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I'm inclined to agree. I associate the KotOR engine with the storyline and gameworld now. Making an Unreal3 engine or HL2 engine KotOR would make it feel like a different world. I would like to see improvements in texture resolution, and the creation of new models and textures, but I don't see that this would necessitate an entirely new engine which changes the feel of the world completely from what we're familiar with.

Whoa, I just saw someone write the words... I'm going to take a picture of this and frame it.

Using the three-letter method: Kimtor Ontaar I dunno. Sounds pretty silly. I like my automatic-name-generator name, Gann Thren, better.

While it's harder to guess at statistics for single player games, this age group among women I notice is not at all uncommon in MMORPGs these days. Over the last few years, it seems to me, the number of women in their 30s and 40s playing games online has skyrocketed from what it was when I started MMORPGing five years ago (at Asheron's Call's release).

Here she is in Zardoz

Case in point: It looks like Somethingawful forgot... 5) Pretend the argument never existed: If desperately losing an argument on grounds both of factual evidence and popular opinion, assert that the argument was never an argument to begin with, or that winning it was not the objective. ARGUMENT: Feeble, is it? Ironic, since I thought that term would better suite your posts. Howevever, I won't be baited into ignoring the actual discussion and instead insult your posts. INCORRECT RESPONSE: Okay, look, we're not getting anywhere with this. Let's just leave it at that. CORRECT RESPONSE: winning ain't really a goal, but thanks anyway, we seen it linked at the alfa board... wouldn't really use any of those, but we appreciate the thought. HA! Good Fun!

I especially liked "keep your elbows off the table; don't speak with your mouth full; always use a knife and fork" - Kreia being bossy, as usual...about...TABLE MANNERS!

And she's in Zardoz. Another reason for me to get around to watching Zardoz, the movie immortalised by images of Sean Connery in orange underwear and in bridal dress which it produced.

IMDB does not credit her for any role in KotOR I, and only credits her for Kreia in KotOR II, and IMDB tends to be right. Incidentally, I agree. Kreia was terrific.

Now that you mention it, I have to agree, I'd like to see the KotOR series ended well, in a fulfilling way, in a final episode. But that being put aside, I do consider the division of good and lawfulness, evil and chaotic behaviour, along two separate axes to be a huge improvement over their relegation to a single axis of good and evil, as in Star Wars, under the compulsion of the Force. In contrast, the axis which denotes adherence to laws and rules and spans from lawful to chaotic is largely independent of the axis which denotes adherence to the (altruistic) good and (sociopathic) evil in D&D, and that crucial separation of "good" from merely "litigious," as well as "evil" from merely "prone to breaking rules" makes all the difference in the world. Our favourite characters tend to be the Chaotic Good ones (e.g., the cowboy, the vigilante, the mercenary, the thief with a heart of gold), it seems to me, and the whole point of the doctrine of the Force is that the Chaotic and the Good cannot coexist. That's a big problem. Notably, it seems to have been the problem which both KotOR games were focused on, so in that sense, they turned a problem into a possibility, but I wish that plot ideas didn't need to always proceed from the alignment system's being fundamentally broken in the first place.

Ditto for point-and-click adventures. At least, if they ever made any ... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I think the problem with the Adventure genre presently isn't so much its loss as the RPG and FPS genres gains. The problem is, the KotOR games do 90% of what history's great adventure games do, and they have an RPG system behind them, to boot. Great stories, rewarding puzzles and clever dialogue are no longer exclusive to adventures. The FPS and RPG genres have increasingly concerned themselves with managing to include good writing and plot in the mix. I don't know if Adventure has a future, and I think it's specifically because the genre has nothing unique to add to what the increasingly immersive games of other genres already do. The great adventures of the past will remain great (Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey are personal favourites), but I don't see that the formula they use can survive without doing something unique from other genres, unless they survive merely as budget titles. There are lots of adventures coming out these days, they just don't get press, and they sell for less, because the market's not there. And I doubt if it will return. I think the adventure will go the way of the FMV game. That is, its defining element will be eaten up by other genres, until it ceases to exist by itself.

Good luck not shriveling up and dying as of the big 3-0

Whether or not you were joking, I pretty much agree with that statement. I know this is a controversial opinion, but having played pen and paper (D6) Star Wars as well as the KotOR games, some Galaxies, and various other Star Wars games, I really am of the opinion that Star Wars isn't a very good RPG setting. Why? Because it wasn't made as an RPG setting! It's a space opera, not a viable roleplaying gameworld. As a consequence the two KotOR games have been Space Operas in their own right, and they've done a good job of it, but I'd prefer if I were playing games by a great developer, who writes amazing dialogue and backstories, but who was writing with a fully developed or wholly original RPG gameworld as the basis for that expression of creative energy, rather than being subject to the oversimplistic "good versus evil" premises of the Star Wars franchise, lent such credibility and complexity as Obsidian's writers can artificially superimpose onto an otherwise all-too-generic backdrop.

I wouldn't say that. I got to grow up with Pong, then later arcade games like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Galaga, etc. Then of course there were the original LED handheld games, heh. Perhaps what you meant is the first generation to grow up with PCs? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Indeed, and even "first generation to grow up with PCs" is a bit of a stretch, since the first mass market personal home computers (Sinclair, TI 99, Apple II, PET, TRS-80, etc.) which took the name computer were out well before (my own) 20-24 demographic had a chance to appreciate them in their heyday. Even at 24, my first computer, my TI 99/4A, came out the year I was born, after all, and by that time, it'd already been six years since the S-100 systems (Altair, IMSAI) brought computing to the consumer level. The only thing distinctive about the 18-24 demographic is that it was the first to grow up with computers largely running Microsoft operating systems, and that hardly seems distinctive. Now the 10-16 demographic has something really genuinely interesting to say about themselves, I think, in that they were the first to grow up with The Internet. While it's true that even in the early '80s, there were BBSs the geeks were playing around with, the 10-16 demographic were the first to grow up knowing the WWW to be a fact of life.

:'( I didn't know about that, and hadn't heard that quote...but not surprising I guess... There's indeed stuff to hint at such an absence. To quote DGRACE.DLG,

I've got to offer a rebuttal to this assertion. My video card was two and a half years old (Radeon 9700 Pro), and my motherboard and RAM were three years old (Asus K7V-266 w/ 1GB DDR2100), with my CPU being probably about two years old (Athlon XP 2400+) when Doom 3 came out, and the system wasn't even close to falling beneath the game's specs. Even my system from over FOUR YEARS prior to its release (512MB DDR, Athlon XP 1800+, Asus K7M, Geforce 4 4200), which was not a particularly expensive system at the time, is capable of running the game on low settings. And all that hardware is from well before the Xbox's release, I'm fairly sure. And Doom 3 was the most demanding title of the year from a hardware point of view. I don't know where you're getting this 'every year' idea.

It depends what circles one moves in, one supposes. A majority of the women I know are to some lesser or greater extent into gaming, but they're academic types.

*crosses fingers* "

Indeed, but given we're talking about the admittedly hastily-released-to-grab-the-Christmas-sales KotOR II, I think it's worth bringing up the major reason that we aren't seeing that kind of thing right now: the profit motive, and selling to the largest possible market. KotOR and KotOR II are hopeful signs that developed characters and stories have a place in popular gaming, but whether they continue to have a place, we still have yet to determine. If legitimately mature themes and stories fail to appeal to the youth demographic, while cookie-cutter non-characters (especially of the JRPG sort), generic save-the-world (from something-or-other; it doesn't matter what) stories, and dialogue that looks like it was written by a 12 year old continue to sell in droves, there will remain little to encourage developers to produce genuine maturity or depth. The problem, as I see it (in games in general, not specifically in KotOR/TSL, and perhaps least of all among these), is that the best money is in making games in which everyone (but most importantly, youth age 14-19) can feel they're dealing with mature and adult themes, even though they never really do. For some reason, when it comes to games, "mature themes," when they do happen, mean sensationally portraying boobies, death, crime or prostitutes, drugs or murder, while not ever truly asking any meaningful questions, or dealing with any controversial subject matter. And yes, I consider murder an uncontroversial subject. Everyone knows murder in the generic sense is wrong. Portraying it doesn't suggest any sort of thematic maturity at all. Far, far moreso than any other medium, I think games are a gigantically, universally censored medium. Hollywood has its share of generic, action movie dreck, but it also produces really meaningful and mature movies that pushes boundaries or ask difficult questions with a fair frequency. But Hollywood has come a long way since the '40s, when movies were only a couple decades old, and I think games still have just as far to come before they start to deal seriously, with mature subject matter. A dangerous romantic entanglement, carefully developed, is mature subject matter. Shooting a prostitute in the head (I think it should be obvious what series I'm suggesting here), which is the kind of supposed maturity the game industry is more interested in right now, is no more "mature" than Super Mario Brothers. It doesn't ask or answer any questions. It just shows the viewer something obscene.

So I wonder if someone will do a KotOR II mod, like the KotOR I Romance Mod that makes romances acceessible regardless of gender. And I wonder if, unlike that mod, it will make male romances available to male PCs. I can always dream. Unfortunately, this might result in the dialogues making no sense. I've never played a female PC in either game and don't really expect I will at any point (I can't be certain, but I don't think I've EVER played a female PC in a CRPG - just can't really identify), so I wouldn't know. I could really go for a coherent non-gender-bias Carth romance though. Atton I don't know if I could be bothered with, even if random flirtation wasn't incomprehensible in a non-hetero context.

Now I'm scared... 25-30 for me. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, yeah, I recall when I was 18, I had supposed that 19 was the end of youth, and that then it was just the sombre, meandering journey on to middle age, once adulthood hit, then I figured 21 would be the end of the world, then I decided maybe it was 25. More than likely, the sky won't fall when that age hits either.

Man, being a male age 19-24 is so cliche. But I think being a male age 25-30 (which reality I will have to face in a few months) is going to be even more frustrating. As of 25, I figure my last possible claim to youth is gone, and it's all just the long path through adulthood, toward death, from there on in

Tanuvein: Nice Avatar

In my opinion, KotOR II is, at the very least, largely better written and acted than Episode IV. Having said that, its quality overall by comparison to Episode I goes without saying.

This possibility, it seems would be somewhat impeded by the fact of it making absolutely no sense whatsoever.