Saz

I vote you start with The Stand instead. Bag of Bones is pretty unfocused and unmemorable. King's books tend to be either great or terrible, and Bag of bones was one of those that was just so bland that I don't even remember much about it.

Sometimes yes, but the problem is sometimes he tries for suspense but you get 100-200 pages of fluff material that ends up going nowhere (liseys story was the worst for this)

Story: amazing! One of the best I've seen in a jrpg in ages. you need to play it through 3 times or so to get the full story, but each extra play only takes ~5 hours. Be warned it's probably one of the most depressing games I'cve ever played in my life though (in a good way). Music: same as story, beautiful and I've considered picking up a soundtrack for it, which I havent done since the 90s with an rpg. visuals: nothing special, spells look a bit gimmicky gameplay: a bit repetitive

Sorry if that was spoilers, I thought it happened like 30 pages into the book >_<. Eyes of the dragon was a really, really bad medieval fantasy. Needful things is a really cool premise. Basically a wandering merchant comes to town and has the one item every individual seems to want. Instead of charging money, he asks for simple tasks to be done, and basically the book is about human nature, materialism, and greed. Like I said, I think King does a great job doing character drama.

Stuff that I enjoyed: Stuff thats on 360 but way better on PC Avoid oblivion, play it on PC (mods make a huge difference with this game) Fallout 3 (better on PC, mods) Fallout NV (get it on PC if you can, load times on 360 even after install to HDD are really bad) Dragon age: orgins/awakening (PC ALMOST MANDATORY. It's very difficult to play on 360, but doable) Rift: If you like MMOs, this one is infinitely more complex than WoW. Not on 360 Stuff thats fine on 360 Mass effect 1 (bioware shooter/rpg) Mass effect 2 Nier (action rpg, brilliant story and soundtrack) Splinter cell: double agent (stealth) Splinter cell conviction (action) dead rising 1 dead rising 2 (zombies) resonance of fate (rpg) castlevania: LOS (action) Resident evil 5 (action) alpha protocol (open ended rpg/spy) alan wake (horror) Borderlands (shooter/rpg) Bioshock (shooter/cinematic) rock band 3 (rythem) FFXIII (rpg) Red dead redemption (open world wild west) ace combat 6 (cinematic, arcade flight) Last remnant (rpg) operation darkness (strat rpg in WW2...with nazi zombies and Trexes) Tales of vesperia: tales rpg gears of war 1/2: wanton violence eternal sonata: like vesperia on psychadelics. Call of duty: black ops (competitive multiplayer) I say black ops because I thought MW2 was terrible, glitchy, full of hackers, balance issues (OMA/DC, M/L/C, etc) and killstreak spam was terrible. Cod4 is awesome but community is pretty dead now. WAW is also massivly overrun with hackers. BO is either love it or hate it depending on what you like in these games. I very much prefer it to MW2. Rainbow six vegas 1/2 (competitive multi): sadly community is probably dead by now Halo reach: I really don't like the halo series but had to list it as a core game LA Noire: coming soon Battlefield 3: coming soon

My opinion on his books are that they're usually either amazingly bad or really insightful about human condition. I've read about 30 of them, mostly because they all tie into the gunslinger series or I was in middleschool and though they were edgy rather than poorly written and meandering. It's pretty much popcorn fiction (I recently read Carrie in between classes at school in a single day), but some of it is really entertaining. The girl who loved tom Gordon is the one with the lost girl in the woods? I thought that was decent. I feel like I outgrew his writing a long time ago, but still read them because I'm OCD like that and try to read everything an author writes if I'm at any point a fan. My favorites are: -Shawshank redemption (he does best with short stories) -Needful things -Duma Key -Dark tower series -Hearts in Atlantis -The shining -The stand Ones that were so bad that I literally want my time back: -Eyes of the dragon -Wolves of the Calla -LISEY'S STORY. THIS BOOK IS BORING BEYOND BELIEF AND I NEED CAPS TO EMPHASIZE THAT Everything else: Mediocre-passable

Think of it this way: How much do you trust the guy? Account sharing is not allowed, so if he jacks your account and you complain, steam's kneejerk reaction will probably be to ban the account. I share accounts all the time and have never been burned, but then I only share with people I trust. This is very much a "do so at your own peril, use your judgement" situation. We have no idea who this dude is and thus can't tell you what to do here.

Ah yes' date=' vulgar one-liners about ripping heads off and defacating down necks, accompanied by ultra-violence. Surely the type of entertainment values a christian wants to associate themselves with. The nudity is just icing on the cake! Also, are you saying that with a straight face? You think the sex appeal isn't one of the main selling point of duke nukem? Go watch the recent "babes" trailer, it's 2 minutes of breasts and sex one-liners, not an alien in sight haha. The trailer before that one featured "lesbian schoolgirls" as it's selling point. That was intended for zombiewolf, one of the four other "wolf" posters and I quoted you instead, it's hard to keep you guys straight, sorry

Seems kind of like the usual christian attitude of "People who do things I consider as sinful are horrible...until I feel like partaking in sin". This game is going to basically be ultraviolence, pornography, lewdness, profanity, and dozens of other forms of negativity that most people on this forum condemn with zeal in other threads. I don't want to sound too critical, but it's a very hypocritical attitude to take to complain about pornography in one thread, then talk about how you can't wait to play a game where you restore health by paying women to take their clothes off and give you a lapdance. I mean, zombiewolf, in another thread you just told me that america losing it's christian values was the reason things are so bad, and then in this thread you talk about how excited you are to basically play interactive violent pornography? Sorry to call you out here but I'm missing something, big time.

First, to clarify: I'm not knocking RPGs, I'm willing to bet I've played more than the rest of you in this thread combined during my teen years alone. I finished almost every game Square ever made on playstation, snes, gba, and a huge portion of the games they made on other systems. (I lived in rural Georgia, life was boring) I'm simply explaining why they're not as popular. Also: online RPG gamers nerdrage just as hard as people in shooters. If you disagree, you've clearly never played FF11, Everquest, Ultima, or WOW. It's the act of being online that turns people into insufferable fools, not the genre. (see also: madden, any other online game ever) Again, the reason that 'simpler' games are much more popular is because it's competitive. Most people read books when they're interested in storytelling because the quality of a good novel is pretty much always infinitely more complex and intricate than the best of video games. Even the games which are considered the masterpieces are generally very weak storylines with very cliched stereotypical characters. Thats where the visuals and music comes in to make it an interactive experience, but thats not a priority to a great number of gamers. If you're ever on a college campus and look at most of the gamers in dorms, they're playing competitive games like madden, halo, and CoD because it's something fun that an entire group of people can pick up and play with no time investment. That's the key. Most people don't have hundreds of hours to sink into what usually amounts to acceptable storylines at best. Everyone loves FF7 but they forget how sloppy and terrible of a translation it was. It was the literary equivalent of something someone would read in 4th grade (complete with a load of typos, grammatical errors "this guy are sick", etc) Some RPGs do have fantastic storylines (FFT, Xenogears come to mind right away for me) but a ridiculous amount of them rehash the same storylines and themes over and over. It's getting worse with the new crop of RPGs especially.

Call of duty/halo/etc is more popular because you can play online with friends, and for about 20-30 minutes and have some fun without investing your life into it. It's very easy to learn, but competitive multiplayer keeps it challenging. Most RPGs are absurdly easy outside of postgame and that bores people unless they have an amazing plotline to keep things fresh(which most dont). Also, players who've been playing square-enix games for awhile see that the games basically repeat themselves to a ridiculous degree (dungeon designs, monsters, stories, character archetypes. we've been seeing the EXACT SAME ones since about 1992) I've played and finished every Final fantasy except 3 for the NES, and while I enjoy them, the storylines of recent games have tended to be pretty nonsensical, repetitive, and trite, and the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired (final fantasy 13 requiring nearly 20 hours of in game tutorial to unlock the full battle system is a fantastic example. I know how to work a battle system with my eyes closed -rpgs are easy- and would rather not play through tutorial mode for that long). The gameplay in 13 was pretty sad too, I can only think of 2-3 post-game fights where I wasnt just idly pressing "autobattle" to win. Maybe a paradigm shift now and then to heal and debuff/rebuff. I really don't feel a game is that engaging when I can win while reading an ebook on another screen. I'm looking forward to 13-2 if for nothing else than to clear up the cluttered plot.

Sounds like a pretty big stretch to me, and I found all of his examples to be completely wrong Because most star wars fans I can think of watch almost every type of sci-fi. I dont think I've ever met a single person in my life who uses "spartan" as an identity either.

Effect. I only call you out on it because professors view this as nails on the chalkboard and you will get points knocked if you mix up effect/affect My internet grammar/spelling is horrid but I noticed you used that twice. I mostly agree with you, big business is very exploitative of most countries without labor laws. However, there are a few points I'll bring up. 1) It is exploitation on a global scale, but often being paid so little in a local economy is still significant to the workers. When I was in Cambodia, I talked to alot of people about this, and many people in these workshops consider it a huge boon compared to other jobs they can take (prostitute, drug dealer, or join the army). They're working dirt cheap by American standards, but it's lucrative to them. They have plenty of local jobs to work, but the standards are often worse than large multinational companies. You have to remember how cheap things are in a developing nation compared to what they're being paid. 2) totally agreed that labor conditions are horrid and children are being exploited....but thats also the case with small scale in-country jobs. What a country really needs to do is outlaw the exploitative practices and enforce adhesion to them so that the people inherently have basic workers rights. But in many of the Third world countries I've visted, it's corrupt enough that police are the ones happily selling prostitutes and drugs, so a place will keep being exploited by corporation, corruption, and malaise until things change at the local level. 3) Absolutely, the goal of any pure-capitalist endeavor is to get the maximum amount of labor for the lowest wage they can pay the worker. This is why things like child labor and worker rights laws are so important (insert lawl libertarians rolleyes emoticon here), because developing countries have absolutely no way to compete with what corporations offer them, even if it literally means working to death for your family. In some Asian countries, girls are treated as total trash (and sometimes killed at birth in rural areas) because they're seen as economically useless to the family. But if a family can legally send an unwanted daughter into a sweatshop all day against her will and with no laws restricting it, you can bet they will. It's all very circular. A country's laws and living conditions are terrible, so corporation X moves in and exploits it for profit, country's standards remain horrible because corporation X has brought economic benefits to the country, no progress is made. Sometimes big business drastically improves life quality and wage though, even if it is extremly exploitative, very rarely does it turn a cesspool area into more of a cesspool. It just goes from "I'm starving in a field and missing most of my limbs because I stepped on a 30 year old UXO" to "Working in a sweatshop for 12 hours straight but at least I can afford to drink myself to sleep every night"

Currently on disc 2, mixed feelings about it. I've played and beaten every FF game except for ff3 on the NES. Things I like about 13: -cool characters -battle system is decent after awhile, love switching classes on the fly -story is interesting -Frocobo Things I dislike: -The entire game is so linear. The last 20 minutes have literally been running forward in a narrow line and pressing A to trigger a cutscene now and then. Most boring dungeons ever -Advancement system for paradigms is cool on the surface, but really just limiting. You really just go from one node to the next with no chance to pick different paths of development. Why cant I just have it set to automatically give me the level ups instead of forcing me to go into the menu and advance the linear exp bar to the next stat bonus node -Easy. man is it easy. I find myself watching TV most of the time while playing it because 90% of the time autobattle wins for me and the 10% of the time it doesnt, I just have to paradigm shift once or twice -Party & babysitting: I'm 20 hours in, stop forcing me to use the default party and giving me tutorials about things I knew 15 years ago Favorite character? Thundergod Cid, master of gamebreaking power.

Have over 300 games from NES-present after I sold 200ish last month. I'm just going to post what I have on my shelf rather than my collection. I used to make ALOT of money as a teenager by mowing lawns, and wasted it all on games and later a firearms collection. 360: Ace combat 6 CoD: WAW Cod 4 Cod MW2 Guitar hero 3 rock band 2 halo 3 eternal sonata infinite undiscovery operation darkness perfect dark star ocean enchanted arms blue dragon dragon age origins dead space borderlands mass effect 2 viva pinata banjo kazooie Ps2: ace combat 5 xenosaga arc the lad: eod contra SS FFX FFXII Front mission 4 Harvest moon max payne max payne 2 phantom brave star ocean street fighter alpha anthology persona 3 wild arms 3

This one is awesome humbly requesting it be added as :saz: with more pronounced eyeroll. and colored like a russian blue instead >_>

Make an annoyed looking cat rolling its eyes because that's the only emoticon I really use on forums so it should be a cat like me. the emote code should be :saz: and look more jaded than a standard

I know it sucks to talk about but if you ever do feel up to telling this, I would be interested in reading it. I always (for personal reasons - my will is weak) want to hear what it is that finally causes people to lose faith.