If you sat down and mapped out the number of sex scenes in the show and the book, the show would win out by far. The book's sex scenes are really restricted to Dany/Drogo, Jaime/Cersei (scenes which are also in the show) and a post-coital scene between Ned and Cat (which isn't). Tyrion/Shae is inferred in both but…

Agreed. And of course this is one of the reasons KotOR worked so well, being set so long before the movies/books that it was essentially its own micro-universe which could invent quite a lot without affecting the canon.

ARENA had a fairly detailed world map. Actually, the world map was far vaster than SKYRIM's and took in the whole continent of Tamriel (although it was procedurally generated, so was nowhere near as detailed). Almost all of the towns and cities in SKYRIM actually appear in ARENA, including the GoT-esque ones…

A no-name developer, but not no-name creators. I assume Salvatore, MacFarlane and the ex-Bethesda guy they hired all came with significant price tags.

To be fair, Bethesda have learned from their own 'awful, illogical, plot-hole-filled ending' situation with FALLOUT 3 (and its subsequent fix).

FALLOUT 4 will almost certainly be Bethesda's next full game, but not until after all of their SKYRIM DLC and expansions are released, which will likely take the remainder of this year and maybe into next. I think realistically the earliest we will hear about FO4 is E3 next year for release in 2014. I can't see it…

You can get the first two (plus the two non-RPG spin-offs) in a budget pack pretty easily, and I think they work reasonably well with modern computers.

Fallout 3 is a good game, but gets hated on by fans of the first two for not being as hardcore an RPG. New Vegas gets a more respect partially because it was created by a lot of the same creative team as the first two (which is nice, but ultimately irrelevant if the game's not much cop), partially because it's much…

Pretty much all of Christopher Priest's work fits into this category. In THE AFFIRMATION a young man is writing a fantasy novel about a man living in a place called the Dream Archipelago and is expansive on all the work he's putting into it. The twist is that he's actually having a nervous breakdown and all the pages…

True. There are quite a few cut scenes that end with people bursting into the room and Max rolls behind a convenient box or pillar before the game gives control back to you. I'm thinking particularly of the early confrontation with the twins, where the firing starts and the game puts you around a corner before giving…

Here's what you're after. Someone linked to one of my maps below but those have been supersceded by the release of newer, more official maps on the HBO website, which I used for this one. They also have a 'Dany's journey' map:

With GTA4 on Steam, you only needed to use the Social Club for multiplayer. If you were only interested in SP, you could just hit 'Play Offline' when the Social Club screen popped up and it would be disabled. Annoying, but bearable (especially since you still had to use both Steam and GFWL).

The problem with your thesis is that, whilst MAX PAYNE sold very well, MAX PAYNE 2 bombed on release. Its failure was so bad it caused the publisher significant difficulties in 2003, and is why Remedy's MAX PAYNE 3 (promised in the end credits to MP2) never appeared. Rightly or wrongly, the lack of multiplayer has…

Considering they're dirt cheap, still playable today (the second one much moreso, it has to be said) and rather short (8-10 hours for the first, 5 for the second), I'd recommend checking them out. You don't 'need' to, as I suspect something like 80% of the people who buy this game will have never played the first two…

Neither MP1 nor 2 have a 'formal' cover system, in the sense that you took cover and stuck to walls or crates like glue, could blindfire etc. Both games have things to stand behind (less effectively in MP2, due to the game's slightly OTT use of physics), like almost every shooter since the dawn of time, but that's…

The mechanics are important, although more for their historical significance: MP1 was the first game of any note with bullet time and MP2 was the first with a working physics engine. They've both aged very well, though you have to forgive some ropey character models in MP1 and some amateurish photography in the cut…

Having just replayed both games (and, once again, lamenting how shot MP2 is compared to the first game) I think it's definitely the case that MP2 is much better-written than the first one. The first one does gloriously go over the top and has a much more overt sense of humour than the second (though the latter has its…

It should be noted that the publishers (in the UK at least) have rather quickly backed away from the 'YA' label for the novel in recent months. Whilst it has no sex or swearing, it does have a fair bit of violence. Also, whilst Mieville's language is less dense than in say EMBASSYTOWN, he hasn't really dialled it down…

I agree actually. A lot of the problems people identify with AFFC and ADWD actually began in ASoS (most notably Arya's wandering in circles through the Riverlands for half the book). ASoS seems to get a pass because it does have several awesome scenes to make up for it. However, it's half again as long as A GAME OF…

As others have said, there's natural resources (timber, coal, silver etc), manpower for any future military requirements, taxes and of course the handiness of being able to dump people on the Wall at will.