SteveThaiBinh

I remember there was a massive terrorist attack on Japanese tourists in Egypt several years ago. More than 50 were killed, I think. There have been smaller attacks since. This kind of thing does happen in many countries, but Egypt seems to have a particular problem.

Infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy. A Freudian slip, perhaps?

I agree with Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. Make sure you have enough memory to play it - it stutters a lot if you have less than 1Gb on many systems. Morrowind takes time to get into. It doesn't have a fantastic main quest, its strength is in the richness of the world, the backstory, and the degree of freedom it offers. If you judge it on its own terms, it's a very good game. I'm suggesting a game that I've never played, so take this with a pinch of salt, but I know someone who loves Ultima: Ascension. It was very buggy when released, but that was because it was too demanding on graphics for its day. It still looks fairly good, from what I've seen, and Ultima games always had a good story. Maybe someone who's actually played it could give you more info.

For me, power-gaming means playing with the intention of gaining the maximum amount of XP possible. It involves doing every possible side quest, defusing every mine, picking every lock, to that end. I don't tend to do it because it runs counter to the spirit of role-playing - that you have an idea of what kind of person your character is, and choose your actions accordingly. If my character is LS, I will refuse obviously DS quests, and so on. Yes, I suppose that if I were to try powergaming in this way, it would add a few levels by the end of the game.

Many of Russia's problems are Western inflicted, and I suggest you do some research into the events that followed the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. Western governments sent hundreds of 'experts' to advise the new Russian government on how to switch to a market economy, and these experts advised the cheap sale of state-owned companies to private buyers on the grounds that simply by being privately owned, they would become more efficient and successful. This is what brought the corrupt oligarchs into being. A slower and better thought out transition could have avoided this. 'Once Russia joins the civilized world'? What on earth does this mean? Russia's civilisation is ancient. Piracy and copyright infringement exist in all societies, and I believe many western software companies are involved in legal proceedings against each other over such matters. And what about illegal internet music downloads? Where is that most common? The majority of Russians are unable to own computers or buy games, restricting such purchases to a portion of the middle class. Middle class gamers or their middle class parents prefer to buy legal games, and will pay extra, provided it is not extortionate. My middle class students in Latvia paid extra for expensive legal English textbooks, even though cheaper local copies were available. They also bought pirated games, largely because they, like I, were not sure they were illegal. I suspect that if legal games were available and publicised, they would soon come to dominate the market. I appreciate you wish to express your point of view strongly, but I don't feel that I have been shouting brainless accusations.

Amen. First time through was OK, because you tend to ask everybody everything. First replay, and trying to remember who triggered which quest how was a nightmare.

I was doing my best 'anal forum spelling corrector' impression, inspired by an earlier post. As a (former) English teacher, I have to fight myself not to correct mistakes, which is just as well since I make a fair few myself. Ironically for English teachers, English has no 'authority' to declare one thing correct and another wrong. Selfbiography is a very common 'mistake', and if enough people keep writing it, it will eventually stop being a mistake and become a legitimate alternative. Here's a useless piece of information that I'm not sure is correct, so maybe someone here knows more about it. I've heard that early recordings of spoken English reveal that the accent of British speakers in the early nineteenth century is much closer to modern east-coast American accents than to modern British accents. Is this true?

It might be the Kreia thing. I don't take her with me much, because she seems to give most of her dialogue telepathically anyway. I did do the super level-up Hsiss thing once, to see what kinds of objects you got at higher levels. I wouldn't say the random loot generator threw me anything better than the Ossus robe, though of course that could just be my bad luck.

It's autobiography, not selfbiogahpy. And the ellipsis should have three evenly-spaced dots, as follows... Shame on you.

But I tend not to have such a high level, as I don't exploit the bugs/cheats. So at the level I finish Onderon, it's easily the best robe I've found, every time. I've never managed to finish the game above level 25 without cheating. I don't know how others do it.

Take a game that aims to be subtle and ambiguous. Combine it with a development process that includes half a dozen writer/developers and hours of dialogue. Add an impossible deadline and an almighty rush to finish the game on time. And you get Kotor 2. Maybe Kreia and Kae were supposed to be the same at one point. Maybe they were supposed to be the same in the final version, but the developers wanted to make it unclear. Lots of different interpretations are possible, until someone declares one version to be 'canon' and spoils all the fun.

We don't, and in fact they probably won't. But at the time when Obsidian was finishing Kotor 2, there was a LucasArts team working on Kotor 3, though this was later shelved.

I actually thought the Ossus Keeper Robe was a mistake. It seemed to me that before that, the writers were deliberately trying NOT to have any one robe that was clearly better than the others. They were all slightly different, but none gave a decisive advantage, so you could choose one that suited your character. You can still do that, of course, it's just my preference - I don't like superpowerful artifacts; I don't think they add anything to the game.

I'm sure they're doing their best. But as most of the bugs seem to be caused by hardware/driver conflicts, I don't see how Obsidian has the resources to resolve them. LucasArts QA is probably better placed to sort these things out, and so it's more than just procedure, it's genuinely the case that the patch depends on both parties working well together. That always takes time. But it is frustrating for people who can't even get the game working, on systems that really ought to be able to run it.

The Russian versions are pirate copies, it seems, but the problem is that the games companies are failing to provide a reasonable alternative. Russia is a huge and growing market, so why are so few games legally translated into Russian? Kotor 2 was translated into Italian, after all, surely a smaller market than Russia. The problem is that the companies refuse to sell games at a reduced price - instead they charge Western prices, which are extortionate in former USSR countries, so no-one will buy legal copies. Their priority is to prevent cheap legal copies reaching the West, not to bring their product to a wider market. While you can buy anything on e-bay, most legal game retailers such as Amazon won't sell directly to countries outside their specific 'zone'. So unless you have someone in the West willing to act as intermediary, it may actually be impossible to buy legal versions in many countries. I'm not offering this as an excuse for software piracy, just an explanation of why it is so common.

Mitch Benn's Fantastic Voyage into Rick Wakeman http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.s...itchbenn_crimes

I'm sure the first time I read this it was completely different. I think it's better to add extra information in a new post rather than change your original post like this, especially if somebody has already replied. Whinging means pointless and annoying complaining. I think it's more common in British English. The game isn't always well-balanced, in that most fights are extremely easy, but now and again there's a huge, difficult battle, and because the player hasn't been stretched until then, it becomes more difficult. If you try some of the rebalancing mods available for download on kotor fan sites, they will make the whole game more difficult and that's good training for the tough battles. Can't help about the bugs, I'm afraid. It seems to vary hugely from system to system.

And ILM could add CGI lips.

Don't hug the zombies. The zombies are not your friends.

One of the developers said it would be out a day or two after the bug fix patch was released. However, it appears that he shouldn't have said that, because any patch has to go through the formalities of being checked and cleared by LucasArts. However, rather than come to the boards and admit that immediately, Obsidian maintained their usual radio silence on the issue. Several posters asked why there was a delay, and eventually (after a week or so, I think) a developer acknowledged that it was indeed being held up while LucasArts was checking it. In other words, Obsidian made exactly the same mistake with this patch that they made with the previous patch, strongly implying an imminent release when this was not something they could control. Obsidian, please hire a forum manager with some PR experience. You know it makes sense.

I think I will probably enjoy Episode III more than I or II because I no longer have any illusions about what to expect. It will be visually impressive, and it will be satisfying to see the characters go down the paths we know they will. The dialogue will be weak, and the acting will be patchy. If I'm wrong about that, it will be a wonderful surprise and will make my day. If I'm right, I'm determined to enjoy it as it is. I'm hoping the TV series will be better. We're told here in the UK that one reason why many American TV shows are better than ours, and they undoubtedly are, is that they have teams of writers behind them, producing consistent, solid writing. George Lucas' weaknesses are both his lack of writing talent and his inability to recognise this lack of talent and bring other co-writers on board. Surely the TV shows won't make the same mistake.

I like this idea. Against the background of a Sith-run galaxy, where force users are immediately detected and sent off to be 'converted' to the Dark Side, an entirely non-force party would be necessary to offer any kind of resistance. The Force would still be important, in a sense it would be central, as you would have to deal with (i.e. kill) force-using Sith as part of your adventure. But it would be approaching it from a different angle, as well as making an original and challenging experience, to employ techniques such as those Atton mentions to defeat enemies substantially stronger than you could ever be.

Copying the game and giving it away for free is also illegal. The End-User License Agreements on old floppy-disk games only allowed you to make one copy as a backup. Selling multiple copies of the game is more likely to attract nasty letters from lawyers than giving it away for free, but both are illegal, at least in the UK.

Cambodia is in South-East Asia. South Asia is the Indian subcontinent. Maybe if Zombies were better at geography, or issued with maps, they wouldn't wander around aimlessly all the time.

So this was a TV series, right? Presumably they'll make allowances for those of us who haven't seen it. I liked Farscape: Peacekeeper Wars, but that was because I'd seen the series and wanted to know what happened to the characters. Did he say 'I aim to misbehave'? That line made me wince.