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Riiight, sure. Perfectly believable. You have gay friends who use the term 'gay' in a negative sense. Maybe in PlanetHomophobe, Alberta there are gays made so completely backward and nutty by virtue of cultural disenfranchisement that they consider their own identity to be a casual pejorative, but living in saner parts of this planet, such wackos are not to be found among gays in or out of the villages, in my experience. I have literally never heard a gay man use 'gay' as a general casual pejorative. And this is not for lack of experience, given my experience in the area is centred on but not limited to several years in Canada's largest gay village. Personally, I think you're just pulling it out of your ass.

Discriminating against others and expressing a guild orientation are not one and the same. Ethnic/linguistic community guilds are absolutely abundant. They generally function on a "sure you could join us if you're not one of us, but...why would you want to?" basis. Similarly, this is the way that many sectarian organisations officially recognised by universities or governing bodies are compelled to function. Most universities will not officially recognise a group which officially discriminates on the basis of religion or nationality. But they will officially recognise a campus organisation of, e.g., Arab Muslims, or Korean Christians, or what have you, as long as they function on a "sure you could join us if you're not one of us, but...why would you want to?" basis. Expressing an orientation does not constitute discrimination.

As I see it, the only acceptable basis for refusing to permit mention of members being gay in the description of a guild would be one which considered all romantic characterisations in an RP context inherently disallowed in the game universe. And while I don't play it, I assume WoW allows heterosexual characterisations just like any other MMORPG. In-game "marriages" have been a norm in RP MMORPGing (kind of funny that you have to emphasise roleplaying in a roleplaying game as an esoteric exception to the usual way of thing) for years. Everquest and DAOC have had no lack of "married" RP couples (who may know virtually nothing about each other aside from the fact that both are good at playing in-character) and in game marriage ceremonies as RP events. It'd be one thing if an MMORPG company said "100% of beings in this world are asexual, reproduce asexually, do not form personal bonds of any kind and create no long term partnerships during their lives - with no exceptions" and sure, they could say anyone who violated that by having a "gay" guild is playing out of character. But if you're playing in a game universe wherein the population isn't 100% sociopathic, asexual automatons who form no personal associations whatsoever during their lives, you've got to accept the fact that where there is heterosexual pairing, love or partnership, there is also gay pairing, love or partnership unless it is repressed. Love and partnership are fairly crucial to the human experience. Denying gay players the experience of the partnerships which they enjoy in the world's RP context would be sheer asininity.

Now NES manuals: those were art.

On the one hand, Nintendo's take on RPG/Action RPG gameplay is exactly opposite to my RPG tastes in every conceivable way. On the other, it could be a truly great game on its own terms, even if they're precisely opposite to mine. Usually, I'll only buy a console game (or a console with which to play it) if it's a game which genuinely demonstrates brilliant storytelling and good writing, and can only be played on a console. And that's a rare case indeed. Jade Empire was one. RPGs are very much about good dialogue writing and character development for me at present, and until recently, there was virtually nothing that could be considered objectively good writing (which scans as being intelligent and convincing prose when taken out of video game context) on consoles. There was always a sense that with JRPGs, writing and translation shouldn't really matter much as long as game text achieves a certain level of tolerable mediocrity. If it was coherent, and you could tell what was happening, video game writing wasn't expected to live up to the standards that any other medium's writing was expected to live up to. For the most part, it was just letting you know what was going on. But I'm hoping that will change. As production values increase, there's simply no excuse for economising on writing or translation, within a multimillion dollar production. It doesn't make sense. Bioware showed with Jade Empire (even if the characters were stereotyped caricatures) that dynamic and complex dialogue can fit into an Action RPG format. I hope that Twilight Princess will have that.

the thing is that i have way abouve the minimum syte requirments i have a gig of ram ewen it recomends 200 etc,, <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Try reinstalling DirectX, updating your DirectX version, or installing newer video card drivers. If you have an ATI card, try the latest Omega drivers. You could also try the -dxlevel command line switch. For example, place -dxlevel 70 after the target of the exe in your bloodlines shortcut to run in DX7 mode. So that if it's installed to your C:\ drive under English Windows, the target would be "C:\Program Files\Activision\Vampire - Bloodlines\vampire.exe" -dxlevel 70

Jyhad. I mean, hey, the spelling's totally different Yeah, I'm not a fan of WoD's penchant for quaint and cutesy spellings or, on the other hand, for bits of ye olde englishe, used to differentiate fundamental game concepts, myself. VtM is at its best when it's ripping off Anne Rice wholesale. But wherever it strays from simply ripping off Rice and turning her world into RPG material, I tend to like it less. That's not because I'm an Anne Rice fan. All in all, I think White Wolf is a better RPG publisher than Rice is a good writer (and I would just barely call her a 'good writer' at all). But the cases of unique setting and world-specific vocabulary in VtM is for me probably its biggest lacking. And how a setting is written does matter.

Firearms are more challenging to use well in bloodlines than melee by far. Ultimately, firearms can be useful, but only once you've learned when and how they can be useful. The Katana is, overall, a more useful and intuitive weapon than any firearm (and the Fireaxe along with it), that's for sure. The only real need for firearms is in certain rare instances, in boss fights, when you need to turn the tide. And with a Toreador and Celerity, you can mostly get away with just beating everything down in melee if you want to.

Yep, as far as I can tell, the fanmade 1.8 and 1.9 patches create more problems than they fix at present. Which is a problem that's been growing ever since the earliest unofficial patches, as more and more gets changed and added. Which is why I play with just the official 1.2. At least the bugs that can still happen under 1.2 (e.g., the barred door in the kuei jin temple sometimes requires a noclip to get past) are known and easily bypassed, if they do happen. But in my last playthrough, I experienced no game-stopping bugs whatsoever under 1.2, so it wasn't even a matter of lesser evils.

The unofficial patches are exclusively geared towards fixing quest bugs in level scripts and dialogues, or in the game's plain text configuration files. Engine issues are not their concern. If the unofficial patches fix an engine/rendering/graphical issue anyone's experiencing, it's a sheer fluke. The Source revision which Bloodlines uses is very poorly understood, even by the Bloodlines mod community. Adding to the difficulty of working with it is the fact that Troika has modified some elements of the engine (e.g., both the model and map specs) to suite their needs. Consequently, what is known about and what can be done with Bloodlines' engine and file types is extremely limited. There have not been any successful attempts to make Bloodlines filetypes interoperable with Valve's Source tools. The model and map specs remain pretty much opaque, over a year after release. Though one hacker was successful in extracting model geometry from Bloodlines' MDL files, the depth of Bloodlines mod work is at this point for the most part limited to reskins. Engine mods and tweaks beyond what can be achieved by simply playing around at the console with the Source engine's graphical variables aren't a possibly at this time and presumably never will be. If you want quest and content fixes and mods, get the unofficial patch, but as far as engine bugs and tweaks go, you're no better nor worse without it. I should add, because Gamespot doesn't make it obvious, these unofficial patches are not the work of anyone with any relationship to Troika or Activision whatsoever. They are just the work of individual members of the mod community who modified the scripts that come with the game to fix some things. Unfortunately, because the capacities of any one member of the mod community to playtest a patch are limited, the unofficial patches have been known to introduce as many bugs as they eliminate, for some people. Consequently, I play with 1.2 and Histories added, but without any unofficial patch mods.

Very true. As for the Ocean House, my example of that is the difference between playing it as a Toreador and playing it as a Nosferatu. I found it scarrier as a Toreador, for the simple reason that, as a Nosferatu, one is so utterly terrifying that the world around one can hardly be as terrifying by comparison as it is for someone who is more or less human.

Japanese and Westerners both like to mix their porn and their casual entertainment. Westerners (though chiefly Americans) only differentiate themselves by their preference for the unconvincing pretense that they aren't, even when they really, really are, and obviously at that. Westerners fetishise all manner of strange erotic behaviour and quirky sexuality. They just simultaneously demand plausible deniability in the matter, and try to keep the more obvious stuff behind closed doors. Fetish niches, some profoundly odd, exist everywhere, in every country and every language. The Japanese are willing to admit that and, furthermore, to market products around them. Americans in particular I find like to pretend this isn't the case in the land of the free (though the British have rightly pointed as well to their own preference for sexual obliviousness), and if they do have a weird quirk, keep it quiet. Japanese sexuality is what American sexuality would be if it was honest with itself. What any country's sexuality would be if it were honest with itself. Some people don't want this kind of honesty and openness. And I suppose one is well within one's rights to pursue a sexually closed society, if its members are in concensus. But Japan isn't one. And the difference between it and the English speaking world is decreasing every day. There are certainly enough games that sell themselves on boobs in the western market at present. And there's a generation who's grown up quite willing to admit openly that it enjoys looking at boobies and that this is a selling point. I think the silly pretense will die in time.

WoW 10 Day Free Trial. I've played pretty much all history's other major MMORPGs (it's easier to simply say I haven't played Shadowbane or the Lineage games, as I've played essentially everything else), so it's pretty absurd I haven't played WoW yet. But I got the impression that despite its quality, it was in many ways precisely what I didn't want in an MMORPG with regard to its particular design goals. And this is to an extent true in practice. Though I'll grant it's an extremely slick execution, for what it is. I'm waffling between playing WoW and continuing on with AC1 at the moment, in which I also currently have an active subscription. Or, could go back to DAOC and bother to go through with the endgame PvE that has come about since I quit in the wake of ToA (as many others did)

There are no universal (i.e., everyone experiences them) gamestopping bugs with the official 1.2 patch. There are a couple that a significant minority seem to encounter, but it is entirely possible to play through the game using only the official patch without encountering any gamestopping bugs at all.

AC1 still had my characters four years after I cancelled. That's right, four years and they were still there. My main character was even still in exactly the same spot where I left him four years before, after failing a series of corpse runs and losing so much stuff I just couldn't go on.

Bloodlines combines all my favourite ideas from the RPGs of the past five years and packages them in a fun and highly immersive bundle of gaming joy. It's also the first game I've ever found myself replaying solely for the sake of hacking it. That is to say, playing around just getting ideas to modify some given things in some particular interesting or screwy way as I go along and trying them out, finding a way to make strange things happen. The combination of the Source engine and Troika's own fairly intuitive scripting makes it pretty easy to toy with. You can do essentially everything from the console save for introduce new content. Fun stuff.

You know what JE2 needs? Ninjas! I'm only sort of kidding. Only sort of. Playing the Thief games, Bloodlines, Deus Ex and similar games that work subtlety and finesse into the mix, a game which allows none feels just a bit less immersive. JE had its own coherent gameplay dynamic, and it was certainly interesting, but I've grown rather fond of the "first person sneaker" element most FPRPGs/FPSRPG games introduce to at least some extent these days. I don't know if it can have any place in a design whose gameplay has more in common with Street Fighter 2 than with most FPRPGs/FPSRPGs, but I wish it could.

We've been through this many, many times before. If you don't want a game with a full-time live development team, that's fine, and there are lots of games like that. Most RPG worlds do not have a full-time live development team and all but a few have no central server infrastructure. Many are multiplayer nonetheless. However, if you want a world with a full-time live development team and active and available customer service, constantly adding content, maintaining storylines and tweaking balance while covering the costs associated with a massive central server infastructure more or less in perpetuity, they need to be paid money for their work. Most MMORPGers complain incessantly about the lack of adequately reliable customer service and timely bug fixes and tweaks in their chosen MMORPGs. If these things are a concern as it is, removing the revenue stream which provides for them will not help matters. I like my MMORPGs to have good regular content updates, timely bug fixes and tweaks and a reliable server infrastructure and customer service staff. I don't expect the money for those services to grow on trees. I don't trust any product that offers me a costly and complex service in perpetuity at a nominal one-time fee. That's nonsense economics. I didn't believe it when the "one time fee - dialup for life" ISPs came about in the late '90s and crashed not long after, and I won't trust it now in the present.

Without cheating? If so, why the **** are you here and not in some museum of something <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Agreed, if someone here actually beat battletoads I want details. I mean...how?

Most difficult game played: Probably Battletoads (NES). Like most people, did not beat it. Most difficult gaming challenge undertaken: Metroid (NES) using only one hand (index finger on D-Pad, pinky and ring finger on A and B, middle finger on select/start). Beat Ridley, did everyone possible up to but not including beating Kraid, but gave up on the attempt before I could succeed. Most difficult gaming challenge at which I've succeeded: Beating Doom (PC) using mouse-only control. Most difficult game beaten: Zelda II (NES). Although it seems kind of easy at this point, this is largely a consequence of experience I think.

1) Black Isle 2) Troika 3) Bioware 4) Obsidian 5) Looking Glass

Groovy pic, whatever the case may be.

No. You're clearly faulty opinion has been noted and disregarded The "MM" part can also refer to just the socializing, NOT just to the concept of team activity. You have been denied <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Furthermore, most MMORPGers think of MMORPGing primarily in terms of competitive player economy, which attributes a common and collective but fluid value to everything from crafted goods to loot drops to having attained a given character level or gained a given title. And you don't have to group for PvE or PvP to be part of that economy. It's still there when you play solo, even if perhaps less obvious. Recent MMORPGs make solo engagement in player economy even more viable with a greater focus on (or less broken versions of) crafting, trading and vending of goods. In some games, being a very good crafter is more valued than being of very high level. At any rate, these game aspects are a darn sight better these days than they were in the days of AC1, when there wasn't even an interface for trading items (i.e., you traded by putting an item down on the ground and letting the other individual pick it up). I've tended to be a more guild-focused and group-focused MMORPGer (prefer to play support classes). But I think that the essential character of an MMORPG which makes it distinctive has less to do with cooperation towards goals, though that is also very key, and more to do with player economy. You can in theory have (and have had, in a couple cases) an MMORPG with effectively no organised cooperative grouping. You cannot have an MMORPG without player economy, where player levels, equipment and possessions are without relative value.

Monolith: Hey, you know what sounds like a good idea? Releasing a Console RPG exclusively for PC! Fans: Actually, that doesn't sound like it'd be a very good idea at... Monolith: ...Hmm, actually, that doesn't seem to have been a very good idea at all.

I downgraded to 512MB a while ago as a consequence of unforeseen compatibility issues between my Asus K8V and the infineon sticks I had on hand. Had no trouble playing Bloodlines with only 512MB (although it annoys me to no end that I've got two gigs of perfectly good RAM the Asus won't use without causing error). I've also read a couple people state that they played through the game from start to finish on 256MB. Certainly not ideal, but even that is possible. Anyway, I'd put the base recommended spec at 512MB, definitely not 1GB.