SteveThaiBinh

Well, the developers put a lot of effort into the combat system as a major selling point of any game, so I guess they think it's a shame if players don't use it. Plus there's probably only a tiny percentage of purchasers who would want to play a completely pacifist route, so it's a lot of work for the designers to build a non-violent workaround to every problem involving, as Volourn says, some rather stilted and unconvincing solutions at times. Better to spend that time making customisable sleeves on your armour or soil erosion or various other fancy things like that. Running is good exercise.

Yes, you are. Honestly, what's wrong with you? I personally only play Kotor 2 for the deep, fulfilling role-playing experience of sending my light-side mastery Jedi hacking his way through dozens of hapless, hugely-overpowered Onderon soldiers who are only fighting because of Sith coercion. I've played Arcanum through as a pacifist, but never completed the Fallouts. What other games are you thinking of that had realistic pacifist paths to winning?

To each his own.

Ooh, I remember that from PS:T. I must have used that spell an awful lot. It was one of very few that I felt I could actually control. It'll be weird having all the same icons for NWN2. Well, it'll be weird for the first twenty seconds, but then I imagine I'll get used to it. It'll be nice to have 'portraits' that actually look like my character. NWN's tiny portrait selection wasn't up to much, and it took me ages to find portraits for BG that I could live with.

The Shadows of Undenthingie-Hordes of the Underdark campaign/story was much more replayable than the original campaign, I found. Are there any user-created mods that had a better story or better characters than the OC? Should Bioware get Kotor3, I fully expect Time-Travelling Lizards of Doom to be The True Sith . Others have mentioned it, but I also liked Arcanum, and I think if you're nostalgic for Baldur's Gate, Arcanum could fill the hole. The magic/technology thing pleased some and infuriated others, but I loved the story and some the characters were good fun.

Have you even been to North Dakota? I think my entire knowledge of the place comes from the episode of the West Wing where they're discussing changing their name because the word 'North' frightens away the tourists.

Because the Olympics are too big, and the IOC wants to make them smaller and/or make room for other new sports. Because professional baseball in the US has had a lot of drugs problems and the IOC is very worried about drugs affecting its image still further. Because softball, and to a lesser degree baseball, aren't played widely in very many countries. Because the sports are identified as American, and America isn't very popular at the moment. There were other reasons mentioned when the decision was made. I was still surprised, as I imagine it will hit the amount of money US television companies are willing to pay for viewing rights and put a dent in the IOC's pocket. As for whether videogames should be an Olympic sport, it's an interesting question which I will use as a discussion topic with my students next week. Thanks for the link.

If you haven't played Oblivion or Morrowind yet, I'd recommend starting with Morrowind. It seems very similar to Oblivion (though I'm only a few hours into Oblivion), but is probably much cheaper and still very pretty, if endlessly brown. I suspect you either like both games or hate both. For very old games, I always recommend the Quest for Glory games - they're fun and funny, and with five games in the series (you can carry a single character through all five) have a real epic feel.

Better, I suppose. When you're berserking, you've pretty much switched your brain off and are less-vulnerable to mind-affecting spells, or at least that's how I imagine it. Surely he means the Bioware forums.

Get a big stack of cold compresses to relieve the discomfort (a little) and a new computer game to take your mind off it and eliminate the desire to move around.

I can't believe the Democrats are seriously considering Mrs. Clinton. Don't they even want to win? And what happened to Elisabeth Dole? On-topic, it's unlikely that Bush ever deliberately covered things up as anything that needed covering up would have been kept from him - 'plausible deniability' and all that. The top people at the Pentagon and so on, maybe, but probably not Bush himself.

Rats, I bought BG and BG2 last year and paid a total of over forty pounds. If only I'd waited... Then again, considering all the hours I enjoyed playing these excellent and lengthy games, it's still money well spent.

I agree, although I'm only about five episodes into the first season, it's pretty well-written and I like it a lot. Why does no-one watch it?

Has there been any progress in predicting earthquakes? Is it even thought to be possible? I'm sure the Japanese were working on something along those lines a few years ago.

Reluctantly, if at all. We draw our definitions from our own culture, or at least the culture with which we choose to identify. For me, that's Western science, and therefore race is, as the wikipedia article suggests, a social construct with more to do with culture and tradition than with biology or genetics. Probably just the one. Human. As for age and race, on a census or visa application form I tend to tick the box marked 'British' or 'White'. I'm in my early thirties.

What's happened - and is happening - about the hole in the ozone layer is indicative of two important things. Firstly, man and his activities can have a significant impact on the environment, and in ways that are potentially very dangerous for human health (skin cancer and so on). Secondly, action taken together by individuals, corporations and governments can turn such situations around. Let's see the same for CO2 emissions and global warming, please.

Go Realism! As someone who mostly plays CRPGs for the stories rather than the combat, I quite liked Fable's approach - where you find 'life potions' equivalent to extra lives, so you only really die if you run out of HP 9 times in succession. Very arcady though, I suppose, and in Fable's case the story itself wasn't that great anyway. I don't mind having to reload a few times to get past a tough battle, and I don't feel that it detracts from the story at all. I'm always interested to see how the various approaches to dying are explained away in the game. Planescape: Torment and the immortality was pretty good and certainly memorable, I thought. The funniest was perhaps Ultima 7 and Elizabeth and Abraham's Britannia-wide MEDEVAC Service - No Dungeon Too Deep! I also miss the Quest for Glory death humour, where every different death - from getting squished by a rhino on the savannah to overdosing on the hookah - had its own joke death message.

I liked it too, and I recommend you try the Japanese original as well. I've heard it said that people either liked it or didn't depending on whether the video sequence resembled how they remember their own nightmares. For me, it kind of did.

That was funny. I guess the Lord of the Rings fans turned out in droves. Unfortunately, it's likely to spawn a lot of cheap imitations in coming years.

That was informative. Please add my 'Who?' to those above.

Diagnose your own condition with NHS Direct. Who needs a medical degree? Actually, it's a pretty useful and reliable site, but no substitute for actually going to see a qualified doctor, which is of course what you need to do. Your back pain threatens your livelihood, so money spent diagnosing and treating it is a worthwhile investment.

You mean all the movies in which soldiers have their will to resist beaten out of them by screaming drill sergeants aren't true?

I wasn't aware that the US army was twiddling its thumbs looking for more things to do, but as they apparently are, I have some heavy pots that need lifting. I would imagine, and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, that one major problem is that the existing border security is underresourced for the job it's expected to do, and the solution is to hire more people, train them better, and pay them a decent wage so they stay. I don't suppose there are many catchy headlines in that, though.

The options aren't exhaustive, so I can't choose the one I'd like, which would be early thirties. I'd be really surprised if it were below twenty.

Not only ninjas, but crates as well. The PNJ forums were ground-breaking, exploring the very meaning of spam. Where does the boundary between speculation and spam lie? Can anything truly be spam in a forum about something we know nothing about? Can anything truly not be spam? We were pushing the envelope, and I for one was proud to have participated.