It's uncanny that you just described my past 3 months of gaming and the submitter described my feelings of late.

After finishing Mass Effect 2 (which I recommend, along with Dragon Age) I spent a while with Minecraft until I started to feel sick playing it, the game is awesome but the cramped spaces or heights and constant sense of fear had me feeling woozy so I had to step away and I turned back to Mount & Blade and Mount & Blade: Warbands. The vanilla game isn't all that hot but the mods, oh boy, the mods are worth it even if a few are buggy. I personally like Prophecy of Pendor (M&B) and Brytenwalda (M&B:Warbands) - both change the game significantly for the better but they're not easy and, while the AI is still dumb as a rock, the battles are still a lot of fun.

Currently I prefer games that I can play at my own pace - an hour a day - but still have a sense of accomplishment. I'm still not a fan of casual games but I can find fun in them but I still like the idea of building characters or worlds except not in MMORPG's, I tried that once as a way to kill an hour a day and lost 14 months of my life.

I too loved Dragon Age: Origins.

The whole world seemed so alive and the break of a few RPG paradigms (No Clerics, dwarfs with US accents, elves with spanish... I FUCKIN' LOVED THAT!) brought back that feeling I had as a teen playing RPGs - I really could lose myself in that world.

At any rate, I'll anxiously wait for it and I'll buy it like a good Bioware fanboy should and I'll love it.

I only hope they make a proper PC version for the game like they did for Dragon Age: Origins. I can't even begin to describe how much I hate Mass Effect 2's PC-as-a-second-thought interface. Mind you, the game is awesome, the scope is epic, the story is fantastic, the sound and visuals are breathtaking and the characters are all "real" but the console-like controls drive me nuts.

I wonder how long it'll take until someone posts the xkcd comic that seems obligatory everyone makes a comment from Idiocracy.

Just this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1BUH9eXy18

China is giving the world the middle finger and not giving a shit about the repercussions.

Face it, corporations are hungry for dollars and one of the only markets left for them is China and the whole Google thing proved that it doesn't matter what China does, the corporations are going to fall in line and obediently do what China wants of them. Of all the companies affected by the breech only Google has spoken out - the rest are quiet and will remain so in fear of losing precious Chinese business.

China has seen that it has nothing to fear from the corporate world - the ones that give them money. They'll do whatever they want now - taking down sites and silencing opposition will only be met with silence and their homeland population is so docile that they'll never revolt so why the fuck should they care.

It's been a long, long time since banter was so much fun. In fact, the last time banter was so good was on another Bioware game - Baldur's Gate.

I love mixing and matching the characters and trying to spark their comments just to listen in to their chats and comments.

Morrigan with Claudia Black's voice is pure fanservice - of which, I'm very thankful.

BTW, Leliana's voice is also really sexy.

I really enjoyed playing BF Heroes - it's light, I never felt that other players had unfair advantages, the promise of no grind, easy to pick up and get going game with fun graphics and I was happy. There was a single problem that use to keep me from giving them some paypal love - the game would disconnect me for no reason after 5 minutes or so of no-lag play.

I was patiently waiting for this to be fixed or for servers to pop up here in Brazil but alas - the fun of BF Heroes is gone.

Paying now means serious advantages to gameplay so no more for me, I don't have hours a day to play nor do I think that I should constantly pay for a game so I'll stick to CS:Source or my other free-to-play games and give money to indie game companies.

EA screwed up BF Heroes, what was fun now became unbalanced - all the best to the players that stick around but I'm having none of it.

But weren't there a few guys, back in 1999 that used to have a pretty neat weekly show. Back then I don't think they were called podcasts but I do remember that the shows were really fun.

Anyway, I found a link to it on Wikipedia but I'm sure there are more links around.

It was called Geeks in Space, or something like that, and the site's admins that used to make the show was called flashdot, dashdot, slashdort or something like that.

The parody domain has been given to Glenn Beck but the controversy still hasn't been answered.

Here's the new(ish, same content, different domain) site: http://gb1990.com/

Spread the controversy because, after all, people are asking whether or not Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990. I, personally, cannot believe he did such a thing but why hasn't Glenn denied these allegations?

What is Glenn hiding, if he's hiding anything at all.

Robert Heinlein!

Note: I'll write only about the books I've read, other folks might have other points of view.

Heinlein might have had a weird way of looking at things but he has great stories as an introduction to the scifi genre - light(ish) reading with plenty of topics to discuss.

Take two of his works that I recommend to folks, Starship Troopers and Farmer in the Sky. Both are "juvenile" books - sex and misogyny are themes in Heinlein's later works - but deal with life in space in a very realistic way. They're wildly speculative yet, just barely, they're plausible enough to make sense.

If you're looking for short stories, there's The Man Who Sold The Moon - short stories populated with really far-fetched ideas yet it's a really fun read.

I'm sure other people will suggest other things but I strongly suggest you take a look at Heinlein for the kids, after all he wrote a bunch of stories for them that are easy reads and are, as far as I can remember, kid-safe.

I'm resisting recommending more authors - as I'm sure this thread will be full of them - but Heinlein's earlier works, from what I recall, are nice examples of scifi aimed towards younger audiences.

It looks great but for space sims I'd prefer a single player experience - nothing against MMORPGs but I'm not all that into fighting to stay alive and get better ships nor participating in a corporation. I want to freely explore space and pick fights only when I want to fight all at my own time.

The ability to freely fly through space is something that really attracted me in Final Frontier (my first game of the series) and I really liked swooping down on planets and explore them without worrying to much about making a buck.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up, nice game but I'm not too sure that's for me.