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Ah, the ever friendly Laozi. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> From the way that generic jibe gets thrown around, one would almost think that every forum poster on the web were living in their mother's basement as I write. It occurs to me that I've never known anyone among the many and various geeks I've known, none of my high school nerd acquaintances, university academic acquaintances, nor working world acquaintances, who lived in their parent's basement at any point. And I've known quite a number of nerds. Why would one live one's parent's basement, anyway? What's the logic behind it? And from whence does this notion proceed?

Given there are around 20 MMORPGs currently operating, with some very different approaches to the genre, and completely different approaches to tasks/quests/missions/goals/world events/etc., how you managed to arrive at "all MMORPG tasks/quests/missions/goals are repeatable on a two minute timer" is completely and utterly beyond me. Really, it's all about playing in the right circles. If you aren't playing an MMORPG with other roleplayers (e.g., in an RP guild), then you're doing what would be the equivalent of playing a PnP game with just any old random people you picked up off the street. The result will be frustrating, if that's what one does. But play in an RP guild (with required character bios, and such) in an RP friendly game, and there's great RP to be had, still.

That's what I'll be playing next if I have time in the near future. Never managed to get through the beginning section. Just didn't compel me adequately. But I didn't give it much of a chance, so we'll see.

Or better yet, brutally kill him. Influence Gained: Everyone

I'd have gone for dual Green and Orange for the sake of sheer ugliness, but the Orange wasn't Orange enough to make the effect ideal.

I think that this is absolutely, completely inaccurate. For one thing, the aims of the Crusades and the Inquisition were completely different from one another (heck, some of the "Crusades" don't even bear any resemblance to one another amongst themselves). For another, the Jedi aren't interested in killing, expelling or converting all dissenters from their faith within the bounds of their realms (as, the Inquisition). They're if anything extremely hesitant to accept adherents, except under very specific, carefully controlled circumstances. They're a monastic order, not tyrannical absolutist theocratic dictators. And as for the second analogy, the Crusades, well, those were so various in their aims that it's hard to unite them by anything but, in the most prominent cases, the intent to secure the Holy Lands. But I certainly don't see the Jedi leading military conquests of Holy sites anywhere in the universe. Really, where does this analogy come from?

Yeah, G0-T0. Really annoying. At least Bao-Dur's little droid is cute. G0-T0's just an irritation. His irrelevance being all the more emphasised by the fact that,

If this refers to the post I'm thinking of (which was in a thread which was indeed deleted), then indeed, this news bit is a gross misrepresentation of what was said which may as well bear no relationship whatsoever to fact, but what do you expect from web gaming journalism at this point?

I've treated the Jedi as more good than bad in my playthoughs, despite my disliking the extremely negative way the Jedi end up being portrayed in these games in order to make the dark side seem psychologically probable. The thing is, the dark side isn't naturally psychologically explicable, it's a compulsion brought on by an all-consuming force in the universe. We don't need the dark side justified to us by virtue of the light side being dominated by complete and utter twits.

Spending too much time surfing these boards? No...honestly

And here I was expecting the canon version to be a female dark side Revan having a sexy little romance with Carth and then arbitrarily killing him before taking over the Star Forge. Nuts.

Anyway, adding yet more official endings to the same game (i.e., as a consequence of a rerelease/content patch/what-have-you) seems problematic, especially for a pseudo-canonical franchise game (whether or not it's officially canon, it is influential) like this one.

See, I don't understand this argument that views KotOR II as "unfinished" by virtue of the fact that unused content was retained unimplimented in a release version, while other games which did not make the mistake of including unused content in the release get to be deemed "finished" games. My favourite game ever - Planescape: Torment - has just as many unimplimented bits, I'm fairly sure, as KotOR II, but I don't consider the game unfinished. Incidentally, the reason that I know the majority of the unimplimented bits were ever there in the first place is the same: they were included in the release version's data files, but unused. If they were omitted from the data files, would the game be finished, while with them included, it is not? Can I switch PS:T back and forth from being a finished game to an unfinished game simply by swapping those files in and out at will? Since when is a game judged not by the content of the product, but instead by what is left out? We can certainly judge its content and comment on continuity errors as problems with the product. But as far as merely unimplimented aspects of the game go, the removal of a quest or a planet from the product does not make it unfinished, any more than, say, the existence of a 5 hour (Japanese release) cut of the movie Dune makes all other versions of the movie the "unfinished" versions.

Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine how any game could be worth that much, but I guess this was after all a collection of all the greatest text adventures in history (with manuals), with relative uncertainty regarding whether such a collection would ever be released again.

This game sounds like TEH WINNA! Where can I find it? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You can download both of the Phobos games at Home of the Underdogs. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Nah, it appears Leather Goddesses of Phobos is still under copyright. Some crappy graphical sequel is available at the Underdogs. The original is still available for purchase in a couple different Infocom Classics collections released over the years here and there, and seemingly someone owns it, oddly enough, so if it's available for download anywhere, it's being hosted illegally. The Underdogs don't appear to have it, of course, consequently. Incidentally, the version I purchased it in (for $20 or something) was at one point in time (a couple years ago) so incredibly rare that it was selling for $500-600USD mint (actually selling, not just being priced at that) at auction. I believe another Infocom collection has been released since, however.

My best hope would be for a partial restoration of ending content in some less-than-complete form (some things, like custom animations for the purpose of the scenes, are presumably not something fans can restore) by modders. This might be text-only for some parts, or include voice for parts which permit it. It seems the most probable solution. Something akin to Platter's Planescape: Torment Restoration Pack.

I used green for much of my game just to be odd.

Yay! More KotOR fanart. <-- Fanart fan, but no artist It's funny, I consider myself quite experienced as a photo-edit and photo-manipulation producer, but actually creating an entirely unique image is beyond me (unless it be a logo, or some such thing composed of simpler geometry and gradients). Consequently, I envy those of you who have that talent, and take that direction.

As a former officer/webmaster of an RP guild in DAOC, and a sometime player of EQ, AC, DAOC, SWG, FFXI and City of Heroes, I think I can with experience say that there's indeed no such thing as a major MMORPG server on which RP chat is consistently maintained, so in that respect, I agree with your impression of MMOGs. However, there are roleplaying communities in each of them. And if you move in them, you can get a satisfying RP experience. For example, being part of an RP guild in an RP alliance in DAOC can result in 90% of your chat being RP: a satisfying RP experience. As for roleplaying websites, meh, I've never tried them. I'd be interested in opinions from MMORPGers who have, but doubt it would interest me. If I wanted to RP in that way, I'd give in, and participate with my local LARP clique (I've played P&P games in the past, but I just can't deal with LARP). At least that would mean RP in a more meaningful real-world social environment.

It seems to me the first generation of mainstream anime viewers in North America has grown up, and have become anti-anime in their adulthood. Mostly, I find this refreshing, as I did for the most part find the irrational anime fandom among my fellow nerds during the '90s frustrating. I couldn't grasp how a huge demographic of film viewers could become so completely oblivious to the comparative quality of the products of an artform (there really was a large portion of the anime fanbase who would declare any anime whatsoever to be good and to be entertaining, absolutely regardless of its quality of writing or intended audience, as long as it was anime). And I prefer mass artistic cynicism to mass artistic non-judgmental fanboyism and race-fetishisation. I'm glad the if-it-comes-from-Japan-it-MUST-be-good mentality is dying down a bit.

This is unclear. Brown's story about them is not grounded in fact, but there is a document dating back five hundred or so years listing the members of the priory of Zion. This document doesn't say who they are or what they did and there is no mention of them anywhere else. It could have been a listing of poker champions through the ages for all we know. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Indeed, it seems to have the wonderful virtue of being so poorly evidenced that disproving its existence is just as difficult as demonstrating it. The character of all good myth.

Nah, hmm, after raising the gamma on that original shot to get a better look at it, doesn't look like the Ossus Keeper Robe after all.

Sion is the French spelling of 'Zion,' and priorie de sion was a french organisation. It's a French-specific thing to not use 'z's when the other romance languages do. I'm sure that Russian people spell Zion with a character that doesn't exist in an English alphabet. I meant that I've never seen the word Zion spelled 'Sion' when someone is speaking in English. Furthermore, if the point is that Darth Sion means Darth French Jew, instead of Darth Heir/Student, then you might want to start by explaining why he has a scottish accent. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You're once again distracting yourself from the obvious. I say to you again, if you do a google (located at google.com, if you haven't heard of it), you will find many, many English language organisations and places and titles which use the spelling Sion rather than Zion. This is a variant spelling within the English language. There are lots of those in the English language, especially in theology. Furthermore, it's entirely possible that whoever picked the name Sion intentionally misspelled it, in order to make it look less like Zion. After all, the word Zion is rather politically loaded, where Sion is less so. The fact that Zion is sometimes spelled Sion does not imply that, when it is spelled with an 's', the conventional word for Israel means "French Jew," and I'm not sure how you ended up at that conclusion. Furthermore, especially in this instance, amongst an array of names and places that really were picked because they sounded cool to some given person at some point in writing the script for a game, arrival at a likely origin for the choice of the name should not lead us to the conclusion that it has deep interpretive value. Whether Malak was picked because some writer thought Moloch sounded like a scary character in Milton (strikes me as exceedingly unlikely), or Sion was picked because it sounded mysteriously theological, regardless of which of those turns out to be the case, the name was ultimately chosen because it sounded like a nifty name for a supervillain, in the end. How the name was chosen is a source of curiosity. The suggestion of the possibility that the name has profound literally interpreted implications strikes me as ridiculous.

Never seen 'Zion' spelled 'Sion.' And Darth Jew makes a lot less sense considering the character than does Darth student/heir <{POST_SNAPBACK}> In many instances, "Sion" is standard. For example, "Priory of Sion" and not "Priory of Zion" is the standard spelling of that (mythical) organisation, most recently made famous in the US by its centrality to the best seller The Da Vinci Code, as is "Sion" otherwise common in any number of Christian theological instances. "Mount Sion" is a common alternate spelling of "Mount Zion," as I say. You need only Google to determine this.