Roderick

There's nothing about Morrowind that isn't extremely awesome and non-traditionally insane. I think the main attractions in the Elder Scrolls world are a very grandly developed sense of culture that persists in the world in every way, from architecture to concurrent views on history and lots of ways to say the same thing (in Morrowind the main body of gods was called the Tribunal, the Temple and ALMSIVI, just as in real life you have gods with many names). The other thing that gives it unique flavour is its host of deadric princes. Sure, there are more standard 'invisible' gods in Elder Scrolls (the aedra such as Akatosh, Dibella, Kynareth), but the deadric princes are where the real fun lies. They often manifest in the world, they meddle in human affairs directly and every game has you finding their legendary artifacts. The final thing that's so great is that there are very believable political systems in place, vying factions and scheming politicians. At the same time, it's never presented in black and white, there are no good or bad guys, just gradients. Everyone's motivations are understandable and often reasonable. There are few cackling villains in this world, only tragic and misunderstood heroes. I'd like to lay the whole dwemer-naming-convention thing to rest, btw. I understand the situation now. Thanks for explaining.

But if mer are elves, why make the distinction between the mer races as elves, dwarves and 'other'? It makes it seem sloppy, unless mer is a classification above that. In that case, mer are mer, and can be divided below that as dwarves, elves, etc. It's only way for this to make any sense. It might be that dwemer and orcs started out as an elven race, but evolved into something else along the way that made it logical to classify them no longer as an elven race. But it's such a weird thing for a race to be both elven and dwarven, they're not the same and Bethesda apparently thinks so too, or they wouldn't have made the distinction.

The full list is nothing short of amazing. Nintendo isn't skimping on this one. Minish Cap was all I hoped for!

All right, it makes sense if 'elves' is not the same thing as 'mer'. Gotcha!

OK, I am probably a little confused now. I thought the Dwemer were a different race thatn elves. The game never calls them elves, they're 'dwarven' for crying out loud. Why make the distinction in that case? I do agree with your reasoning why engineering would be out of place, Sno, by the way. It's sound reasoning. Races I'd like to see have a part in Elder Scrolls are some point are Akaviri and Sloads. Hehe.

WpmILPAcRQo

It's great music. Also check out You're Not Here from SH3: (Don't watch the video though, it's pretty annoying)

I saw a presentation of Nifflas this year on the Nordic Game conference. He was working on an extensive tilebased engine that would power his future games. Don't know why I'm telling you this.

Oh fuck it IS Ellen Page!

It's called... no, I can't say, maybe someone will Google this Let's just say it's about DREAMS and BEARS and a SAGA. The game's not even out yet, we softlaunched a year ago on a national social network (boy that sounds like Nazis) and we're currently trying to launch this damn thing in Germany. OK, now I'm pretty sure this is about Nazis. I should've gotten suspicious at our rotating fireplace. I've been working on the game for a good two years now, so it'll be stellar when it finally hits the (virtual) streets. I hope it becomes a bit of a success because my employment quite depends on it. You know, even though it's at its core a typical money-grabbing online social game, it's kind of a cool place. As you can see we have really nice handdrawn artwork and there's a huge emphasis on story and quests, courtesy of yours truly. My point is, if your kid is going to waste a lot of time and (your) money on anything online, our game isn't be such a bad choice. Once it hits wherever you live. I'll inform you when that time comes!

In the wake of the Carrie Fisher / William Shatner feud, who else can't resist to jump on the bandwagon and take a piece of that hot media action but George Takei. mvTCr5Z-0lA Takei is the master of the he's clearly not taking this serious himself, yet I'm still embarrassed as fuck for him. This man is a genius, make no mistake. It's pure gold.

Kinda reminds you of the Garfield strips without Garfield. Wow, Leonard is really unlikeable. Back to movies, I've been watching the strangely international (by which I mean these movies are spoken in three different languages at the same time) Largo Winch flicks. Based on the French comic (which is pretty great). These movies rock! They're half boardroom thriller, half James Bond action film, but it all comes together surprisingly well. Usually I get massively bored with action films (especially the action scenes themselves), but Largo Winch manages to circumvent that by letting the action flow from a logical espionage/thriller plotline. Despite it all being highly glossy and glamorous, it's easy to buy into. Easily digested, but surprisingly fun.

On second thought, I'm not sure what I meant with 'faster editing' either. It's more... it needs to be... pithier? It's hard to grasp. (PS. Thunderpeel, you have passed the balls test.)

I like it, Nevsky. It's obvious it can use some faster editing and a better focused kind of satire (the jokes here don't really seem to have a point other than being funny), but it looks slick and you're sure to work the kinks out. I work on an online social world for kids, so obviously I make it point to work obscure references to The Mighty Boosh into the text.

I never use fast travel, I only use the ingame carriage method of transportation, which is limited between the major cities. I'll do you one better though. I play without the map. I've never used it, never even looked at it. Don't bethink me an idiot though, there's a sound reason here. I've found that maps are so useful in a lot of games that you spend too much time looking at them instead of using the game world itself. And since you see the exact shape of the world, you also see its borders, which limits your imagination. For the 90-odd hours I've been playing so far I have been forced to search for visual reference points in the environment and it's been fantastic. I've gotten lost on countless mountains, had no clue where I was and had to negotiate ravines and grasslands just to discover where I was. I use the compass to point me in the general direction, but even there I wish the game gave me descriptions of where I should head instead of pointing it out to me. My point is: maps take away some of a splendour of exploring and I wanted to check out if I could do without. I've been having a wonderful time. As a fun excercise, I plan on drawing the map once I finish the game from my own experience, and then comparing it to the actual map. For science.

Even though fast zombies are no zombies at all, this looks nice.

I had anticipated this very answer, Sno, you walked RIGHT into my trap! Haha! I agree with you that it's exactly the in-universe confusion and contradictions in lore that make it so appealing, sometimes you just don't know which subjective account of some historic batle is true. However, two problems still remain with the naming of dwemer as dwarves. 1. It's logical that the dunmer, altmer, bosmer et al are collectively known as the elven races. They need that monniker to signify the collective. There is, however, only one 'dwarven' race, the dwemer. So there's no need for that collective name, even if it is correct in-universe. 2. It's not the in-universe part of the game that subjectively calls dwemer dwarves, it's the interface. 'dwarven armor' and the like. That's just messy, since it arbitrarily mixes dwarven en dwemer. To my recollection this didn't happen in Morrowind, where the word dwarf rarely if ever fell. I could be wrong on this though. It just irked me that dwemer were referred to as dwarfs. Going on a tangent, I am perpetually disappointed that the whole dwemer theme is never exploited fully. This disappointment was already present in Morrowind, so it's not Skyrim-exclusive. The dwemer ruins in these games are largely just tile-swaps for regular dungeons. They look really cool (steam, valves, pistons, gears, whatnot), and there is a bit more emphasis on levers and extremely light puzzles, but it's still pretty vanilla. The first time I went into a dwemer ruin I was expecting all the machines I found there to have some purpose, to be able to activate and do cool things. In Skyrim, you can pick up dozens of weird dwemer gizmos, but then the only purpose they serve is to melt into dwemer ingots. How much more interesting would it be if you could craft and construct actual dwemer machinery? Little drones to help you, or explosives or whatever? World of Warcraft has a whole engineering class which is the best. It would perfectly fit into Elder Scrolls. Well, maybe next time. (Except, there won't BE a next time for the dwemer since maybe only Blackmarsh has some dwemer ruins still in it!) (So, what do we expect for the next game, Summerset? Elsweyr? Valenwood? I'm thinking Valenwood.)

I found The Man Who Fell To Earth rather painful to watch. It didn't register with me at all. I had to wash it down with Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence which also featured Bowie, and had Tom Conti and Beat Takeshi as a nice bonus.

I'm sorry, I couldn't bear to respond seriously to the objectionable people in those last few posts. I know my own tendency towards theatrics and bold statements, so to spare myself the embarrassment I chose a Baseketball quote instead.

Steeeeeeve Perry. Steve Perry.

That was more than I hoped for, Subbes!

I've been ignoring this topic so far for fear of having things spoiled, but I do want to assure you that my save game clocks in at 85 hours at this point and I'm still getting 'firsts', such as recently exploring my first Dwemer ruin. Generally speaking the game is brilliant, exactly what I want from Elder Scrolls. It's so expansive and the written books are great again. Lots of repetitions from earlier games, but also great new ones. Look up 'A Hypothetical Treachery'; it's good. There are a few minor spelling errors and quirks in the game here and there. It's not just that the accents are all over the place (why are Dunmer suddenly rural Brits? Do I even hear a Dutch accent?) -British English and American English are mixed willy nilly. Half of the time, Deadric prince Vaermina's name is misspelled as Vaernima. And why are the dwemer suddenly openly referred to as 'dwarves'? That shouldn't happen. I can't imagine what a job it must be to keep track of all this stuff in a game that has such an enormous amount of text, so I always just consider it part of the charm. With Elder Scrolls, I'm not looking for a perfect game. I'm looking to be engaged and intruiged on a level that few other games can offer and Skyrim does exactly that.

Sorry to interject, but who in their right mind would even think to compare The Wire to How I Met Your Mother? That's not apples and oranges, that's anvils and orangutans. I have to sidetrack this (interesting) conversation to report that I just watched Zardoz, by far the most baffling movie I've seen since The Man Who Fell To Earth, but way better, more fun and entertaining. It stars Sean Connery who looks like this: And features a floating rock head god called Zardoz which looks like this: Its main soundtrack consists of Beethoven's 7th. This movie begs to be seen and defies description.

Here's my take. How I met your mother: Genius. Ted is a shallow bore, but Barney and Marshall more than make up for that. Now that I've been watching it for a few years, I feel right at home, they feel like 'family', though that may sound a little Forever Alone. The point is that even though there little philosophy to it, the jokes and writing is actually pretty smart. In stark contrast to: The Big Bang Theory. I don't hate the show, but I don't care for it either. Now here's a show with inane writing. Though Sheldon can be pretty funny, the rest of the cast is meh at best. I think the pandering is particularly off-putting. Community: I had a hard time getting into this, not really buying into it for the first season. But somewhere along the way I did start to care for it, even though it's not HIMYM or Arrested Development (the serie Harmon did previously). So there you have it! You're not crazy, or alternatively, all of Jordan is!

I feel as if we're getting a rare glimpse into a weird, extremely specialized world of fountain pen aficionados engaged in bitter rivalries and brand wars, simmering throughout the internet in hidden places.