kadaju86

@grimglottis: Can only speak for myself, of course, in relation to the games I mentioned. Not sure I would say "horrible", but definitely boring as hell and not being able to see what is supposedly so great with those games that everyone else/so many others seem to think. The games I listed are also all in genres of games that I otherwise usually love. Black Flag being the only mainline AC game I haven't finished for example as I don't think it's a good AC game, and only okay as a pirate game. The first Mordor game; I have really enjoyed LOTR, read the books, seen the movies and played through a bunch of the decent to mediocre PS2 era games, and I also have loved all the Batman games, even Origins and Arkham Knight. But, Mordor is bad at being both in my opinion. Combat feels worse than Batman and the story doesn't feel like it fits in LOTR at all.

Valve games... Half Life is not a good series. I like a ton of different FPS games, ranging from stuff like Doom, Wolfenstein, COD to Deus Ex and so on, but Half Life feels off. Not an interesting world, don't care for the controls and never really found anything about them impressive in any way other than HL2 having some neat physics for the time it came out. Portal has a humor that generally falls flat for me.

The Bethesda RPGs... My main experience with both series stems from Oblivion and Fallout 3. Worlds I got bored of after a couple of hours in each. I just feel when you have an RPG with a world you should be able to really immerse yourself in you are not doing yourself many favors by having each conversation look like you are talking to a cardboard cutout of a person. Neither does having combat that lacks any kind of impact when you stand there swinging a sword at someone for example. Couple that with a story that feels tacked on and the game ends up having such a lack of direction that it feels more like it should just be a sandbox without anything else attached to it. And I generally love other RPG games of the same ilk, such as the Witcher series.

A lot of repetition there, but oh well, might as well attach a few more points to each as to why I don't like them :P

@the_greg: Personally love the AC series myself, but can also understand why someone might not like it as well. My personal favorite of the series is Syndicate with 2 and Brotherhood really close behind, but Black Flag is just baffling to me in how much praise it gets even though it was a decent "shake up" of the formula when it first released.

Every TES and Bethesda Fallout game: Tried a few of them, and I end up playing for like 2 hours before getting incessantly bored. Just way too little structure in those games for me to enjoy and the jank is a huge detriment for my enjoyment. If I need to spend like 5 hours modding a game to make it "good" then the developers do not deserve my money, plain and simple.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: I have tried to get through this like 2 or 3 times and I just can't do it. It is the only mainline AC game I haven't finished. I even got through Revelations and 3, but Black Flag is a terrible AC game. Might be a decent pirate game, but not a good AC game. The game has just about every mission that everyone seem to be criticizing the AC series for (rightly so in a lot of cases too), but still it gets so much praise and I just don't get it. Also, tailing ships with vision cones can go stuff itself some place hellish.

Pretty much everything Valve has made: I got Portal for free when Steam launched on Mac way back when, and that is the only reason I would have played and finished that game. It was decent for not paying anything for it, but other than that I don't get any of the massive praise everything Valve related seems to get. Half Life I got about halfway through the first game before being bored and not wanting to keep going. While Half Life 2 I have, like Black Flag, tried to play a few times without understanding the appeal at all. Nothing about their games feel or look good, even for the time they were created, to me.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor: I like the Arkham games and I like LOTR, so I should be in the perfect demographic for this game, but I found nothing of the combat or the story any good or worthwhile to get through. The combat has a floatiness (?) to it that makes me like it less than Batman and the story with the main character feels incredibly lazy which takes out any kind of enjoyment for me when neither the gameplay or story aspect has any real hooks. The nemesis system also just ended up getting incredibly boring when needing to see a bazillion small cutscenes that interrupted the combat flow each time they happened. (Which seems to be an even bigger issue in the second game so I stayed far away from that)

Bots are posting gibberish replies to other bots' posts as well... botception

@peezmachine: In fact, there is one in here too :P With the easy to type name of "dfsghrtrthrt09"

There ends up being like 5-6 pages worth of new posts from those bots generally around 1 pm-ish CET. Seems to be complete gibberish every time though, so wonder what the point of having bots spam with nonsense is.

See this is an old post that was probably, ironically, bumped by a spam bot, but hopefully this is info that can be used to stop the insane amount of spam posts in Korean. Literally 5-6 pages of new posts by those spam bots pretty much every time I log on here around this time (1pm-ish CET).

@notnert427: Just as a small addition to the point about compulsory military service, you get called in the year you turn 18 for an assessment and then for deployment into an army/navy/airforce unit after finishing high school, though you can postpone it to finish up a college education first if you want to. The compulsory service used to be only for men, but just a few years ago it was extended to apply for women as well. If you choose to not serve in the army you will be put to to some other sort of civil service instead which is usually a bit longer than the 12 months that the military service is. (Personally I was only in for the assessment as there were cutbacks in the military at the time and I never got a call in for anything else).

The National Guard also numbers about 45000 currently out of a population of around 5 million, so the unit is fairly large I would say. It also consists of something that is more close to a special forces unit which was even sent on some tours to Afghanistan. That part was somewhat debated when it first happened, but at least it shows how well trained some of the soldiers in the National Guard is I suppose.

@notnert427: Not the one you directed the question at, but can try to give at least something of an answer to it. The Norwegian National Guard is a branch of the military that was established in 1946 after seeing what happened when Norway was occupied during WW2. It is basically a rapid response unit of the army that is meant to secure infrastructure and assist the civilian population in case of war on Norwegian soil. Those who are part of it have undergone the one year compulsory military service, or 3-6 month voluntary training. As part of being in the National Guard you are handed a weapon by the army which you have at home and can use in case the country is occupied. The different weapons used by the National Guard seems to be MP5, MP7, AG3, HK416, MG3 and the FN Minimi; where the MP5, MP7 or AG3 is commonly what you are stationed with outside of active duty. The soldiers in the National Guard are generally civilians, though will be called in for additional training up until the age of 44 which is the maximum age unless you are fully enlisted.

Think that should be a decent general overview of it at least, though I am sure others might wish to add more if needed!

@fatalbanana: Pretty much agree fully with everything you've said. As for my post, there was more to it as a reply to someone else in here that claimed the gun ban in Australia had no effect and that Norway (which is where I'm from) and Finland had way more gun deaths than Sweden, where the poster claimed to live or be from, which was just factually wrong. He posted no sources, and now it seems his post is deleted along with my response to him so guessing he has infracted on some forum rules of some sort. As someone from outside the US the entire situation is sort of absurd to watch though, but a large part of that is that the media loves to sensationalize so most of what we see does get blown slightly (or majorly, depending on point of view) out of proportion. Hopefully there will be some good coming out of it in the end at least in terms of stricter gun control to make sure that individuals who should never under any circumstance can be more easily kept from getting guns than they are now over there.