Tigranes

The pop-star's voice was not communist enough, so the politburo replaced her vocal chords with a Russian's.

Maybe he means the real Goth chicks. The ones who don't just dress black then go around talking about Britney Spears and squeal and go OMIGOSH. In which case, awooga.

Keep telling yourself that Josh

Generally, the prettier the girl, the more likely you'll regret their personality.

Yep. Then the local press publishes crybaby stories about local game dealers going out of business.

Actually, 'next-gen' games are sold at a standard of 120NZD over here... which is 85USD these days. I actually ended up having a friend in the US buy most of my games over the years.

Not really. But I'm definitely not suggesting DA looks H&S = is H&S. Just saying we dont' know that much about its actual combat gameplay yet.

mrmud - certainly some of us would, but sometimes I think we're more resistant... heck, I still haven't bought Mass Effect (and won't). I really, really want this game to be good. I like Dave Gaider and I want to believe. In fact, even if this Ferelden crap and LOTR wannabeness is disgusting, I'll buy it if theres good tactical gameplay reminiscent of IE engine... didn't see too much of it in the video yet, just a lot of confused hackin'.

Always puzzled me how such high-profile people think they can get away with plaigiarising other high-profile people. Either these folks are a lot sillier than we give them credit for, or it works a lot more often than we think. You know, considering ~10% of America still believes Obama to be Muslim, it's clear that we have the fiersome Muslim-Catholic Alliance on one ticket!

Wow, that's... really bad running animation. HUP HUP!

Thought it was pretty standard Bioware writing, but weren't the range and quality of animations quite impressive? It's certainly better than what you see in most RPGs, isn't it? The setting looks truly crap so far, though.

Necropostin' from the depths of helllll, but it's better than starting a new topic, right? Vince has kindly answered a few questions about Age of Decadence, game design and more on the Alley - a fledgling blog/site of mine. Go to http://alleyofinfiniteangles.com/ and check out the top news post, or the left-hand side bar. All comments/feedback, here or on site, are welcome. A snippet:

Wait, don't they mean, 'closely resembles a thousand other games out there'?

Tried it. It's basically that you go to this completely new town and try to work out some mysteries, visiting other nearby areas. Areas are often anachronistic patchworks of resources from all sorts of IE games (as all new IE mod areas are), but he's made an effort to make things look pretty different as a whole. The writing is decent, better than the kind of crap you sometimes get from mods, but you still have something that blatantly screams out AMATEUR. The gameplay itself - the combat is average and pretty decent, the story/dialogue is pretty good with twists. Recommended if you generally enjoy IE mods and don't mind their inherent modness, but if you do, maybe not.

Awooga, the day I arrive in Korea. Won't have a computer good enough to play it for the first couple of weeks at least, then. Ah well.

Don't think anyoen would have suspected it if it made its way onto the 6 o'clock news, for example. Pretty amazing.

Yeah, those made the rounds on NMA a few days ago - although this one seems 'comprehensive'. Cool to see them really go round the world.

I can imagine. The Enchantress is neither intellectually stimulating nor emotionally moving: it is not a 'quality' book. In fact, I feel like I'm reading one of Eco's more lackadaisical novels - but again, its a fun light read. I could have also picked up Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies instead, but as entertaining as he is, he is also torturous. I'm not sure why. I think I wish that these contemporary writers wouldn't focus so much on self-indulgent, contradictory characters who use sexual debauchery to symbolise postmodernist identity, either. It's getting really trite.

We're a long, long way away from getting some juicy stuff, probably. Although, Hip hip, pip.

Jeff Smith's Bone is very fun. It's definitely got the child's adventure story vibe, but you really enjoy it.

*shrug* I've kept myself in the dark about all that hoopla since it didn't really strike me as particularly relevant or important... halfway through the book and it's a nice read, just nothing particularly special. I like the setting and the way he's brought that about, really, and it's serving well as a light holiday read.

Slam dunk! Fair enough, we'll have to wait and see just how widespread the 'deja vu Oblivion's will be/won't be.

IWD was definitely reminiscent of BG, but not only did it use the same engine, it deliberately aimed for a similar gameplay experience, and was set in the exact same world, so there was no problem with that, either. If Fallout 3 was set in some other part of the elder scrolls world there wouldn't be much of an issue. But it's an entirely different setting in almost every imaginable way, and what's more, a history of very different games. For example, if we developed IWD3 using the ME engine, could you blame people for not wanting it to feel just like Mass Effect? I get the impression that the Bethesda devs honestly think there is potential / value in the level scaling system. I'm not sure of course, but that's the impression I get. I was talking more about the main quest - where you have big demons and Diablo-like gates screaming WE R EVIL at you. Imagine if the Super Mutants vs. Brotherhood of Steel in FO3 adopted the same kind of symbols/discourse. I'd feel like I was in a bad American movie.

I think the way they fixed it is potentially even worse. If it sets the area level in proportion to the character level when you first etner it, and it 'sticks' for the entire game, then you could ruin the game's challenge for yourself by wandering too freely - which is directly against the entire point of Fallout and TES games! The irony is staggering. When an interviewer during E3 (might be wrong) asked Todd, what happens if you just run through many areas at level 1, does that mean those enemies, being 'Very Hard', might be set at level 10 or so, for the rest of the game? Todd just laughed uneasily and evaded the question. We won't know until the game ships, but all signs point to another clumsy, messy level system waiting to be broken by even honest players. We might even see online fan guides on what order to play the game and visit the areas so that you don't ruin the level system - which, again, screws with the whole point of TES/FO games. I agree that the (practical) truth in general is neither "OBLIVION AWESOME = FO3 AWESOME" (I'm looking at you Tom Chick et al) nor "Sounds like Oblivion, SUX". But we know at least that the crap stilted animations remain; level scaling has changed but is still likely broken; we are waiting to see if dialogue/main plot has improved. The difference I think is that Oblivion is a world with very clear 'good' and 'evil', but its practitioners were prone to failure or error; so you still ended up with a very classic fantasy B&W world, just with 'twisty' characters. With Fallout, as a whole, you have a world which itself has no clarity on good and evil, right and wrong. In oblivion you already know, mostly, what good & evil is, you just have to work out WHO is good/evil; in Fallout, you run into occasions when nobody really knows what's the right thing to do, never mind relying on someone to actually do it.

Going out soon and will pick up Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence. Never got around to trying him before (and dont know much about the controversies) but read a few pages of it yesterday and was interested. Anybody want to warn me off/etc?