Maclintok

Nice impressions.  I gotta admit that the longevity of the C&C/StarCraft RTS formula has dumbfounded me a bit.  Yet at the same time I do feel worried when games like Dawn of War II go waaaay off track and simplify the moment-to-moment strategy into just managing a handful of units without any resource management.  I didn't think it could happen but it sounds like C&C4 has an even more abstract war system than even its predecessors. 
 
Maybe having barracks, harvesters and factories on the front lines IS quite a bit less far-fetched than a mobile crawler that spits out units specific to some abstract class and level designation...

I was guiltily watching Alien Resurrection last week before being dragged off to bed.  It is easily the worst film in the series by a parsec but I still had a blast watching the xenomorphs do their business.  I'm very tempted to get AvP if only to soak in the atmosphere and do all the faction campaigns.

In the retirement home, they had better have a fully-equipped gaming room.   
 
Scratch that, I'm requesting a gaming rig in my bedroom.  To hell with bingo nights.

The general gamer consensus is that the Deep Roads sucked.  I nearly gave up on the game at that point. It was the first time I toggled down the difficulty just to get through it all that much faster.

Bang everything that moves.

I am working through Anger and am starting to enjoy the game again.  I really did not like the Greed stage.  The puzzles there were tedious or convoluted and there seemed too to be too much focus on jumping challenges.  The end section of Greed was actually quite cathartic and nearly made up for the pain I endured earlier. 
 
Contrary to the reviews, the upgrades actually do help in combat. Mashing X or Y yields diminishing returns since the enemies are custom-made to combat those simple techniques later on.

If there's a serious games drought AND I'm unemployed and I have someone to pay my meal ticket for a few weeks, then yes I suppose I could see myself playing through the entire ME trilogy in one heaping marathon.

There are many clones in this industry. It's a bit unfair to pile on Dante's Inferno for having many similarities to GoW but that's as much the fault of EA's marketing team as it is the prevalent "group think" phenomenon you see among game reviewers and the Internet. 
 
I like the tone of DI so far. The story goes into some dark places. Dante himself is not a very likeable guy which is definitely a very different approach to these type of games.  My issues with the game come more from the puzzle design and combat mechanics... just general game design stuff. 
 
Again, it's too simplistic to just write it off as a clone but EA should know better than to release DI so close to GoW3.  Or perhaps that was their plan all along. The sales numbers will tell if this whole scheme backfired or not.

Madeleine Shepard 

Set up tactics for everyone & routine update their commands when they unlock new tactics slots. 
 
Also, your team will routinely forget who they were targeting (warriors are especially guilty) so you need to keep an eye on everyone to make sure they are not standing around dumbly or pathfinding around useless crap.