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It's funny looking. Hasn't killed me yet, but evading it is tough since it's so easy to get lost or fall. Apparently it doesn't like fire and may leave if you throw shit at it. You can also hide in grass and vegetation, but it may not help.

It's one of those games just made for Idle Thumbs. It's not perfect, but it sure is different and interesting. It has and ethos it follows to the end. I've enjoyed it, but then I love Far Cry 2.

Oh, man, that first conversation with Marylin. I had forgotten it, but I remember how it hit me when I saw it. A smart, young lawyer in awe of how many hits her asshole nerd client's website got!? Never. Just never.

Just decent black loose-leaf tea. Maybe the shops near me were especially crappy, I dunno.

Huh, HBO Nordic wants me to pay for 12 months before I get the chance to cancel. Nope.

Hah, we can do that. But I'm not really implying Britain (I was in Scotland) doesn't have good tea, only that most people just drink whatever. Tea is a bigger consumer product there than in most countries, so they have more cheap brands of it as well.

I dunno, it goes a bit too sci-fi for me and doesn't really add much. I wouldn't say it's better than any of the others, but it's better than I feared. There really wasn't any need for another Bourne movie.

Finished the main story. It doesn't go in the interesting direction it hints at somewhere along the way. After Vaas it's very straight and boring. Almost all of the story missions are simply a chore. Every time I play this I plan to take screenshots like I like to take when I play FC2. But it never shows me anything worth capturing. Maybe if I could disable the stupid DOF effect.

Cheers, BigJKO!

If objectification of women is such a fixture in our culture that some women internalized it and demand it, that doesn't make said objectification OK, it underlines the need to fix it. If some woman happens to think a particular case of objectification is OK, that doesn't let anyone off the hook. Women obviously know what it feels like to be the target of constant objectification in a way we men cannot really fathom, and thus can have more insight to offer the discussion. However, no single woman (or man) determines what is acceptable and what is not. It's up for debate and, well, I like to believe that the best arguments will prevail. Eventually, people will be informed enough to make noise in these situations. Levine, for example, seems to care about what people say about Elizabeth. He probably doesn't like to have her portrayal described as overly sexualized. Once he understands why that is, he might want to avoid similar problems in the future. That, or decide to abandon his cred as one of the more sophisticated game designers, which I doubt would happen. Of course some content creators knowingly pander to the lowest common denominator. Can't be helped, really. But we can at least affect the people who care about what they are making and how it's seen. So when a company claims it's making a grown up game with fully developed characters, we won't have to spend a portion of playing time counting the polygons on female characters' butts.

I actually had a horrible time finding good tea in Britain. All I could find were cheap teabags, which might as well have been Lipton. Eventually I found some, but I had to go looking for it.

I only learned that word from Thumbs Arma2 games

For a while I expected that football thing to be an entire striptease show while he keeps that balancing that ball on his head.

That Motley Crue song has got to be the shittiest song I've ever heard.

I don't remember such problems with the tutorial, although I suppose it's such a long time ago... I wouldn't use the quicksave very much, except perhaps when you've pulled off a big mission. Instead, learn to avoid the check points when you can, even the roads if you don't have a technical with a machine gun. A big part of the game is planning your route in order to avoid trouble.

You know, I wouldn't remove the minimap. The actual map is too crap, and you need a map. I'd prefer a much larger map you could call up with a button, that wouldn't pause the game.

Heh, Ratatouille was the one that didn't hold my interest at all.

I think that'd be a pretty sweet illustration for a book about goblins.

I don't see the point of this thread if we can't shit on Citizen Kane!

Huh, you can't use the existence of a reward as proof for lack of altruism. It's an easy claim to make because it sounds so cynical and realistic, but mere opinion that rises from the argument you want to make: you still don't know the actual motivation. This is especially true when you try to use rewards that were at the moment of action fuzzy, distant and not certain as the original motivation, when they only materialized later. Everything looks certain when it has happened, but you'd be hard pressed to prove that the potential rewards ever occurred to the altruistic people in question. And if they did occur to them, you would still have to prove they weighed their options and chose to pursue that reward. That gene argument is really strange. Predisposed compared to what? You can't ever find the universal (were talking genes, so universal) neutral disposition for altruistic action, so you can't claim altruistic people are predisposed to it. You could just as easily say some people are neutrally altruistic, but the rest of us are bastards you are too cowardly to go save people. And that's presuming you can trace personality traits directly to biology which you bloody can't. Of course our genetic material affects us, we are born with it and it has an effect on our activity from the start, but you can't look at a person and deduce which parts of his personality were caused by biology and which by his life history and social activity. Our particular traits affect our activity from the start, but our activity is in the social world which responds to it, changing us. The personality forms through continuous activity, and our activity depends on context, past activity, whatever predispositions we may have, etc. You can't just look at a personality in its current state and determine why exactly a person has some trait, separate the biological from the rest. I can sense the hair on TP's neck bristle as he reads this, because we've talked about a similar subject before. You can't separate a 'biological self' from a 'social self' either, even though people may categorize different wants they have in such a manner. Now, whether you care for my arguments or not, just finish the essay as it is, cut out the chaff so it's closer to the length it's supposed to be and just give it to your professor. You're a second year student, which means you have all the time in the world to refine your arguments or change your entire theoretical disposition three or four times.

How parallel dimensions could increase MineSweeper's popularity. That's pretty cool.

I take back my comments regarding flux, it's great once you get used to it. I wish I could find a good solution to make it affect my mouse cursor as well, because now it looks blue.

Maybe I should keep that in the background when I play FC3.

I went back to your dad's Far Cry. Playing Far Cry 2 again reminds me of the things I miss in Far Cry 2. The fantastic map, which doesn't pull you out of the world. How much better the diamond economy is compared to the fiddly and grindy economy of Far Cry 3. Excellent music and much better sound design. It's odd -- Far Cry 2 has less wildlife and what it does have isn't nearly as well made as in Far Cry 3, but when you're making your way through a rain forest, the sound design makes it feel more alive. I miss the tigers and such that keep you on your toes a bit in Far Cry 3, but the atmosphere and sense of threat is still a lot stronger in FC2. I like that in FC2 I need to pick my route, while in FC3 you can just go toward the waypoint until you reach it. FC3 starts out pretty safe, and once you've mopped up an island it's sterile. In FC2 I always have to plan my route in order to avoid the most dangerous locations. Most importantly, no corridor runs. I just saved myself from an ambush by jumping off that bridge in one of the photos. I feel like FC3 has smoothed out all the corners in FC2 and avoids all the complaints people had of FC2. However, I learned to avoid those frustrations a long time ago, but the new ones FC3 brings along don't seem avoidable.