SteveThaiBinh

Ages ago, before the IAU took this decision. I found this one just after the news broke, and I'm seriously considering a T-shirt as a birthday gift for a friend who's up in arms about this.

I believe it is better. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I agree . I mean, they're very different movies, but The Thin Red Line was more to my tastes, certainly.

Exactly. And at the end of the game in the Trayus Academy you're pretty much fighting Sith/Dark Jedi the whole time, and then you have Sion and Traya to deal with. That's why every time I've thought about going the blaster route I've got cold feet. So Chenwong88, was it okay getting through the endgame in one piece as a pure gunslinger?

That's very true. Also, from the point of learning efficiency, I'd suggest that those with a will to learn often do so better and faster in a country where the target language is widely spoken than in their own country where access to target language resources may be very restricted. Plenty of students go to the US or UK wanting to study English, and they often learn very successfully. Why struggle in classes three times a week for two years when you can achieve the same progress after six months in the US?

Japanese is a fairly regular language, with only three irregular verbs and two tenses, the past and non-past. The writing system can be fiendishly difficult, especially where some characters have two or more possible readings, but spoken Japanese is quite easy to pick up to a level where you can chat to people. Spanish is easier than some languages because it's written the same way it's pronounced, so fewer spelling headaches and no need to learn a special phonetic script like many foreign students of English do. Every language I've studied has had its peculiar difficulties, but I'd say Spanish was probably the easiest, even though I started it at school.

I am - well, not to the entire world, just one bit. Foreign language teaching and learning is a vast private industry and methodologies, traditional or progressive, don't survive long if they don't lead to results. It all depends what kind of results you're looking for.

Umm, I guess. Or eye-scans maybe, if fingerprints are too easy to copy/fake. I've heard that all this stuff is years from being workable, but I've also heard that Australian immigration are already using it.

Fine by me. I've been trying to play NWN in the last few days, and the graphics are really a turn-off for me now. I guess it comes from the way the world's built up with tiles to make it easy to create your own modules, but it just feels very clinical and artificial. I only just realised it, but I would honestly say that Baldur's Gate 2 looked a lot better. If NWN2 has similar gameplay but cosier, more vibrant and more artistic graphics, then I'll be a very happy gamer.

How far are we from fingerprint technology for cars, front doors and the like? I'm useless with keys. I don't usually lock myself out of things, but I can never find them in the morning.

Bilingualism's a fascinating subject. Countries all over the world are afraid that English will displace their own languages (due to US cultural exports like Hollywood), yet some Americans are afraid that English is in danger in the US. :D Calax, I think it's a good idea for every student to learn another language at school, even if they live somewhere where virtually nothing but English is spoken. Learning how another language works can be part of learning how other people might think, and learning to accept that other people see the world differently to yourself. If not Spanish, then French, Chinese or Ancient Greek, maybe? Fenghuang is right that studying a language at school often doesn't lead to very much real proficiency in the language, but there are other benefits, plus the student may learn to love it and continue at later stages in their schooling. The email at the start of this topic talks about English-only instruction because that seems to be what's good for English-speakers and the English-speaking government, but it's not necessarily what's best for the child. For the child, I think it's best to become bilingual in English and her mother tongue. If she's from a middle-class background or a culture where academic education is highly valued, she might survive being dumped suddenly into an English-only environment, because she gets a lot of family support. Otherwise, she's more likely to sink than swim, get alienated from school and learning entirely, and head off for a brief and unhappy life of delinquency and crime. Well, maybe not that bad except in the most extreme cases, but can you imagine enjoying school and getting much out of it when you can barely understand what's going on? If schools provide some instruction in her mother tongue and extra support so she can make quick progress with her English, the results are probably better for everyone.

*shrugs* It was just a thought. Besides, nominations have closed already. I should have suggested it earlier.

You're right, of course, so I guess it's not such a problem. I was trying to think if there were any tech NPCs in Kotor 2 who could substitute, like Bao-Dur perhaps? Or maybe there's a really cool blacksmith in NWN2?

I'm not a huge fan of the Skeeter idea. I think it's a bit obscure, since many of the people who come to these boards may not have played the Fallout games. That'll probably be even more the case now Obsidian's signed their deal with SEGA. Also, I think it's a bit odd given that Obsidian didn't create Fallout 2, and I thought they didn't want to be known as Black Isle 2.

3, 14, 5, 8, 4, although 'plaza' suggests buying and selling to me. Nothing else appeals.

It all depends on having him in your party when certain events occur, as LadyCrimson said. I could try to remember them all for you, but there's an Influence Guide over at gamefaqs that's much more comprehensive than I could be. And why not? Not only are you allowed to mention it, but you're actually allowed to criticise Obsidian for letting it into the finished game.

You think so? It had some great moments, like the belly-dancing, bribing your way into Hades with chocolate, and the top 10 paladin powers. I really liked QfG4 as well, of course, especially for the music, but it was incredibly buggy in the beginning, and then again because of runtime errors until Dosbox came out. Still, there's nothing quite as terrifying as an approaching Vorpal Bunny. :ph34r:

Kotor 1's 'cinematic' approach to dialogue and the game as a whole has been quite influential, hasn't it? I'm sure it wasn't the first game to do this, but you can see the influences in Oblivion, and probably in NWN2 as well. The whole subject of whether games are finally becoming interactive movies, and the ramifications of that, are pretty interesting. How do you apply cinematic techniques so that the final product feels like a movie but still plays like a great game? Many games disappoint at the end, because they've been building to a climax for thirty hours rather than one-and-a-half, and perhaps because developers don't invest as much in a good ending as they should. I find the tendency to cut out plot and NPC interaction and just throw wave after wave of monsters at you is boring, and final boss battles often equally so. The problem with the Malak scene is perhaps that he had to pause to drain the Jedi, which isn't very realistic, but that just sounds like a game engine thing, turns and so on as well. Again, perhaps they could have cleaned it up a bit, but I can't say I ever was really bothered by it.

We're getting the same nameless hero again? I guess that makes sense, given the ending of Gothic 2. If we can't customize gender or appearance, the developers need to compensate by making him highly customisable in other ways. That could include membership of factions (which seem to be a big part of Gothic 3), relationships (romantic or otherwise) with various NPCs, alignment and moral choices, choice of path to completing the game and different endings that correspond with your choices. The standard fighter/mage/thief choice isn't really enough by itself, I think.

Topic? This isn't a topic, this is a post-it note!

Ah yes, the famous developers of Knights of the Old Republic and Tomb Raider. Maybe he had a bet with a mate to see how many mistakes he could get a major national newspaper to publish? I shall always think of you as Willfred Honeyboffle. You should change your username, too.

In the Swedish original, in the sentence: does 'they' refer to Bioware or Obsidian?

For a minor side-quest, Sasha was pretty good and original I thought. Trying to figure out a language is better than yet another delivery-boy quest, even if the sounds got a bit repetitive. For an NPC and party-member, G0-T0 was no fun to be around and a useless fighter, although somewhat improved by an interesting backstory. A 'Jettison from Ebon Hawk' option would have improved him no end. :D G0-T0 is the more useless.

This is good news. I don't object to having some characters unvoiced, or sharing a voice actor with another (ideally minor) character, as you say. It sounds silly, perhaps, but I found Oblivion rather small, for that kind of game and compared with Morrowind. In part that was because it was smaller, but also because you could see Imperial City from everywhere, so it made the world feel smaller, and there were fewer towns to speak of. If they can get the engine stable and running on a less-than-absurdly-powerful system, I'd like to get this game.

How about The Kotor 2 Technical Support Forum?

What, another one? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's what I thought. Still, I guess it's a useful discipline. The guy knows that unless he makes some truly great games in the future, people will never stop bugging him about Fallout 2. I still haven't played this game, after a bug left me unable to finish Fallout 1. Is it as much of an improvement over Fallout 1 as BG2 was over BG1? Similar levels of character interaction, he asked hopefully?