GreasyDogMeat

Bagging hot spy chicks and torture just isn't going to be as fun if its rated T for tender!

Well at least we know that there is at least one developer on the team that knows how these things are supposed to work. I should point out it was a very particular JB name that I'm very fond of... Hey, Joseph Bulock is just as good as Michael Thorton! Thorton sounds like a boring english major. You could just reverse the JB and give him an uber cool name like... BOB JOHNSON! Seriously, would you mess with someone named Bob Johnson? I know I wouldn't.

I would choose a manly name... like any of these

I read the title of the thread 'OBSIDIAN MMORPG, NEW OBSIDIAN CONSOLE-EXCLUSIVE ACTION MMORPG'... Rage building! RAAAGH! MMORPG?!? CONSOLE EXCLUSIVE!?? GRRRR!! Then I read the actual report. Rage fading... fading... gone. This RPG actually sounds pretty cool. Just hope you can torture people like Jack Bauer. 'Where is the nuclear suit-case bomb!? Oh, wont tell me eh?" :Jabs pencil in eye:

I see the terminators being 'too human' in both a positive and negative light. On the one hand that is exactly what they are created to do... be as human as possible to infiltrate and... well... terminate. I also liked how the show has sort of poked at how humans deal with it. On the one hand we have John who has become very emotionally attached to terminators, Arnie from T2 & now Cameron. I liked the touch where he is stroking her hair when she was deactivated. She is nothing more than a toaster oven, but it shows how people could become emotionally attached to a piece of machinery that emulated human looks & behavior. I can certainly imagine some computer geeks who do the same thing to their computer towers when a motherboard blew out. On the other hand, we have Derek Reece who absolutely despises them, which is understandable coming from an apocalyptic robo-future and all. However, his emotions for them are just as irrational as John Connors, just at the opposite end of the spectrum. It makes as little sense to distrust a machine to the point he does as it does to practically be in love with it as John seems to be. The point I think you are getting at, is certain oddities in the show. Like how Cameron seems so well adjusted in the first episode. She behaves like a high school girl, obviously to lull the audience into thinking she is just that. However, in all following episodes she is extremly socially awkward like, well, a machine. What happened to that perfect high school girl act? Did she fry a circuit or something in that openning battle? I've always enjoyed the idea of machines gaining a human like consciousness and I certainly wouldn't mind seeing the show explore that idea. I'm betting, for better or worse, they plan on doing a 'fried chip' comedy episode to make her act oddly along the lines of Robocop 2. "Thank you for not smoking."

I must admit, I paid very little attention to the idea of a Terminator show, thinking it would be crap, but after watching all 9 episodes I've found them rather enjoyable. I think it is a shame that they couldn't bring back some of the actors from the movie, the psychiatrist is a prime example. I'm not really sure how many shows they'll be able to maintain this with though. How many incarnations of the start of Skynet can they go through, as well as terminators from the future? There are also a few awkward moments in the show. One involves a terminator aiming at one of his targets and taking painfully long to take the shot. Its a machine people! Its reaction time should be pretty darn quick I'd think... target aquired... millisecond later bang. I'm also having a really hard time accepting the plot of a terminator skull flying through a time warp, and then reassembling itself in the future... huh? Though watching the terminator go on a mission to 'remake' it's skin was pretty cool.

I admit that my only real experience with D&D through the last 10 years, starting with Baldur's Gate has been the video games. They've hooked me though with the best ruleset and settings I've seen in RPGs. I once read that Gygax was a teacher, and that any student who could beat him in a match of Age of Empires would recieve an A for the semester. Coolest teacher ever. RiP

Thanks for the info on Ruins of Myth Drannor. I'd like to complete the entire Pool of Radiance series, even if it turns out PoR: Ruins of Myth Drannor is Pool of Radiance in name only with no connection to the previous Gold Box Radiance series other than its location in the same region. I don't really mind losing my equipment in the transfer from Pool to Curse, as it is explained in the manual/journal that your party is jumped and then wakes up in Tilverton with the titular five azure bonds tattooed on your arm. Makes sense that the baddies who managed to put my party under and place the symbols on their arms would want all my phat loot and gold . Heh, I'm betting once I complete Curse that my party will lose their equipment again in the transfer to Secret of the Silver Blades.

Well, NwN 2 didn't handle city areas well. The lowest frame rates were there. Mulsantir in Mask of the Betrayer ran pretty good for me though, so I'm hopefull Mysteries will run more like Mask. I agree btw, about Darkness Over Daggerford being excellent. It was ironic that it was the best of the 'premium modules' despite being cancelled.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/pool-of-radiance - Youtube vid of the Pool of Radiance intro/demo. I'm play the dos version, which doesn't have music or sound as good and, if you can believe it, doesn't look quite as good. At the time, the original Pool of Radiance was extremly well recieved an liked. It hasn't aged the best and it does require a bit of die-hard interest to get into it. Since I basically started playing RPGs with Baldur's Gate and Fallout, it was extremly difficult to get into Pool of Radiance. I can certainly handle older graphics, I grew up on Kings Quest & Space Quest, but getting around the menus and performing tasks often makes you jump through hoops. For instance in Baldur's Gate, to pass an item to a companion you click drag and drop. In Pool of Radiance you press V for view, I for inventory, press up or down to hilght an item, press T to trade, highlight the character you want to trade to and then press Y for yes I want to trade to that person. Combat is also a bit awkward to get used to and requires numerous key strokes to access different commands. It has become second nature to me, but in all honesty this game had one of the steepest learning curves I've ever experienced. The positive is that these old SSI games offer great tactical battles and fairly interesting stories that play out through a journal. Pool of Radiance basically involves a town, Phlan under siege by beasts, with various sections of the city under control. You go through the city liberating each section unravelling more of the story and getting closer to the big bad 'boss' controlling all the monsters. Another cool thing about the series is you can take your characters through 5 seperate games (Pool of Radiance, Hillsfar, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades & Pools of Darkness), creating one long epic experience. The initial thing that drove me try this game is the remakes for NwN 1 & the more recent Pool of Radiance Remastered, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed and there was just something about going back and trying the original D&D video game that started it all. The 'infamous' Pool of Radiance is a sequel/remake to the original game from Ubisoft. Its the one that supposedly removed everything from your hard drive when you uninstalled & recieved horrible reviews. http://www.mobygames.com/game/pool-of-radi...of-myth-drannor

Figuring out how to transfer is a pain. You actually needed to go into one of the training rooms and remove all the party members you planned to transfer from the party. Removing the character from the party would create a file called "charname.CHA", i.e. "whackyhalfling.cha". Then you can either drag and drop these .cha files from your Pool folder to the curse/save folder or use the 'copycurse.exe' file to have the game do it for you. Not too tough if you know what to do... a flippin' pain when the %#&@ manual doesn't tell you about this. That group of lvl 8 fighters defending Tyranthraxus is indeed a real pain. The trick to beating them was loading up your mages with charm spells & your clerics with hold spells. While they land about 33% of the time its usually enough to really turn the tide of battle in your favor. Initially I used Fireball but it just didn't do the trick on a large group with 80+ HP per enemy. Oh, and the Mulmaster Beholder corps is impossible. Well, unless you use 'Dust of Disappearance' beforehand. Gives your party a specialized invisibilty, so even after an attack you don't lose invisibilty and enemies can't cast spells on you. They can still fight back with melee attacks, but a Beholder in melee only is a different story. Still a brutal fight even with the dust... took me almost 30 minutes in a single fight to beat it and the use of every spell and inventory item in my arsenal. If I remember right it was 12 or so Beholders, 15 Drow fighters and 8 Drow clerics. Its funny you should mention the Beholder Corps, as that is the exact fight where I realized my Dwarf was lower level than he should have been. Then consulting the manual I realized in horror that 9 was a dwarf fighters max, and even worse my party was comprised of numerous demi-humans I hadn't multi-classed. :'(

After realizing how sucky my characters were in Curse of the Azure Bonds, I've gone back to Pool of Radiance to replay it again with better characters (More humans). I didn't realize it until Curse of the Azure Bonds, but certain races have level limits. A human fighter can reach level 18 by the end of Pool of Darkness (The final game in the 4 part series), while a Dwarven fighter is stuck at level 9. This time through I created 4 humans, one for each of the 4 classes in PoR (Fighter, Cleric, Mage & Thief) and 2 demi humans, a gnome fighter/thief & a half elf fighter/thief/mage. I only have to finish Zhentil Keep, then assault Valjevo Castle and I'll be finished with Radiance. Once done, I will import the four humans over to Hillsfar. Hillsfar, while technically not a part of the Pool of Radiance series allows you to import Pool characters and improve them with XP rewards and some bonus hit points. After finishing Hillsfar I'll import my humans to Curse of the Azure Bonds and create two new humans, a Paladin & Ranger (Both classes were added to the series in Curse and were not present in Radiance). Basically, I've decided on class diversity so I can have a character of each class over a party of multi-class demi-humans that are limited in their max levels. I can just imagine playing Pool of Darkness with a 5th level Half-Elf Cleric. Despite all the difficulties of getting this game to run in the first place, atleast one save game corruption, restarting because of poor characters and host of other problems I'm actually enjoying my self quite a bit. Man, figuring out how to transfer characters was a nightmare! If anyone ever plans on playing Pool of Radiance I could give a lot of advice about starting the game, why the Manual of Bodily Health doesn't give a point of constitution, transfering characters between Radiance, Hillsfar & Curse and what to do if the game asks to insert a disk during character creation! I even took the time to figure out how to Hex edit the characters if something goes wrong. I used a Manual of Bodily Health on my fighter, but his constitution did not raise. Thinking it was a glitch I edited the save game to raise his constitution by a point, only to find out later that in Pool of Radiance it takes many days for the book to kick in and get the con point. So... I re-edited my character to again lower the con and remove bonus HP I recieved from previous level ups before the bonus kicked in. Yeah... I'm gonna finish this series come hell or high water. I think I'll even try and play Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor when I'm finished with the original Pool of Radiance Quadrilogy, though I haven't heard many good things about it.

About two or so years ago I took an 'epic journey' through the entire series of Infinity Engine games an their expansions with the various tweak and enhancement packs, and I'm getting to a point where I wouldn't mind taking that journey again. I really love how you can choose what specific tweaks you want and none of them are forced. Playing the game that introduced me to D&D, Baldur's Gate 1, with Tutu and the tweak packs was especially awesome!

Of all the scary jump moments in games, nothing has ever made me spasm/jump/freak as much as the first time a face hugger got me in AvP 1. The scream it made was straight out of the first Alien movie, and I had the volume loud.

Sounds very cool! I loved the restoration projects for Baldur's Gate 2 and some of the restored minor quests for Planescape Torment. This would give me another excuse to replay the Icewind Dale saga so thats a big plus.

Deffinitely agree. NwN 2 has some extremly cool spell effects, but it is lacking a lot of animation for different actions and missing a lot of 'modern features' like ragdolls etc. I miss a lot of the effects from NwN 1 like heads that would look at what you put the cursor on, or would actually glance up and down when talking to a character of a different height (Halflings talking at a Half-Orc's crotch etc.), water pools that splashed as you walk through them, arrows that would actually stick to the environment or the enemy. How cool was it to use a bow and shoot a goblin right through the noggin in NwN 1?

There's more to marksmanship than lining up the sights. Of course it's debatable whether other factors should be considered, and how they would be modeled if included. I have no problem with slight random 'inaccuracy' added to the game. I never had nice, neat quarter-sized groupings when I fired at the range... and that was at the firing range, with stationery targets that were not firing back at me! I believe 'sway and shake' is more than enough added realism. When you are fighting the sway and finally get the shot lined up for that split second it is just a cheap rip off to have that shot miss by five feet, give or take. That there is a case of 'magic bullet'. The spread even with the weapon at your side was extreme beyond belief. I remember trying a few rambo rushes just for the fun of it, stopping literally 5 feet in front of a german, unloading the weapon dead on at his chest and having every bullet hit the ground or wall around him... ridiculous. 'up and to the left', 'up and to the left', 'up and to the...' Another massive flaw, imho, was the game did not feature pain animations. The original Medal of Honor for PSX featured enemies that would grab a wounded extremity, buckle over or generally show the discomfort of being shot. In BiA every shot except the final kill shot might as well be a BB. I had frequently hit Germans in the head, but the only clue my bullet hit would be a blood splatter that appeared after the shot, yet the enemy would just keep fighting like my gun was loaded with paint balls or something.

Don't forget Fallout. I think both arrived at just the right time and I wouldn't give ALL the cred to Bioware. I love both games for slightly different reasons but I have just a bit more for the old Fallout as it came out a bit before Bioware and was the first RPG that made me realize they could be 'cool' and fun.

I guess Bioware is in to Blue butt-cheeks.

Seriously doubt it. It would be like, THE first handheld game ported to a PC ever.

I hated BiA. Really REALLY hated it. For all the bluster about realism they did some stupid things with the weapons. They also pulled a cheap trick where bullets would not go exactly where you aimed down the site. You could have the site dead on an enemy and the bullet would hit 5 feet away. Realistic and understandable when the gun is at your side, bull when you are aiming down the site. The game also didn't feature corner leaning or prone position. Considering leaning around a corner is common sense, and prone is one of the 3 stances taught in the military it was a huge blemish on a supposedly realistic WWII shooter. Also what Nick said. It got really old really quick.

He is also responsible for the invention of the Teddy Bear... sort of. http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinvent.../Teddy_Bear.htm

I actually preferred the gameplay of AvP 1 by Rebellion Software. My ideal AvP 2, or Aliens: Colonial Marines would have been gameplay by Rebellion, with story and cutscenes by Monolith.

My favorite Teddy Roosevelt event that was not mentioned: Teddy was at a western salloon. He sat down at one of the bar stools, dressed like a banker, spectacles, suit, top hat etc. A tough cowboy wont have any sissies in the bar so he walks up to Teddy and starts insulting him. Teddy proceeded to beat the crap out of the cowboy. http://www.who2.com/presidentswhoslugged.html

Resident Evil 4 is neither survival nor horror. It's about shooting very slow zombies. Then its the best very slow zombie shooter EVAR!