It's not offensive by any means, merely - to me - inexplicable. I have a number of rather extreme hobbies that I didn't think people would be interested in, and even within the main thread of discussion I don't see how it deserves a high rating.
... started as a comic before it became a movie. In the graphic novel I have, the Rocketeer's girlfriend is Betty Page, the 50s pinup icon who was at that time (mid to late 80s) thought dead.
If you're willing to deal with a Windows version, there's a boxed set called [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000CE1L7/qid=1079028421/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-0 524318-5144849?v=glance&s=videogames]"The Laptop Collection"[/url] that includes SMAC, Alien Crossfire, Red Alert and Tiger Woods golf. It costs $15 - $20 and can be found at Walmart and Babbages, among other retailers.
In the movie department there are a lot of variables. I'll restrain myself to movies you might find on the shelf at your local shop.
Movies from Private usually have unenhanced girls doing nasty things with guys who don't look like they just got out of prison. Quality is generally very high there but no single movie stands out.
Wicked's films usually have something resembling a plot. I like Brad Armstrong's work almost universally. "Not a Romance" is a recent standout.
Vivid has all the "name" performers. Chances are, if there's a starlet you're into, she works for Vivid. Vivid's movies are reasonably well-made, but photography isn't ever great and they use the same four former inmates in every movie. On the plus side, they (and Wicked and things fom Adam and Eve productions, also) tend not to veer off into anything particularly nasty, so they're a little more S.O. friendly. One of my favorite recent Vivid movies is "Roommates", which happens to have the best plot I can think of in a movie from the '90s. It actually manages to be a little bit thrilling in a "thriller" sort-of way, and there's a sense of "real life" about it, too.
Andrew Blake and Michael Ninn both make heavily stylized, beautifully filmed material. Pornographic art-movies, really. Their movies are less about the sex act and more about the image on the screen; comparing a Blake movie to something from Vivid is like comparing "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" to "The Tuxedo".
I avoided Hustler's video line for a long time because, well, it's Hustler. I don't like the magazine, it's too crude for my taste. But I got a copy of "Barely Legal #1" about a year ago and, with the unfortunate exception of the director's urine fetish, it was good. "Barely Legal" is young girls and the inmates who love them, but it's well-photographed, stocked with really cute natural-type young women and consistently hot sex. I actually like "Hot Showers", the all-girl series a little better, since it maintains the otherwise high-quality of "Barely Legal" and completely avoids the knuckle-dragging simians. I think "Barely Legal on Vacation" is probably the best of the series. I mentioned softcore: I like Playboy videos. Over time a decent number of high-quality vignettes have been produced to show between movies on the Playboy channel, which have been collected on DVD as "Erotic Fantasies" and "Inside Out" They're short and steamy. Me and my ex- used to love 'em.
Is that enough or are you looking for something in particular?
I have a number of fairly normal desktop machines (mostly Athlon64s) that happen to have around 900GB of disk space. It's not a big deal. A terabyte of disk space costs about $1000. I've acquired around 2TB of space just in the last year. All told I'm a hair over 5TB among my various machines (some of that space is redundant storage in arrays).
No. I don't invest very much actual time on downloads. I wrote some scripts to grab content from various places on the web. I look at a few "favorite" sites daily, but that's not a large investment in time. Maybe 15 minutes. I usually find new sites serendipitously, and they if they appear to update content with any frequency, I add 'em to the script.
It's pretty typical for me to pick up 300MB of stuff in a night from scripts. Sometimes I'll subscribe to a pay site and grab the whole thing.
I'm a general-purpose media collector. I own maybe 3200 CDs (all classical music), about 1000 (video, non-adult) DVDs and collections of paperback novels, magazines, sheet music and comic books. I have a complete-except-for-three-issues collection of Playboy magazines, for example.
I got interested in video capture hardware seven or eight years ago, when my Pentium Pro machine was a fantastic powerhouse, just to see what I could do with it. I started doing my home movies, then tried commercial tapes... which didn't work, because of macrovision. But a porn tape did, so I started duping the oldest tapes my local video store had (the ones I liked best). Not long after I picked up an affordable CD-R drive and I started making VCDs that I sold on ebay. From there I started getting requests, and then the hunt was on for stuff I couldn't get locally and... wham. I had a collection.
So I'm a media geek of some kind. I re-wired my whole house for media access about three weeks after I bought it. I can watch my DVDs or listen to my music in any room. If I have some kind of OCD, it's probably deeper than just downloading/collecting porno. I *do* take 200mg of Zoloft a day, which I know is used to treat OCD among other things (severe depression in my case).
For the other thing: there's this. She didn't mind playboy stuff, and she actually _liked_ dirty movies, although ironically she had me pre-screen to make sure there WASN'T g/g activity... which itself led to a great deal of knowledge about the movies and the people in them (for example, a movie with Tera Patrick is a good bet for straight M/F sex. I haven't seen her with a girl yet). Anyway, she was more annoyed with the amount of space my collections took up than anything else. At the end of our time living together, she asked me for specific things to take and share with her girlfriend (in case you were wondering why I need the Zoloft).
I can't judge how other people react. I'm not good at that sort of thing. But it's not like I'd talk about it in front of other real-life people. But here I can be at least be honest about such things.
No. I barely look at any of it as it is. I think of it as archiving.
I'm hunting down complete collections of mainstream (Vivid, VCA, Cabellero etc) porn from the late 70s to present and capping them to electronic formats. At any given time I share maybe 5% of my collection on fasttrack.
I set up an old Motorola StarMax with an 18GB drive, running NetBSD. I put Samba on it, and configured samba to do roaming profiles. Once a week, my mom clicks an icon that reboots her machine and restores a ghost image from a DVD. When the PC reboots again, she presses "1" to start windows, and all her email and stuff is where she left it, on the BSD machine.
Sadly, it doesn't work that way. The "not feeling bad" part, I mean. I've been suicidally depressed ever since, and I usually work around 90 billable hours just so I don't have to go home and be alone.
I paid for her masters degree and her first year of med school. The "wrote a check" kind of paid. I agreed to "wait until we were married". I bought her a car.... and her militant-bitch "all breeder sex is rape" girlfriend looks like she could be my sister (and, in case you have any illusions, I'm not anything like an attractive person).
YOU try living with that. I was with her for 12 years. I never learned to "read" her. She might've been broadcasting "gay" to the entire tri-state area but all I could do was take her at her word. That's what it's like to not have social skills. Almost 24 months and the thought of someone ending a romantic relationship makes me physically ill.
It's surprising in any case; Intel dominates in mass-market retail. Sure, you can get a Presario or an Emachine with an AMD CPU, but a quick glance at the shelves of your local Best Buy or Harvey Norman will find Intel boxes to be the norm. 66% of computers sold are brand-name models and the majority of those are going to have Intel inside.
Dear kindly Peter Norton, You gotta understand It's just our hacker egos That gets us outta hand. Our friends are all spammers Our teachers teach VB Holy jebus that's why we are 'leet!
I'd *love* to have a super-hero game universe under my control, but I won't play online with other people.
I was really excited and interested in this game until I found out it was a monthly-fee-scam kind of thing. It'll turn into yet another low-positive-feedback-by-levelling thing, I'm sure, and it'll be set in a fairly generic universe. No licenses (would it really be that hard to snag, say, the Malibu or New Universe license from marvel, or Wildstorm's world?)
What I was hoping for was something along the line of NWN - anyone can run a server, build his world and offer no-fee play. Heck, I would've even taken a single-player game like Freedom Force, if I could make my own game.
So we'll have this generic world, where it probably won't be possible to be "Deena" from Powers or, based on the archetypes they list, someone with non-obvious powers like Longshot. Would Batman - world's greatest detective - even be any fun to play in an MMO world where muggers are probably the equivalent of rats and spiders?
One of the knocks I had against Freedom Force was that it was relentlessly upbeat and really forced one into a Lee/Kirby-style semi-whacky flawed-but-noble hero mode. It captured the comics of 1963 very well, but there wasn't room for anything else; no "normal guys" or detectives or anti-heroes or cosmic bad-asses. No shades of grey, either. I want to play in a world where I can be a regular bank robber or Green Arrow or Captain Marvel (any of 'em) or Silver Surfer and have all of them be fun and challenging.
Anyway, I think there's a million and one ideas for something besides Stupendous Man and his sidekick Super Lad, contending with a million and one clones of Wolverine, which is what it looks like I'll get with City of Heroes.
I think I'll wait another decade for the day I can finally build Jokertown and play with the people I choose to play with.
If you're going to save the packaging for every game, and no one else does, eventually that complete product will be worth money over and above the value of the game itself.
The simple fact is that I don't really appreciate the retail package of a game, once I own that game, and I'd rather use the space for other things, just like every other normal person. The packaging was meant to be disposable. They made it out of paper for chrissakes.
If you're different, then so be it. In 50 years when universities are offering "video game packages of the 20th century: a monological examination" as a class, you'll have saved cultural obscura and done your job as a pop-cultural historian. The world will thank you.
1. One of my players realizing the full, evil power of his role as Hygene Officer, in a roomfull of "Real Role Players". He brought along some old bottles of cologne, Listerine, and, soap for the washing of commie, mutant traitors. The poor bastards even went along with it.
2. A paranoia mission known as "Whitewash", wherein players were tasked with painting an Ultraviolet-clearance hallway Black. A Code-7 masterpiece, it was fully capable of killing dozens of clones with literally no prompting on the part of the GM. Experienced players don't even bother with that one.
3. Telescopalmine. Visomorpain. Rolactin....and the side-effects that happen when you take 'em all at the same time.
4. Invisible Commies, sub-bots and Plaid-clearance rooms in "Alpha Complexities".
5. The sheer, character destroying joy of "Me and My Shadow", in which characters are tasked with guarding a Mark IV Continental Siege machine. Anyone remember the simple joy of "A Piece Falls Off"?
I ruined someone else's angsty, longstanding "Vampire: the Masquerade" campaign by involving a couple of his players in a run through "Alpha Complexities".
Man, I wish I could've seen those last few sessions.
I'm not really into pictures with bullshit site- and phonesex ads on them, but if the web is your choice...
Boobdex.com is a good start. And I like the amateur pages at Voyeurweb. I get lots of goodness from Coolio's Babelog as well. You might also spend some quality time at Domai or Kindgirls, which both have much free goodness.
I use scripts to grab most of my smut, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Mozilla extensions Linky and Magpie which combine to make my life as a pr0n browser much more pleasant.
I swear I played the original game for months and couldn't win it. I knew everything I had to do but I couldn't advance my characters to levels high enough to make it through the underworld without being munched by "Demon: Summons Demon" BS. IIRC only the character that killed something got any XP for it, so I'd end up with a 9th level, hammer-weilding Shamino and a bunch of pansy 5th level hangers-on.
I played it simultaneously with the original Might and Magic. Both games were incredibly rich, filled with details. Both were very much opposite of modern games like NWN - I'd love to see an NWN-like game with outdoor areas the size of those found in the later Ultima games, or the tiny discoveries that suddenly change the way the game is played (such as U5's magic carpet).
I loved the fact that in Ultima5, the NPCs had their own schedules, and the free-form conversation system that really did reward me for the occasional tangent from a character's main purpose.
Dungeon Siege, on the other hand, was been almost the antithesis of a decent CRPG. The graphics and music were cool but it was at-best a half-step over a Diablo clickfest (don't even get me started on that one). The whole game was "Oh, a new tileset, and different color bad guys. Yay." I'm glad I only paid $15 for it, and with an Ultima-like expansion, maybe now I'll feel like I got my money's worth.
I have full-time playboy on DirectTV (more precisely, the guy who shares my duplex does, but I pay him for a receiver so...).
Playoby's offerings are FAR different from what they were 5 years ago. In that time, Playboy has eaten the Spice Network, home to harder-core material than the T&A stuff playboy is known for (and, if I can digress for a moment: That's the stuff I like. I don't want to see some guy's hairy ass, looking like he got out of prison that morning, pawing at Tera Patrick or Carmen Luvana. Give me T&A and I'm a happy guy).
Used to be, you didn't see penetration on Playboy. Now you do, even in some of the Playboy-branded content. I've seen gonzo-type movies and I've seen unedited titles from the major US porn studios (mostly Vivid, but also Wicked, VCA et al). No Max Hardcore, no "1200 Anal Cumshots", no interracial degradation porn, no midgets, but if your tastes run to something a woman might conceivably watch with you, Playboy is a pretty good deal. Cost is IIRC $12 a month, same as HBO. I think a four hour block of adult PPV on direcTV is $5 or $7.
"Totally Busted" and "The Naked News" are both pretty worthwhile for entertainment value. The "Are my Boobs crooked?" bit that's advertised on iFilms.com came from "Totally Busted".
Now, the day I can get Playboy in HDTV, I'll finally invest in a directv subscription of my own.
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It's not offensive by any means, merely - to me - inexplicable. I have a number of rather extreme hobbies that I didn't think people would be interested in, and even within the main thread of discussion I don't see how it deserves a high rating.
... started as a comic before it became a movie. In the graphic novel I have, the Rocketeer's girlfriend is Betty Page, the 50s pinup icon who was at that time (mid to late 80s) thought dead.
Yeah, 'cause nobobdy EVER needs to move around a DVD image to the PC with the DVD burner. :)
Wrong way. He's referring to the fact that his case needed a specially-shaped CD-ROM and floppy and that he couldn't replace them.
Why the hell is this modded +3, Interesting?
Whoops. Wrong forum type.
Fixed link
If you're willing to deal with a Windows version, there's a boxed set called [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/- /B0000CE1L7/qid=1079028421/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-0 524318-5144849?v=glance&s=videogames]"The Laptop Collection"[/url] that includes SMAC, Alien Crossfire, Red Alert and Tiger Woods golf. It costs $15 - $20 and can be found at Walmart and Babbages, among other retailers.
What's your definition of "quality"?
My tastes actually run to softcore photos rather than out-and-out porn.
Here's a decent set of recommendations.
In the movie department there are a lot of variables. I'll restrain myself to movies you might find on the shelf at your local shop.
Movies from Private usually have unenhanced girls doing nasty things with guys who don't look like they just got out of prison. Quality is generally very high there but no single movie stands out.
Wicked's films usually have something resembling a plot. I like Brad Armstrong's work almost universally. "Not a Romance" is a recent standout.
Vivid has all the "name" performers. Chances are, if there's a starlet you're into, she works for Vivid. Vivid's movies are reasonably well-made, but photography isn't ever great and they use the same four former inmates in every movie. On the plus side, they (and Wicked and things fom Adam and Eve productions, also) tend not to veer off into anything particularly nasty, so they're a little more S.O. friendly. One of my favorite recent Vivid movies is "Roommates", which happens to have the best plot I can think of in a movie from the '90s. It actually manages to be a little bit thrilling in a "thriller" sort-of way, and there's a sense of "real life" about it, too.
Andrew Blake and Michael Ninn both make heavily stylized, beautifully filmed material. Pornographic art-movies, really. Their movies are less about the sex act and more about the image on the screen; comparing a Blake movie to something from Vivid is like comparing "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" to "The Tuxedo".
I avoided Hustler's video line for a long time because, well, it's Hustler. I don't like the magazine, it's too crude for my taste. But I got a copy of "Barely Legal #1" about a year ago and, with the unfortunate exception of the director's urine fetish, it was good. "Barely Legal" is young girls and the inmates who love them, but it's well-photographed, stocked with really cute natural-type young women and consistently hot sex. I actually like "Hot Showers", the all-girl series a little better, since it maintains the otherwise high-quality of "Barely Legal" and completely avoids the knuckle-dragging simians. I think "Barely Legal on Vacation" is probably the best of the series.
I mentioned softcore: I like Playboy videos. Over time a decent number of high-quality vignettes have been produced to show between movies on the Playboy channel, which have been collected on DVD as "Erotic Fantasies" and "Inside Out" They're short and steamy. Me and my ex- used to love 'em.
Is that enough or are you looking for something in particular?
Zoloft's side effect include "sexual side effects" which can either raise or lower sex drive. In my case I don't think it did either.
I have a number of fairly normal desktop machines (mostly Athlon64s) that happen to have around 900GB of disk space. It's not a big deal. A terabyte of disk space costs about $1000. I've acquired around 2TB of space just in the last year. All told I'm a hair over 5TB among my various machines (some of that space is redundant storage in arrays).
No. I don't invest very much actual time on downloads. I wrote some scripts to grab content from various places on the web. I look at a few "favorite" sites daily, but that's not a large investment in time. Maybe 15 minutes. I usually find new sites serendipitously, and they if they appear to update content with any frequency, I add 'em to the script.
It's pretty typical for me to pick up 300MB of stuff in a night from scripts. Sometimes I'll subscribe to a pay site and grab the whole thing.
I'm a general-purpose media collector. I own maybe 3200 CDs (all classical music), about 1000 (video, non-adult) DVDs and collections of paperback novels, magazines, sheet music and comic books. I have a complete-except-for-three-issues collection of Playboy magazines, for example.
I got interested in video capture hardware seven or eight years ago, when my Pentium Pro machine was a fantastic powerhouse, just to see what I could do with it. I started doing my home movies, then tried commercial tapes... which didn't work, because of macrovision. But a porn tape did, so I started duping the oldest tapes my local video store had (the ones I liked best). Not long after I picked up an affordable CD-R drive and I started making VCDs that I sold on ebay. From there I started getting requests, and then the hunt was on for stuff I couldn't get locally and... wham. I had a collection.
So I'm a media geek of some kind. I re-wired my whole house for media access about three weeks after I bought it. I can watch my DVDs or listen to my music in any room. If I have some kind of OCD, it's probably deeper than just downloading/collecting porno. I *do* take 200mg of Zoloft a day, which I know is used to treat OCD among other things (severe depression in my case).
For the other thing: there's this. She didn't mind playboy stuff, and she actually _liked_ dirty movies, although ironically she had me pre-screen to make sure there WASN'T g/g activity... which itself led to a great deal of knowledge about the movies and the people in them (for example, a movie with Tera Patrick is a good bet for straight M/F sex. I haven't seen her with a girl yet).
Anyway, she was more annoyed with the amount of space my collections took up than anything else. At the end of our time living together, she asked me for specific things to take and share with her girlfriend (in case you were wondering why I need the Zoloft).
I can't judge how other people react. I'm not good at that sort of thing. But it's not like I'd talk about it in front of other real-life people. But here I can be at least be honest about such things.
No. I barely look at any of it as it is.
I think of it as archiving.
I'm hunting down complete collections of mainstream (Vivid, VCA, Cabellero etc) porn from the late 70s to present and capping them to electronic formats. At any given time I share maybe 5% of my collection on fasttrack.
In terms of local storage, without dipping into removable media, a little over 2.5TB.
If you're willing to include CDs and DVDs of downloads, I'm pretty easily over 20TB.
Do I win anything?
Amazing what one can do with wget.
I set up an old Motorola StarMax with an 18GB drive, running NetBSD. I put Samba on it, and configured samba to do roaming profiles.
Once a week, my mom clicks an icon that reboots her machine and restores a ghost image from a DVD.
When the PC reboots again, she presses "1" to start windows, and all her email and stuff is where she left it, on the BSD machine.
Sadly, it doesn't work that way. The "not feeling bad" part, I mean. I've been suicidally depressed ever since, and I usually work around 90 billable hours just so I don't have to go home and be alone.
... and her militant-bitch "all breeder sex is rape" girlfriend looks like she could be my sister (and, in case you have any illusions, I'm not anything like an attractive person).
I paid for her masters degree and her first year of med school. The "wrote a check" kind of paid. I agreed to "wait until we were married". I bought her a car.
YOU try living with that. I was with her for 12 years. I never learned to "read" her. She might've been broadcasting "gay" to the entire tri-state area but all I could do was take her at her word. That's what it's like to not have social skills. Almost 24 months and the thought of someone ending a romantic relationship makes me physically ill.
I have no social skills, and I had one. She picked me because she likes "smart".
Of course, later on, she picked a smart girl, 'cause she was smart and has boobies.
Cripes I wish I was joking.
It's surprising in any case; Intel dominates in mass-market retail. Sure, you can get a Presario or an Emachine with an AMD CPU, but a quick glance at the shelves of your local Best Buy or Harvey Norman will find Intel boxes to be the norm. 66% of computers sold are brand-name models and the majority of those are going to have Intel inside.
Dear kindly Peter Norton,
You gotta understand
It's just our hacker egos
That gets us outta hand.
Our friends are all spammers
Our teachers teach VB
Holy jebus that's why we are 'leet!
I'd *love* to have a super-hero game universe under my control, but I won't play online with other people.
I was really excited and interested in this game until I found out it was a monthly-fee-scam kind of thing. It'll turn into yet another low-positive-feedback-by-levelling thing, I'm sure, and it'll be set in a fairly generic universe. No licenses (would it really be that hard to snag, say, the Malibu or New Universe license from marvel, or Wildstorm's world?)
What I was hoping for was something along the line of NWN - anyone can run a server, build his world and offer no-fee play. Heck, I would've even taken a single-player game like Freedom Force, if I could make my own game.
So we'll have this generic world, where it probably won't be possible to be "Deena" from Powers or, based on the archetypes they list, someone with non-obvious powers like Longshot. Would Batman - world's greatest detective - even be any fun to play in an MMO world where muggers are probably the equivalent of rats and spiders?
One of the knocks I had against Freedom Force was that it was relentlessly upbeat and really forced one into a Lee/Kirby-style semi-whacky flawed-but-noble hero mode. It captured the comics of 1963 very well, but there wasn't room for anything else; no "normal guys" or detectives or anti-heroes or cosmic bad-asses. No shades of grey, either. I want to play in a world where I can be a regular bank robber or Green Arrow or Captain Marvel (any of 'em) or Silver Surfer and have all of them be fun and challenging.
Anyway, I think there's a million and one ideas for something besides Stupendous Man and his sidekick Super Lad, contending with a million and one clones of Wolverine, which is what it looks like I'll get with City of Heroes.
I think I'll wait another decade for the day I can finally build Jokertown and play with the people I choose to play with.
If you're going to save the packaging for every game, and no one else does, eventually that complete product will be worth money over and above the value of the game itself. The simple fact is that I don't really appreciate the retail package of a game, once I own that game, and I'd rather use the space for other things, just like every other normal person. The packaging was meant to be disposable. They made it out of paper for chrissakes. If you're different, then so be it. In 50 years when universities are offering "video game packages of the 20th century: a monological examination" as a class, you'll have saved cultural obscura and done your job as a pop-cultural historian. The world will thank you.
1. One of my players realizing the full, evil power of his role as Hygene Officer, in a roomfull of "Real Role Players". He brought along some old bottles of cologne, Listerine, and, soap for the washing of commie, mutant traitors. The poor bastards even went along with it.
...and the side-effects that happen when you take 'em all at the same time.
2. A paranoia mission known as "Whitewash", wherein players were tasked with painting an Ultraviolet-clearance hallway Black. A Code-7 masterpiece, it was fully capable of killing dozens of clones with literally no prompting on the part of the GM.
Experienced players don't even bother with that one.
3. Telescopalmine. Visomorpain. Rolactin.
4. Invisible Commies, sub-bots and Plaid-clearance rooms in "Alpha Complexities".
5. The sheer, character destroying joy of "Me and My Shadow", in which characters are tasked with guarding a Mark IV Continental Siege machine.
Anyone remember the simple joy of "A Piece Falls Off"?
I ruined someone else's angsty, longstanding "Vampire: the Masquerade" campaign by involving a couple of his players in a run through "Alpha Complexities".
Man, I wish I could've seen those last few sessions.
That's weird. I plug my vacuum cleaner into an outlet by the sink in one of my bathrooms. Vacuum cleaners are assuredly not "low voltage"
My house is only 16 months old.
I'm not really into pictures with bullshit site- and phonesex ads on them, but if the web is your choice...
Boobdex.com is a good start.
And I like the amateur pages at Voyeurweb. I get lots of goodness from Coolio's Babelog as well.
You might also spend some quality time at Domai or Kindgirls, which both have much free goodness.
If you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, Hegre-Archives is awesome, as are Quantum Proadult and Met Art. Playboy's CyberClub can keep a downloader busy for weeks.
Hardcore really isn't my area of interest, but holy crap, if you're even making jokes about pr0n, regular slashdotter NineNine has just the site for you
I use scripts to grab most of my smut, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Mozilla extensions Linky and Magpie which combine to make my life as a pr0n browser much more pleasant.
I swear I played the original game for months and couldn't win it. I knew everything I had to do but I couldn't advance my characters to levels high enough to make it through the underworld without being munched by "Demon: Summons Demon" BS. IIRC only the character that killed something got any XP for it, so I'd end up with a 9th level, hammer-weilding Shamino and a bunch of pansy 5th level hangers-on.
I played it simultaneously with the original Might and Magic. Both games were incredibly rich, filled with details. Both were very much opposite of modern games like NWN - I'd love to see an NWN-like game with outdoor areas the size of those found in the later Ultima games, or the tiny discoveries that suddenly change the way the game is played (such as U5's magic carpet).
I loved the fact that in Ultima5, the NPCs had their own schedules, and the free-form conversation system that really did reward me for the occasional tangent from a character's main purpose.
Dungeon Siege, on the other hand, was been almost the antithesis of a decent CRPG. The graphics and music were cool but it was at-best a half-step over a Diablo clickfest (don't even get me started on that one). The whole game was "Oh, a new tileset, and different color bad guys. Yay."
I'm glad I only paid $15 for it, and with an Ultima-like expansion, maybe now I'll feel like I got my money's worth.
I have full-time playboy on DirectTV (more precisely, the guy who shares my duplex does, but I pay him for a receiver so...).
Playoby's offerings are FAR different from what they were 5 years ago. In that time, Playboy has eaten the Spice Network, home to harder-core material than the T&A stuff playboy is known for (and, if I can digress for a moment: That's the stuff I like. I don't want to see some guy's hairy ass, looking like he got out of prison that morning, pawing at Tera Patrick or Carmen Luvana. Give me T&A and I'm a happy guy).
Used to be, you didn't see penetration on Playboy. Now you do, even in some of the Playboy-branded content. I've seen gonzo-type movies and I've seen unedited titles from the major US porn studios (mostly Vivid, but also Wicked, VCA et al). No Max Hardcore, no "1200 Anal Cumshots", no interracial degradation porn, no midgets, but if your tastes run to something a woman might conceivably watch with you, Playboy is a pretty good deal. Cost is IIRC $12 a month, same as HBO. I think a four hour block of adult PPV on direcTV is $5 or $7.
"Totally Busted" and "The Naked News" are both pretty worthwhile for entertainment value. The "Are my Boobs crooked?" bit that's advertised on iFilms.com came from "Totally Busted".
Now, the day I can get Playboy in HDTV, I'll finally invest in a directv subscription of my own.