Bullethead

I'll take your word for it for now, but I'll still have to dig through my books to be sure BTW, I got a joke email the other day about eBay fraud. This guy said he ordered a blow-up doll and then there was a picture of what he got. I can't post it here but suffice to say it was a babe wearing nothing but an Arab head scarf and a suicide vest

I got the 1st one, thought it was good but no cigar, didn't finish it, and never bought the others.

I didn't even touch the main quest in Oblivion until my 5th or 6th character. He was a goody-2-shoes type who first did the Knights of the Nine DLC thing. All my previous characters had been thugs or worse and had lived very successful lives. One guy was head of the Thieves' Guild, then moved on to the Dark Brotherhood, and finally took over the Shimmering Isles. Another became leader simultaneously of both the Fighters' and Mages' Guilds. Another was a very powerful vampire. One explored the entire world and had at least 1 scalp of every non-quest-specific enemy in the game. Stuff like that. It was only after doing all this other stuff that I finally decided to give the main quest a try.

Sure about that, Lou? AFAIK, all naval Zeps had a base coat of silver paint. This reflected as much sunlight as possible, to minimize the expansion of the hydrogen. The reason for this is that when the gas in the cells expanded, it had to be vented out or burst the cells, and on long trips they could only afford to vent off so much if they wanted to maintain altitude. In the war, only the bottoms of the Zeps were painted black.

That's a real shame. But it just goes to show, you never know. For instance, a while back a guy I knew got killed in a car wreck the very night he got back from the war.

Although Skyrim will be at my gridsquare on Friday, I doubt I'll play it then. I have to work the weekend, I doubt my current box is up to it, and my new rig won't be here for another week or so. So try not to spoil it too much for me :).

I remember when you joined this forum, so now I feel old But WM already said even Jan 2012 won't see P4 in our hands, so my advice is to ask for a new computer for Xmas so you'll be ready when it gets here

I was under the impression that 2nd Life wasn't a game but a business tool. If you're an architect or civil engineer, you can give your clients a virtual walkthrough of your designs. If you're a fashion designer, you can offer virtual copies of your latest ideas for sale and see how well they sell. Or you can just use it as a venue for videoconferencing with avatars instead of webcams. Of oourse, the whole thing being a sandbox, if you're willing to spend the money you can create your own wannabe WoW area or whatever. I understand some folks have done that. But I have to wonder why....

Still, I can agree that collisions are the biggest threat in combat. I'd say 80-90% of my careers end that way.

What do you tell a woman with 2 black eyes? Nothing. If she didn't listen the 1st 2 times, she won't this time, either.... But I'm sure there's some sort of bad kharma involved in this sort of thing in Skyrim. I prefer romance in The Witcher--collect trophy cards from each woman you seduce

My mom was a stewardess back in the 50s, mostly in DC3s. One time, besides passengers, they had a seeing-eye dog as baggage and the crew decided to let it ride in the cockpit with them. The dog went aboard before any of the passengers so none of them knew it was there. Anyway, at the end of the flight, the pilot put on dark glasses and walked the dog down the ailse to the back door before any of the passengers had gotten up. This caused some consternation

I don't understand the attraction of getting married in real life, let alone in an escapism thing like an RPG. Tried it once, never again. And I'd think that because the big draw of such things as Skyrim is that they're totally different worlds you can escape into for a while, then very few folks would want to get married in there, either

I wouldn't say Daggerfall was the best. Looking back on it, it was pretty clunky. It wasn't really 3D, it was 2D tricked into approximating 3D in the same what the original Doom did. All the characters were 2D sprites so an infinite number of enemmies could stack up front-to-back in zero depth and really whallop you all at once.

As long as there was alcohol aboard, I'd agree. After the 1st hour of such a ride, I figure the discomfort would overcome my enthusiasm and the prospect of another 15 hours plus to go would put me in need of a drink

Very nice. Are those Ace bandages for puttees? I also had to get in costume for a parade, but it was the high school homecoming a week before Halloween. The problem was, we were playing a team called the Pirates so the fire department decided to do the parade as a "scalp dance". You know, 1 warrior dresses up like the enemy and is symbolically killed by the others, to get some good mojo working for the upcoming battle. So, I had to dress up as a pirate and get beaten up by other firemen dressed as such, all the while getting jeered and pelted by the crowd. For 3 miles.... Damn good work-out, though

Ah yes, I love that game. I still play it and have recently gotten my nephew hooked on it. You can get it on Steam for like $4 and it'll run on today's hardware

As far as I can tell, there's nothing in OFF itself to configure sticks or rudders. What you do is calibrate your rig on the Windows Control Panel and OFF takes it from there.

I think your tastes have just changed. It happens to us all. I used to love FPS games from the original Doom. At that time, I had no use at all for the fantasy flavor like Heretic and Thief. But somewhere along the line, I completely reversed myself on this. Now I like the fantasy type and won't touch the gun type. I don't know why but that's the way I've been for the last dozen years or so. I see things differently because I'm in the gaming industry. The bottom line is, the PC as we came to know it over the last 20 years is obsolete and on its way out. I believe it will no longer exist be the end of this decade. It's incredibly extravagant and wasteful compared to modern alternatives. I think us old codgers only keep buying them out of habit and snobbery. We think consoles are beneath us because 20 years ago, when we were young adults, we saw consoles as kiddie toys and have maintained this opinion despite the march of progress since, and the growing up of the kids of 20 years ago. For some years now, the future has already been upon us. The mundane computing functions like using this forum, running a business, etc., don't require much more horsepower than they did 20 years ago, and that horsepower can now fit inside something the size of a pack of smokes. The vast amount of horsepower possible today, however, is only needed for gaming, and even that doens't need much of a package. So the natural process has been to split these functions up between specialized machines. This is both cheaper overall and much more convenient to use on both fronts and is why, for some years past, consoles have been by far the biggest market for games. These days, they're practically the only market. Have you been in a Best Buy or Game Stop lately? They have only a very few PC titles, shoved back in a corner behind aisles and aisles of console titles. So as I see it, it's a miracle there are ANY releases for PC at all these days. That's the industry just throwing us old dogs a bone. It won't last much longer. I just ordered a new PC last week and I wouldn't be surprised at all if it ends up being the last one I ever buy. By the time I'd normally be looking to replace it, there could well be no more new PC games available to need a new PC. Now, as to your claim of lack of depth in FRPGs lately... I think that's a subjective matter. Some folks think it means lots of stuff to do, others mean some long, involved storyline with lots of character development. These 2 are usually mutually exclusive. Personally, I prefer the former to the latter.

FINALLY, a decent airshow rolled through Lousy Anna and, even more amazing, I had the time to go see it. This was the Sertoma Cajun Air Festival in Lafayette, LA, from which I've just returned. It was an amazing show. I took well over 100 pics but have uploaded the best of them to a gallery here at Combat Ace, which you can find at the link below. It includes most of the acts and static displays. There's even a pic of a now-rare Piper "Traumahawk" in which I somehow managed to learn to fly without kiling myself. Most of these planes have, thankfully, gone on to a better life as beer cans . Anyway, here's the link: http://combatace.com...-festival-2011/ There was all sorts of things here, military and civilian. The military side included demonstrations by an F/A-18F and A-10, a fly-by by a B-52, and a performance by the Thunderbirds. The civilian side had 3 of those little modern stuntplanes all flown by award-winning pilots, some sort of homebuilt flown by the guy who flew the BD-5J through the hangar in "Octopussy", the Aeroshell team, and quite a few others including a helicopter. One guy (who also flew a stuntplane) landed a Piper Cub on top of a pickup truck while it was rolling down the runway. And there was a jet-powered dragster that could get over 300mph in 5 seconds. All in all, a very cool show. I have to show off a few pics here to whet your appetites . One good thing about Lousy Anna's humidity.... It makes G-streamers and shockwave clouds highly visible. This F/A-18F was doing about 5 knots less than Mach 1 when it went by here This is the Aeroshell Aerobatic Team, flying T6s. They were every bit as good and, due to having way less power, even more impressives than the guys below: The Thunderbirds, however, were still very impressive. My only real gripe with the show as that they had the PA system blaring music so friggin' loud you couldn't even hear their engines, which was very disappointing.

Miss :).

VERBALLY? When I was that age, my father would give me a dozen lashes However, he never lost his cool. He'd come home from work tired, mother would fill him in on whatever bad thing I'd done while he was gone, and he'd sigh heavily get changed into comfortable clothes. Then I'd be summoned to his room where we'd have a sort of "captain's mast" proceedure. He'd calmly recite the charges against me, ask me if I had anything to say in my defense, decide my excuses didn't hold water, explain why, and then would sentence me to a flogging with his belt, which was carried out immediately. Afterwards, as far as he was concerned, the incident was over.

Ah, there's your trouble. By now you're supposed to have a tablet. OT1H, you can read all the free WW1 aviation PDFs that Lou keeps linking for us. OTOH, you can read game wikis for free. So after about 4 games, the tablet will have paid for itself in savings on strategy guides

The insane thing is that there's still a market for strategy guides. I just can't fathom that. If I was a book publisher, I'd have gotten out of that market about 10 years ago at the latest. By all logic, the internet should have destroyed the commercial viability of strategy guides no later than 2001. Every game, no matter how obscure, has at least 1 fanboy crazy enough to build a wiki detailing its every aspect. When it's a major title like Skyrim, it'll have have half a dozen wikis and their webmasters will all try to scoop each other. And for each such fanboy, there are a about one dozen others who get their jollies out of contributing to such wikis. So these very few folks buy the strategy guides and almost overnight, the entire contents are available for free to every other potential customer. I thought this was the Internet Generation. Babies these days don't say "goo goo", they say "google". Thus, logially, for something like Skyrim, I'd expect to sell only 100 copies of the strategy guide at most, which won't cover the production costs or payments to Bethesda for all the secret info prior to release so I can have the book ready on the same day. But somehow, logic is failing here and strategy guides continue to be part and parcel of the release of major titles. WTF? Seriously, do you all know anybody who buys them, who isn't a wiki webmaster fanboy? I sure don't.

Hell, I don't know if I'll be alive in 2014. After all, the world's supposed to end in 2012 . But it does sound awful tempting. The one main thing the show yesterday lacked was biplanes. Not even a Pitts doing stunts, only a PT-17 on static display (although, for enough cash, you CAN take a ride in it). I suppose if I'm going to go, I need to make reservations at least 6 months ahead of time. So I guess if we make it through 2012, I'll start seriously considering it

Well, that makes sense. Did you ask them what the knobby black things on the model were? Not searchlights, surely ;). The old Stringbag did an awful lot of damage throughout the war. It put paid to many U-boats out in the Atlantic and scads of ships in the Med. Most of the latter was done at night, too, due to the local air opposition. But they managed to stick radar in the plane somehow, so it could find ships in the dark. It wasn't until fairly late in the war that the the US Avenger and Fairey Baracuda started appearing in numbers for the FAA.