Well that was crude; Blues posters used to be less uncouth.

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I really did like that original DoW intro though. Very nice; one of the few intros I don't always skip past when starting, because it actually gets ya psyched up...

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Don't forget HoMM. But there's not a lot.

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There were two turn based - maybe three. They were passable; "Chaos Gate" was ok and "Rites of War" (using one of the panzer general engines?) wasn't bad. I got tired of hearing Choas Gates' "Death to the Emperor" lines over and over though, but I did like the points/movement system (pretty close to SpaceHulk the board game, actually). Decent enough at the time. Didn't try the one set in the 'Titans' scale, forget the name of it. SpaceHulk was ok; again not great. And 'Fire Warrior' seems to have come and gone quickly, though that was FPS from what I gather.

I couldn't ever get Shadow of the Horned Rat to run; bought it cheap a few years after it came out, and for whatever reason I couldn't get it to work on the newer hardware.

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Yeah, looking forward to another licensed fantasy battle game...

I want an RPG for either of these. c'mon, get some KOTOR-esque Inquistor stuff going, or some "An Enemy Within" fantasy RPG stuff (including the "Restless Dead" sidebar...) and toss in some cameos from Gotrek and Felix...

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How about them Packers? Ouch.

Yup. Gonna be 0-4 after this coming week. The secondary is being eaten alive. The offense isn't grand, but it's not anemic.

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Did anyone have ANY doubt whatsoever once the kick was returned to around the NE 45 yard line, that Brady, with 1:21 remaining was easily going to get in range for Vinatieri?

Certainly helps when the officials gave you an extra 52 seconds to work with.

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Haven't read this whole thread yet, and someone probably already pointed this out, but I believe the salary cap is 85 million right now, on the way to 100 within two years...

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but for sporting conversations, not to fill out his suit jacket.

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Day After Tomorrow was just a film, pure fantansy[sic].

I'll agree with you there, if we can agree "fantasy" means "bullflop".

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It is astoundingly linear though, which was partly what turned me off the first one. You follow a path by your nose; the maps (while really cool looking and often somewhat inventive, plus all 'seamless') are all strung together in one big string, punctuated by well placed teleporters. There's really not a lot of side tracking, even the side quests are more bumped into along the way and involve backtracking more than anything else. Granted, I only started Act II last evening, so I'm perhaps a 1/3 in. I would have liked to see some optional extra areas just for sidequests. The FF games were good for that; extra optional castles and islands and such to explore.

The death bit of losing all your gear (unless you run back to get it or pay a necrodude 25% of your coinage) sucks. But I like it a lot better than quicksaving, and I quickly learned to back off fights I wasn't going to win. I think the stuff that's making it more interesting this time for me is not just a slight case of 'gear fixation', but also the skills progression (with the special attack things) and the pets. Pets are fun. My dire wolf is a tank; if my party is getting walloped to death over and over he usually is able to zip to freedom and give me time to regroup the party without EVERYONE dying on me. And until I maxed him out, it was fun just tossing him any crap to eat that I didn't want.

Multiplayer, frankly, is a disappointment. I'm also behind a linksys (WAP54G) and when we finally got it working, we realized it was only co-op starting from the beginning, there was no 'self contained play world' like in the original. Good idea, but we didn't cotten on to it early enough and didn't want to start from the beginning. Guess reading the manual would've been a good thing. I'm sure some free content will come along from the community (or the inevitable expansion), so we'll see how it goes. Hoping a saveable 'romp' zone I can take my party to.

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me too, actually; good way to build up a couple of pets to swap in and out for a change.

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Don't forget Brady's first year. I'm still expecting Roethlisburger to come back to earth a bit this year.

True enough. The main thing some of the rookies who perform well 1st year end up concentrating on is "don't lose the game, let the team win it". The teams around them tend to do a lot of the hard work, whether strong defensively (perhaps applicable to the pats) or controlling the ball through a solid run game (perhaps applicable to the steelers). One problem is, this same tenet is that much harder to accept when your a QB on the downturn than it was to accept as a rookie coming in. And he's on his way down. Shrug. It's a high-profile position, draws a lot of the spotlights good and bad.

As to top 5, I'm not sure I can put Marino there. No ring can't be hung on just your surrounding cast. But it would be a lot of thinking to make the calls, so I won't post one.

AFC is rampant the last while. It'll be horrid to see the NFC north champs be an 7-9 team bleah.

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For the first part of the so-called 'preview', he could've been describing a game on the Age Of... series.

Always good to send someone who has little familiarity with the series to preview an anticipated sequel; the insights the new player offered into the game's progress, controls, innovations, graphics etc. were simply stunning in their detail.

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So I'm not "assuming" anything, he SAID THIS ON NATIONAL TELEVISION.

Said "supposing", not "assuming", by the way; at least get the word correct if you're going to quotey-mark it. And it wasn't INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION (all caps makes the medium sound fancier than it is), so you can pardon me if I didn't hear a whisper about it. Although, perhaps I wasn't listening as hard for negative points on the fellow as you and your "tits". <shrug>

There were a few points in your reply I agreed with; I also don't think other players should involve themselves in someone's holdout - and Favre got took to task for it in a fair swath of the media, and rightly so. However, I have a problem with holdouts in general; I think they're childish, unprofessional and pointless. I also don't hold Favre at fault at all for Walker's injury. Shit happens. Buy insurance.

I mean, what's Favre accomplishing by still playing those games? Is he near any kind of record?

Well, he'll possibly pass Elway for #2 in a couple, Most Passes Attempted or Most Yards Gained... but that's not important either. Don't play for records (remember Alexander's whining last year for one more yard?). Play to win. I'm not convinced he's not doing that, and as I said before, I think the supporting cast is weak (regardless of his performance, teams don't live and die by one position, as easy as it is to suppose). Marquee name or not, he's a player. Play the game, and get your team around you to play the game.

All in all, I agree he's a good QB in his winding down stage. I don't think we should hold him to standards of 1997, nor always expect him to be "better than 28 of the other guys in the league" - QBs don't have to be really good or really bad; they're allowed to be average. He didn't lead the league in INTs last year (plummer, vinny, collins), nor did he lead in TDS (peyton, culpepper, mcnabb). It's a team sport. Unfortunately, because of a goodly number of vocal people pilloring or pedestal-ing him (each are really unwarranted, I'm talking to you Peter King and John Madden), he tends to draw the focus for the team's performance.

Favre won't stay around until his current contract is up in 2010. So long as he's better than the next guy in line (and nothing in Rodger's college stats tells me otherwise, just look at some of the other 1st years, roethlisburger excepted of course :)), I still see no reason to bench him.

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They have Aaron Rodgers, let the kid play. And if Favre feels like being an asshole and refuses to help the kid learn the ropes to BENEFIT THE FRANCHISE, then he's a fucking asshole and they need to tank his ass QUICK.

good gawd man, you're certainly supposing some things there. Throwing out unproven suppositions to back up your case isn't cricket, old chum. Favre has been historically helpful to Craig Nall and Doug Pederson (and all the rest - even Couch from what I read), so I have no reason to expect he'd be any less with Rodgers. I certainly don't think it's time to 'warner' him in favor of the rookie though. Yanking a QB after 2 games would be a kneejerk reaction for sure; I don't see people calling for Culpepper to be polishing the bench and handing the job to whoever the heck his replacement is.

I think you will see Rodgers play this year if the Packers are mathematically put out of playoff contention - though like I say, an 8-8 team may end up with the division crown; or even a 7-9 team! But even still, tossing in a rookie just because you drafted him high isn't necessarily a wise idea either. I'm taking the wait and see. I doubt anyone expected them to be contenders this year anyways; they've been struggling a fair bit since 4th & 26 took the wind out of their sails; that was the last year they had a decent enough team for a shot, I think.

I think there were a number of problems with the week 2 game, and they were only mildly exacerbated by incompletions and the loss of Walker (and corresponding lack of depth at WR, though not too many teams could lose their #1 wideout and not see a performance drop in the next game). They start in coaching & management decisions (which this year weren't all Sherman's). When you give up two TD plays of longer than 60 yards; there's HUGE problems with the secondary. Letting Sharper go certainly didn't help (McKenzie on the other hand is still a good call; he's not looking too hot for the beleagured Saints). Running through defensive coordinators like they're the solution to personnel issues is another. Clock management in the 4th was atrocious; did they borrow mike martz' approach?

Always deadly discussing football with folks who... umm... seem to be so... umm... expressive... and... see the middle ground as so... umm... untenable.

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Goddamn Packers are 0 and 2 so far and it doesn't look like it's gonna' get much better at this point. This better be Farve's last season and they better get them some goddamned defense for next year.

aye, the defense be leakin' like a chain-shot mizzenmast. Don't be stirring up a quarterback squall by passing Captain Favre the black spot, he's heaving cannons at his bilge rats, but they be dropping and falling like crew from the Mary Celeste. He be trying his darndest, and 'tis true his risky moves be causing his usual grief but his o-line be collapsing and his gold pocketwatch be running out of playtime...

That division be like the dread sargasso sea, all the teams mired in muck and unable to sail away from the others, doomed to rot 'til the sea hag feasts on their bones... t'will be long replanking seasons comin' in the years ahead...

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Can I get that on normal cable though? I'm under the impression that I need to either have sattelite or digital cable for that?

No, it has to be Direct TV.

Digital Cable has it up here in canuckistan; I could add it to my service if I wanted (though with HD channels, regular channels and west coast channels, there's not too many games I don't get already). I think the DirectTV restriction only applies to below the 49th... though it still isn't cheap.

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Deja Vu! I swear I saw this same news item a week ago.

link?

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I'll say this; it appears the collective shine to the Saints is wearing off quick. Crowd was definitely pro-Giants last night; causing burned timeouts and false starts. more blatantly home-team than the panthers fans were, not sure if that's a carolinas/hurricane sympathy zone kind of thing or what.

oh. and the saints used to win more on the road than home anyways, so not sure it's a mega disadvantage, though still an issue given the travelling.

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