Roderick

Alright, so it's not strictly necessary to watch before going into S4? Because I have S4 here right now, but not Razor, and I wanna watch me some Battlestar! =)

The problem with a Warcraft IV is that they'd have to do World of Warcraft 2 after that. Progressing the storyline would have the side-effect of making everything happening in WoW obsolete and therefore less interesting. They've placed the universe in a tricky situation, really. But frankly, I've had enough of Warcraft for a while. The franchise doesn't feel very fresh or exciting anymore, unlike Diablo and Starcraft, which both had some 8-10 years rest and are reinvigorated =) I do completely agree with you, Miffy, that MMO's just aren't that exciting in the first place. I love how Tycho put it when walking around in WoW: I wish they'd make a game out of this. MMO's just don't satisfy that peculiar gaming fancy in a way that singleplayer games do. They feel shallow and uninteractive in terms of environments and setting. But that's going a bit off-topic

(If you've got any tips for me, feel free to PM them or something; I'm looking to learn this stuff) I thought Razor was the nickname for the pilot? So it's something completely different?

Ah, it didn't become a chase in my case. Also, I managed to finish the Bernie mission in one go. It was pretty lenghty though, so I can see how it might be irritating.

Horadric is awesome. I hope the transmuting cube is still an artifact in D3. I don't know whether the interviewee was Farnham. It most definitely wasn't Cain, and most probably just a random character we've never heard about; one of the legions of adventurers to visit Tristram. With a friend called Jeremy. Farnham was great; can't a feller drink in peace? I also loved how in Starcraft, the Protoss Arbiter would seem to pick up a signal from Sanctuary of Griswold getting all excited about HUGE MUSHROOMS

I used Painter, with mostly the digital watercolour brush. It was the first thing I did with it, hence the roughness. Favourite episode, ooh... that's tricky. Definitely something with space battles, because they're just so awesomely visualised. Never seen them as epic as here, with thousands of explosions and barrages of sweeping fighters. None of that Starwarsian 'one hit blows up the big Star destroyer'. No sir, Basestars endure massive beatings before finally kicking it. I will say this though, on favourites. The final episode of Exodus, where Galactica crashes down the atmosphere in a crazy stunt to free everyone, was terrific, and so far the episode that made me tear up when Tigh told Adama that he couldn't save everyone, meaning Ellen. Oh wow. Also, every episode that has to do with politics. The presidential elections? Loved it. The courtroom acquittal of Baltar? Complete adoration. But I'd have to think some more about my favourite episode (or rather, favourite moment). It's funny, because when I watched Babylon 5 I knew exactly which moments were my favourites.

The car chases are undoubtedly the most awesome thing in the game. I miss them, now that I've finished the missions and have only the stunt jumps and car stealing jobs to do. And pigeons. But I digress. Chases. Awesome. The best one was the one in the park in one of Bernie's missions. I won't spoil anything though, it's too hilarious. Also, during one chase scene I had almost completed the mission, but I accidentally blew up my car with me in it, with my own sloppily tossed grenade.

You mean the old guy with the beard who is introduced in the movie, the gameplay video and production stills as 'Deckard Cain', who is featured on the page with and reading from 'Deckard Cain's Journal' with the voice of Deckard Cain from Diablo 1 and 2? Yeah, that's probably Deckard Cain yeah.

Ahh, the old door-closing bar-shooting trick. If you don't do that, you'd best leave the Butcher until you've finished the first four levels and then return. He's one tough beast to kill on level 2! I remember playing D1 again a few years back and it struck me how incredibly slow you moved there. You get used to it, but after D2 that's a huge thing.

UPDATE: I'm still not reading this thread, because I haven't caught up with you guys just yet. I have already seen all of season 3, so it won't be long now. Season 3 was excellent by the way. Apart from a few fluff episodes, I love almost everything they're doing. S3 was full of momentous events and I can't wait to see what happens next. The other reason I'm posting this is that I've made a BSG digital painting. It isn't especially good, but I wanted to share it nonetheless

Hey, could you help me get some Wow Gold?

New quote of the moment if ever there was one!

Ah, lasagna is the perfect gift! Congrats =)

I've always referred to D2 with the nickname 'Collect 'Em All 2'. It's basically an action RPG with huge amounts of randomly generated stuff to collect. The action is easy to do with just the mouse and hotkeys, and it's totally addictive. Slaying monsters gives a visceral thrill and questing for better loot never was quite as alluring. You say Diablo is a contentrated version of Wow? I say Wow's a watered down homeopathic destillation of Diablo.

The D3 faq says the game will still have randomly generated maps. And thankfully, it seems to create some more interesting things and diversity than D2 did (no matter how randomly you create a square grassland level, it's still a square level). I'm especially tickled by the proposition that they'll have random interactive events in levels, so now the areas will actually have a degree of interactivity. Hopefully they'll make it organic and not too gimmicky. I'm excited.

Especially the Barbarian's pauldrons seem a bit 'Orcish', if you know what I mean. The outside areas shown seem a bit Warcrafty, but I think you'll notice the difference when playing. Diablo's colour palette has always been more washed-out and darker than Warcraft's saturated tones.

Yes, and in 1996 that was THE BOMB. That's King Leoric being assaulted there, by the way. As a sorceror, if you didn't have the Holy Bolt spell there, you were fucked. Hey, but that screenshot looks a lot more colourful than Diablo 1 was in my memory. The way it's in my head is that it was almost monochrome black and white and very dark. I guess that's just the atmosphere I got from it. I think two particular things really helped in making the game so very frightening. One is that outside, in Tristram, it was always dark. You notice that in Diablo 2 there's a shifting cycle of night and day, and that caused the game to have a lot more (or too much) relief in terms of darkness. The second thing was that in your descent into hell in Diablo 1, you're always going down, going deeper, deeper into the underground. That made it psychologically much more intense than dipping into shallow, 3-level dungeons in the second game and then breathing fresh air again. I think these two aspects really made the game feel as dark and gritty as it did. Of course, Blizzard can't make an epic, multi-continent game with only one vertical dungeon, so it's safe to say they'll pursue the second in the series. Here's just hoping they'll make it as scary as they can.* (*Though I pooped my pants in D2 when you confront Duriel. My computer almost crashed entirely because he was too graphically heavy.)

Diablo has always been good for me both single- and multiplayer. Only in singleplayer can I really take the time I need to ingest all the lore and the dialogues, when playing with friends there's always a bit of a hurry to get things done in towns. One other thing I was really rooting for in Diablo 3 was that Blizzard would return to the horror roots of the series. Diablo 2, for all its excellence in gameplay, was visually too colourful for me and never got as scary as D1 was. So I hope this game will be terrifying again, as it should be.

Wall of zombies! I've been following the live blogging and stream of the Invitational in Paris and it was awesome. Fire-dancers on the town music of Tristram. It looks undoubtedly gorgeous. I'm curious whether they've gone with premade levels this time around (it would appear so) or if there's still some element of random level design in it. Regardless, this is stellar stuff and will be huge fun. I feel vindicated that they've stuck with the isometric perspective, because I feared they would make it too much like World of Warcraft. Also, I hope they'll have at least as good a storytelling framework as Diablo 2 had, with its unique and inventive framework of Marius in the sanitarium retelling events.

The Incredible Hulk was nice enough. At least it was way better than the previous Hulk movie. It was bit disappointing that I also saw 21, the Las Vegas blackjack movie. A bit formulaic, with only Kevin Spacey's performance as the thing to lift the experience up.

Excellent! Congrats If the wedding is in the Netherlands I'll come and cheer you on

Ooh, I've got a new girlfriend since a few weeks and she absolutely blows my mind. I've never been in love as much as this, I get nervous just thinking about her =) And she's a Pokémon fanatic. What more can I possibly ask for? I gave her a Drifloon card from the Pokémon TCG as a token of my love, and it was duly accepted.

I saw the trailer and the voice-acting seems hilariously awful =D What I wonder though: how does House of the Dead fare against the much newer Umbrella Chronicles? I always viewed that title as a mature outcropping of the rails shooter genre. Does it show when playing House now? Does that one feel significantly more static or less scary?

Snake Plissken, now there's a hero. I guess that's where the Metal gear franchise falls apart for me. On the one hand it tries to be so mature and epic and serious, but it continuously shoots itself in the foot by being so goddamned campy all the time. The two just don't gel well. I think a good analogy is Grand Theft Auto. It too sort of evolved as a rather goofy game into a very critically thinking, culturally loaded series. GTA reflected this however, in part 4, by having excellent voice-overs, doing away with all the zany stuff and generally being quite excellent and consistently mature in terms of storytelling. I feel from what I have seen that Metal Gear didn't make that step and now clumsily tries to play both the wacky card and the games-as-art card.

Yesterday and today I watched a friend play Metal Gear Solid 4, and watched the beginning, and there were three things that I latched onto: 1. The voice-acting is horrible. Snake sounds like a bad young actor desperately trying to sound old but failing. I know saying this gets fans angry because they seem to have gotten used to the voice, but he's an overactor and it hurts the believability and maturity of the plot. 2. The writing sucks. Okay, it's not abysmal, but, again, for a high profile game like Metal Gear you'd expect something vastly better. The opening monologue where war apparently 'never changes' is a great example of self-indulgent teenage poetry. Perhaps this is also due to Japanese styles of writing (which are always quite exhaustive, repetitive and symbolical) translating quite poorly to what is acceptable in English. 3. There was an elevator Snake had to enter in a room. That helper guy in the robot had the following paraphrased dialogue: ,,You need to find the elevator, Snake. There's the elevator, to the left. Go enter the elevator." I know Snake is old, but does the player need to be lead by the hand as well? There are probably good other reasons why this series is so popular, but this is, while perhaps acceptable in games of lesser stature, really poor performance and makes me question whether Metal Gear really deserves its high accolades. I can easily picture a scenario where the hype makes it more and better in the minds of many than it really is.