Especially since Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft are all made up from liberally poaching tropes from all sorts of other sci-fi and fantasy properties.

I would like to do another roleplaying game, but 3E/3.5 is so burned into my memory, it doesn't make sense to play much else. The people I play with are happy to make up new rules or steal other rules as we see fit. I keep finding that our house rules of Heal spells out of combat doing max healing, or you can rest…

I do see value in having realistic games for 'recreation' purposes... putting someone in a historical place and time to tell a real-life story, for instance, or show you what real medieval fighting or Russian helicopter piloting is like. But they're likely to be frustrating games, since you're gonna be playing…

It was clearly author appeal with that game though.... the designers spend months modelling the geology, weather, etc. Which is cool and all, but not what a game company would actually sink its time into.

The game from Reamde convinced me that this game had no chance of being a game I would want to play. Stephenson's idea of a world famous MMORPG had it being brutal to its players in a way that fell out of favor with Everquest. Smaller games like Eve still do the 'lose everything at death' and 'everything is free for…

That's one way... but I'd honestly rather see a movie actually deal with the after effects of all the comic book superweapon, supercure stuff a little bit more. Have Reed Richards try to make a Utopia in a movie. The Fantastic Four Vanquish Death. I guess the problem is then, what do the others do? I'd be nice if …

That whole story raised so many issues. Did Lois not tell Superman/Clarke Kent she was pregnant? Which could imply that that she was either also dating James Marsden at the time too, and didn't know, or that Superman just up and left without consulting her at all. Either way, Superman came off seeming kind of…

Yeah, I'm not saying its impossible, it manages to suggest that life is very difficult to start and yet super adaptable to astonishing conditions. Both of which are just assumptions that people seem to want to make because they want life to be more special than if it just originally here on earth. And I think that…

One could argue that this was the entire plot of Star Trek: The Movie.

I don't know if it would have helped. In the end, Prometheus was the epic love story of the android David and all buttons, everywhere.

The main character of the first Culture novel even described the Culture in terms of it being sort of the end of all civilizations. They'd hit upon a combination so potent that it would eventually overwhelm everyone else if not contained, and he distrusted the Minds on a very fundamental level, and was helping the…

I don't think it is the fault of technobabble, per say. Every science fiction needs a certain amount of additional technology to work, and a certain amount of vocabulary to make it seem like a real thing.

Fair enough :) Its cool to like things. And, don't get me wrong, I actually really enjoyed Prometheus, I just think it is a B movie trying to pretend to be a super thinking movie.

I disagree... Prometheus could have done a lot of interesting stuff, but the characters made*such* poor decisions as to render it hilarious, not serious (and I'd argue, as a bad movie, it works *fantastically* and I quite enjoyed it when I saw it, having known that it would not be good sci-fi).

I still think the parts of Thor where he was wandering around Earth breaking cups was the best part of the movie. And Avatar was completely CGI generated.... I'd be happier if they did that with an FF movie than if they kept trying to do a makeup/CGI mashup.

5 - I think that trying to go off Earth for a comic book movie is a bad idea. Look at how well Green Lantern did with its entirely CGI environments, were the only living, breathing thing was Ryan Reynolds' head.

Or, the people that quit smoking started feeling significantly worse, and so decided to try and improve their health by quitting. But by that point it was already too late.

While the obvious answer is that these are radar images, and thus grainy because that's just what you get, its also lot easier to take photos of things that produce their own light, like a galaxy, than something reflecting light, like an asteroid or a moon. I was surprised by how low res some of the hubble photos of…

Poor sharks, its not really their fault the primary means they have of evaluating something is by biting it.

I remember really enjoying the TNG book Vendetta, where one of Guinan's people car jacked a Planet Eater from TOS and used it to fight the Borg. But I was also 12 too, so my standards have gone up a bit since then.