The game plays like Diablo 2 and Sacred with modern lighting and physics. They also have a technology/nature axis rather than the usually silly good/evil axis of the typical RPG. It’s fun if you enjoyed those games.

A note to developers: don’t describe playing 20 missions in sequence as “nonlinear”. The lack of a world map will remove much of what was great about JA2. Being free to decide which sector to attack next and having to plan your shopping trips (the handful of merchants moved around the world map and were not always available) was a lot of fun for me.

There was a mod for JA2 that let the enemies climb onto the roofs. While scary at first, it’s basically an automatic interrupt for your squad and you can burst them all to death pretty easily. The same thing happened when the AI got break lights in JA2 Gold. It was hard only until you thought about it for a bit.

The government is simply reacting to the sight of large sums of money that aren’t flowing through their pockets, and they’ll do whatever is necessary to change that. This doesn’t mean that taxes are inevitable though. If the MMORPG makers start supplying the government with ‘interns’, ‘pages’, and ‘campaign contributions’ then you can be sure you’ll see fewer articles advocating taxing game players/developers. Though you will see the cost of games mysteriously rise.

It’s asinine to suggest that there wouldn’t be roads if there weren’t taxes. No one is forced to pay taxes so the government can supply us with beer, or books, or games yet all these things are available anyway. This would apply to roads also.

The attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t a surprise.

“Using documents pried loose through the Freedom of Information Act during 17 years of research, Stinnett provides overwhelming evidence that FDR and his top advisers knew that Japanese warships were heading toward Hawaii. The heart of his argument is even more inflammatory: Stinnett argues that FDR, who desired to sway public opinion in support of U.S. entry into WWII, instigated a policy intended to provoke a Japanese attack.”

http://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299

"TP class going from XL cargo to L cargo only"

does this mean Mantas can't lug Silicon around anymore?

I haven't been able to find much hard data about the patch. Do you have anymore information about it (what's the Artificial Life engine?) or a useful link? The egosoft forums don't seem to have much about it yet.

Fallout 3 being worked on once again isn’t particularly interesting news but that it’s being done by Bethesda instead of the munchkins at Black Isle or Bioware is nice to know.

They’ve had some serious technical issues in the past but Morrowind actually worked when released and still is very nice to look at, while their writing is deeper and more mature than anything else I’ve played (hint: prostitutes don’t equal “mature”.).

Adding color, sound, and lots of well written background material can’t be bad, while even doing small things like making the ‘good guys’ not entirely good and ‘bad guys’ not entirely bad and getting better rewards from the latter would be nice. It would be a big improvement over the simplistic black/white choices you get to make in most RPG’s and in pretty much all Black Isle & Bioware games (Planescape Torment being the notable exception). I can also look forward to having a story where every nuance isn’t explained by having NPC’s talking to the monitor. Slowly. Using small words.

The final product could still end up being disappointing, but since the very foundation of Fallout is nonsense (cars can travel across California dozens of times before refueling and vast quantities of that fuel can be stored in your pocket, while the best military hardware uses the same processes, yet somehow there was a cataclysmic war fought over another, now clearly obsolete, fuel source.) it’s going to be pretty hard to say Bethesda ‘ruined’ it.

The worst case scenario is they turn it into a faux non-linear game like KotOR where you can rob and murder your way along the rail road tracks that constitute the game world yet maintain a perfect reputation as long as you denounce your targets as ‘evil’ enough times