either way on this. *and he's a perv that spends the whole game looking at their butts. That's precisely what I was referring to. Ethan and I both agreed that despite playing as FemShep, seducing a male character is still weird.