Calax

Basically, the argument boils down to, TV shows can have character moments naturally during the course of the situation, while Games have to have the character moments feel forced because of the nature of the game.

The point I was trying to make was that in an RPG the character development will either happen at a hub (like they did in ME) or almost not at all. If they try to integrate the development of secondary characters into the primary storyline they're gonna have interesting times when that character was not carted along for the ride. Meanwhile TV series can have entire episodes dedicated to expanding upon a line of dialogue from a previous episode that was centered around somebody who is entirely different and that they only showed up for 30 seconds in, because the director and staff have complete control over who appears in the situation.

Thing is that most of the time the characters have to be generic enough to fit into most any situation. AND they have a variable amount of screen time based on the individual player (In ME here). So you can't have them all spouting off 3 minute speeches about their motivations at critical points that effect them in the plot because you don't know when they'll be there. I mean ME2 was basically a character moment for each of your supporting cast with four other missions. If they decided that your game was only going to have three characteres for the entire thing (Say, Legion and Jack) they could have a lot more to play with, but as it is they have to make each character (effectively) modular. Comparing this to Final Fantasy, where you have set characters and the entire crew travels as a party, and you see a significant difference in the level of character developments.

on the getting swarmed thing, it can sometimes be ok to let yourself get swarmed and then jumping into the group kill style and just murder everyone.

If I have one gripe with the Assassins Creed series, it's that it paints a very one sided picture

I HATE it when people say, Bio included, that Dragon Age was a descendant of Baldur's Gate. If anything it was a descendant of NwN. That isn't intended as a slam, it looks and plays like NwN with D&D rules replaced by MMO cool-down powers. Comparing DA to BG shames BG, and it was just thrown around by Bio to get old RPG fans excited. That list is pretty much why I switched to primarily console gaming a few years ago. Why play console games on my PC dealing with sloppy ports when I could just... buy a console? The trend was showing no evidence of changing, so spend thousands of dollars to build a new PC to play said console ports? All of my favorite devs were switching over to console development first, PC second. In the time I've switched I haven't seen a SINGLE PC only title which excited me and made me think 'I HAVE to upgrade my PC for that!'. The only big PC releases I've seen so far are RTS games which, while they can be fun, are not really my favorite genre. This is one of the few times I've seen a tech trend and responded early. Took me ages to finally get a cell phone and go to dvd. I also think its a bit bunk to blame DA 2's problems on it being a console game. You might be able to pin some of the 'streamlining' on it being a console release, much of it I didn't mind, but you can't blame bad writing and hurried re-use of assets on it being a console game. I think Laidlaw outright stated that they didn't have time and it was a choice between reusing areas vs. more dialogue etc. (GET MORE TIME DAMN YOU, or hire more/better map creators. You bastards should have enough after all the ME1/2 & DA1 + DLC sales). I do think that the points on the lack of patches and rather pathetic ports of the games to the PC's (with horrible controls etc) was quite the valid one all things considered. Although right now I'm basically refusing to play my DA:O because when I do play it after 20 minutes it just flat out crashes for whatever reason (some say it's a memory leak, others say it's graphics). And I think tech for pc's are at the point where for the most part you aren't really gonna need to upgrade as fast. I'm able to play most games on fairly high settings with a 6 year old system (ok, so I had to replace the motherboard because the Memory controller decided to flatline but still). It's just that the standards that people are going to for graphics and performance are set by the consoles. If/when they get to the next generation, you may see a BIG leap in the graphic reqs. I also liked the point about the Kinect. Microsoft set it up so that it only really worked on their consoles, but hackers got a hold of it and all of a sudden they backwards engineered that sucker to do SOOOO much more... hell I'm surprised that MS hasn't decided to start doing that sort of development in house to sell to big companies and hospitals.

Two things, one is a new West and Zamp Lawsuit (because they wanna ring as much money out of everything as they can) http://kotaku.com/5788162/modern-warfare-m...ouble+standards The other that I thought would be interesting is "12 ways consoles are hurting PC gaming" http://kotaku.com/5788122/12-ways-consoles...rting-pc-gaming

well, there IS also the tunguska event to think about.

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/console/ Starcraft 2 for Kinect. Requires two white guys in sweats in broad daylight to beat a single korean in the dark.

I must say I am disagreeing with your assessment of the French Military Prowess

Starcraft... UNLEASHED! http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/console/ Also in WoW they added Crabby, the dungeon helper. Who is going to be just as annoying as Clippy (in fact he pops up as you browse the site) http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/dungeon-helper/ A new DUNGEON! http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/dungeon/t...mortal-darkness And finally, they're making an app for the Iphone that gives you a full working Horadric Cube http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/media/horadrapp/

Started playing the Witcher again (because I can) and with the directors cut. And am watching a "Let's Play" of Dante's inferno and wondering WTF viceral games was thinking. I mean I know that people harped on it when the game came out, but just the.... horrific mythology screw ups here (Oh Hey it's Orpheus!) is staggering. I was chatting to a friend as I started it and ended up saying this: "You know, Both the witcher and Dante's Inferno are known for their nudity, but at least Witcher showed SOME restraint and taste in it's use of boobage". I could see myself playing the game after it's down to 6 bucks or something on the used shelf. This let's play is HILARIOUS however, while Dante is slaughtering people on the boat to cross into hell proper, they're discussing exactly how Father Gregori would deal with the situation. Including a comment of "You know, I can see Father Gregori dying, going to heaven, and then saying "No! There is more work to be done!" then grabbing a shotgun and leaping into hell to kill demons. And this is the Father Gregori from Half Life 2 (for the record, this is the Let's Play from lparchive.com... than you Yahtzee for showing that to me)

Oh, Kai Allard-Liao. And yeah, the twilight of the clans series is pretty... interesting. Hunters is what, book three? I think that author got one other novel for them, and then that task force basically was referenced once near the end of the saga. Stackpole got two books in the series and the rest were sort of oneshots for authors to tell different war stories about the thing and then Victors return.

You talking about ? Wait, are you doing the clans invading the Inner Sphere or the Inner Sphere going for the clan worlds? And I liked MOST of the books in the Btech series. There were a few duds but for the most part they were all pretty good. The main thing that bugged me was that Stackpole basically doesn't like to necessairly change his characters to suit the new series. I mean, Victor Davion and Corran Horn (sorta), Galen Cox is more like Tycho Celchu, Natasha Kerensky is Mirax Terrik.... He does start to branch out as he gets to more ancilliary characters who show up for a very short amount of time. Worst thing to ever happen to Battletech was the decision by Fasa to go to "the dark ages" rather than simply back up to before the Clan invasions and go over the various other wars that'd taken place.

http://kotaku.com/#!5787444/get-an-ama...-shooter-hawken Uh... HOLY HELL!

Is it odd that I think that they won't even mention the mother because of the fact that she was probably just a prostitute?

Indeed. Both parts of Ezio's story are pretty good about the love scenes (or lovemaking).

I just realized a very sad fact. Robin Williams has made me laugh more and harder than any other person has in the past 6 years.

Greatest song ever made for highschool guys.

DoW2 could have been much better if they varied the gameplay more. The main campaign had a few awesome moments, but most of the levels felt stale. The actual GAMEPLAY was pretty good overall, felt very tactical and cool, it's just you can only take so many "go to point X and kill a boss" or "Hold off X waves" levels.

Relic should have done it themselves instead of giving it to Iron Lore. I played it patched up, and even so I wouldn't buy it if it didn't come in a box set. On the other hand Dark Crusade was one of the best expansions any RTS ever got, so some disappointment was inevitable. Thing is that the DC had some well known issues that were totally ignored (for example, the fact that somehow 8 man maps were entirely available in the campaign as fighting maps, for two people to spawn in. Or the fact that after a while you could just cheese the game with your honor guard). Meh. And yeah, AC2 was more an expansion with Multiplayer than a stand alone. Still, at least it advanced the story, and gave us the awesome execution streak system.

How about "Who dares, gets arrested"

Do phys. It will help with the stress, and help you sleep. It's now 6 am (barely) and it's snowing outside. *sigh*

Soulstorm as an initial product was pretty pathetic. Unfinished models were rampant, the campaign was horrific, and the two new races didn't really add anything but more balance issues. The campaign could have been better if the stronghold maps weren't devoid of personality. At least in DC they had uniqueness that wasn't just "if you don't kill X then Y will appear and blow you up!"

wow so you're saying that it's not just the downtrodden of the society that are rising up but possible *gasp* those who might actually have some sort of education in economics and engineering!? MY GOD!