LadyDisdain

Level 7 isn't too bad. Did you change classes from your other game? I'm playing a consular this time, and I've found that physical fights take longer when my Force powers aren't doing the job...

Is your version of XP patched and up-to-date? I also run XP, and while I had the occasional frame-rate slow down (solved by changing the antialiasing settings), it rarely crashed on me. You might need the native drivers for your video card. XP will sometimes "helpfully" install MS drivers for them.

Mission as Sarah Michelle Gellar? Okay, that was funny. The rest of them were somewhat meh, but that made me laugh out loud.

I couldn't agree more. Religion will muddy the waters in almost any discussion about ethics. At this point, any Lutheranisms are cultural rather than religious for me. I suppose if it were possible to go more the master-manipulator Sith route, I'd do it, but somehow, persuading people to jump to their deaths, or threatening them for credits just doesn't thrill. Until it's possible to roleplay a more subtle version of a Kreia type, I'll stick with the blue shininess.

I've also wondered about that mysterious open tenth slot in your party screen. I, for one, am glad. At least on Telos, she was quite the obnoxious, though her character model is quite spiffy..

While I have heard of the term roleplay, and don't particularly believe a digital analogue of me has much at all to do with the real me, I've never played dark side in the KotOR games. Think it's probably that I saw the original trilogy at such an impressionable age and was pretty much scared sh1tless of all the Sith in them, so playing one feels wrong to me and does, indeed, make me feel bad. And to answer metadigital's question: I was raised Protestant--Lutheran, to be precise--so my guilt tends to be about things like not being clean enough, or not being polite enough, or not having enough food when the relatives come over.

For reasons I can't explain, this idea amuses me greatly. I may have to try it.

Scarily enough, a friend of a friend indeed inflicted the name Maximus upon his child.

Edited because I am a huge dork, and the whole Jedi Enclave thing got me confused with game 2....sigh. Never code and post at the same time! I still go with the Jedi Enclave music for K1.

Until the oh-dear-god-WHY-did-I-get-dropped-into-an-FPS ending, I was of the opinion that K2 was superior to K1 in pretty much all ways. I loved the upgrade and influence systems. I loved it that by the end, the Obsidian tweaks to the combat animations made it look like my damned PC was dancing, not fighting. I loved it that most, if not all, of the characters in the story, including mine, were pretty gray when it came to past actions. I loved it that the central conceit was about choice. I loved it that I could at least somewhat roleplay a Neutral Good/Chaotic Good, rather than a Jedi-boot-licking Lawful Good like you had to to go lightside in K1--I like a little sass in my characters, thank you very much. HOWEVER (and it's a doozy).... Not a whit of it paid off. I spent the game gaining influence and coaxing NPCs' backstories out of them, only to have them fall completely out of the game as of the meeting with the three Masters on Dantooine. All the choices I'd made to help/harm didn't matter, and I got to make no choice about how to handle Kreia/Sion. I spent the game modding the crap out of everyone's stuff (or at least my favored Jedi Superfriends), only to... See above. K2 was an abominable disappointment. And for all that the plotline of K1 may have been linear and simplistic, the writers at BioWare do seem to understand the concept of setup and payoff. And they also understand closure--character revelations having ramifications not just for the PC, but for the members of the party (whether or not you've detected them a mile out). The ending of a game makes or breaks for me, so until the blessed modders finish the ending restoration on K2, K1 wins by a landslide.

Melee worked fine for me, but I do often find myself jealous of the Force Storm power...

I used a combination of force speed and valor + flurry attacks, I think, but I was a guardian with a pretty good to-hit on that run. Without knowing what kind of character you're playing it's hard to say. If you're a more delicate (read: less HP) class, still use the speed/valor, your best shield, and try grenading the crap out of it from a distance while you run around avoiding damage.

Because I honestly believe it can't be said enough, I'm piling on the praise train. Thank you Aurora, Dashus, and everyone else involved with the restoration project. This game had a hole where its ending should be, and I'm looking forward to the future lack of sucking-end-wound. I will bake cookies, beta, knit hats, edit text, whatever, as I sadly can't script to save my life. Much adoration, LD

KotOR I LSF: Anapasia Oinopa KotOR II LSF: Lilira Orison My character names tend to be influenced by what I'm reading. For the first game, Homer (oinopa = wine-dark, which wins the prize for my all-time favorite description in literature). For the second game, Shakespeare. Lilira= a corruption of Illyria, the setting of Twelfth Night. And Orison is straight out of Hamlet (Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered). Hilariously, this is no reflection of my actual reading taste, which usually runs to Stephenson, Winterson, Rushdie, et al. A friend of mine, who always plays as close to Chaotic Neutral as he can get away with and still be light-side, calls his LSMs Jackaz Roodsbi.

Without question it is a modified head from the first game. I should know. I spent many hours of my life looking at it!

I may be the only one geeky enough to get that, but I love it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Finally! MaryAnn Johanssen once said the great unifier among geeks is that we like to combine the things we love. I am guilty as charged, on both counts. Oh, and love the sig line, Aurora. Have that panel up at work. LD Remaining on topic, however.... Exile: Will someone please tell me what the hell 'schutta' means? I wouldn't want to compliment anyone unintentionally. ******** Exile (to Vrook): On second thought, why don't you just stay right here in your nice force cage? ******** Disciple: For I am Disciple, King of Cretins, may all lesser cretins bow before me.

from GuardDog: Couldn't agree more. Ultimately, it comes down to why you game, and for everyone, that probably changes based on mood, life circumstance, etc. For example, I imagine that if things had been stressier for me at work, I really would have enjoyed that last, solo run-and-gun through the Traya Academy (though how it could ever compare to taking bats to crack dealers in San Andreas, I will never know). As it is, though, things are pretty mild for me, and I was shocked how disappointed I was by the ending. I mean, fundamentally, it's just a game, right? It's been bugging me, though. And GuardDog hits on it: as it seems to have been conceived, TSL could have excelled the original in almost all ways. But it didn't. If I want to run around solo, and not interact much with anyone, like I said, I'll toodle over to my console and play San Andreas. A 3-p RPG cannot compete for gameplay with something like that, so why try? When I play RPGs, I want to talk to my NPCs, get to know them, see how their stories unfold and how they interact with the main plotline (to this day, I'm weepy over Yoshimo in BGII). But most of all, I want the many, many hours of my life spent developing characters and influence and building nifty armor and lightsabers for everybody to mean something. The last rushed hour-odd effectively robbed the preceding hours of effort of their worth, since all that really mattered was that my PC character was a tank (be it Force tank, weapons tank, or some combination). There was no real point in bothering with the more traditionally RPG elemetns. And if you game for story, that's hard to swallow, regardless of whether you identify yourself as a thirty-something RPG-er, a teenage console fiend, an overgrown teenager with a console and a PC, or anything else.

Ah, fed ex missions.... Go talk to the nice guard captain on the merchant square. He'll point you in the right direction.

He makes one hell of a guardian, it's true. Something to do with the arm, though that doesn't make a lot of sense, since his armor sleeve always appears to be neatly cuffed up above it. Maybe the idea was to give you an NPC whose path as a tankity-tank was pretty hard to miss. This was probably the beginning of the HK factory mission that was deleted.

See, that's where the Jedi Code went all wrong. All that unexpressed lust....

Apparently, his first pet was named Freedon and he lived on Nadd Road. Who knew that was the method for choosing your Dark Lord of the Sith name, too?!

I'm deeply torn, what with HK's "Shall we go kill something to make ourselves feel better, Master?" line (among many others). I predict he'll win in a landslide. But I gotta go with Jolee, and here's why: Jolee: I did it all for the Wookiees. Revan: The Wookiees? Jolee: The Wookiees.

I'd have to vote for Atris. She wasted her life in bitterness because she was afraid to go to war, never told the Exile she loved her/him, and ended being corrupted by the Sith in the attempt to defeat them. Kreia has some tragic elements, but she does achieve her goal in the end. Atris, on the other hand, pretty much destroys everything she touches and at least in the beginning, from a place of good intention. Too bad there wasn't more of her in the game, but that pretty much seems to be my mantra these days...

A good friend of mine and I got this game on the same day. He played through as LS Male, I played through as LS Female. And for the past two weeks, we've been talking about nothing but how incredibly well the game was written and structured, how all the dominos were in place for an ending of cataclysmic beauty and satisfaction.... And then you get to Dantooine to visit the Masters.... And! Nothing!! Happens! A solo run-and-gun (if I want that, I'll play, dunno, San Andreas) and a lame battle with Kreia. Bizarrely, my favorite part of the endgame was the duel with Sion, but that might be because I played female....shouldn't have been that way. There's a sense that the game is incomplete, and not in a good sequel-y way; more a rushed-out-the-door-too-soon way.

For my tastes, had the side effect of Atton turning Jedi not been him losing his ability to speak, he probably would have beaten Carth...but only narrowly. In a discussion with a male friend who's played both games, I recently found out that Carth is a completely different character if you play male v. play female. With a female, you get all the amusing Han-Leia fight-fight-fight-but-really-we-want-to-kiss flirty dialogues (come on! you have to love a guy who lets you call him a hairless wookiee and then says you hurt his man-feelings); with a male PC, it's apparently a great deal of whining about his wife and Dustil. Interestinly, FeeZ, my two male friends who played the first game call Carth almost the same thing as you, except it contains, unsurpisingly, expletives best not reproduced here. Staying on point, the Disciple could have been a kinda neat Force buddy with his mad meditation skilz, but he has the s3x appeal of a lamp post, a lower humor quotient than even Kreia, and a goody-goody demeanor that made me want to reach into my monitor and smack him.