To me it's like playing with cube-shaped Lego bricks in that the satisfaction comes from thinking of, planning, and building cool-looking stuff on an infinitely large green baseplate. Also like playing with Legos, sometimes you have to hunt through the pile to find that one block you need to make your tower go from cool to extra cool. And to take it a bit further, sometimes at night your little green brother who is totally annoying will come over and blow up the fishing cabin you were working on for the last 15 minutes.

(Or to take another tack, if you liked building cars and creatures more than playing the actual game in Spore you'd probably enjoy Minecraft.)

Different Neil, I think.

Unless Loki shows up in The Big U or Zodiac, neither of which I've read.

Guys, they just want the Sudetenland. That's it. Just one little strip of land. Just sign the Munich Agreement and quit disagreeing, you alarmist jackasses. Hell, they even promised they'd stop after that. What else do you want?

OK, maybe Prague and the rest of it, too. But that's it. Come on, they signed a paper. Ease up on the hysteria, don't commit any logical fallacies.

Well we didn't see that Poland thing coming but at least we weren't illogical. It's not a slope. There's nothing slippery.

Hmm, Alsace-Lorraine, well that doesn't count. You've clearly lost your grip on reason if you think this shows some kind of trend or something.

Left 4 Dead strikes an ideal balance between user-selected difficulty and adaptive difficulty. The user gets to pick what general difficulty they want to play and this affects damage taken, friendly fire damage given, etc. But then the adaptive part looks at your health, your ammo, and what you've killed recently (essentially, player skill) to determine how many enemies there are left out there, where/if you find the good weapons in a level, and where the special boss bad guys show up. So basically the user picks the quality of the opposition but the game picks the quantity of the opposition. Also, while the game picks the quantity of the reward, it'd be nice if the player could pick the quality of the reward (by choosing a harder difficulty). This isn't really in place in L4D, but it would be nice.

With a scheme like this, in Oblivion the decision tree to see what you face when you go under that arch by the ruin might go like:

          -easy level/beat up player character: 1 highwayman, easy, crappy drops

          -easy level/fresh player character: 2 highwaymen, easy, crappy drops

          -hard level/beat up pc: 1 highwayman, hard, good drops

          -hard level/fresh pc: 2 highwaymen, hard, good drops

I've got it on both systems and play on the 360 99% of the time. Why? All my friends have 360s. Not all of them have PCs that are capable of running the game very well.

and the diagram with the hydraulic press. Think of the incredible shrinkage that must come with -100F temperatures and how that displacement of fluid forces blood to all your other vitals to keep you from going into shock. It's just physics.