Gwardinen

My biggest early cancellation disappointments, apart from the obvious Firefly, would probably be Sports Night and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It could be I'm an Aaron Sorkin fanboy (spoilers: I probably am) but I loved both of them and felt like they just didn't get a fair shake. At least Sports Night got a second season, but Studio 60 - which I probably liked even more - didn't even manage that. On the up side, Sorkin has a new series coming out soon, so I'm sure I'll fall right into that.

In that case this is my Steam id and I would be very grateful indeed for it!

If it really is the whole season I would be very interested in that, but if it's only episode one then it should go to someone else who hasn't had a chance to see the game at all yet.

As soon as I read those posts and tried to go to another thread I got a database error on the site. My first thought was that Doug really is pissed.

Has anyone else seen the first couple of episodes of Girls? I'm actually rather enjoying it, so much so that I'm kinda bummed that there isn't more of it already. On the other hand, it is horribly embarrassing at times, as I recognise aspects of myself or those I know in the characters. Smart people are dumb in even more excruciating ways sometimes than the likes of the antics that occur in the Inbetweeners or similar.

Our reasons continue to become more horrifying.

Warning: spoilers for pretty much the whole episode.

That seems about right. There's one character in particular in the first episode who I'm fairly sure goes on to be a regular in the Rick crew. Nevertheless, with it being about a different group you absolutely do not need to force your way through all the comics first to enjoy it. In fact, from my vague understanding of the Walking Dead timeline, it seems like episode one of the game story is slightly before the start of the main story. So arguably you'd want to play this first!

Just in case you're not aware, the game, unlike the TV show, does not follow the events of the comics. It's a completely new story that just ties in to the TV/comics story. The characters and plot are all different. Not to say you shouldn't read the comics if you want to, but it's absolutely not necessary to get where the game is coming from. I've never read beyond the first few issues of the comics and I thoroughly enjoyed this.

The facial animations seem fine to me, but I wasn't looking too hard at them. They're not incredibly nuanced, but the art style would honestly make that somewhat difficult anyway. I fully agree with toblix about the sound quality, though, I regularly felt like I was hearing hiss or weird wobble in Lee's voice and it threw me off more than once. That said, I didn't have any issues with performance whatsoever, certainly no freezing. Sean and Jake as top billing in the credits really made me smile, and overall I very much enjoyed the first episode (as is probably evident since I just consumed it today more or less without stopping). I was wondering at the end, does the Next Time on the Walking Dead teaser take your choices into account already? It seemed like it might have had different characters featured if I'd picked some different options, so that's neat.

That's a fair point. I also noted myself but didn't really factor it in to my analysis of his character that there are compromises being made by him, though they aren't necessarily for his own benefit. That said, though, I don't know if I'd paint him as a bureaucrat due to his being a stickler about the succession. I think that could be more aptly explained by loyalty to the former king, his best friend. A character that I'd legitimately like to criticise in the TV show is Petyr Baelish. We mentioned it before regarding a composite picture of a scene between him and Cersei, but he continues to be weirdly heavy handed with his supposedly somewhat secret information. In the most recent episode he antagonises another Queen over another sexual impropriety. Either he is very focussed on Queens having traditional sex or he's just not as good at this subtlety game as he thinks he is. Again I wonder if it was this way in the books, it's been so long since I read the first two that I can't remember well enough.

We might want to keep that in spoilers still. I recognise most of the people on this forum have probably either read the first book or seen the first season but I really found that particular event quite surprising and engaging when I first read it. That alone probably tells me that he probably seemed smarter and more well rounded in the books. Though actually, if you remember, that event wasn't meant to happen as it did. Arrangements had been made. It was the interference of that caused it to go the way it did. Yeah, I agree regarding character development. has the , which situation goes up and down rather as her own fortunes go up and down, which I really like. I think that in the case of , however, the supernatural elements are still rather out of left field. They're still not really affecting any parts of the story that matter to anyone else. My hope is that are both going through such a slow, somewhat unrelated buildup so that if the supernatural elements suddenly make a huge impact on the wider storyline they will feel like they have "earned" it. Edit: Actually, now that I think about it this speaks to a wider issue I'm having with the later books. It feels much more like a bunch of independent adventures happening to the various characters recently. The first couple of books (and along with them, the TV show to date) have a very interconnected feel. With the exception of with Daenerys, the focus has been almost entirely in Westeros so far and the same characters have been interacting for the most part. The later books have been introducing a lot of secondary characters and locations and plotlines all over the place, many of which don't stick around all that long. In a lot of cases it feels like kind of a diversion. I'm sort of hoping that it is again just a prelude to really "earning" some good resolutions.

Well, obviously the actual answer is "because it's in the books". As for the question of why it's in the books... that's somewhat harder to figure out. I think one of the basic concepts of the story is that this world used to be magical, with dragons and White Walkers and Children of the Forest and all that stuff, but it's been a very long time since any of that stuff was seen. Running parallel to that, the story also begins at the end of the longest summer the realm has ever seen, more than a decade long if I remember rightly. I think George Martin has, from a few different angles, tried to suggest that all of these squabbles between the mortals are all well and good, but they're really only making themselves more vulnerable as the genuine threats start to reveal themselves once more. The Wall and what's beyond it is really where any fantasy hero should be heading, to save the world and so forth, but they're all too wrapped up in their own power struggles. However, while that's kind of a neat concept... I do sort of share your lack of enthusiasm for how it's been shown so far, both in the books and the TV series. For all that being reminded that all of this noble infighting isn't actually good for anyone in the long term is somewhat useful and interesting in itself, the supernatural aspects of the story still remain kind of an intrusion. I am curious whether it's all going to tie together beautifully at the end of the story, but so far it seems like both the readers and viewers of this tale are having to take it on faith that all of this will pay off. Edit: Forgot I also wanted to briefly respond to this: Yeah, kinda. He's more of a plot device than a character, but every time I think along the lines you do I remember that Joffrey actually existed. Many times. History is full of people gaining too much privilege too early and going off the rails. It's also full of people who feel the only way to exercise their power is to hurt people with it. It's hard to argue that he's flat or unrealistic when he's possibly the most traditionally true of the archetypes. The mad king was a reality, over and over again. Eddard Stark is actually the character that is least believable in a historic context. You could even argue he's no more interesting, as well, since we see the heroic, selfless defender of the realm and upholder of honour character all the time. He is almost as locked in to his path as Joffrey is to his own - 100% Paragon and Renegade characters are never as interesting.

Yeah, I only managed to play about 35 minutes of it myself but I felt much the same. I'd like to know what difficulty I'm going to have to have it on, unless it can be changed midstream. I also had a lot of problems with the game if I didn't let it download fully first, but frankly that could be due to how lagged the servers were in general. It's not surprising that streaming content was causing issues given my download speed from them was atrocious to begin with and the EU servers were causing me lag on the menus. I had to play on the American servers just to make the game work. Overall it seemed decent, but chances are I'll be getting a review copy anyway. If I had to pay full price for it myself (which it's possible I might have to, I dunno if Blizzard still has me on their list) I think I might hesitate a little, given what little I got to play of it wasn't particularly "special".

Yeah, Kroms, if you don't want to go to the police immediately I'd suggest at least beginning to document his behaviour so that if and when you feel it becomes necessary, you can have that evidence to hand. Even something as simple as noting down when and where and what he did each time can be helpful to refer back to later, but keeping emails or recording him in one way or another is probably even better. Sorry to hear about this stuff, particularly the idea that you're uncomfortable going to the police due to cultural issues, that really sucks.

Well my username on both Blood Bowl and Steam is Gwardinen, so if anyone fancies a game outside of the league, let me know.

I'm only part way through season four myself, but a friend of mine just told me tonight that he was desperate for me to have seen the most recent episode of season five. So presumably there's something interesting going on.

Every time I watch a Brass Eye programme I am thoroughly amazed that the celebrities involved didn't understand what was going on. But then again, with such a weird society we live in that people end up going on TV espousing views and encouraging behaviours they don't understand someone would have had to take advantage at some point.

A friend actually found a key for BB:LE for me, so I have it now! Is there any space left at all in the league? I'm really interested. If not, is there any way we can do an Idle Thumbs beginners league spinoff or something?

I played that a while back when it first came out for PC and I would add my recommendation. I never finished it, but I certainly enjoyed what I played. It's a pleasant mix of real time enough to be engaging and having pauses to think about how you're going to do things and where you're going to go.

Yeah my save from Chapter 1 appears to still work. I previously had a version after the last big update, the one that introduced the tutorial and so on, so if you're coming completely fresh it might be more of an issue but so far patches seem to be ok with previous saves. Now if I can only figure out how to stop this weird black grid effect from appearing on textures.

I hope they are, I'm downloading the Enhanced Edition patch right now and I'm hoping my save near the end of Chapter 1 will be useable so I can roll right in to picking a different Chapter 2.

Decided to try out Crusader Kings II. I was playing as the Duke of Bavaria and for a while I was heir to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire for no reason I could ascertain, had no idea how to achieve my goal of becoming Chancellor, was moving armies around at random trying to catch some daft southern European rebels of some sort... basically I have no idea what's going on. I could really use some direction to help me figure out what I'm even supposed to be doing to begin with in this game, and what basic information sets are going to be useful. Does anyone have any advice or links to some good intro guides?

Speaking of Kairosoft, has anyone played their latest game, Epic Astro Story? I really enjoyed Game Dev Story but I'm sure not a small part of that was the theme. Consequently I've ignored all their other games as the theme didn't interest me, but this kind of mini version of Alpha Centauri concept intrigues me.

Little hints of dubstep stuff similar to the Syndicate music in there, but yeah it looks interesting. I'm basically in love with Joseph Gordon-Levitt at the moment so I'll almost certainly watch it. Which reminds me, I forget if it was mentioned in this thread already, but 50/50 is a great film with him in. A very funny look at life with cancer and so on.