SteveThaiBinh

We don't know. I suppose a sequel, if there is one, might reveal that, but then again, I doubt any sequel would dwell too closely on the characters of Kotor2. They'd either revisit Revan, or do something entirely new.

Not yet. My game is stalled over this as well - it happens because as soon as you arrive at the sunken city, the game jumps you forward to a particular time of day. If your craving is high, that's usually enough to kill you - characters with lower craving don't notice it so much. Supposedly there's a workaround if you leave Mulhorand at exactly the correct time, you can survive it, but it never worked for me. A fix is promised in the next patch (whenever that is).

I stayed up until something like 5am playing Civilization IV, fell asleep on the sofa and slept through the workmen letting themselves into my house and replacing my shower. Either they were very quiet hauling all the stuff through my front room, or I was more tired than I'd thought.

As I try to persuade my family and friends back home in the UK that Muslims are generally good and reasonable people and that I am unlikely to be burned alive in my bed, I can't think of anything more helpful than pictures on TV of a knife-wielding mob baying for the blood of an English teacher who allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammed. I can certainly tell you that it's getting no interest and no media coverage in Saudi Arabia, at least not in the mainstream press. All the attention has been on the Annapolis Summit, which is perhaps fair enough, but this is going to impact on the British public's view of Islam for years, as much as the July 7 bombings did, I think.

If I don't finish a game, that shows something's seriously wrong with the game. After all, it's the story that's often the main hook for me, so of course I want to see it through to the end. That said, for many games, the end is the weakest part - perhaps some marketing executive somewhere has found out about all the gamers who never reach the end, and so tells developers not to 'waste' money on good endings?

I don't think so. Surely we would have heard - it would have been pretty big news.

The Doctor Who News Page (formerly Gallifrey One, and a pretty reputable site) is reporting that Cubicle 7 is going to produce a roleplaying game based on Doctor Who. It's an interesting idea, and I want to know how they'll make it work, given that the Doctor doesn't really fight as such.

Do whatever you want to do, whatever entertains or inspires you. It will show in the quality of the writing, no matter what any alleged die-hards may say.

I rely on Gamespot for their reviews of traditional point and click adventures: "This game sucks, because it's got, like, puzzles and stuff, and some of them are like, hard and stuff - 3.6!!!"

Short comment from Gamespot. Firing a guy over a poor review because a sponsor complained is a very foolish thing to do. Firing a guy over something entirely different, around the same time he gives a major sponsor's game a poor review, is also a pretty foolish thing to do since it's fairly obvious people would leap to conclusions. All in all, a disaster of Gamespot's own making?

No. I think Team Gizka addressed this before. LucasArts might see that as Team Gizka profiting from their (LucasArts') copyright material, and shut them down.

How action-heavy is it? How well developed are the NPC companions?

Go into your profile settings and set your class. That's true.

Yes, it's the fear of endless combat that puts me off these. I know, I know, I'm fussy and impossible to please. Has anyone played the NWN module Tortured Hearts? How is it?

I've been a barbarian for months, as apparently that's the default setting. Now I'm a druid.

I have my anti-console elitist moments, but I wouldn't let that stop me playing a really good game (which ME appears, from the words of others, to be). But I bought a PS2 and tried a few games on it and I just never felt at ease with the controller. You can buy console-like controllers for the PC, so why can't you attach a keyboard and mouse to the XBox360 and use them instead?

But not alone, though. I would probably say the same. For me, I'm just not sure I could have a positive experience with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse - it's too far outside my comfort zone.

In the absence of guidance from the original poster about what we should be discussing, I'm going to close the thread. Mr. J, you are welcome to get in touch with any of the mods, clarify the topic and get the thread pruned and re-opened. Otherwise, I don't think this is going anywhere.

If the campaign hops around the planes, I don't think that matters.

Think of a number and quadruple it. Then quadruple it again. Seriously, I've found it a serious, but fun and worthwhile, investment of time. If you're coming into it as much of a newb as I was, I'd recommend fiddling around with the toolset, especially making conversations with multiple paths and actions/scripts (like moving NPCs, which I found a real killer). Once you're familiar with the kind of information the toolset needs and the kind of things it will and won't let you do, stop. Sit down with a piece of paper and plan your entire module, with conversation outlines, character descriptions, quest outcomes and multiple pathways. Do this all on paper before you start putting it into the toolset.

Could you explain what you want to discuss, Mr. J? Topicless threads have an unfortunate tendency to attract spammers, naming no names...

It looks good. I think the ATI Radeon is similar to the nVidia GeForce FX5200, and that's what I ran Kotor 2 on when I got it and it ran perfectly well. Higher resolutions (above 800x600) will be jerky in places, but I was quite satisfied with the visual experience I had. This site is suggesting that the card meets the 'recommended', not just the 'required' specifications.

Broadly speaking, I think so too. By this time, the rivalry between Chinese and Russian Communists was a huge factor in the region, as in the Vietnamese invasion (liberation?) of Cambodia - the Vietnamese communists were allied with Moscow, the Cambodians with Beijing. The Chinese even invaded Vietnam in 1979. Not really consistent with the idea of a communist juggernaut sweeping across South-East Asia. With regards to the original questions, I notice that Yugoslavia and its continuing collapse are back in the news - Kosovo is approaching UDI, and with the US and Europe's support. Would they have rated the US' power so highly in 1915, though? I'm not sure the European powers really saw the US as an equal until the First World War made its name as a power, so to speak. If you're right, though, and the war had been over much more quickly, chances are the next war, whatever it was, would have been fought sooner. It was the horror of the Great War that led a generation of politicians down the path of appeasement and destroyed the popular notion of war as a heroic adventure for young heroes, and I think that had to go at some point. Fascism would still have arisen in Europe because it was (certainly in the cases of Italy and Spain) more a response to Communism than a result of the post-war settlement, and Russia would still have turned Communist because I don't think the war was that decisive a factor in that either.

So, did you?

I'm trying to sound out ideas rather than present an already coherent or well thought-out argument, so please bear that in mind. Both points are of course speculation and nothing more. It occurred to me that these 'local fighters' were fighting the coalition for a signicant period of time, and yet at the end seemed to be in sufficiently good shape that when they turned on al-Qaeda, that made a huge difference in the direction of the struggle. On point two, there are anti-war activists who would suggest that if the coalition withdrew from Iraq, al-Qaeda would also largely withdraw because they're there to oppose the coalition. If we don't accept that, and say that in fact al-Qaeda would have continued on their brutal path trying to bring their interpretation of the world to Iraq, then these Sunni groups would have come to oppose them just as they are doing now. So the question, why would they have been less successful then (however many years ago) than they are now? In order for the coalition presence to have been beneficial, one of two things must have happened. Either al-Qaeda started out much the stronger group, but the coalition presence somehow tilted the balance of strength in the favour of the 'local fighters', which on the face of it seems unlikely since for most of the time they were actively fighting the coalition alongside al-Qaeda. Or, something about the conflict over the last four years (over and above al-Qaeda's attrocities), has made the local fighters more willing to side with their government and the coalition against al-Qaeda. Perhaps general war-weariness? Comments/refinements/gaping holes?