Strategies for Playing Games Ipswich Junior Chess Club

BC: Healing Gems
2009-08-31
(I know that the links are broken, will remedy this later). Same as the tanking gem reference, but for healing. I play a paladin, thus the reason why no spirit gems were included. Same schpeel as the other gem list: if the socket bonus is crap, don't worry about gem color, maximize whatever stat you need.
The purple epic gems labeled as "Quest" are the reward choices for completing the Nightbane chain (summon and kill Nightbane in Karazhan).Most other purple crafted gems are from The Scale of the Sands rep.There are a crapload of green gems with stamina + a healing stat. I listed those as well.
[b]Red[/b]
[item]Teardrop Blood Garnet[/item] +13 Healing, Crafted
[item]Teardrop Living Ruby[/item] +18 Healing, Crafted
[item]Teardrop Crimson Spinel[/item] +22 Healing, Crafted
[b]Yellow[/b]
[item]Brilliant Golden Draenite[/item] +6 Intellect, Crafted
[item]Brilliant Dawnstone[/item] +8 Intellect, Crafted
[item]Brilliant Lionseye[/ite...

Made Man
2009-08-15
"Let me tell, youse guys, it ain't easy being a freakin' gangster game. One minute you're riding high on the power of a cultural zeitgeist, the next you're lying face down in a bargain bucket in some two-bit games shop with nothing but a 'Buy 2 Get 1 Free' tag to identify you. Sometimes that's the least of your freakin' problems. Like what happened to my old pal Joey 'The Getaway' Pompeii. After they'd massacred him in the press, the boys opened him up and gutted his freakin' manual. They had to bury him at the back of the second-hand rack. Those godless sons of painted freakin' ladies."
Made Man, as if you hadn't guessed already, is a Mafia game. It's also a game that, given the amount of half-stirred influences chucked into its simmering cauldron, should have come packaged with a large wooden spoon to stir it properly. These chunks of inspiration aren't, for instance, the sublimely metered concerns of respect and revenge that make up The Godfather (the film not the disappointing game). Hell, no. They're the banal under-cooked, over-excessive cliches of Tarantino and Scorcese-esque violence, with none of the ugly beauty or directorial intel...

Questioning Conan
2009-08-15
There's a concept known as l'espirit d'escalier, which describes those wonderful comebacks and phrases you think of the moment you walk out onto the steps after an encounter that didn't quite go as well as it might have.
This writer learned this wonderful phrase a few months ago after an early morning BBC news programme presenter caught me out entirely by asking condescendingly whether our topic of discussion - videogames, unsurprisingly - was "all just a fad". By the time I'd made it out of the studio, I had ten wonderful, sparkling comebacks in my head - none of which had made it as far as my gaping, astonished mouth while we were on air, of course.
In that spirit, then, an apology is owed regarding this interview with three of Funcom's staff working on the upcoming Age of Conan massively multiplayer game. Somewhere over the North Sea between their appropriately wintry development headquarters in Oslo and the marginally less freezing London, we realised that we'd completely failed to ask Ole Herbjornsen (associate producer), Joel Bylos (quest designer) and E...