EnderAndrew

Volourn defends EA, and yet calls the business practices of someone else obtaining an exclusive license to be stealing. Take note! I agree with you that MVP Baseball is the best baseball game, but I really suck at pitching. I need to get better at it. NCAA Football honestly has a better simulation of a football game, and the pass defense is unreal. The features of creating one player, and taking them from high school to the Heisman is really neat. I love watching my play become the next cover of SI. And the NCAA players are real players. There are tons of NFL players that are only famous because of their college exploits.

Honestly, the whole game reeks of Aurora. The way you target someone is identical to targeting in KOTOR. Inventory is very similar. The whole menu interface is identical. Dialogue is exactly the same. The controls are very similiar. Combat is honestly the only thing that seems different on any level, yet Jade Empire seems to be turn-based made real-time. Have you ever noticed that you press an attack and it goes off instantly one round, but sometimes the attack won't go off until "it's your turn?"

Facts prove you wrong. LA couldn't hold either of their NFL teams because no one bought tickets. In fact, more studies are showing that smaller markets are prefferable because they have less competition. I live in little ole Nebraska, where a small town like Lincoln, NE (population 100,000) can hold a stadium that sells out 80,000 seats every single game for over 40 years straight. Why is it that an area with 20 million people can't sell tickets, but a town of 100,000 can? City size is almost irrelevant. Fan interest is all that matters.

Again, I don't care for hit points in level-based systems. L5R is the only system I like with hit points, and L5R is not a level-based system. Anyone in that game can be taken down at any given time with one good katana strike.

City size means nothing. Phoenix is the third largest city in the country, and the Arizona Cardinals have the worst attendance in the league. Green Bay, Wisconsin has the best attendance, and is the smallest city to host a team.

Lost, Lost, Lost and House.

Let's backup for one second. You don't seem to want to believe the countless people who have broken down the physics and scoff at the Warren Commission's report that there was one shooter. Fine. Reconcile this. Roscoe White was a Dallas police officer, who fled the scene of the shooting, and while pursued by another officer (who didn't know who he was pursuing) fired a couple shots to get away. Roscoe White ended up killing a local police officer, and a friend. Roscoe White posed for photographs holding a rifle and communist newspapers. Those same photographs were later faked to make it appear that it was Oswald. The day of the shooting, Dallas police officers were called off duty, and security was intentionally lessened, despite rumors that Kennedy had pissed everyone off from the mafia, conservatives, and Cuba. A newspaper in Australia reported the shooting 12 hours before it happened, and the FBI was handed a parcel with an orgy of evidence framing Oswald before the shooting ever happened. An assassin was lined up for Oswald, and everything was covered up within hours. Who in the world would have a boatload of evidence, including the faked photographs of Oswald, and why would they believe he was going to kill the President, and why turn all that in 1 day before the killings? Considering someone had all this evidence, and the FBI had the evidence a day before the shooting, and Roscoe White is somehow involved even if only so much as to pose for those photos, then why was security lessened and no one did anything to protect the President's life? And why did Roscoe White then confess to being a shooter? Add those up for me and tell me that you can honesty believe there was no conspiracy.

Screw the rules. Those are simple enough. The real feat in this game is in diplomacy. You have to be more daft cunning than the next person. So far I am really enjoying the game and I imagine that the game would be moving faster if not for one player taking their time.

Rockstar wasn't an Infocom title, was it?

NCAA 2006 > Madden 2006 NHL 2005 is still fairly tough for me, and 2006 will no doubt feature a weaker Avs team, so I'll stick with 2005.

I would be sincerely shocked if Jade Empire wasn't built on Aurora. In KOTOR:1, the only fight that was difficult was killing Bendak Starkiller with a level 2 character. I ran into several difficult fights in KOTOR:2, but most of these were when I played with other characters and didn't have Force Heal. Mira fighting all those mercs in the arena was really tough, as was G0T0's yacht without my PC, and Atton taking on the Twin Suns. Some people found Sion really tough if you played Korriban early.

It would be pretty near impossible to fire a bolt-action rifle with one arm and adequately aim. Marksmanship is all about good natural bone support, and keeping the rifle steady. The point is to eliminate all unnecessary movement to be consistent, and then adjusting your tight grouping to the target. If you want to argue Marine Corps sharpshooting, then don't argue with a Marine.

If the merits of the game is that D&D on the whole is a good entry-point game for players by giving them easy classes to slip into, then D20 is a good system for DMs to slip into. It seems the 2E crowd loves 2E, and others prefer classless systems. So let me, the hater of all things D&D defend D20 for a minute. Most people defend 2E in the fashion that really knowledgable and good DMs can make the game good. I contend better systems are playable out of the box. What happens for that 12 year old running his first game for friends who has to contend with all the charts and tables of a game like 2E, Rifts or Shadowrun? We got through it, but things could have been better. Combat takes forever, and we make poor arbitrations along the way. We also have to invest a great deal of time learning said systems and mastering them. D20 provides simple base mechanics to the point that you don't need additional rule books. If you didn't play Spellcasters, all you would need is the chapter on classes, a monster manual, and you can run the game. The three core books are freely available, and you don't need any more rules. You present any situation, and the DM provides a difficulty number and tells you to throw your D20. Each basic complication is a +2 to the base difficulty. Life is simple. You roll and move on. For number crunches, that is a 10% chance of success. Finding appropriate challenge levels, and picking good DCs can be done relatively simply in comparison to systems like Shadowrun, Rifts and 2E. The system doesn't get in the way of the game too much. I prefer systems that get in the way even less, but I personally think that D20 is an improvement on previous incarnations of D&D. It certainly doesn't FIX D&D, but it is an improvement. [/devil's advocate]

I agree. Once you establish that reality is malleable, anything and I mean anything is possible. Neo defied physics and flew leaving a mini-hurricane in his path. Yet his strength in the Matrix is finite? Only if he believes it to be so. Honestly, I hated how he just gave in and then "something" happened and Neo won. Neo is a hacker with the power to rewrite the Matrix like no one else can. He should have ripped Agent Smith apart and "deleted" his code, uninventing all of them, as we see the viral copies of Agent Smith all die in inglorious fashion. Then again with most movies, I have in my mind a far superior ending to the one I see on the screen.

And surely KOTOR:1 didn't have those issues?

There are NES emulators you can run on a DS, GBA or PSP. Ahem.

I remember when Volourn used to be funny. Jade Empire looks, feels and plays exactly like the Aurora engine, and you're telling me it is a brand new engine from scratch? "We have an existing engine, and it plays exactly how we want Jade Empire to play. Let's write one from scratch that plays the same way just to waste time!" That sounds like the type of thing you'd say. I liked KOTOR:2 more than KOTOR:1 because of the dialogue. I also had no problems with the game once it was on my XBox's HDD. I never had any lockups, bugs or glitches. Well, I noticed that after Mira was in my party, she still stood around on Nar Shadda, so there existed two Miras for a moment, but honestly that was the only glitch I saw. KOTOR:1 locked up on me, and I hit the Galaxy droid. KOTOR:1 overall was incredibly easy, so don't know KOTOR:2's combat. Atleast there were a few more choices with more force powers, and forms. They also made unarmed worthwhile, and made skills worthwhile. I had no uses for skills in KOTOR:1 What inventory problems did KOTOR:2 have? I didn't notice any,

Well, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 2/4 got released as one game. Final Fantasy 3 and 5 got released as one game. Final Fantasy 1 and 2 got released as one game. It seems to be their trend. A recent poll shows Dragon Warrior to be the second most anticipated title in Japan, so some people apparently want that more than the next Final Fantasy. I never got into the series. I tried playing Dragon Warrior 1 on a NES emulator and couldn't get into it. Where should I start in the series?

PC game sales are down, while mobile game sales are up, and probably have a much higher profitability due to an overall smaller game with less art resources. I know you can get Dark Alliance I and II on the GBA. Does anyone know who is responsible for the GBA ports?

Square-Enix will probably release 2 Dragon Warrior titles together as one GBA game at a time.

Anytime you devote more than 40 hours a week to a game, you should be getting paid for gold farming, or you need to start dating.

Seriously, Jade Empire probably had well over 2 years, if not 3, and they were using an existing engine and the game still came out horribly short. KOTOR:2 is just as long, if not longer than KOTOR:1 with tons of new features, and had less than a year for development. During the early development they didn't even have a full team hired. Most of the problems are Q/A related, and LucasArts took 3 months off that. Stop acting like children and blaming Obsidian for it. You're just making yourself look foolish.

The DS has two screens so that on one screen your inventory can always be up. Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, etc. all prove you can have a pretty good RPG on a handheld. The PSP sports PS2 caliber graphics, and both new handhelds have wireless mutliplayer support. Several classic console RPGs are getting ported to handhelds.

Definately check to see how many Force Points he has.

Baseball lowered ticked prices for 2 years after the strike.