SteveThaiBinh

You know, I never really liked that explanation of events in Kotor 2 - Kreia isn't trustworthy and the Jedi council were fools. I saw it more as an attempt to explain away a rather clunky influence system. In any case, when you talk it over with Visas she rejects it out of hand - sure, you could say she wouldn't know as she's caught up in the effect, of course. (I just finished replaying for the first time in over a month, and it reminded me how I really didn't like the conversation with the Jedi Council near the end - "Haven't you noticed how you've killed your way across all these planets, gaining in strength" etc. That's part of the conceit of every CRPG there's ever been! Exposing it and trying to explain it away like this just destroys the suspension of disbelief.)

Precisely. Who are these characters? What do they want? Sure, you can influence people up to a point, but to take someone who's basically moral and turn them to the dark side is a big deal, so either give it an epic progression or don't do it at all - i.e. have them leave the party. About Mandalore, If the writers are going to make the characters interesting and their backstories meaningful, then they have to go all the way and live with the consequences of who these characters are.

Although romances are an 'added extra', such added extras are what makes the game fun for every player. If you have a good set of romance subplots, people who like romance play them, and people who don't, don't. If the designers put in these extra elements and players still complain, then fine, you can throw up your hands and say "There's no pleasing these people". Alas, Kotor 2 was sadly lacking in this area.

Surely the alternate realities thing has the same one-way ticket problem. With an infinite number of realities to jump to, how can you ever return to the one you started out from?

Excellent! Librarians are heroes in the fight against ignorance and apathy! They deserve much praise.

Why isn't there a 'weeps with frustration' smilie? I really need one of those now.

Surely if you 'go' back into the past, your presence there will have an enormous impact beyond your control (like the butterfly effect). In theory, it might be possible to gather information directly from the past, by sending some kind of 'probe' that can only observe, not do anything. Although, my very limited understanding of quantum theory is that even the act of observing changes the thing observed. In any case, these poor scientists were probably phoned at 3am by some BBC writer who wanted a time-travel story for the same day as the finale of Doctor Who, so let's not read too much into what they said. Travelling into the future doesn't present any paradoxes, so long as you don't mind staying there. It's a one-way ticket.

All these spoiler tags are weird.

Well, unless McDonalds openly promotes information that's damaging to its reputation, then evidence against it is likely to come from people who have an agenda of opposing it. You can't just dismiss the evidence for that alone. On the McLibel site, some of the more interesting and reliable evidence is the testimony of witnesses on McDonalds' employment policy, here.

http://www.mcspotlight.org/issues/intro.html McLibel - that was lots of fun. "Coca-cola is nutritious because it contains water."

I didn't think there was anything that would stop me buying Kotor 3, but this would.

It's a nice story, and would make a very good setting for Project New Jersey. As a serious theory? The Mayan and Egyptian pyramids are very different in construction, and unlikely to be the product of the same culture. And I think this advanced civilisation would have left some pottery, weapons or something that they traded with neighbours. It's interesting, though. The idea that a Messiah will come to save us is common to many cultures, and very attractive. So is the idea that we're descended from a great and lost civilisation. The power of human dreams, eh?

Nah, that was there before. But I'm not worried. Next series we get the Cybermen.

No, just lived there. They have a version of Cinderella too, I think - possibly involving beans?

Viet Nam has a story about a king who was facing an evil enemy (the Chinese, I think), and not knowing what to do, he went to a lake in Hanoi to meditate. There, a magic turtle rose from the depths and presented him with magic sword, which he used to win great victories etc. etc. When finished, he went back and threw the sword into the lake, where it was caught by the magic turtle and taken down into the depths. So the Lady of the Lake was really a turtle in disguise.

Scunthorpe. Just checking.

I won't get to see it for a few weeks. There's no chance of avoiding finding out what happens, though - not without severing my internet connection. So I'm guessing the Daleks didn't win, worse luck.

And here I thought it was because they both originated from a single culture in the atlantic that vanished when the iceage ended and the water levels rose worldwide. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> More likely it's because any other way of putting stone blocks on top of one another falls over.

You can't help thinking it, just don't say it out loud.

I'm getting a decent breeze through the wide-open window, but still miss my air-conditioner.

Obsidian is recruiting lots of new people at the moment, and I hope they take the opportunity to remedy the situation. With games played mostly by males, with most people in the industry being male, then you can't blame a company if the majority of employees are male. But to have no women at all isn't good.

The more depth your party members' stories have, the happier I'll be, and that includes romance. It doesn't necessarily have to be romance that you manipulate them into, though - romance that occurs independently (possibly randomly?) of the actions of the player works too. How about if one of your party falls in love on a planet you're visiting, and asks to stay behind? Do you let him/her? Kotor 2 needed more romance. The dark and ambiguous tone of the game called for some fraught, complicated and difficult romantic entanglements, not no entanglements at all. This is a perfectly good topic - no problem that I can see.

No! The Mayans and the Egyptians both built pyramids because aliens told them to!

I think belief in God is more of a leap of faith than belief in science. Belief in science is based on some evidence and allows the possibility of being disproved. Belief in God is based not on evidence but on faith, and allows no possibility of being disproved. Believers often say that science is as much of a religion as Christianity or Islam, but I've yet to see a convinving justification for this.