Yst

I was one of the bunch of people who expressed the wish that they had the opportunity to kill G0-T0. And playing an LSM, I frankly would have liked to dump HK-47 into space as well. Both of them. HK-47 is clearly evil. He had no place on an LSM's ship.

I pretty much never had Atton in my party as a male LSM. Mostly Visas and Bao-Dur as my ideal combo. Bao-Dur for the class-based skills (I never made him a Jedi), Visas for Jedi powers, Lightsaber combat, and Influence (since she seemed to be the most interesting of the characters). Kreia was alright earlier on, but she's more blatantly evil than Visas more often, so not particularly compatible with LSM behaviour. Then some Handmaiden as well, later on (since she's less evil than Visas). That was my Male LSM character favouritism order. As my current Female Dark Side character, on the other hand, it's going to be all Atton all the time. He's hilarious :D

While I certainly favour story based games, I can understand the point that not all games require stories, or in depth ones. A great number of console gamers are convinced that Ikaruga is one of the great games of the last decade, and I can see why. But is that because of story? Well, I indeed once heard someone attempt to sum up the story: One upon a time...there was a boy who could change polarity. The End. Heh.

Yes. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, alright then. Just checking.

Further to the perma-lipstick issue: I thought her mouth was a tad too weird, overall. They took normal human lips and stretched them to twice their natural height, then slathered them in red lipstick. I know hollywood likes freaky-deaky lips these days, but do our dark side video game heroines need to fall in line too?

Wow, yeah: CA was already my hero, but hearing his take on this particular topic, with this particular point of view openly and cogently stated, can only redouble my fanboyism.

I've already beaten the game, so I'm aware of what I'm gaining and losing. From a combat standpoint, the game is so easy that one couldn't make it challenging if one tried (which is completely fine with me - I'm playing for the story/dialogue), so having a very low Con, Str and Dex is fine in that respect. It's not gimped, because gimping a character is virtually impossible. Having a Con which prohibits useful Implant use is unfortunate, but for this playthrough, I'm putting a different spin on my character from what I did with my last consular, by having high Int to make necessary Int checks, instead of just high Wis with middling physical stats.

I go for mind over matter. Starting stats for my new character were as below:

Heh. Just seeing how unique all the noses are was neat. Cool idea :D

I am presently playing dark side female as well, for the sake of the male romance bits, and would be interested in getting disciple to join the bad guys P.S., Atton's flirty bits...pure gold!

I played the beta. Like a lot of other beta testers, I didn't see how the game could possibly be considered ready for release, by end of beta. Wasn't surprised to hear a lot of people complaining about content and the monotony of combat-oriented play, as of release. I neither loved nor did I hate, the game. I've heard it's improved. But it's not really my thing. If I go back to an MMORPG, it'll be either AC1 or DAOC.

The "some things end up on the cutting room floor" argument is the pragmatic position for Obsidian to take at this point, and I in no way hold it against them, that they take it. However, it really isn't ultimately a convincing argument, as much as it has a very basic ring of reason to it. "Some things end up on the cutting room floor" would be a reasonable explanation for the removal of aspects of the game which didn't jibe with the rest of the final product, sure. But it is not a reasonable explanation for plot-holes. In fact, if the removal of parts of KotOR II were analogous to an editing process in cinema, it should have resulted in a more coherently resolved plot, not a less coherently resolved one. KotOR II begins to tell stories which it doesn't finish, and describes and depicts events which contradict other elements of the tale. This isn't the result of careful editing, to use Obsidian's analogy. It's the result of careless, or perhaps at times merely absent editing.

I guess how you look at this depends on how much replayability you demand from your single player games. I don't feel ripped off by a game that I only play through once, for 50-100 hours, then finish and don't play again, as long as I enjoyed it. There are even games I don't finish, spend under 50 hours on, and don't feel ripped off by, because the experience was sufficiently worthwhile. I don't have enough free time in my life to play the 20-30 good games that come out every year for several hundred hours each. That's crazy. So if I can get a good experience in less than that, it's all well and good. If every game you ever buy absolutely must have several hundred hours of gameplay (by replays, or by sheer content) in it to be a legitimate purchase at $50, then I guess MMORPGs, where the price of entry is $0-$50 + $10-18/month might seem unreasonable at the very top end of the pricing scale because you can't get those hundreds of hours of gameplay in before you top that figure, and can't get several hundred hours in within a single month, but even there, you're only making an exception for the most expensive MMORPGs on the market. When I reopened my AC1 account last month and played for maybe 50 hours, it cost me $10. There's no box price, either for new players or old ones. By comparison to AC1, KotOR's pricing model is a ripoff, it would seem. But, really, it seems to me, making the comparison in the first place is a bit silly. They're very different products.

(when Atton encounters female Exile for the first time, and she asks him what's happened) "I was sitting here for a long time, then you showed up in your underwear, and things got a lot better"

See, for me, it's not a matter of not caring about good graphics. Beautiful visual artwork in a game is quite important to me. Were KotOR made with an unmodded Quake 1 engine, for example, it'd look like crap, immersivity would be vastly worse, and play, for me, would be overall substantially less enjoyable. Yes, I admit it: there's absolutely no way I would look at Visas (probably my favourite character) the same way if she were a character produced for the original Quake 1 engine (i.e., a jagged mess of triangles, painted in a small set of earth-tones). For me, it's a matter of the KotOR engine's graphics being good already, as it is. Lousy graphics would damage the game for me. But KotOR's graphics are far from lousy.

Scoundrel/Sentinel I liked having the skill points available, as I prefer to seek the "intelligent" solution to as many problems as possible.

Something similar? Isn't the Xbox 360 supposed to release with Halo 2.5: the Halo 2 "Director's Cut" version, as it were? Heh, wouldn't that be something: KotOR 2.5: the Director's Cut version for Xbox 360.

Yeah. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> How can someone possibly fail to correctly identify teh intarweeb as such in this day and age?

Master Flurry seems as if it should be the best overall for persistent use, but this is just my impression.

Oddly enough, this is a source of infinite credits. If you tell her to get dressed, and she puts on that robe of hers, if you unequip it, you can tell her to get dressed again, and she'll pull out another robe. Now you have 2. You can do this as often as you want, but I'd save first--sometimes it causes the game to crash. However, each robe sells for something like 2200 credits, so that's a lot of money. All by telling Handmaiden to get dressed. And then taking her clothes away. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I can see using the cheat, sure... But getting her to put on clothes? Unconscionable.

On the contrary, we move out, and into our Star Trek Apartments.

I really wouldn't mind if a KotOR 3 used the same engine, though it seems unlikely that it would. Actually, I might *prefer* that it used this engine. The graphics in this engine are clearly good enough for me to be fully immersed in the world. All it needs is more content: more faces, more characters, more quests, and using the same engine frees up more time for that. But it certainly seems unlikely. A lot of gamers want a glitzy new engine, I'm sure. Blah.

Heh. Trekkies and Star Wars fans are in the same situation, at this point. That is, they're forced to decide whether the latest works of the franchise itself are adequately tolerable to be considered canon. There are Trekkies who don't treat Enterprise as canon, and there are Star Wars fans who are Original Trilogy purists.

Indeed, yeah, if I hadn't already beaten the game, and gotten high influence with her, I would have been pretty damn frustrated at having read that post.

What I need is a KotOR community that speaks Canadian. Or, even better, one that realises a true monarchist should favour a rigourous programme of artificially, ostentatiously over-traditional spellings and inflexions characteristic of the British empire, even be they somewhat archaic, practised at all times within the bounds of that Commonwealth.