legion

Throw in some space cowboys, or maybe a space pirate or two, and it'd be the perfect desktop wallpaper.

Blind Guardian - Nightfall In Middle-Earth Tolkien would approve, I think.

I love Stargate. I really do. At the very least, though, it needs a break. It's been going downhill for the past few seasons, and the writers either need to end things with a bit of decorum or just take a break to refocus. Plus, the fact that I love the SG-1 cast AND the Farscape castaways so damn much makes the mediocre showing for the last few seasons that much more disappointing. All the elements are there to make something so much better, but instead it just feels like the show's dragging on aimlessly. What they really oughta do is continue with the Ori storyline for the rest of this season, without rushing things too much just to wrap up the Ori story threads before the finale; then, if another station picks up SG-1, so be it, but if not, they can bring an end to the show in a grand three part, made for TV movie finale. And they could call it the Stargate Wars or something. Seems familiar for some reason though

Blind Guardian - Turn The Page

Blind Guardian - Fly

Only if by "weight room" you mean "a place where they feed you lard through an IV". <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Protein enriched lard as I understand it

After seeing Bale in The Machinest, I'm convinced he must have damn near taken up residence in a weight room to bounce back from the shell of a man he was in that movie and bulk up again for Batman.

You can get a GeForce 6600 for under $200. It's a great card for the money, and fully supports PS3.0. Plus, it comes in AGP variants, so the card will work fine on older motherboards, unlike ATI's equivalent card in that price range, the X700 (also a good card, but lacks full PS3.0 support), which only comes in PCI-E variants at the moment.

Atton kicked all kinds of ass. He was probably my favorite character in the game, in fact. Seeing that pretty face of his get all wrinkled and crinkled with dark side curruption brought a tear to my eye, it did Now if I could just figure out how to change the head model for that buck-toothed howler monkey of a companion, Disciple, I'd be able to make it through the game as a female Exile in peace...

I was disappointed that you could never actually see the statue being built. A brief little cutscene showing the statue in the beginning stages of construction the next time you visited Dantooine would have been cool. Then having the option to berate the artists working on it for their shoddy craftsmanship would've been icing on the cake :D

I temporarily uploaded this wallpaper to one of my servers for another board user a while back, but never got around to deleting it, so luckily enough, it's still kicking around. Here are the links to two resolutions of the Nihilus / Atris wallpaper: 1024x768 Version 1600x1200 Version Enjoy the KotOR-y goodness!

I can't say I agree. Evil characters should be adept liars and masters of deception, unless they happen to fall into the all too familiar 'dumb evil' archetype that runs rampant in far too many games. As such, working the system to gain the trust of NPCs is less powergaming than it is fully immersing yourself in the role of an intelligently evil PC... at least that's how I justify it to myself I want my evil PC to be intelligent enough to feign righteousness and compassion while under the scrutiny of lightside companions to gain their trust (there's never enough [lie] dialogue options for darksiders, in my opinion), then get to work currupting the good natures of those companions once they're wrapped around my little finger. Darkside and deception would seem to go hand in hand, and a well fleshed out influence system should allow a darkside character to remain firmly entrenched in their darkside mastery, all the while playing lightside NPCs for the easily manipulated saps that they are. A lightside PC, however, should have a much more difficult time doing this with darkside NPCs, since lies and deception aren't nearly so closely tied to the path of light as they are to the dark. Lightsiders should have to go the pansy redemption route instead. Hopefully, the influence system in KotOR 3 (assuming it gets made) is more dynamic in this regard, and allows for more subtlety in influence manipulation.

From what I remember of my initial playthrough of KotOR unpatched last year, I'd have to say there's about an equal number of bugs in it and KotOR 2. Oddly enough, however, in my most recent replay of KotOR patched to 1.03, I'm experiencing a much more annoying bug / instability than anything I encountered in either of my two playthroughs of KotOR 2 or my initial runs through the first game. Way too frequently, saving in KotOR is causing some weird issues, from currupted saves to crashes (which end up resulting in currupted saves anyway). None of the bugs in KotOR 2 caused me nearly this much aggravation (any crashing issues in KotOR 2 were solved with updated soundcard drivers, and the crashes never centered around saving / loading), since I continually have to backtrack to older saves and redo a fair bit of progress. So as it stands, I prefer KotOR 2 to a fully patched KotOR, regardless of there being more quest related bugs / glitches, since I'm coming across way fewer game stopping, save currupting, mind numbingly annoying crashes. Hopefully new bugs don't end up creeping their way into the KotOR 2 patches the way they seemingly have with the KotOR patches.

I went with a silver / bronze combo for both my lightside and darkside characters. I can't for the life of me see much of a difference between bronze and orange sabers mind you, but bronze just sounds cooler and the colouration is nice one way or another.

For me, the solution to repeated crashes was to uninstall the drivers for my soundcard (I was using the latest driver package for the SB Live! from Creative's site) and installing the drivers from the Windows Update site instead. I haven't had a single crash since. Flakey RAM or an overheated processor very well might be the problem for some, however, so giving memtest (which I love for testing whether salvaged RAM from old machines is any good) and prime95 a run through is likely a good idea to test that end of things as well.

I've been spending a lot of time in the new World of Darkness lately, mostly with mortal PCs so far, but the focus is quickly shifting towards Vampire: The Requiem material now that one of my PCs has managed to stumble far enough into the world's underbelly to get embraced. I'm really enjoying the new setting, moreso even than the old WoD--an opinion many a White Wolf fan has given me crap about I also have a soft spot for Rifts. I always felt the alien overmind angle they went with for vampires was a little weak and leaned too far towards the sci-fi end of the spectrum for my tastes, but you've gotta love zipping around in near Earth orbit, ready for action with a Boom Gun mounted on your shoulder... *drifts off into fond memories of his rail gun of a boom stick*

KOTOR2 wallpaper at 1024x768 & 1600x1200 You mean that wallpaper? If that's the one you meant, grab it in your prefered resolution now while you can, since I'll be deleting them from my server in a few days.

So, Atris is the cow and Master Vash is the sexy one? Ha, don't that beat all. The devs should've switched their names around.

Story, without a doubt. I'd love to see more RPGs where combat played a fairly minor role in the game world, with complex character and social interaction, as well as world exploration and the like being more fully fleshed out in its place; more RPGs where beating the end boss isn't so much the endgame as finding interesting solutions to whatever conflicts the story's presented you with. Now maybe some of those solutions will be combat oriented, so if it's there, it had better be good at the very least, if not great. However, for every combat solution, I'd like to see two or three alternate solutions for resolving a conflict or progressing the story; alternate solutions that might better serve the story or fit the game's protagonist than yet another dungeon crawl. I suppose I look at it more as story versus gameplay issue, where story still takes precedence as the driving force behind the game, while gameplay is there to serve the story in the best way possible, be it through complex dialogue options, stealth, inventive environment / tool use, combat or whatever else the story happens to call for and the character is most likely to do. For me, story provides the motivation, intrigue, interest and emotional investment, not to mention the ultimate payoff, while the gameplay is simply a means to that end. With the goal being to get to that end with as a high a level of satisfaction as possible, the gameplay is unquestionably important, and has to be both good and appropriate so as not to detract from the telling of the story itself, but the story is still the star. At least in my world

Lovely. Just set it as my new wallpaper, in fact. Too bad there isn't a logo free variant of the wallpaper though. Official wallpapers tend to grate on my nerves a little with their penchant for plastering logos and copyright text all over the place.

Warmth was probably a poor choice of words there, since I didn't really mean that it needed warm colours per se; it just needs some subtle colour gradation, be those colour grades warm, cool or otherwise. Cool colours would probably suit the tone of the game best, granted, but the current gray is more neutral than cool / cold anyway. One way or another, the current colouration makes the logo look like a photocopy, whereas a slick metallic sheen with hints of coloured reflection from some imaginary surrounding would be better. Sure, the silver colour would still be the overriding theme, but not as bland a silver as it is now.

I prefer the look and general shape of the silver one, but the colouration of the gold one is vastly superior. Not because I like gold over silver mind you, but because the silver one looks like an image that's simply been grayscaled and sapped of any semblance of saturation. It needs some additional subtle colouration to add a bit warmth to the overall silver theme.

I like the idea of mixed dual wielding, no doubt. I can imagine some very stylish melee / blaster combo attack animations--a sweeping backhand slash / spin, quickly followed by a pointblank blaster shot through your enemy's defenses still tied up defending the melee blow, for example. Unfortunately, I seem to remember one of the devs (Akari, I think) saying that mixed dual wielding wasn't going to happen though. Can't find the post at the moment, mind you, so I might be remembering wrong, but I doubt we'll see it implemented.

I can't help but smile at the thought of evil Prof Edison (Day of the Tentacle) or Murray the Demonic Skull (MI3) playing maniacal Sith Lords. Granted, they'd be more a silly, cartoonish kind of evil than anything... but still :D In any case, I can't really comment on whether LucasArts tends to bring back an ensemble of VAs for their games, but they've always managed to make entertaining casting choices for their old graphic adventures, if nothing else. Not really choices I'd tend to take seriously, but entertaining in a comedic, graphic adventure setting

"KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!" By the time I got to that point on Dantooine in my second play through of the game, I couldn't help but fall to the darkside fully and completely in hopes of triggering another sequence even half that funny :D