GW have become the biggest problem in Wargaming, their game systems are terrible and their approach to making profits is "Jack up prices to make up for less customers". They keep releasing new editions which dumb the rules down and then they release army rulebooks where there is no balance (in Fantasy there are 3 tier 1 armies, you play 1 or you lose to them, in a game of 15 factions or so), but little kids buy into GW as the gateway drug. They are only just starting to release nice models, but you need so many of them it becomes insanely expensive to build any sort of real army.

If you're a wargamer and wish to play a good game and support a good company then get into Warmachine/Hordes. It's a more mature game with better quality miniatures, with balanced rules and a company that supports it's fans. Privateer press are updating to a MKII version for January, in doing so they have released the rules for every model and the main rulebook for MKII for free on PDF. They also consider fan feedback in balancing things, they are currently running a fieldtest for the beta rules for Hordes MKII, fans get to play the game and they can give feedback on how to buff/nerf a model if they wish. PP take this into consideration and did fix issues with Warmachine MKII models.

Privateer also support their game systems. They started out making D20 books but moved onto Wargaming (and now boardgames) and intend to return to the roleplaying side of things where possible, but in their bi-monthly Magazine you will always find 5 pages dedicated to a new scenario for the roleplaying, as well as about 10 pages of solid fluff for the Iron Kingdoms, some examples are alchemist guilds famous through out the land to how humans discovered magic and the secret society that grew up from that. To supplement this, their roleplaying books are now out of print, so they have put them up as PDFs for people to download from several E book sites.

Privateer press are not perfect and maybe in the future they will become the new GW, but as a wargamer I am happy to support a company that tries to support the community around it. One example that sticks out in my mind is there was a new faction released recently, on the forums people were discussing what their robots were made out of, no one was quite sure and one guy requested some official word. 20 minutes later the lead writer had posted with at least an A4 page's worth of text explaining every possible detail you could wish on the subject. PP isn't a small company and yet it's staff members still do things like this and get "into the trenches" with the fans.

Disclaimer : I play PP games, I don't work for them in any way. I dislike GW because I see what a mess they make and yet they keep selling people their personal brand of crack, which restricts the wargaming industry and does more harm than good in general.

Yes, the "Russian crew members" should be forced to all be plumbers to resolve problems like this. That'll sure be useful if the US and Russia ever have any political differences. Maybe every American sent into Space should be trained on all skills they could possibly need up there, so they can deal with any situation at hand instead. I mean it's not rocket science to make sure your crew is prepared for things like this, where as it's pretty damn stupid to depend on someone else doing it (although this an increasingly common attitude these days)

BT is NOT unmetered. I got kicked off BT for "excessive use" a couple of years back. They considered it wrong to be connected for long periods of time and using software to redial when they dropped it.

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I've been a huge fan pretty much since birth and all this makes me think is that I won't be buying the game. I picked the 360 because it had more games and content I wanted to play, I was quite looking forward to the game but a year+ delay just means by the time it has a 360 release I will be buying something else and the game will be long forgotten. It's a shame that Sony are trying to sell their console instead of selling a game, their first priority should be to making profit and making successful games, not to screw a game's sales over by desperately clawing at a failing console.

The PS3 is in a bad position and is clearly in last place this generation, but they do themselves no favours by stealing a game from the 360, because they will lose far more in game sales (and reviving a franchise) than they will gain from getting a handful of new consoles sold. I don't really care for the fanboy crap and was tempted to buy a PSP for some games recently, but when I see Sony's commitment is to selling hardware and not selling great games, I question if I should be giving them money.

As someone who is sitting here recovering from an operation I must strongly disagree with you. I met some damn incompetent people at the hospital and wouldn't of minded smacking them up side the head, but I also met some very good nurses and last time I checked my operation went well and that says my surgeon probably did his job pretty damn well.

We remember the incompetent far more than the competent, if people are doing their jobs well you will rarely hear about them but the moment they make 1 mistake there will be giant flashing billboards 3 inches from your nose. Not everyone is terrible at what they do, it's just if they do what they are meant to you will never have them stand out to you.

If this is the case, can you please explain why the UK is also in a recession right now?