Getting price labels off book covers

After picking up two books from the bookshop recently, (Discworld: Making Money and Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, to be precise), I'm left with a bit of a conundrum.

How do you remove the price label from the dust jacket or the book cover itself, without causing any damage to the cover? Not only are they a blight on the cover, they sometimes cover something you want to read or look at. I'm just worried that I might end up tearing the cover when peeling off the sticker.

Some area easy enough to lift off, but there are those (particularly papery labels) that end up tearing the cover off as well. I'd very much prefer to avoid that. Does anyone have any effective tips or secrets to at removing difficult labels like this off books?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

I guess this could also extend to such things as DVD box set cases or pretty much anything that might get damaged while peeling off a difficult price label.

- NKF

Fallout

Just a general talk-anything-you-want-about the Fallout games topic. There didn't seem to be one after a quick look in the older threads, so I created one.

I got myself the Fallout collection that includes Fallout, Fallout II and Tactics. The prize for me was Fallout as I'd never played it before, and I'm not terribly keen on Tactics.

Although I haven't understood all the ins and outs of the various subquests in Fallout, I've beaten the game in pretty much two days of gameplay (well, a couple hours and a day). I'm a bit disappointed as the game's very short. Also, those who know me know that I've got this thing for pistols, but this game feels extremely pistol-centric most of the way through the game. It even gave me access to my favourite weapon, the .223 pistol from the very start. Only one I found too, so it was well used by the time I was through.

The lack of a variety of wacky NPC buddies was a bit of a let down, but as I only use NPC companions to carry the luggage, it's not too bad.

Serves me right for starting Fallout II with all of its mod-cons. Still, it was a lot of fun.

And just as an aside, has anyone attempted to play a jinxed gunman? It's both funny and simply amazing. It becomes absurd later on once the failures start working to your advantage. Works best if you excel in a weapon with small ammo magazines.

- NKF

In closing...

First of all,

I must say that the title of the game is fitting. After Shock. You get the shock afterwards. This rant may provide a spoiler to some, but I feel it hardly matters. So jolly well read on my good friends! Or don't, it's not really that exciting.

Anyway, I've beaten the game. It was - well, let's put it this way, disappointing. To be fair, I was not expecting some grand finale. But, someone did mention this to me a while back and now I've finally seen it for myself. The whole game revolves around sex - on a large scale.

That's putting it crudely, but it does explain the irrational behaviour of the Reticulans in the first game (Oh, hey, I know, let's make this one giant organic computer out of that planet over there! It'll have all these bits in it and these whistle things and - yeah, genius!). Although now I feel dirty.

Anyway, here are some thoughts on the final mission.

1. Brilliant! The three missions were so fast loading thanks to not having any exteriors (or complicated exterior for the first one). Why can't all the missions be like this? Anyway, this was more like it.

2. Your soldiers must have gone to the Batman school of space travel. They can all breathe in space.

3. The reticulans are buffed up thanks to them suddenly having their good old warp rifles - they actually put a minor scratch on my soldiers! Well, no worse than what the Star Ghosts or Wargots could do at the best of times. Probably 7 to 12 hour recovery time tops.

4. The thingies that you have to destroy just need to be pummeled until they go splat. At least you're not forced to use some sort of explosive like you were in some Aftermath missions. I still wished there was a bit more positive feedback that what you were doing actually had some effect. Like having the organic bits writhe in pain, some screaming sound, or get a message that you dealt it some damage.

5. The progression between the second mission and the very last mission (which had pathetic resistance, by the way) didn't make much sense. But I guess they needed something to add a bit of drama to the end-game movie. Would've preferred the escape to be an actual mission that you had to play rather just watch.

After colonising the globe and blowing up the big potential suitor, all the missions leading up to the final mission were monotonous. They ALL involved the same strategy. Which went as follows for almost EVERY mission:

1. Map starts - I look at the minimap to see which side I'm on. I'm on this side, so they're most definitely on that side!

2. What bright spark designed the deployment bit for your soldiers? I dislodge my troops by moving them all out to some wider area. Kind of miss the drop pod by this point in the game.

3. I select my three main androids, consisting of a machine gunner (lvl 24. +2 mechanical skill with PK machine gun), my sub-machinegunner (lv 24. +4 short range skill with colts) and my energy weapons expert (lvl 20 +2 short range skill with sonic gun and plasma shotgun - for SG Clouds) and head towards the most likely location the enemies will come from. Can't say I used the rest all that much.

4. Wipe enemies out.

5. Assuming it was an escort civilian mission, I just have the pointman run to the target area and be done with it. If it's an obelisk mission, I just have one of my heavy hitters run around until I find it (or bang my head against the wall if the mission is bugged).

That's it. Missions generally ended in half the time it took for the whole danged thing to load.

Was that a rant? Probably was, but in the end I think it's a real mixed bag for a game. It was a good idea, but they really should've ironed out the late-game gameplay a bit more. Horrible game crippling bugs aside, I did enjoy it, but there's far-far too much room for improvement.

Oh well, I'm uninstalling it. Some day, maybe when I'm 60, I might play it again. For now, there are greener fields to be found, and I need to find that damned fence.

- NKF

Rebelstar Tactical Command

I just picked up this game for the Gameboy Advance recently - because of its obvious roots with X-Com, and have just played through the tutorial missions and whatnot.

It seems like a cute and fun little game. It's not as advanced as X-Com, is chapter based and the graphics are simple but get the job done. I just wondered if anyone else has played it and what are your thoughts? My only gripe so far are the limited number of turns you can take to complete the missions.

It has given me a proper name for Current Reaction Level. Initiative. Simple, elegant and not confusing. I like it.

- NKF

First impressions

Well, I've installed the game and will make the occasional comment as I descend into madness. I know I'm a bit late into this - I've been slowly going through a few games I have backed up to play. (The last game I tried being Worms 4 Mayhem - a bit of a disappointment, has a lot of additions, but doesn't seem to be as much fun as the earlier Worms games. But I'm digressing.)

These notes may sound like gripes, but hey, these are just first impressions.

- The manual scares me. I like detailed manuals, but for some reason the manual turns me off. I guess it's because it was probably because I was going "Yes, yes, I knew that, get on with it. No, no, I don't want the backstory. Why is there so much text? Why all these definitions?" all the while flipping through that. I'll get round to it - some day.

- Started off on the middle difficulty. Is this a bad idea for someone new to this game? I'll soon find out.

- You can't skip all the talky bits. I can read faster than the talking heads can take to enunciate - very slowly - but it won't let me skip through it. As you can probably tell, I already hate the talky bits.

- Everyone seems to have thick legs. Baggy legs all in rage in the future, I'll bet. Nothing wrong with that, mind. It's just something that seems to stick out.

- What's wrong with your soldier audio responses? They complain all the time that they can't hit their target - right after killing it. And why did I get a "What, again?" the very first time I selected a soldier? Why are they so negative? Am I just an annoyance to them? Argh, they are most incorrigible.

I'll probably switch the audio responses off. They just won't stop talking. At least in the X-Com games your soldiers didn't talk back at you. Continuously.

- The pauses. Even in Aftermath, I seem to switch most of the auto-pause options off. The continuous halting slows the action down considerably.

- The Reticulan laser cells have certainly become compact. Quite like that, but being your first weapon, these are obviously your initial stop-gap weapons. Unless, of course, they've changed the weapon progression from Aftermath's 'the next gun is even better' weapon system.

- In the Geosphere, there's just too much information clutter at times. I'm just a simple person and like simple straightforward and non-flashy interfaces. There's often too much information on the screen, and the various screens don't seem to be very intuitive. But then again I've only just started, and the game unlocks more things as you go along. I'll somehow manage to figure out how to start research on things other than new departments.

- The Laputa - a mobile base. I like this idea. Oh yes, I like this very much. Don't care that much for the drop pods though - but they're certainly an improvement over the somewhat static troop deployment locations in Aftermath.

- No one said you had to move the Laputa to start investigating new areas. Or maybe I missed that bit. In any case, I was wondering why nothing was happening for a few days.

- You now have resources. The multiple resources and resource line building reminds me of empire building games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. I suppose it's better than having limitless resources like what happened in Aftermath. Naturally, I've started running out of high tech resources.

Doesn't sound like I've made a very good start, have I? Well, I've only started, and it'll take a while to get used to everything. Perhaps reading the manual first would help things along too. Must figure out how to cue several of the same type of item to build.

The game does seem promising. The Aftershock Geosphere management is certainly much more elaborate than Aftermath's overly simple system (which felt like a bit of a let-down for an X-Com fan).

- NKF