Tigranes

Okay, so I need some field knowledge on jazz, so that I can locate jazz I like. I am woefully ignorant of the specifics of this genre. Fire! Basically, I don't really have a mental map of the genre in my head. I have a basic idea of chronology, who's who and stylistic varieties for classical and rock music (terms used very generally), but not really for jazz. I know (and have music of) some 'big uns' like Miles Davis, but that's about it. My brain has this screwed up system of classification which puts "big band/swing" is on one side (slow, ponderous, do not like; Mingus big band falls here), bop in the middle (pretty cool) and the jazz i actually want to hear on the other side, which I get to hear live sometimes but don't know how to name or find it otherwise. I want jazz that has: Medium/fast tempo Drum, bass, piano & electric guitar (or saxophone) Mucho improvisations, melody-driven No vocals, evar So an example would be a fast-ish piece with a constant moving bassline allowing piano / elec / sax improvisations. I have recently laid my hands on some abandoned CDs that include the likes of Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck Quartet, Charlie Christian, and they all sound good, but not what I described above. I'm also a fan of Tomasz Stanko, but again that's a bit different. Any ideas?

Where is it out??

Based on what I've seen at school, I don't even know how staff or the institution can detect or effectively protect from subtle bullying. And it's not even like I ever went to particularly bad schools.

Okay, but that doesn't really change anything, does it. Wals, think about it this way. For many people, it is now socially acceptable, economically viable and 'normal' to spend most of your teenage years not reading or writing anything beyond what you do at school (which is, by the way, roughly 1/3-1/2 of what you'd have done, both in difficulty and quantity).

Pretty average. Nobody on this forum will really care, yeah, but is this cover really going to have random people pick it up in the store? Well... I guess the phrase 'espionage RPG' might. It's not bad enough to drive away sales, though - you can't beat Torment for that.

The issue with item descriptions in the BG / IWD series were that they didn't provide bang for the buck; i.e. for all the text that you had to read through, it wasn't interesting or memorable enough to justify you spending that time. I feel the same way, incidentally, about most books in Oblivion (and about half in Morrowind). I think part of it was that they felt compelled to write a full essay on each one - set the scene, narrate in a traditional fantasy manner, etc, etc. There were a few gems in there, though, especially the more lackadaisical ones.

You can past undergraduate programs in most Western universities and still sound like a retard, especially when you write anything. (I don't imply that non-western are better, I just don't know enough 'bout them.)

Generally I agree with HK/alanschu - Bioware taking the time to create origins for your characters should be applauded. (I'm disagreeing with MC - now there goes your partisanship. ) One point that shouldn't be buried, though. The key difference between, say, backgrounds of Arcanum and origins of Bioware were this; (a) the backgrounds were not hardwired to particular character types; being a pyromaniac didn't mean you couldn't custom-tailor any otehr part of your character, and (b) you could have no background if you liked. I remember the Elven Peasant(?) origin as being a woman whose to-be-husband was killed or something and is angry/out for revenge, or something to that effect. I'm sure they'll let you be male or female. But can you be an elven 'peasant' without having the emo-story attached to you? Can you be a human peasant where a similar thing has happened? Or is it going to be that if you choose to play an elf for gameplay / personal reasons, you're going to have to choose to be one of the 2 origins that Bioware has created for you? I like how detailed Bio have made the origins, and how they say they'll integrate it into the game, but it would be quite ironic if all that meant I couldn't play, y'know, a normal elf.

Quite apart from the Codex as an entity - there's no reason why older styles of game designs cannot return (it has happened before for other media forms), and the 'oldness' doesn't say anything about their quality. In fact, both dismissing design because it's 'old' and abhoring anything 'new' are just as nonsensical as the other. re. Generic: I think anyone hoping for Dragon Age to provide a wildly different setting were fooling themselves from the start. Alanschu, I think the challenge for Dragon Age, and what its creators probably want to do as well, is to provide a world that feels fantasy and has a lot of familiar ('generic') things to ground you in, but uses those familiar ingredients to develop more unique, complex or unusual situations than before. Thus the attention to lore. I am happy with that as long as it doesn't turn into another Latter Day Elder Scrolls - books and books of lore that the games can't take any advantage of (apparently ME suffered from this too, but I can't say).

Codex regulars are very, very far from Obsidian fanboys: in fact, apart from Troika, there's hardly a company that escapes unscathed from their scrutiny. In any case, why do many regulars here appear to be O/T/B 'fanboys'? Uh, because they happen to believe in certain design philosophies and game direction that happens to match with the style these companies deliver/try to deliver? I mean seriously, we have to stop looking at this in a backwards way in terms of classification. It's not "X is a Bio fanboi" -> "X thinks all Bio games are awesome". Of course that always happens to a degree, but the basic pattern you want to think in terms of is "X likes Y and Z" -> "X is a fan of Bio, which generally provide Y and Z" -> "X begins to get rose tinted glasses on top of this". No this isn't just metaphysical fapping. The point is that there's nothing wrong with having a strong opinion or being a 'fanboi', and it does nothing to invalidate their arguments (which you are implicitly doing here). We got to get over the whole drawing lines business IMO. That's like saying if you like the Elder Scrolls for their big seamless worlds then you must surely like the GTA series. Do I really need to spell out the specifics here? In an ugly attempt to bend these threads back into the topic of Dragon Age, though - they had initial premises and promises that I really really liked. For example, an RPG that actually provided bigger scale battles as opposed to 'wars' between football teams: after playing BG series it had you thinking good things, and when they went the even smaller scale combat route after NWN it had you gasping. Some such earlier ideas have gone (which is, duh, realistic), others have remained, and of course it was always going to be your classic Gaider - fantasy and heroism played very straight and epic, even if darker and/or more ambiguous than before. To me what defined Dragon Age throughout its development process was the promise of a large fantasy world chocked full of things to do, squad tactical combat that was a little more tactical and challenging than the button-mushing retard rehabilitation programs KOTOR/JE/ME combat was (and yes, K2 is included here), all with typical Bioware dialogue (decent) and polish (great). Looks like its still there, but just how much of that solid base is going to be eaten away from the inside by gimmicks grown larger than life (romances / cutscenes) remains to be seen, especially in light of the marketing. Actually, I don't really want to end on the note of marketing, because I'll bet anything that the game won't be as, uh, extreme as in the marketing.

Actually, while this would be true for cases like, uh, pre-release Oblivion, DA's ridiculous marketing has been mocked in various places. I love how you say this in every single thread on the Codex and OBS that criticises any Bioware game for anything. I haven't bought a Bio game since KOTOR, and that was second-hand. Which is consistent with the way I tried JE / saw a lot of ME and decided it wasn't worth my money. What makes you think others are different? That is what people are doing. It so happens that a significant proportion of regulars on these boards agree that they do not enjoy Bioware's latest games or are unlikely to enjoy their future games based on their direction. By throwing logically bankrupt memes like "lol u buy it anyway" and "nwn1>* fact", it is in fact your posts that do their best to contradict the spirit of your own argument.

It would be nice if the combat was good enough to make people want a multiplayer component. Anyway, zero chance of this happening so late in development, unfortunately.

Check the Codex, General Discussions for a couple.

Humble pie eaten then, that's perfect.

By physical features they appear to be talking about his body build, height, etc. - otherwise the next sentence in that quote doesn't make a lot of sense.

To clarify: it seems almost certain that mini-games pause the world, you cannot be interrupted; it's unknown afaik whether you can re-try or not. Really, all of this needs to be thought of in combination. If you have mini-games in real time where they can be interrupted, this is awesome as there is actually urgency to it and they make sense; but then they would need to be relatively short, and of a sort that you can screw up by hurrying (e.g. the hacking one shown here). If you have mini-games that you can't re-try again there are consequences and alternatives in the world, so this is good; but then you'd need to make them a lot more skill-dependent, so that you can't screw up an easy lockpick even with a high lockpick skill just because you happen to be useless at them. But my point is, if you can't be interrupted, you can try them at any skill level, and you can re-try infinite times... there are no consequences for failure, no tension, no challenge - only tedium.

I don't get this bit about the hard drives, by the way. FFVII on the original Playstation used Save Points, for instance, but if you wanted to you could fill up your entire memory card with a couple dozen FF7 saves (more than most PC gamers would ever use). Hell you could have even added a self-overwriting quicksave function - saving that game on the PS took no longer than saves take in NWN2. I always thought it was rather the controller that stopped console games from having quicksaves. What am I missing? :/ genci88: OK, so you're firing something back, awesome. It's not as if I haven't experienced the personality-twisting influence of bad checkpoints (checkpoint + maze + monsters that disable party members = mental genocide), either. Your post basically boils down to "I find the inevitable failing of the checkpoint system so terrible in any game and I would hate to see it in AP, or anywhere". Fair enough. Really has nothing to do with CRPGs or RPG v. JRPG or consolitis or dumbing down or anything. Just that you find the system terrible. Which... well, I can't really persuade you otherwise, because I'd be an idiot to argue against the fact that checkpoint systems are liable to cause frustrating repetition that free-save never would. All I can say is that for me, there are also failings of the free-save system (that sawyer has already described), so I see it more as a 'depends on the game' thing.

E3 footage shows subtitles turned on for all dialogues.

Fun stuff. Graphics look real good now, actually - everything fits together well. 02.00-04.00: First thing I notice about the gunfights is how sluggish/slow the enemies seem here - like they're pretty thick guys. They don't shoot instantly when they see you, and if you're competent with your aiming and reactions (like the previewer was) you end up taking them down quite easily even in gung-ho mode. Of course they're meant to be distracted by Sie's men, but you'd want them to be a lot sharper in anything more than default difficulty. Making the AI have a wild burst in your direction as soon as they get shot (i.e. you get shot from the left, you're going to spray some bullets looking left THEN see what's happening, not turn around, have a look then decide to shoot or not) would help. 2.30-3.00, 4.30-5.00: Interface looks clean, sharp and responsive. All good stuff. Wish it looked a little less sterile and with more personality, but ah well. That's a complaint I've had since the KOTOR and NWN series. 04.00: The hacking thing, where you're meant to pick out the right nodes that are on the end of twisted lines; cool, but once again the biggest thing about these minigames is, you want them to be in real-time. You don't want them taking up the entire screen, you want to be able to swivel your camera and see everyone still run around as you're trying to solve this puzzle; and if anyone attacks you you're interrupted. I think we can be 99% certain that time stops when you play these minigames now - and that's rubbish. I wonder what happens if you fail? Does the thing lock you out and you can never get past the door (or need to find another way)? That at least would be a redeeming factor. If you can try as many times as you want, then the minigames have zero positive contribution to the game. 5.00: A thousand African children spontaneously combust as our intrepid hero witnesses arrow markers for characters showing through walls. Nooooooooo 5.17: Probably what Will was talking about, nearly 2 seconds of the guy pointing the gun at your head and not firing. If that is not just for the press preview there will be bloody crates all over come October. 5.28: You can see one of the enemies on the tower get 'stuck' next to the railing, running against the railing on the spot while the scope swivels wildly. Not a big deal though, as he soon un-sticks himself. They still take longer to shoot you than the Americans take to issue green cards. 7.17: "R" to leap over. Jumping is not allowed everywhere, then? Hrmmm. 8.00-9.00, 9.23: Despite what some preview hinted at recently, health does not seem to regenerate automatically over time. Unless it only does when you're in cover, which would make.... not much sense. So hopefully none of that nonsense. Health kit use at 9.23 shows that the health bonus is almost instantaneous - and the menu where you choose it pauses the game anyway, so you can abuse health kits while being hit. 9.30-10.00, 10.45: You suspect that if you were able to turn off those markers and arrows, even with the torpid AI and easy difficulty in the preview, the game would be a lot more fun and exciting for the player - navigating trying to find them all. I'm sure it will be possible...hell, in 10.45 the previewer sees the red arrow behnd a door, waits for the enemy to kick it open and shoots him in the face. I like what I'm seeing with AP in general (okay, so maybe that's not so obvious from this post, but I do), but that is just plain retarded. 12.00-13.00: 'Boss fight' really is a boss fight, complete with special enemy maneuvres (flying fox) and a giant boss health bar in the middle of your face. I don't mind it that much, to be honest. 14.30: Good mission ending screens, stats are always good. I wonder if the mission shown here is indicative of how large or long other missions will be? It would be nice for some to be much bigger. Generally, same things that we/I knew would be silly are turning out to be silly - magic markers/arrows for enemies, minigames that freeze you in time, sluggish AI. Still looks pretty and fun.

Your avatar killed my mother, you bastard. Gonna have to decide on my masters topic soon. I want to do something with a hideous and unique new genre of TV in Korea, but gonna be sort of hard to research it from New Zealand. It's like a crazy blend of western reality TV, traditional Asian 'game shows' and hyper-internetised celebrity culture. Plus a fetishism for subtitles and excessive editing.

Okami awaits. Sort of scared that I won't like it that much (first console game in ages), but well, it's purty.

Already been done irl.

Exhibit A: Repetition of a viewpoint without substantiation with the aid of (mildly) inflammatory language. It's a pity that you feel compelled to overload your core complaint about saves, which is a valid one, with pointless and unsustainable invective. I feel I've responded to that core complaint already, but to make it blatant - for the particular game experience AP looks to provide, what exactly is it about the checkpoint system in comparison to free-save that is so bad, and how exactly will it detract from the player's experience? By 'exact' I mean 'exact', not general, diluted and overused strawmen like "Freedom for the player!!!!" and "Real RPGs have free-save", which all sound like they could go straight into Braveheart.

Depends on the gameplay, I think. I think it's especially good for adventure or FPS games where your character & abilities don't change that much anyway - you don't feel like you're cheated of whatever you've accumulated with one character, and the game encourages you to change things round and get different experiences. With, say, an RPG, a much greater concern is how you deal with the XP / loot / etc - in other words, that sense of accumulation and progression. While this might not apply to Kaftan's OP, I thought FF6 did this the best - all three of these rules are followed, and you end up juggling a massive cast (all with different gameplay styles, backstories and personalities) quite competently.

They always end up being made available for everyone though, one way or the other. If you only had in-game extras sales would probably drop.