Tigranes

Playing Icewind Dale + HoW + TotL. I could never play the two IWD games without cheating - namely, using Ctrl+Y to 'skip through' about one in every five or six 'normal' encounters. Like the Lizard Men or Histachii in Dragon's Eye. They're not really challenging at all, but just enough to take up time and attention; there's always a bit too much combat for me to take. Really beautiful games, though. I'd really love to see the Wizard's room in the Kuldahar tower or Arundel's home rendered with the best technology today can offer.

It'll be interesting to see what you think of it, Di. Personally, I thought Geralt was a well made character (but then, I play both genders in RPGs so I'm never fussed about lack of that choice), and all the sexxing about was pointlessly vulgar and clearly catering to the fourteen year old pimplemeisters, but really, the key thing is the gameplay and the story. The story is alright and the gameplay is pretty solid, so I enjoyed it. Bit of an odd timing since the Enhanced Version is coming out on May, but oh well. If you aren't too concerned about the VO not exactly matching the text dialogue, I would recommend you grab the English dialogue restoration fan-patches that I hear are already available. I'm sure someone else can direct you to one - but that's probably the one thing you would want from the start. Finally, it is a resource hog, but I managed to play it with my Radeon 9600 Pro and 1gb of RAM, so you should be all right.

A lonely soldier always has time. *ahem* Generally, I would indeed think it was things like newspapers, photos and letters that tell you how life is going on back home.

wee-oo. I haven't read the whole thread, so call me up if I'm being silly, but I never really thought the main point of God is to explain stuff about the world you can't understand. That segregates God. That's like saying "if you can understand X scientifically, woopdey doo, but if you can't understand Y scientifically, go to God!" Nah. Theoretically, being a Christian would mean that the spiritual mode of explaining the world takes precedence over science in every instance. This doesn't mean you need to be an amish oddball that doesn't believe in science, it would basically mean you are saying: "I accept the scientific hypotheses that govern our human societies and believe in them, but I believe that these scientific laws and phenomena were ultimately created by God, and thus if God's word appears at a point to contradict what we know scientifically at this point in time, I would believe God over a human scientist who may be refuted or completely contradicted by other scientists or other scientific findings in the future." A Christian would, theoretically, not refute science as a discipline, but refute science's claim to absolute truth and its own infallibility (not that science really does this anyway, but a lot of people seem to think so). And I think one has grounds to do this even if they were atheist - science is a human discipline. Humans are fallible. Scientific standards of truth and falsehood change constantly and new 'facts' are constantly brought into light. As I say, the purpose of science was never to provide absolute universal truth that we could rely on; that's just how some(many) people have come to see it. In the end, that can be just as dangerous as a "I believe in God so I won't take my medicine or go to the doctor" crazy-o. So what, then, is the point of God? Well, that's something I still struggle with, so I can't be as clear here. The concept of faith, as always, is both the key and the tombstone; if we presuppose God exists and his Word is true, then it makes complete sense to prioritise a set of laws and paradigms which are guaranteed in their truth than one which is not (science). And no, whether God's word is true or not, or whether he exists or not, would have nothing to do with if he can be scientifically proven or not. What you would be doing is taking a standard of judging truth that is made by fallible humans, that changes constantly and over time, that admits to being based on hypotheses rather than absolute truths, that changes its understanding of the world as it learns new things and finds errors, so on and so forth. I don't say science is uselss, because it's one of humanity's great bets at explaining the world, but it is by its nature never complete and never sure. Using science to explain God is from the start untenable, even if you are an atheist. So we come back to the question of faith; if God exists, problem solved. If God doesn't exist, problem solved. Which one? How do we explain this phenomenon of 'faith'? In my experience faith seems to be as much a doctrinal thing as much as a 'natural' and 'spiritual' thing - which is why I am still not comfortable with it. But then, you didn't expect this single post to explain everything, right? edit: Wow, lots of posts while I was posting. Hurlshot, let me just say, while you and Kirottu are right, in my experience, quite a lot of your joe average Christians still have the latent belief that if you believe in a different religion, then you will not go to heaven (and thus, to hell). And I think the Presbyterian Church for example still, well, implies it.

And I think this is the crux of the matter. If, in the past, in RPGs where we could choose genders, we had seen significant or 'believable' amounts of variety in experience or even cosmetics between male and female protagonists, then I would probably be joining Sand in the cry for genders, at least before nick's latest post. The fact is that I don't see this as a big loss anyway, because adding male/female option hardly ever does anything at all in most RPGs. Either they should really concentrate on making these different races/backgrounds/genders matter, or just stick with one character and flesh him out well.

It would be nice if they didnt' all have boobs the size of footballs. No, really. How can you find it attractive if it's big enough to give birth?

Certainly, Guild Wars suffers from the Great Bloom Plague of 2004-2007. But the variety of locales delivered was immense and Guild Wars certainly made you feel like you were going all over the world and finding historical architecture.

Eh? Are you referring to your own post? In which case, I thought it served as a useful starting point. It's easy to look at particular fashions that immediately seem stupid to us and label it retarded, but as long as that kind of fundamentally ignorant impulses direct one's positions, our commentary can only be polemic. I don't mean 'ignorant' in the sense that you are an ignoramus or an idiot, but literally, that you base your position without knowing the conditions or wanting to know the conditions. Certainly it prevents you from understanding what it is that is so appealing about JRPGs. I don't play JRPGs anymore and can't stand to go back to FF7's gameplay, but I can certainly see where its coming from, and additionally, the fact that the 'androgynous emo' archetype derives originally from not 'Japanese culture' but from Western culture. I only have to go out to town and take a look at all the 15-year-old goth/emo wannabes stalking Wellington streets... Anyway, I'm sure you didn't mean to engage in a prolonged debate about this, so feel free to reply, or not. I don't think you're exactly engaging in 'paranoia' or 'furious hate', but I just feel compelled to call people up when they offer a diatribe against something without trying to understand where it comes from or why. The story I thought started off well then fell on its face, rolled around a little bit picking up some dust then melted into the ground. I always love to see a fantasy story/setting that actually tries to construct proper politics and political commentary of that time and world (instead of just having superpower King-heros or randomly transplanting current issues like racism in a silly manner), but all that early promise quickly devolved into the same old dungeoneering and those Knight guys just turned out, basically, to be traditional 'honour!" lackies. The combat was basically murdered by the ... well, I can't remember any names anymore, but that stupid system which basically meant you could let everyone work on AI and fight your battles for you. Those contingencies. I'm the type that doesn't even use AI in NWN2, but micromanaging everything in FF12 just wasn't fun, either. Add to that all the grinding and it really was quite tiring. If FF combat wants to involve it should take the Tactics path, instead of becoming a bastardised Bioware combat.

Hey, all the middle schoolers in the world can identify with his problems. I respect that others like MGS. I was just commenting on how some people I know love its style and get into how 'cool' it is, while I find it rather try-hard. Anyway, I like my sheep. They keep me company on cold lonesome nights. You ain't taking away my sheep.

So what makes the AoO option better than the old facing/backstab option, tactically speaking? I'm actually asking, because I don't know, not baiting. Personally I've never felt there to be much fun to be had in AoOs, but maybe in practice in pnp it works out differently.

Yeah, you gots to play an American game for real men. Personally I can't stand Metal Gear Solid. Especially 2, or at least I think that's the one where you have so many cutscenes, you'd think it was a Final Fantasy game (hah). But what I mean is, whereas you are sick to death of the androgenous emo-look (and no, I'm not fond of it either), I find much more detestable the kind of archetypes generated by thrillers or action media such as MGS, Tom Clancy, Bourne series; the gruff cold loner who likes his cigarrettes and bullets, or all that stupid stupid talk about global conspiracies and technobabble and whatever. To me it's just as silly as all that talk about Great Magic Item X or all these Freudian disorders all FF characters seem to be born with. It's all a matter of which ones you find particularly disgusting; and that reaction is not predicated on any sort of 'natural' sense, anyway. Thus some people will take to the androgenous emo look like rabid sheep, while others will mock them while taking the 'Bourne'/Clancy look, while their seven year old brother throws pokeballs in the balcony and yells I CHOOSE YOU.

I was talking more about someone who's willing to get into a bit of shoulder barging rather than tentatively stick out a leg, hound opposition players on the ball relentlessly and not back out of a fair challenge for the ball - none of this really requires the kind of silly and risky hollywood sliding tackles. It's more about the approach, and not how hard you hit them. Of course, I don't really need to control myself, because basically everybody's fifty pounds heavier and half a foot taller than me.

Somehow, the very fact that it's Final Fantasy makes me suspend all my usual RPG senses and go with the flow. Japamagick.

I wonder if it's because there are any male-specific events in the main plot itself... for example, a recurring seductress. Speaking of main plots, off topic, but I wonder if we'll have lots of side quests. Taking contracts, stumbling on small leads, things like that.

Hockey's probably a nice game, I just never had a chance to really get into it. Now football, I used to play it back in the Korean elementary schools. Our periods are organised in terms of 50 minute lesson + 10 minute break, for 6 lessons, and one lunchtime. That means we used to have 4 ten-minute games and one hour-long game of football, every day. Sand field, too (as overcrowded as Seoul is, grass fields are not always available). One tackle and your knees would look like a fried donkey's face.

The best part was when I fired up the game with my best friend, and his response was, "They have no elbows!". The next thirty minutes consisted of speculations about how a short bugger with yo-yo forearms could swing a sword large enough to fry two swordfish and a whale on. Azure, FF6 was probably the most 'complete' FF game yet, in terms of size, things to do, battle system, FF traditions (Biggs/Wedge, moogle, etc), story and NPC. FF5 I enjoy, but the story is absolute crap; in fact, it was only good for one thing, the Job System. Now that Final Fantasy Tactics is available, I wouldn't bother. Before that, with FF4 and such, they're not very good and it is *very* dated. I started my RPG fixation with FF7/8 when I was 10/11, and enjoyed FF9, but by then I was moving onto IE games and Fallout, and waiting for NWN. I did make it a point to pummel through FF10 and FF12 (half a week each) just to see what they were like - which is what I did with Jade Empire and will do with Mass Effect. I feel that the later iterations of FF, just like the post-NWN bioware games, are suffering from too much obsession with cinematic storytelling and just becoming another Hollywood flick. That's not to say sickening cliches didn't exist back in the old days, but still.

It has a good story. Even now I would contend that its story is pretty good - certainly better than most of the Hollywood drivel. It isn't the Great High Point of RPG Storytelling or anything like that, but it's entertaining and well made. Pop's right about that it was also the first big 3D RPG on the Playstation, and Squaresoft used FMV's to devastating effect. It was, literally, 'cool'.

Oooh, holster. See, I'm not a gun person. My knowledge regarding them extends to "make loud noise, make people go ploop". That explains it, then.

Mus wins the thread! Having come out of a recent Thief2/3 marathon, I have to agree. When I played both games first time, I tried to 'ghost' it nearly the entire way; that means never, ever being seen (as in, identified as a thief), and never hitting anyone. It is possible (and not *too* difficult) to play the Thief games this way. In the recent playthroughs though, I didn't go easy on the blackjack - and sometimes ended up with a dark closet with six or seven bodies squeezed in there in odd ragdoll fashion (you'd think they have no bones). The thing is, I found little difference between ghosting and Guard Genocide modes, because even if you are discovered and they find the bodies of the dead, if you hide in a dark corner, go for a cuppa and come back everything's fine and dandy. I would really really like to see some realistic security mechanisms in Alpha Protocol - *that* is what the excess processing power should be used for. If you are discovered in a location, the guards in the surrounding area should move to cover all points of exit from the immediate vicinity, and other guards farther away should be called there - so if you aren't out quickly you are screwed (or in a very uncomfortable place), but if you do get away quickly then you can even use this to your advantage. Eventually, the guards will go back, but if that happens two or three times in a mission or in one night then they would go around turning all the lights on and maybe calling up more guards off-shift. Things like that.

Oh. What is it, then? Crocodile skin cloak?

While I play both female and male genders, and customise quite heavily when I can to try all sorts of different appearances and types, I'm equally happy to play a preset character, if that character is well defined and well written. (I wouldn't want to play, say, whatever Bioware might have thought of for a NWN1 OC hero.) At the end of the day, I believe extensive dialogue and world interaction options by which you define your character, and a varied character development system, is really what is important in roelplaying and defining your own, not whether you can choosem ale or female, Twi'lek or Human, white hair or blonde hair. Because of the times we live in, anyway, male/female changes basically *nothing* in the RPGs, except for often shallow romance options. While I agree that more choice is often better, this is not always possible (e.g. PS:T) and I really don't think it's a game-breaker at all; it's really semantic. As long as you have lots of dialogue options to choose from, different ways of influencing the world, and different skills to define your character with.. I think that's what's really important about making your own character. If you could choose your hair colour, male/female and whatnot in a Final Fantasy game, would that really expand the role-playing options? Not really. Edit: You know, it's interesting that these threads always seem to go down the route of "But Sand!". It's not his fault really, he's entitled to his opinion. I just wish the rest of us don't have to be driven to polemics by his personal opinion.

I played it to death when I was ten, actually. It was wonderfully addictive and actually pretty atmospheric (look, when you're ten, its a throw-up between Pokemon, Digimon and FF for immersiveness). Now, of course, it's hard to stomach all the pointless walking around, clicking 'X' past the railroad dialogue and fighting all those crappy battles. I still play FFV/VI from time to time actually - I just use the emulators' speed function to walk ridiculously fast and take care of random encounters in 3 seconds of 'dododododoop'.

Is he.. is he... wearing a back pack with ridiculously thick padded shoulder-straps?!

I imagine the goal is lower as well as smaller, and the dead area is smaller than the normal 18' yard box - probably just the six yard. In which case, it would take a very skilled lob to deny a defending header and nestle in the net. If my guesses are wrong, then no, it would be very easy indeed.

I'm not a fan of Fawlty Towers actually, Cleese is pretty good but the show has entirely too much screechy yelling and isn't really tyte. I love Blackadder, Monty Python and Black Books though.