Tigranes

omg pix plz

If you judge by the extremes, and then toss out the whole, you toss out a lot of things that you haven't judged or considered properly. Basically your current stance comes from the basic supposition that you don't want anything to do with religion and you don't value religion/God at all: so you are then setting these hurdles, and say, "ALL people of a religion must jump this hurdle for the Sand to nod his approval." Then one fails, and you say, "told you that religion is a load of crock." I can't think of any sort of personal, intellectual or social exercise this would be constructive to.

The burka was never even strictly necessary before the late 19th / early 20th century. The only reason it became so necessary and symbolic of the faith was because 1/ many women themselves chose to wear the veil, and preferred to do so rather than walk around nearly naked like some Western women; 2/ many men also felt this to be the case, and the social climate soon became such that even women who didn't feel (1) was compelled to. Culturally speaking, the burka is only so anathema to the western mindset because its values are directly oppositional to the high modernist ideas of extremised freedom of expression. Personally speaking - and sure, this may be the Korean in me - I feel both are just as ridiculous if taken to an extreme, and the hyperexposure of skin is a symptom and cause of deep issues with westernised societies just as the burka can be.

It ain't payment, it be donations. From what little (i.e. zero) that I know, couldn't one 'disable' the use of the override folder rather than ban users? I.e. Sand's idea.

Communism is pretty awesome, yes.

You're talking about when you've gone with the guy to the lizard-infested tomb, cleaned it out and picked up the shard from the chest, right? Exactly where are you stuck? It doesn't teleport you out of the tomb, or your father doesn't recognise that you got it back, or..?

Just finished Final Fantasy VI. It's a solid game that's lots of fun to play, this is the second time I've finished it. It's a pity that I bought my PS Anthology versions in America and can't play them here, I'd love to see the new FMVs. FFV (Jobs!), Bioshock (first time) on boil while I try Football Manager 2008 demo. MoTB's got to be on there somewhere too.

Amusingly, vodafone - the only major telecommunications company in New Zealand that could support the hijinks of iPhone - has said there are no plans at all to sign a contract, therefore basically ruling out an official iphone entry into the country for the foreseeable future. Yet two local distributors have already risen into prominence, 'garage sellers', one of whom import 'raw' iphones and another who manufacture and sell modified sim-cards that allow the iphone to be used with traditional telecommunications networks in the country. The said mod-cards will undoubtedly be updated and reissued within weeks to compensate for this newest development, but it just goes to show - what are your options if you live in a country that the iPhone does not sell to? Anyway, there's a reason I have never bought an iPod (instead one of its dopplegangers that don't look as nice but certainly are free of idiotic iTunes). Making good products and brands is never the whole story, and one must hope that the outrage amongst the U.S - often the only market analysts really look at for things like this - and put Apple back in its place. Heh.

I just don't use the modes, because NWN2 is a lot more claustrophobic than games like KOTOR, where it's built to support the behind-the-cam mode. NWN2 in the IE tradition has a lot more narrow or packed areas, making it difficult to navigate that way. I'm perfectly happy sticking it in strategy mode anyway, maybe that's why the camera has never bothered me that much in NWN1 or 2.

But then he'd have to spend the rest of his days befriending white walls.

I thought that was Fallout.

I suppose reading 11 might make me feel less cheated towards 10. In the holidays, then.

Yeah, like those ones in manga books where there are about 70 portraits all with arrows linking each other, and 40 of them would have the same exact hairstyle, same face and same name just with different suffixes and hair parting. The first ~5 books definitely were fun stuff though, even if that woman was a bit frustrating. Heck, I've forgotten all the names - the original mentor magic woman.

Pity, I own book 10. It was like listening to a middle-aged woman gossip about her friends. For 900 pages. I mean, Elayne (i think) doesn't even give birth. She's just "in pregnancy". And doing the day to day chores of kingdom running. That's all she does.

That would be interesting, but I would expect that all dialogue is fixed, its just that they don't type the entire thing out for you in order for a 'more cinematic and real time' experience. Which is fair enough on the type of dialogue they're trying to achieve.

Hrm, the dialogue stuff doesn't look too bad in action. Never going to be a great RPG but ME sets out to be an action RPG really, and if the combat is actually fun (I have no idea what's going on in that combat sequence in the video) this will be what Jade Empire was supposed to be: a really fun action RPG with a decent/good story in Bioware's original setting. Graphics and all look fine to me, as long as they make sure they make lots of animations for those cinematic chats.

That's sad, 17 years and I'm sure he'd have finished it with three or four more years in the lifetime. I gave up on that around the eighth book when it was clear he was just making it longer for the sake of it and each book had no real plot advancement, but it was a fun series to read.

Running around naked and headbutting walls is surefire media coverage, too.

Who is he?

Perhaps there is some level of, at least, illusion of, choice early on regarding the adoption of the curse (you need it to save a puppy or something. a very rich puppy.), that would be interesting and a bit more different from PST's TNO. Still, sounds good, and it's very fitting that it's set in Thay.

That sounds pretty amazing though, Terranigma? Was the game itself fun? I want to play it, but I doubt I could find it I guess.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.

Pop's idea is really what I'm talking about... without trivialisation into some sort of "oops, I unleashed evil by mistake" (common in many games).

Mad Scientist, your idea has been executed a lot, but in a slightly different way. Basically, the hero always starts out thinking that that they're going to destroy big evil X: on the way they find out some crucial secret, that says big evil X is actually NOT the big evil dude, its Y. X is either a corollary evil or a force of good. Such an archetype has been, iwth modification, demonstrated in Arcanum, Final Fantasy IX, Neverwinter Nights 2 (sortof), and so forth. It's a nice inversion, but the one problem I always had with the way it was executed, is that it feels so gimmicky. You do all that stuff and finally find the big evil X: but wait, there's more! X isn't it, it's Y! The suddenness of the revelation, often involving a completely new element (Y), feels like a big gimmick to make the plot longer than it should be. So many RPG stories, furthermore, now have 'crucial twists' that they sometimes end up being banal (KOTOR1, Jade Empire). I think a more faithful execution of what I think your idea is, MadSc, would be more interesting; X and Y are known from the very beginning, and it's not that theres some sort of 'hidden secret' about X and Y, its just the perspectives of people; and its the people that work to perpetuate these myths that justify the evil X over the good Y, saying X is actually good. There is no man behind the scenes using secrets and magic to keep up a mask; it's a social effect so that the denizens of this fantasy world are locked into the delusion and operate under it. The player, condemned by the populace, would have to at each step work against the world, while doubting if he really has it right. The 'man behind the scenes' would simply be exploiting a delusion that is already present. Do I make some sense? Probably not, I'll type it up better soon. But that's what I think would be a lot more interesting, fresh, and less gimmicky.

I see what you mean, but my perspective is that while I don't like it, I think it would be worse NOT to play wizards, whom I like, just because of that. In IE games I even used to use Ctrl+J (instant teleport), and just pretend that the character was always there to begin with. It is immersion-breaking, but it's not a big price to pay. It would be good to control who talks to who; however, taking that logic further, if you had a NPC talk to someone you would have to be prepared to have him refuse to say certain things. You would tell the NPC 'go in there and charm him to giving you money', but if he's just a paladin with high charisma his conscience might stop him at the last moment, and he comes out of the conversation with less money than he might have got. That's really really complicated to execute though.