Tigranes

20 pages after a night's sleep, I'm glad I don't mod C&C. I wasn't jumping for joy at the announcement and I'm still not, because I'm worried about 2 things; (a) the actual terms of the 'joint development' which could be anything from Beth making it with Obs providing manpower to Obs making it and Beth providing consultation / help, (b) whether the game, which may have a very short dev period, will actually be anything new, anything more than a FO3 mod. Back of my mind the gremlin keeps saying that Feargie arranged the deal to have a Slam Dunk going in the recession, offset the Aliens blow and such. But hey, I love Fallout, so...

So that is the weirdest news ever. Kind of sucks if it'll use the old FO3 engine - if you're going to make a spinoff why not make it a bit different from the originals (i.e. Onyx)? Heck it could feature VATS again. Still, this will be... interesting. Especially the specific terms of the 'collaboration'.

That story was pretty done though. I bruised my pinky so it's thicker than the ring. Unfortunately, this ranks so low on the Manly Pain-O-Meter that I can hardly speak about it.

At the same time FF12 necessitated a HUGE amount of grinding (I ran past all those pesky monsters and was hugely disadvantaged near the end). 12's story had potential but for how seriously it took itself there wasn't enough substance to it.

Good news, I'll probably buy it unless the DRM turns out to be absolutely retarded. I bent over once for ETW, but doesn't mean I'm keen to do it a second time.

Reekwind's backstory was fantastic, and he felt very believable precisely because he ranted so much. With certain stats you were able to uncover his entire narrative within a single dialogue session, but it didn't feel shallow or gimmicky thanks to the right balance of ranting and flashes of regret and shame. PS:T is great in the sense that commiserating with Reekwind brought no tangible benefits or consequences at all, but you really empathised, rather than Generic Help Me Please Man #3 in a random KOTOR city. Ignus suffered from content cuts, I believe, and yes did not advance enough beyond FIRE FIRE. He is still incomparable to, say, Qara - the dialogue with his partner in the Smouldering Corpse bar, your memory of once teaching Ignus magic and scalding his hands in fire (or is that Ignus' memory?) - all good. It was wordy. There was a lot of filler. But that 'filler' was mostly very good in fleshing out the world and rewarding you on its own right, unlike much of the filler talk in games like NWN1/2 OC and Oblivion. Despite being much less 'wordy' they felt a lot more 'wordy', insofar as the boredom and other disadvantages of pointless verbosity goes. To retain a semblance of respect to the original topic: I would expect shorter and sharper dialogue than any BIS/Bio/Obs game to date in this title because of the setting, and I have no problem with that. Some of the lines we've seen sound pretty good; others sound fairly standard. I feel the success of AP's dialogue will have a lot to do with the real in-game consequences the game delivers; if you really have that going on, AP's short "cliche" lines will really have impact. If not, they will only serve to make the dialogue seem more artificial.

For all the massive quantities of text it had, though, I thought it had very little pointless filter. It did challenge you to invest yourself in reading, but once you did, you were rarely disappointed.

You are underestimating the popularity of these games. NWN, NWN2, KOTOR, etc all scored sales in the millions comfortably. In fact if someone could somehow count it all up persistent sales for PS:T would already have reached 1mil by now.

I have recently found Saint Augustine's Confessions at an acquaintance's and will borrow asap. I wanted City of God, but will give this a go. He also had a Camus... the Sisyphus one. Also sorely tempted by the Borges collection in the local bookstore but it is rather pricey.

Lots of people have a real passion for making lists and giving out awards. I think it would be a lot more entertaining and respectable if there was a single authoritative annual awards scheme that: a) Actually had a clear and transparent methodology for deciding recipients and ranks. Currently, this does not happen because the combination of a still-remaining 'cool/fun/new-age' work culture and mostly misguided and thick-headed scholarship on the subject (of games) results in an inability to treat games seriously (or to know how to look at them seriously). Breaking it down, if only any awards we have now avoided the logically bankrupt pitfalls of "because it's new (or old)", "because it's so fun (or not)", "because it's a sequel (or not)", "because it's hard (or not)". b) Organised a widely respected panel mix of developers, critics, journalists and scholars/commentators. Even within the circle of developers there are names that other developers really respect. c) Actually was entertaining. A lot of vidgame journos out there seem to think that just because they're talking about games they have to look like dorks from the eighties, drool like fanboys, blabber like high school amateurs and gush like middle school girls. (I'm looking at you, Adam Sessler.) Some real descriptions of games and the industry, commentators that aren't afraid to make jibes at games and devs would be nice. I dream of pipes at night.

You likely won't touch it again after a few months, so shouldn't matter.

I'm mildly interested. I played World of Goo when it came out and really enjoyed it. I have to say that I can see Kaftan's side of things though. In fact I'd lean towards it just for balance. WoG was way too overhyped because of its level of polish and its indie circumstances. Goo is cute and is very tightly put together, but it's not "wildly innovative", it's just one of thsoe good puzzle/adventure games that keep it fresh and smart; it's not "stunningly beautiful/charming", it's just whimsical and lackadaisacal without being fantastic. That itself is a difficult balance to strike (and Goo's completely meaningless filler story threatened to break down that illusion at times), so it's commendable, but it's not "OMGOMGOMG". Never tried Portal for various reasons, and obviously yet to try Braid, but they seem similar to me. Great stuff and even better they're indie, but hyped too much by people who try to invest in them more meaning and value than the works can handle.

What the hell was that idiotic 3 minute intro? Not much new really, but good to see some PR.

He is completely serious.

These are all old, right? Isn't there a new one out or something?

Did anyone get the full book by the way?

I actually had nothing in my head when I posted. I'll probably reply when I get around to reading the thread.

As recently as a century ago, pink was widely regarded as a man's colour, as a subset of red, and blue for girls.

.....

Back to Alpha Protocol...

Thank you LC. I'm surprised it took people so long.

What Pop means is that there is only one variable set for the ending of lovetalks in BG2, and would only lead to one conclusion. You can tell Jaheira she is an idiot every time and she will still pop up with talking you know. The actual global variables, such as JAHEIRALOVETALK (or whatever they were called, I forget now) only had corresponding values for the stages of the relationship (0=off, 1=ongoing, 2=after first harper hold quest, etc) What's the point in saying that though? 'Influence'. What a vague vague term. Of course they didn't invent 'influence' meant as an overarching general all-purpose idea. Once again these were specific variables tied to certain quests; in terms of the techniques used and the system used it is actually a lot more similar to, say, choosing the Thieves Guild or Bohdi's vampires. I don't honestly give a crap who the hell invented what, it's not really important to anything. All that matters to this debate is that Obsidian created their own influence system with its own unique particulars, and DA looks like it is borrowing some stuff of that. Which is fine unless you're one of those idiots that harp on about 'originality' and 'copycats'. Oh wait...

Yes, and perhaps we can move on from the collective anal retentions. It's not healthy, you see.

Everyone rips off each other! Rip rip rip! BATTLE As long as the balance is right in the gifting. It would be nice if, for instance, a gift gave you a chance to resolve the issue once again (give you a chance to rationalise your decision to help te villae again to Sten)... but given that gifts are meant to partially replace all that dialogue, probably not.

Well, think about it. Girls can't fix stuff. They just can't. That's why they need a man to fix the things they break, which inevitably do break because they will always think small and buy cheap shoddy goods on the bargain when they take the man's money to go shopping.