[Alpha Protocol on GTTV next Friday]

Was there ever an underground station so clean? Is that Japan or China? I hope Mike has to chase someone (or escape from someone) through a Japanese underground station during rush hour. That would be challenging gameplay!

[Nobody cares about AP...]

It's not a definite sign of failure...

Thank you for that.

I care.

Me too.

 

I have no idea how games are marketed or how you get your game 'talked about'. It would be interesting to find out - does anyone know of any articles on the interweb about such things?

[GDC experimental games]

Sounds a bit like Save and Restore to me.

 

More seriously, yes, it sounds like a fascinating idea, but you need a team like the one behind Portal to make it true to its potential and at the same time accessible and easy to learn. It sounds fiendishly complicated and rather unintuitive from that write-up.

[Uk govt]

I personally like Cameron. I don't trust his fething party. But then maybe he'll do to Thatcher's Tory party what Blair did to Kinnock's Labour?

When Blair was running in 1997, the Tories tried to scare people saying that okay, maybe Blair is nice, but his party is still the same old Labour party and it will force him to the left if they win. It didn't happen - whether you approve of it or not, Blair's government did pretty much what it said it would, at least in the first term or so. That shows the power of the Prime Minister and, regrettably perhaps, the weakness of parliament. The Conservative Party has some elements that I have big problems with, but I'm reasonably confident that the situation is the same and that, if Cameron wins, it will be a Cameron government that we get.

[KOTOR3 Announced by Lucasarts!!!!!!!]

Hasn't there been one of these every year since Kotor2 was released? I believe so. It's been great guys, see you all again next year, same place!

[Developer Diary video]

I hope then when you hover the mouse over the different guns it says what they are. This caused me a lot of hassle in Mass Effect. I'd put lots of points into shooting shotguns and then have to figure out which one was the shotgun. Was it the big gun, the very big gun, the small gun or the other small gun? I don't know guns.

 

Are grenades and mines gadgets now? I thought you guys had been watching Bond. Where's the pen that shoots poison darts? Where's the watch that's really a cunningly-disguised hovercraft?

[G20 summit]

What's with all the protests against the G20 stuff anyway? Are these the anti-globalists or are they just pissed that they lost their job/home/money? They should probably hold the conferences in safer and less crowded places.

It's a mix of different groups with different agendas. Sadly, the violent ones get most news coverage - they seem to be almost professional protestors by now, moving from venue to venue following the politicians. I don't know about this time, but there have always been lots of environmental groups, pro-development organisations and churches involved in previous protests.

[Uk govt]

As good as the Onion...

I think so. Not as good as Matt, though.

 

So, Brown, is it? Or to quote Daniel Hannan, the "Fifeshire feartie". Lame duck, to be sure - I think the Labour Party knows the end is drawing near when they start talking about Harriet Harman as a potential successor. This tired, sad government has run out of ideas as completely as the Tories had in 1997. The Tories' big idea was privatisation and they stuck with it to the point where they were privatising everything left right and centre without thought to how to make a free market viable in that sector - e.g. the railways, and look what a shambles that has been. Labour's big idea has been growing the state, and I've no objection to the state doing things it can do well, but Brown is just growing it and growing it because of blind faith, because he can't think of anything else to do.

 

I would vote Conservative in this election if it weren't for who my local MP is. I am not voting for that man, not ever.

[G20 summit]

I read this morning that the policing cost of the G20 will be around 8 million. Am I the only person who has considered the useless fethers doing a cyber-conference instead?

I agree. All over the globe there are World Bank offices with state-of-the-art video conferencing facilities, many of which are rarely used. Putting the whole thing online would actually make it more participatory, and easier for ordinary people to put questions directly to their leaders.

[Lo, I have become...]

I used to buy Sims expansion packs as impulse buys, but I've been forcing myself not to and to wait for the Sims 3 to come out. It's been delayed, though.

[What are you playing now?]

I'm playing NWN2 with the Romance mod.

 

What?

[Dragon Age]

I think so. I don't play shooters so I don't know if they have romances, but I play point and click adventures which certainly pride themselves on good characters and storytelling and you might think would be fertile ground for romances. They aren't, though, perhaps because it would turn some people off if it weren't optional and adventures aren't big on choices with consequences - it's just not a standard feature of the genre.

 

So have Bioware officially said anything about romances? I'm afraid I also haven't really been keeping up the last few months.

[Legendary Bugs & Flaws]

I don't know if anybody else had this, but before Knights of the Old Republic was patched, overloading any computer terminal would also overload mine, making it crash.

Life imitating art.

 

I was playing Arcanum and having a good time of it when I got to that point where your cultist friend (the one who you begin the game with) had a BG2-esque "my planet needs me now" revelation and ran off from the party. He did not come back. I looked online for the triggers that would cause him to reappear but no matter how hard I tried I could not cause him to spawn. And so I finished the game without that guy.

 

That's not even getting into the game-breaking bug that was Arcanum's design.

 

I had a bug in Arcanum that once the cultist left my party my inventory was FUBARed making it impossible to continue on as I lost main quest related items to the ether.

Cultist? His name was Virgil!! Or occasionally Virgoo, depending on your intelligence. I wish there'd been a Virgil romance mod. I would have written one myself if I'd known how.

 

I had a bug in Arcanum where you got to the First Panarii Temple and as soon as you spoke to the priest, the game set all your stats permanently to 1. That was a pain.

[Pictures of your games]

Cheers.

[Dragon Age]

I'm all for character interaction and stuff, but I don't see how that neccessarily means romances.

 

Doeesn't necessarily mean the game wil be not worth playing. The Witcher has that stupid and completely unneccessary nudie card thing happening and was still a decent game.

 

Just doesn't get me excited, atm. So far not really a mindset that I feel any real connection to.

Perhaps romances are particularly suited to RPGs, in the sense that they have to be optional because they alienate as many people as they attract, and that fits well with the 'non-linearity' that RPG writers aspire to.

 

I've had my moments when I've thought "Give it a rest with the fantasy settings already and give us something new!". That won't stop me enjoying Dragon Age, though. Once you're into the story and the world, it usually works.

[Pictures of your games]

Anyway, I just got Beyond Good & Evil from GOG.com. It's very nice so far. Here's a screenshot:

Did it run easily? I bought an old copy of Beyond Good & Evil and it stubbornly refused to run on either XP or Vista.

[Alex Brandon leaving Obsidian]

Lawlor? I could already think up of joke names for this guy.

 

Sad about Alex Brandon - I also thought his work on Obsidian's games was excellent and very refreshing.

[Your 'bad']

Please see my PM - we're here to help, if we can.

[Legendary Bugs & Flaws]

^ Eh?

I think there's a point, even in point and click adventure games, where the solution to a puzzle is so ridiculously obscure and illogical that it can be considered a design flaw. This is the worst I've ever come across, from King's Quest I.

[Legendary Bugs & Flaws]

Ifnkovhgroghprm

[Good Old Games]

I keep meaning to get Simon the Sorcerer 1-3. They could do with a few more adventure games, it is true.

[Movies you have seen recently]

Tonari No Totoro

Best animated film ever.

Japanese version with subtitles, none of that sissy dubbing for this fella.

Absolutely!

 

Just a splendid movie, a real treat. Hard to choose a favourite part, but I love when the little boy offers his umbrella to Satsuki without speaking and then runs away and starts grinning and jumping.

[French Gimp Online]

Battlefield: Ping Pong vs. Street Fighter

[Games you never finished]

Never finished Oblivion which is amazing considering how many games I started. My problem there is I'll get to about level 12-15 and realize my character has a build flaw because of some poor choices when levelling up. The only thing I can do is start over. And over.

I've finished Oblivion three or four times but never without a levelling mod - the only game I've ever played where I added a user-created mod on my first playthrough, and it took a lot of persuading myself to do it, but I was so alarmed by the descriptions of how messed-up the levelling system was. I don't think I would have enjoyed the game much without that mod - it made the whole levelling thing stress-free.

[Rumor Watch]

Closed for length.