David Cater

@OneManFootClan

On the strength of that recommendation, and the awesome name of the novel, I've added that to my list of books to read. Thanks!

"...I didn't want to freak the kid out about owning a tiger that could sense her bones."

That was brilliant. I laughed out loud for 30 seconds after reading that line. Nice job.

@thisredengine :

Wow..what a douchebag way to reply to a thoughtful comment. Way to go.

Of course I meant I "didn't" just write LOL.

You forced me to attempt to login, recover my password, go in and change my password, and then come back here just to say how hard I laughed at the line about Charlotte's Web. I did just write LOL, I threw my head back and laughed until I choked. Brilliant.

Perhaps one option to discourage massive frontal attacks is to somehow tie a score or performance rating inversely to the number of people you had to kill. A perfect "score" would be to have made one kill: your target. Every kill you make beyond that lowers your "score". So if you run into a crowd of 30 people, you're only hurting yourself. Then you could also perhaps be increasing the replay value; if you killed 25 people while completing a mission the first time you played it, try to do it the next time with killing only 20 people.

Caveat: I haven't played the original game, so I don't know if the concept of a score or performance rating even makes sense. It was just a thought.

@wes:

Perhaps you had something other than a Commodore 64. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64):

"Part of its success was because it was sold in retail stores instead of electronics stores, and these machines can be directly plugged into an existing home television without any modifications."

It seems to me like mars' original comment was pretty much spot on. The Commodore 64 was the first computer that I ever had. I got it to write programs on...but used it quite often for games. That's where I played Ultima III, for example (and Jumpman Junior, the various Electronic Arts games, Archon, and many many others).

It essentially functioned as a console for me (along with my trusty Atari 2600). In particular, not only did it plug directly into a television as mars said, it also didn't have the sorts of configuration issues you had to deal with when moving to DOS-based PC games. When you bought a game for it you knew it would work, just like consoles today. It also used a joystick, unlike most DOS-based games back then (which were all about the keyboard).

I certainly wouldn't want to go back and play those games now, but I will always heart my Commodore 64 (and the start it gave me in programming).

I second this. I loved Diablo, but I love the ease-of-use of a console more. I have enough games queued up to play on my XBox that it would be a waste of time and money to put any effort into doing PC gaming. But if Diablo III were ever to come out on console I'd snap it up in a second.

I have a feeling this is a Pokemon reference...but then I thought, wait, maybe it's an onslaught of haikus. And then I thought...no WAIT...maybe it's BOTH.