EnderAndrew

Whatever floats your boat. I'm only running a 2.1 ghz system at home these days because I had a computer outright fried on me. I should lose uber-geek points there.

Before you destroy the Star Forge, the Sith were decimating the Republic Fleet. And the Star Forge was pumping out ships for quite some time before the Republic stumbled upon it. So while you destroyed the Star Forge, the Republic was already crippled, and the Sith had other ships around the galaxy to spare. Tons of Jedi died on the Star Forge, and Dantooine was bombed to smitherines. As far as a further Sith resurrgence, that could tie into the specifics of KOTOR:TSL's plot, such as the new Dark Lords.

The West End system was fairly neat. You got to add your Control rating to damage, and your Sense rating To-Hit. Powerful Jedi had powers like "Reduce-Injury" that could take a fatal-blow, and reduce it one injury level. Stuff like that helped Jedi stay alive, but lightsabers were quite fatal in the hands of a Jedi. I haven't played it online, but I'd be willing to. I could put together documents of the Force Powers. The basic rule mechanics you can learn in 5 minutes. It is one of the simplest rules systems I've ever encountered.

Yes, for Jedi Guardians don't really get a whole lot of skill points.

Game length was alright. However, after Taris, all the other worlds seemed considerably smaller.

A halfway decent system. If your motherboard supports the faster FSB speed of the later Pentium 4's, I'd jump up to a 2.4 or a 2.6 They're pretty cheap, and the increase in speed is substantial because of the FSB. After that, I'd upgrade to 512 megs of memory. The speed of the memory is also a big factor. Once again, this depends on your motherboard. In fact, the memory might be the first thing I'd upgrade. And the Radeon 9600 series is also getting pretty cheap and features a big jump in performance because of the Direct X 9 support. The upgrades are fairly cheap if you do it yourself and order parts from www.newegg.com

Tyrell, I had no clue you were only 18. Here's my advice. Don't respond so quickly to things. You have a tendency to have an emotional response right away. Often, later in threads you come across as being much more diplomatic. I know you've tried quite a bit to refine how you are seen on this forum. I've noticed how you've changed tone. However, if you snap at people, that doesn't help things. If you want to do PR for TheForce.net, then let people know about the hordes and hordes of content the site provides. It speaks for itself. TheForce.net has an incredible abundance of information, and few sites are like it. When you posted some sample content from the "Just the Facts" section, people were impressed. Don't try too hard. The site does sell itself. On a side note, frankly, when you said that the three people working in the games section were all busy with other matters, it came across as a complaint. That may not have been your intent, but that's how I read it. I understand the demands of balancing real life with other projects. I have had a tendency to take on too much over the years. I appreciate you putting in a word for me. If you guys do eventually need staff, I'm a generic film-geek just as much as a I am a Star Wars geek. I'd happily write for FilmForce. I already make it a daily habit to hit all the regular sites like FilmForce, AintItCool, NewsAskew, SuperHeroHype, Cinescape, etc. If you guys would like, I could throw together a review or something to let you see my writing style. If not, then I'll content myself with harrassing people on the forum in my free time.

Did you ever read the Tales of the Jedi series? Naomi Sunrider's husband was a powerful Jedi who wasn't paying attention and got suprised. In the West End RPG rules-set, there is a Danger Sense Force Power. But you have to activate and maintain the power. Doing so, puts you at a dice-penalty to other actions, but you can't be suprised. The Dark Jedi knew that he was more powerful, and chose not to have the power activated. If the power was activated, he wouldn't have been caught off guard. And as powerful as you may be, an unexpected lightsaber blade through your side will kill you. The West End system wasn't level based, or class based either. You didn't get more hit points by "leveling up". You had bigger dice pools for other actions, but your Strength pool for soaking damage stayed pretty much the same forever. If you got hit by a lightsaber blade, you likely died. Thusly, it was important to have lots of dice in dodging and parrying skills.

It should be noted that the time spent sitting in front of the game, and the game-clock on your save are different. If I decided to try one way of handling things, reloading and tried something else, I put more time into the game. But by reloading, I went back to an earlier period of time on the game clock. My save game had 30 hours, but I probably spent 35 or more hours playing.

The arguement that "I killed a bad guy who would likely do bad stuff down the road" didn't work. If you used violence directly to prevent further violence, it was somehow justifiable. With my previous example, let's say the Dark Jedi was attacking someone, and the Adept ambushed the Dark Jedi to save a life, that's fair game. But he was running away, and had opportunity to escape. He instead chose to ambush the Dark Jedi and kill him using the Force. He got a dark side point. Players also received plenty of opportunities in the game to work towards attonement. One of my favorite moments as a Star Wars GM was when the players developed empathy for one of the major villians and set out to attone and rescue the Dark Jedi rather than kill him.

Art is a subjective word. If the game designers hope to achieve an effect on the player, and they successfully pulled said effect off, then I'd argue the game classifies as art. Now, maybe only a few people "got it" and liked it, but it's art none the less. Now, if you want to discuss which games classify as "good art" then, that's another story. And I'll take SqaureSoft titles over the Baldur's Gate series for production value and story any day.

How did they lose their rights? By being forcibly removed via slavery and war? If that's your logic than might makes right and you better drop your complaints about the US and Isreal.

Then don't complain about not having time to work on the site. If you're content having three writers, then those three writers need to step up.

I didn't finish all the swoop races, but I spent some time trying. I played my fair share of Pazaak hands too, and I beat the game in like 30 hours doing all that I could.

As a Star Wars GM, intent was always the key with me. If you used the Force to kill someone, while in defense of another then you didn't get DS points. There were times players argued DS points. I had a Force Adept player being pursued by a much more powerful Dark Jedi. The Force Adept wedged their lighsaber in a doorway and tried their best to conceal it. When the Dark Jedi entered the doorway, the Adept turned it on via telekinesis. I gave the player a DS point for using the Force to kill.

Okay, Hades. Now try looking through Isreal's eyes. That's their ancestral home land as well. They could claim the Palestinian's are the true invaders/usurpers, and thusly nuke them all back to the stone age.

Your banner ad must have been blinking, lucky dog.

Sometimes you don't have to be cutting edge. So long as you have focused content, people will read the section. Some people want to know specifically about Star Wars titles, so where are they going to go? Are you guys looking for a fourth writer? I spend way too much time on the net and have plenty of free time.

Okay, let me put it like this for you in more elementary terms since you don't understand. It would be wise for Microsoft to save KOTOR 3 and even Halo 3 for their next generation consoles. Tyrell, You wonder why people flip out at you on these forums. Telling people that they can't understand your posts is very antagonistic. I've never ripped you on these forums. In fact, I've tried to be civil when few people are civil to you. I understand that there might be some benefit to having a major title like KOTOR:3 for the Xbox Next launch. However, neither Sony, Nintendo, nor Microsoft are even giving a YEAR for launch dates yet. They haven't decided fully on hardware, chipsets, architecture, or features for the new consoles. It's pretty hard to plan a game for a console that doesn't even have hardware planned out yet. KOTOR:2 is seeing a fairly quick release. If it is really popular, and has a great cliff-hanger ending, I'm not sure people will want to wait too long for KOTOR:3. If at the time of KOTOR:2's release, we have concrete details on the planned hardware for the XBox Next, it would make sense to start a new engine and plan for that console. I don't think we'll hear announcements about the next consoles until next year's E3. It's possible that Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc will have plans by next February, but I don't know if they'll release those specs to developers by that time.

What you describe sounds an awful lot like the typical plot of a console RPG. I don't know why everyone knocks them. I'll take the next Final Fantasy title over the next dungeon crawl computer game. I'm a completionist too, and it hurts watching my girlfriend play and not even bother to explore the whole map. It seems like blasphemy. Edit: And for the record, while everyone loves Halo, and I have played it to completion several times, it is still a Half Life clone right down to the brain-sucker aliens.

Here's an idea. When you go back to the Hawk, you don't automatically get all you're life back. You have to choose "Rest". When you do, you get an annoying rest animation that takes 30 seconds before you resume control with full life.

The old West End sourcebooks give Luke darkside points for Force choking the Gammorean guards even though he didn't kill them.

That all depends. Nothing seems set in stone for the next-gen consoles.