Salamander8
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Posts posted by Salamander8
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I played the original Dungeon Siege a lot with some of my friends on our LAN set-up back in Michigan. It was fun and I liked a lot of the summons, but I really loved the chicken gun when we found out about that.
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piece of toast
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We have a local restaurant called Robert's that serves far better burgers and fries than any fast food chain, and they are fresh and made to order but they still have a drive-through (with a fair wait of course). On the rare occasion that I do have fast food, it's Wendy's in Menomonee Falls. Better burgers than average and the food is always hot. I really really hate cold french fries with a passion. When I was a kid I had fast food as much as I could get away with but almost never these days.
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I just finished the book on Erich Raeder. It was interesting as he really is not as well known here in the US as Karl Donitz (who's autobiography I've read), and I was quite curious about the man in charge of the Kriegsmarine before Donitz took over in 1943. In many ways he was the inheritor of the legacy of Tirpitz and in others quite different.
Moving on to: The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.
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by throwing sandwiches
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A bit of a departure from my usual very heavy metal music, but I like a lot of stuff and after playing some Victoria II with it's period music, I dusted off my best of Strauss CD and played one of my favorite pieces by him, Die Fledermaus (The Bat):
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It is quite complicated but it comes with several tutorials to help. If you can play Star Fleet Battles or Federation and Empire you should be good here. It's more detailed than Space Empires 4 gold (my favorite 4x game ever), but if you can play SE4 well, you should be ok..
As for specs, the box says: XP/Vista/7 OS, Pentium IV 2.4 Ghz or AMD3500+ CPU, 2.0 Gigs of RAM, Geforce 8800 or ATI Radeon X1900 or above. I have XP with 3 gigs of RAM, a 3 Ghz Intel E8400, and an Nvidia GTX 470 and it runs fine for me. It sounds like it might be too much for your laptop, but you can turn some of the effects down to help.
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They've already patched to 1.2 and I'm trying Japan out as I grind my way to industrialization. I found to my chagrin that trying to build too many Men-O-War and Frigates with no indigenous supply of artillery not only costs a lot (which I knew), but it also slows production as my demand for the artillery was too high for world supply! Something to watch for in the future. I've added a couple of screenshots to possibly pique people's interest. I'm actually playing this game more than Civ5 as while I don't actually dislike Civ5, I find it a bit simpler than I'm used to and Victoria II is definitely in the other direction. I did not want to flood the forums with pictures of every single separate game screen, but wanted to share some of the game's features in some detail.
Here's the Main UI. each of the buttons on the top Left displays some info and you click on them for more detailed info. The lower right has various messages and you can click on the flags on the far lower right to get details of things like who did what to who and who passed certain laws and who went bankrupt. By my small flag/symbol in the upper left just below the buttons you'll see my status as a nation in the global community. The star is my prestige, the factory is my industrialization, and the crossed swords my military power. The left number for each of these is the value of the attribute and the right one is my nation's spot in the worldwide hierarchy for that attribute. These 3 are then compared to give me nation's rank overall and that is displayed in the circle on the lower right of my flag. You can see that I'm ranked as the 48th nation overall, I started at 68th or 64th, so some progress there. The military unit's number is the thousands of troops in that unit and the color green means full strength, organization, and supply. It turns yellow and then red as this worsens.
http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan1.jpg
The trade screen is this one. It lists all the goods that are made throughout the world and how much you import/export and the costs. If you hover over on of the goods in the upper portion it will give you more details.
http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan2.jpg
The Politics screen! You can see that Japan is an absolute monarchy at this time and that the conservative "Court Faction" is in charge. You actually start with the reactionaries in charge, but while I want state control of industry (although I can't build factories yet), I don't like how tight the reigns are on the country with the reactionaries in charge. At the lower right are the various decisions you have and you can see that the Meiji Restoration button is greyed out. I don't meet the requirements yet, but I'm working on it! Hovering over the question mark associated with the decision will list the requirements. This is also where you can ascertain what the people think on various issues and where you can enact reforms.
http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan3.jpg
It's a great game, but also extremely detailed. In this new game above, Prussia annexed several northern Germanic states and formed the Northern German Federation, and Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Ottoman Empire are all fighting over the 'bottom' 2 spots of the great powers so a lot messages of them discrediting each other and the flip/flop of gaining/losing great power status are flooding my diplomacy messages UI!
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I do like the trade system overall. I was able to get a Vita-Saw last night by trading away the white paint I got out of a crate. I just wish people would play the game when they are on an actual game server and not spam chat like Orgrimmar.
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These guys are insane!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0n2Ew2RS4o
I bought this album (Antithesis) after it came up on Amazon as a recommendation after buying something else a couple of years back and after I heard this technical and brutal masterpiece, I had to grab all their other albums. This album and this song in particular remain my favorites.
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He's bigger now as he's 14 months old instead of 3 months shown here, but here's Karl my new cat as a kitten when I got him last November.
http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/PICT0004.jpg
His favorite hobby is turning basement lights on and off by playing with the lanyards. :tongue:
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I strongly dislike the store. I don't like the whole micro-transaction model anywhere, although I am guilty of using it in CoH/CoX a bit. The trading spam in most servers reminds me of the various MMOs I've played, but more and more servers are telling people to shut up and play, you can trade somewhere else.
I have played a lot of TF2 since I was in the beta in 07, I have over 500 hours on the game since launch as it's easy to jump into, and you can play in small chunks while doing other things easily. And it's fun to just blow stuff up like crazy!
I've successfully destroyed at least half-a-dozen sentry guns with my fish, and nothing beats the feeling of killing a heavy with nothing but your fish. I had a medic uber me and of course I pulled out my fish and went crazy, I finally got the "Doctoring the Ball" achievement thanks to that.
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I'm sure we have at least some TF2 players here, and I'm a big fan of the game. Even though the new Polygon pack adds a micro-transaction store I'm not fond of, it did add some great new items, including:
http://www.freefrag.com/newitems/pack_final_graphic2.jpg
That's right, among the new Scout gear, they give you a melee fish! Greatest weapon ever!
Some of the new pay money for a hat or for paint ideas I really dislike but the other new droppable/craftable items are pretty cool, but none as cool as the fish! If I get a name tag to drop, which let's you rename items, I need to name my fish someday. :wink:
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If you're a fan of Paradox game's various grand-strategic games, you'll like this one. I'm still trying to get to grip with the taxation problems I've been having, but it has a lot of potential. I never played the original Victoria, but I do love the Hearts of Iron and Europa Universallis series. This game covers the time period of 1836-1936 and currently only has the one grand campaign, but the modders are already at work, and I'm sure Paradox will make expansions for it. My one real gripe with Paradox is their spotty QC. As an example: when they first released the Semper Fi pack for HoI3, there was a bug where you could never or so close to never that it may as will be never, catch enemy submarines that were performing commerce raiding even with extra research focus on it, and sending out several patrols of destroyers. It's been patched to hopefully fix this, but my friend in CA. that plays these games with me online has been having patching issues and so we've been playing EU3 instead as our normal online game group is having "MMO-issues" and it's just us two right now.
The premise is simple; take any selectable nation, and this covers pretty much any nation in the world at the time of the game, and lead them to glory all while balancing the budget, researching technologies, and trying to keep the populace working and happy enough to not rise in armed revolt. I have been avoiding playing any of the 8 great powers (Prussia, Austria, Great Britain, Russia, Ottoman Empire, Spain, France, USA) so far as I want something in the middle to learn with, so have so far tried Bavaria and Switzerland, as my Sokoto and Haiti games didn't go well and those two nations low literacy hurt my research. Japan looks interesting as you can try to research the proper technologies to implement the Meiji Restoration, so will have to try it in future games. The USA has to contend with it's slavery issues and could spark the civil war, many of the smaller Germanic states get Pan-German nationalists that want to unify into the German nation, and etc. It looks to have a lot of replay value and certainly has strategic depth.
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It's hard for me to judge this one to be honest. They've simplified some aspects to the point of making the game a bit dull in some ways. It's not outright bad, but I prefer the original Civ and Civ II. I never liked 3 and 4 was good, but the first 2 look like they shall remain my favorites, even though I don't have the original anymore as my old roommate from the 90s stole it. :verymad:
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Pizza! I only have it with lots of cheese and sauce though, not a fan of too much stuff on it. Pasta in various incarnations follows behind with the simple but enjoyable cheeseburgers and fries nipping at their heels.
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More classic Death Metal. Monstrosity is an older Death Metal band and those who know of George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher of Cannibal Corpse fame should recognize him here before he took the vocal spot in Cannibal Corpse from Chris Barnes. I actually prefer Monstrosity as while I own several Cannibal Corpse albums, I don't really listen to them all that much and Monstrosity has deeper musical themes.
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Erich Raeder: Admiral of the Third Reich.
Since I'm back to work I ordered some more books, but I'm so far behind now! I still have half-a-dozen or more Terry Pratchett books to read, as well as an extensive collection of military history books. I mostly have WW2 stuff, but also some WW1 and some others like Alfred Thayer Mahan's book on the influence of sea power on history.
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Sorry I haven't got any more of these done. I just started a new job finally this week after being laid-off since May and both Civilization V and Victoria II just came out so I'll be busy with those as well.
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I just finished it late last night. I only want to play it at night when it's pitch black in the computer room so my play time was limited even though my mind was screaming to play it more often but I didn't want to ruin the atmosphere, so played the heck out of it every evening till I finally finished it. A great game overall with only a couple of spots that were straight up annoying (example: I had a puzzle solved except that one lever was not fully engaged and it took me some time to figure out what I did 'wrong'). The atmosphere is excellent and I'm glad my normal 'ammunition preservation' instincts served me well with the lantern oil and tinder-boxes as they varied between feast and famine.
It was fully worth the price of admission and one of only a select few of horror games that is actually scary.
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Life
Will flash before my eyes
So scattered and lost
I want to touch the other side
And no one
Thinks they are to blame
Why can't we see
That when we bleed we bleed the same?
that's how I feel...it don't matter what colour we are....we all bleed the same...
It don't matter if your white, yellow, black, purple...whatever...we have this one world to live on and that's all we have...we have to get along...but people it seems will never do that...:(
Well said as usual Illiad86.
Hating another person or persons for something as petty as a different skin tone has always boggled my mind. This is why things like the Federation in Star Trek as one quick example, will never work until humanity stops this nonsense. If humans abuse and belittle each other over such minor things, imagine how bad a non-human race will be greeted by those with these attitudes? The History Channel just ran a repeat of a 2-hour program detailing the Ku Klux Klan yesterday and while I've seen it before it's still disturbing. The part where 4 young girls were killed by a bomb planted in their church because it was a gathering place for many African-Americans and other people active in trying to bring civil rights to the area never ceases to disgust me.
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Death
Impaled
Vomitory
Voi Vod
Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (D.R.I.)
Kreator
Exhumed
Drawn & Quartered
Severe Torture
Monstrosity
Belphegor
Incantation
Revenant
Napalm Death
Skinless
Possessed
Sacrifice
Cadaver
Skinless
Entombed
Dismember
Bloodbath
Bloodfeast
Tankard
The Official Currently Listening To Thread
in Off-Topic
Posted
Anata-Downward Spiral into Madness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIueKHJE1GM