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Lemurmania

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Posts posted by Lemurmania

  1. Bioware, Blizzard, Bethesda...still going.

     

    Black Isle folded.

     

    Don't know if B for Black Isle gets credit, in this sense.

    What the President meant to say ...

     

    Um, what I was thinking was that Black Isle folded and Bethesda makes sub-par RPGs. Two different causes, both worth partial credit. But I freely admit, it was confusingly phrased. And I was mixing up the real and undeniable (Black Isle gone bye-bye) with the personal and prejudicial (I don't much like the Morrowind games).

     

    Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

  2. I played it for about 2 months. Really tried to give it a chance. Decided that watching paint dry was more entertaining, and cheaper to boot.

     

    I thought that with a skills-based rather than level-based system, they would get away from the grind. But all I found was people grinding their little hearts out, and the level of role-playing was pathetically low. What's the point?

     

    In any level-grinding game, the advantage will tip toward people who have no life. That's just the way it is. If you have a job, a family, a significant other, a circle of friends ... anything that demands that you limit your gameplay, you will be out-ground by the people who can sit and play all day.

  3. Well, I'm glad we cleared that up. I trust everyone at Obsidian has their number two pencils out and has been taking notes.

     

    Eh, I guess there's no harm in putting up a wish list. Can't see how a content patch is going to happen though. The Xbox folks will have kittens since they can't patch, and who's going to pay for a couple of months' development time? LucasArts doesn't really have an incentive -- why should they care if TSL is a classic or not? And Obsidian is a new company with shallow pockets.

     

    I fear this will all go the way of Troika, with an incomplete game, a publisher who only marginally cares, and a good RPG maker getting a bad rep. Yeah, the more I think about it, the more the Troika analogy seems apt.

     

    I'd love to be wrong about everything I just said, though.

  4. Sorry, but the whole lesbian cop hairdo doesn't cut it for me.

    Some of us happen to be very fond of the lesbian cop hairdo. On the right girl, it's stunning.

     

    On the other hand, I've never been able to get too worked up about pixel-based women. Maybe that's why I missed out on the whole Tomb Raider thing. I usually save my media-proxy pointless passion for musicians.

  5. Frankly, I'm glad they're not rushing it. I'd rather they took their time and polished the patch to a fine shine, if you know what I mean.

     

    I'd go into more detail, but my flogging arm is tired and the dead horse is stinky.

  6. But my Merriam-Webster dictionary says that:

     

    good adv : well 

     

    ... so wouldn't that mean you can use "it'll serve you good" in exactly the same way you'd say "it'll serve you well" since they'll mean literally the same?  ;)

     

    (not a native speaker here so just puzzled and curious, really...

    Wow. I just wrote a long reply to this, only to have it sucked into the void by the board gnomes.

     

    I may cry.

     

    Here's the short version: You don't use "good" as a terminal adjective. I couldn't begin to say why, but you don't. Also, "good" and "well" aren't really interchangeable. To say "That's a good dog" is different from saying "That's a well dog." And if you say "That's a well-done dog," you get yet another meaning.

     

    "He walks good" is incorrect, unless you're doing a deliberate dialect. Southern English speakers could get away with it, for example. But they certainly wouldn't say it that way if they were trying to be formal or proper. "He walks well" would be much much much more correct.

     

    That's one of the (uncountable) problems in English -- a lot of times the correctness is a matter of degree. Two phrasings can be correct, but one will be more correct. Some grammar nazis try to make it out that there is One True Grammar to English, but it just isn't so. Rather, there are varying degrees of Good Taste and Bad Taste English.

     

    To go back to one of the earliest examples, if you say "Kreia is stronger than I," you're spot-on perfect gramatically, but you sound awkward. It's correct in the strictest sense, but, if I may be so bold, it's in bad taste. "Kreia is stronger than me" is gramatically wrong, but it sounds much more natural to a native speaker, so it's in much better taste, and therefore, since English is defined more by usage than by rules, it's more correct. Because it's in better taste.

     

    When my first post got swallowed, I swore I wouldn't write it all again. Instead I've written more. Argh! This is what happens when a hot grammar/RPG discussion lights up the boards!

  7. English is unnecessarily complex and nonsensical.  I adore language and I adore English, but most languages are very logical - a certain letter always makes a certain sound, for instance.

    Ah! The phonetic problems of English, yes indeedy. You may already be aware of this, but there have been several attempts to phenticize the language. Most of the documentation I've dug up has to do with 19th-century attempts, but I'm certain there were earlier.

     

    Here's a semi-decent article on the subject. It doesn't touch on Samuel Johnson's work, or much of anything before Noah Webster, but it's an amusing read. It will clew you in, though you may be agast.

     

    And Cerebus, prithee, do not believe that the heathen rabble hear aught amiss in thy most excellent speech. S'wounds, thou shalt be taken for a native!

  8. Vrook (voiced by Ed Asner) said something along the lines of:

     

    "This is the Atrau Form. It is best used against single opponents. Use it wisely. It will serve you good."

     

    Shouldn't that be "It will serve you well?"

     

    Or is this one of those wierd English execptions-to-the-rule where it sounds wrong, but actually is grammatically correct (I can't remember)?

    It's not an exception -- it's just wrong. I guess when you're raised from birth to wield the Force there's not much time for readin' and writin' and all that fancy book stuff. Or maybe Vrook has a minor learning impediment that went untreated at Jedi School.

     

    I fear I've done a horrible disservice to everyone by pointing out the grammar and punctuation problems. Once you notice them, it's impossible not to notice them. Maybe I should have kept my big yap shut.

  9. UH yeah dude, thats marked the 24th of last month, the Obsidian request came much after that.

    Can anybody link to the evidence that Obsidian made a content request? I've seen folks talking about it as though it's really happened, but I haven't seen any dev posts, letters, nothing.

     

    And I think it's cute as the dickens that we're debating what price we'd pay for the finished game. If any LucasArts marketing droid ever reads this board, they'll have a good laugh at us. Well, at least a good laugh by droid standards.

  10. As a non-native speaker I really appreciate formal english in games. It is a good method to improve your english if you are too lazy to read books about grammar.  :("

    I'm sure he meant no disrespect to Germans who speak fluent English.

     

    And yeah, playing games would be a great way to learn a second language. I'm pretty sure I read a piece about that in a newspaper, a guy who changed all of his game settings to "French" just to see how much he could pick up from gaming.

     

    Seems like a splendid idea.

     

    In reply to an earlier post, nobody's suggesting they need an editor, but they should hire a proofreader. Full-time. If they're going to have novelistic ambtions with their games, they should have a novelist's rigor about commas, apostraphes and object/subject relationships. And like I said before, it's not as though proofers cost a lot ...

  11. "Me" is incorrect in this instance I believe.

     

    Here is the test:

     

    -"I am stronger than Kriea.

    -"Kriea is stronger than I" -- Both of these sentences are grammatically correct.

     

    Now...

     

    -"Me is stronger than Kriea"

    -"Kriea is stronger than me".

     

    -- The first setence doesn't *sound* correct because it is not grammatically correct if I recall. The second one *sounds* correct, but it isn't because it is following the same rule as the first. Hence, both are incorrect.

     

    An easy way to envision this is to finish out the sentence. Kreia is stronger than I am. However, usage makes the rules in English, so it's not entirely wrong to say "Kreia is stronger than me," if only because that's the way most speakers would say it (even though you'd still be flat-out wrong saying "Kreia is tronger than me am.")

     

    What got me was the places where the writers tried to sound formal, and just got it wrong. Hire a proofer -- they're cheap and mostly harmless. The grammar police are watching! And any videogame developer can tell you, nothing can sink an A-list title like the disapproval of grammar freaks.

  12. I don't know if others have discussed this, but the level of punctuation and grammatical errors in the script of KOTOR II is pretty out-there. I don't have any examples in front of me, but there were quite a few mis-placed apostrophes, as well as a general confusion over when to use "I" versus "me."

     

    Next time I play the game, I'll make a real attempt to write down some examples, but whoever wrote the script had a real problem with the overuse of "I". For instance, you'd be looked at like the freak you are if you said "Come with I," right? It's just plain wrong. You say, "Come with me" -- that's just proper English. But I remember Visas getting it wrong, as well as Kreia. (Maybe exposure to the Dark Side warps your grammar as well as your features?)

     

    All of this got me to thinking about just how freaking cheap a proofer is to hire. I don't know about the relative expense of QA personnel, never having worked in the industry, but I know plenty of proofers. Give 'em eight bucks an hour and some free baseball hats and frisbees, and they're yours for life. Perhaps Obsidian should consider hiring one. Especially when they're creating story-based games, eh?

     

    I know every writer likes to think his or her grammar is perfect, but having a full-time punctuation and grammar freak in the building can be a real boon. And it's not like they cost a lot ...

     

    Oh well. Chalk another one up to Lack of Quality Control.

     

    Speaking of which, I trust you've all read the Resident Cynic's column about how a QA deficit killed another RPG house composed of Fallout alums, right? Check it out if you haven't already.

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