Tigranes

Anything they do will get my money, really, since it's almost guaranteed they will take the opportunity to craft a good story, hitch up the difficulty a little bit, and apply their characteristic twist on tropes and settings. That hasn't really come to the fore in recent titles like it did in KOTOR2 and MOTB. I wonder how much it would cost to do this kind of Kickstarter-funded game on Onyx. I imagine that would be very difficult, and we're looking at a more technically scaled down affair. (Unless Onyx is magical enough to accommodate that, too.)

I'd like to see Obsidian develop its own style, which I assume has always been the plan but has been difficult to do. That would probably, but not necessarily, involve an original IP. More specifically, I'd love Alpha Protocol 2, but that's not suitable as a Kickstarter project. So a turn-based squad-combat RPG of some sort would be nice and probably fit the scope best. Maybe if ideas like the Defiance pitch aren't getting traction with publishers it could work here.

He called Kotick a prick. And that deserves a few dollars.

I think it is a valid concern to raise in general, about continuing to take money after the goal has been met. I personally donated because I'm interested in the experiment and the documentary stuff from an academic point of view, but if I was a regular investor, I would expect to see some clear breakdowns of what the original 400k budget would have consisted of, and where the extra budget will now go into. It doesn't have to say "x, y, z new features in a game" because that makes zero sense, but more of hiring two more people, going from no VA to possible VA, able to do some marketing, etc. The biggest problem with Kickstarter, of course, is you never know who'll just never finish the project or have insufficient ability to do what they promised. So this kind of pitch alleviates the two biggest concerns.

You do realize that it's unlikely to go up a lot more than this, right? Never mind that that money also includes 20k sales they would have got from these people. The game is unlikely to sell more than 200k units total, given it is what it is, so that's 10% of total sales. It's still a great achievement, but it doesn't exactly mean it's rainin' dollars.

Threw in $15 too, I never finished Psychonauts but I like the venture and I really want to see the whole 'documentary' process. 780k now, they could hit a million, though that's not really a large amount of money for a game.

It's my firm belief that I am completely ill equipped to advise on romantic and parenting matters, Hurlshot, but purely from my own experiences with childhood, I think the one thing that is a danger is the daughter getting used to the possibility of getting a bail-out - in some cases, so that the kids start to learn that is something they can engineer, though it's not always that cynical. I think it's important for the reality of the challenge to stay firm. Of course, the super difficult question is when to decide your kid is not a performance/whatever type of kid, or when to persevere. My parents were pretty hands-off (yes, despite being Asian) and I sort of regret that now, because it's actually one of the great advantages of being a kid that you get pushed to do things you suck at, until you get used to it.

I liked it, but from memory there was either a mod to kill it, or console codes to keep replenishing your hunger easily.

In a totally weird burst of nostalgia, have fired up FFIX on the emulator. Still fun, though in a strangely detached way. (The LP will not die, but I don't want to rush it. It'll come back.)

Combat: Play with AI off, at least Core difficulty, pausing like it's an IE game. Then it's pretty fun. Play with AI on on lower difficulty without pausing, and it plays like you're in the middle of Woodstock and you're so drugged up you think it's a medieval fantasy world. (However, don't take this advice if you found IE combat at Core difficulty hard, frustrating or uninteresting.) Campaign: If you get bored with chapter 1, rush to chapter 2, which is a lot better. I think it's worth playing through at least once though, as a whole.

If we're talking pure votability, the Republicans have a fair chance of winning, though I'd still put my money on Obama. The american public doesn't make a mockery of them, it says something about US politics (good? bad?) that despite all the attack ads Romney at least would still be a viable candidate.

Upon careful viewership of the Superbowl, I conclude that: (1) 'Illegal huddle' is the best sports regulation ever. (2) Madonna is pretty much like a K-pop performer, just with worse taste. (3) There seems to be an untapped market in Sumo: American Footballers edition. Especially loved the fat black dude wearing a Bismarck costume and a glowing silver bucket.

It's been so long since I played Half-Life so I don't remember what that was like, but you didn't have any dialogue options, right? So everyone just pretended that Gordon Freeman said something back at them, or something. In this case we really only have two possibilities - (1) the protagonist has lines you can choose from, but they're not voiced; (2) the protagonist only has response types/styles/keywords, and so you have neither voice nor exact lines. In both cases, it's an 'old school' RPG approach. Anyway, Influx's original idea could still work within that system. The only problem I see is that even with a comedy game like South Park, something like that would cease to be funny after a few times, then just appear weird (and some people will think their game is bugged).

That's what you get for reading reviews. Horrible things.

Stayed up till 6 with moderate quantities of alcohol involved... on Thursday night. Now at school.

Japan was nowhere near fulfilling the hypothetical conditions for US-style global hegemony, so it can neither prove or disprove that argument. It wasn't rich enough (though they got closest here), it wasn't big enough, it wasn't rich and strong for long enough to maintain a sustained cultural wave, with post-war agreements the military dimension was virtually nonexistent, and finally, Japan has always been far too insular - even now, you will very rarely see Japanese graduate students or professors, or professors not in Japan Studies getting jobs in Japanese universities. (This is tied up with their weird system.) Even in businesses, that kind of transnational expansion or proliferation was limited to a few specific, and often abortive, attempts like Sony in Hollywood. China is a different story - it would be interesting to see the popularity of Chinese language programs around the world now compared to, say, those of Japan now or in the 80s (though being ni the 80s would autoamtically make it lower anyway). The Chinese culture industry is lamentably awful, but in fact is making significant progress in terms of technological sophistication, infrastructure, funding and personal experience - in movies, television, popular music, video games. It's harder for me to comment on hard economic stuff, so I won't, but while Meshugger's final conclusion I think is right (a steep uphill battle for China), I think China clearly pictures some form of hegemony in their long-term planning and they could well get there (though not necessarily by making America into a shriveled old prune of a world power).

Not bad. I mean, I don't think there's anything special about this place, other than the nice fact that it's pretty walkable, and the weird fact that for such a big city some things are strangely inconvenient. The locales like the Italian community don't do much for me personally, so it's just a generic City as far as I'm concerned. I still need to visit NYC, though. All I want is my guitar, some people to play football (the real kind) with, some people to have a drink with now and then. I'm halfway towards acquiring those things.

Can Allan equip magic armour?

Today I discovered that due to the incompetence of various stakeholders, my Gibson Les Paul will not set foot on American soil. That is probably for the best, since I paid a horrible amount of money for it (guitars cost like 3 times as much in NZ) and wouldn't want to see it broken. Instead I've scrounged together my student stipend to order an Epiphone Dot and a bunch of equipment. Since I can never play louder than guy-singing-in-shower decibel levels, that will be more than good enough. (Also, I'm pretty crap anyway.)

Star Wars will forever be awesome because it gave us http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html

Depends on your timescale, what exactly you want to create, etc - e.g. do you want to create an entire game (even a small one) from scratch, eventually, or do you want to get into / build a small team to do so? Is the type of games you want to make hinging on certain innovations or features that require pretty fundamental changes to the engine, or are you more interested in writing a good story or other such changes that might be accommodated within existing engines? I think modding is a good way to start, take a decent moddable RPG as a kernel and get the experience of finishing something, getting feedback, etc. In the past the best would have been NWN or even NWN2. I think DAO has a pretty strong toolset.

Nothing, no time, except for running FM2012 in the background sometimes. Hoping to finish BG1 soon for the LP, before Crusader Kings 2 takes over completely.

Well, the forum upgrade seems to have put this on the second page. I've been super busy, but don't worry, we'll get there. Currently about to see if our mismatched party can take the Ulgoth's Beard cultists without dying.

But you'll miss out on Space Sex!!111!1

The Clausewitz engine games run fine for me on my new computer, even with the limited multithreading. I can't remember if they said they'll change it for CK2. I tried to play CK1 a whiel ago and found it hard to get into because the way Pdox interfaces work means it's really hard to have an intuitive overview of all the characters and where they are and what they're up to. You have to actively keep track, otherwise people die or move and you just lose them in the pile of names. I could handle Rome OK though, and I'm hoping they improved on this aspect for CK2.