osmosisch

It's coming! http://www.eurogamer...-back-this-year I have extremely fond memories of this series. The only fantasy strategy games that came close to capturing my heart as much as Master of Magic did. They're for sale over on gog.com (Shadow Magic is seen by many as the definitive edition). The trailer's....eh. Still, I'm holding out good hopes for this. It can't be as sad as Disciples 3 was, surely.

I do one bot game of LoL per day most evenings and that's about all I have energy for at the moment. 2 kids are exponentially more draining than 1 I can tell you.

I'm never not playing it though my days of playing through it in a couple of days are long gone.

I think the STALKER comparison mainly reflects one thing - the desire to be unsure whether an encounter will turn out hostile or not. I can definitely second this.

I'm a counterexample to the theory that loving Illuminatus! (and conspiracy theory stuff in general) makes you not enjoy Lot 49.

Huh, that guy's avatar is almost exactly the screenshot I took a while back: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92499581 The hearts are different though.

I love this. Trying to fall asleep.

Kind of tangential but I just want to say how lovely it is to have/read such pleasant discourse about books on a vidyagame forum.

Thanks for linking that review, it reminded me to add Greg as a friend. I find it very funny that you are also now feeling "up to" Infinite Jest - I've also just started it, after loving Lot 49 and quitting halfway through Gravity's Rainbow.

If it's an item in your steam inventory it means that code hasn't been claimed yet (but you might have sent it to someone already who just hasn't accepted it yet); if it's a code from a third party I'm not sure.

Did you mean to type immanent there? It could fit but probably not. It would be interesting if it was on purpose.

The Phaedrus, obv. You'll get sponsor"ship"!

This tends to be a reasonably accurate guide as to which components are on the right part of hte price/performance curve for you. Then if you don't want to assemble it yourself (and I do recommend doing so btw, it is trivially easy these days and can save you tons of money) you can filter the pre-built offerings by whether they contain the components you want. Laptop gaming works pretty well these days too by the way, if you have some extra budget.

Oh hey, an excuse to re-read The Waste Land Oh and: W. B. Yeats THE SECOND COMING Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

OK, yeah, turns out I can't. I knew a lot less about the Anno games than I thought. I think I may have gotten them mixed up a bit with the Settlers line of games where the early ones did this cool thing where the roads grew organically. Not really a city builder anyway. Sorry for shooting my mouth off, though I'm happy that I did in the end because I ended up learning a bunch.

Oh gosh guys, new comic by Ryan Andrews.

Interesting. To me Dallas looks so much neater than the map of any old Euro city. Especially notable is the lack of streets having to bend to accommodate things like city walls, and just really long, straight streets in general. I may be confusing city layout with city zoning though. There's definitely a historical precedent for the latter in Europe as well, with things like ghettos, and streets being specifically populated with a certain profession (god help you if you lived near the tannery area). This discussion has led me to start reading up on this, fascinating stuff. I definitely had some misconceptions about this subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning#History

I'm not sure I understand the question. With 'that' do you mean the difference between cities in Europe and the US or the difference between city builder styles? If the latter I was mainly going on your comments in the SimCity podcast, I don't really play those games. I may have misinterpreted what you were saying - sorry if so. If you're talking about real cities, just comparing the history and maps of a given large town will show you how different they are (I'm sure you knew this so I probably misinterpreted indeed). http://goo.gl/maps/uBIhF http://goo.gl/maps/KZjbe As far as historical urban development in Europe goes, very few leaders/planners in history to my knowledge have tried to demolish and rebuild with completely ordered/straight streets. Only Napoleon's commission to Baron Haussman immediately comes to mind. I find this sort of comparisons an interesting subject so I'm a bit sad I may have misunderstood.

Gosh that artstyle is just gorgeous. Not sure about the control though, I have bad memories of getting completely swamped by Space Hulk and this looks like it might be even more complex.

The main divide in city builders between the continents is probably the same as the difference between the actual cities, ie. planned grids vs. largely organic historical development.

Well, given that one of the related videos is 'dog loves marketing' I'm pretty sure that something's up, yeah.

Oh, I got more than my share of enjoyment from it, I thought it was a great read. It's just that I entered it with incorrect expectations and exited it feeling that I had missed something. But it definitely was an excellent read, and it made me reflect a lot on things like the proper exercise of power in society, feminism, and growing old and children. So well worth it. e: what a lovely speech you linked there by the way, thanks. It made me excited to read Wolf Hall.

This is generally what I see recommended.

Just fyi, you can remove the pando thing independently of LoL without any issues.

I just finished Jacob de Zoet and was left mostly nonplussed. Reading it after Cloud Atlas which has such a strong central theme it is really odd to read a book that, while touching on many aspects of human life, doesn't really have a central message, and halfway through. I'd say Cloud Atlas is conceptually and structurally more interesting, while De Zoet is more pleasant to read and doesn't have the 'too clever for its own good' problems that occasionally dogged Cloud Atlas. I definitely enjoyed reading it, the writing is strong and the situation and characters are fascinating. I was just expecting a bit more after the praise in this thread I guess. Also, his book is incredibly weird to read as a Dutch person because at a certain point there are people translating Dutch into English in English. Also, Mitchell actually makes some puns/connections in the translation scenes which just plain wouldn't be possible in Dutch. I know the book has been translated into Dutch, I'm actually tempted to track down a copy to compare/contrast those passages to see what the translator did with it. I for the life of me cannot enjoy Murakami's work. He's just too much of a show-off with his 'look how erudite I am' stuff, and a lot of it just seems to lack a point to me. Kafka on the Shore was especially egregious in this sense.