Tigranes

Yay! See? We have enough to hang on, but still be a worrywart. Great way to wait. edit: unless you're Sand, in which case this merely confirms the steaming pile of rhino poo poo everything ever shaped by the hands of Todd Howard is.

Let's look at it another way - what reason is there NOT to have eyes / groin targeting? A) ESRB conscious brutality stuff. Um, isn't FO getting Mature already? Or do they think eyes/groin would count as sadistic and get bans? I don't think so. B) Not enough time to make animations for all that. Possibly, it's a lot of work to do it for each opponent type. But its odd to rule it out so early.

The bigger problem is not of exploitation but of that happening by mistake. If you started a Bethesda-made FO2 and by mistake ventured into the Sierra Army Base at level 3 - well, that really changes the experience for you, but is it really for the better? I don't think so. Even with fixed levelling you can experience a wide range of difficulty in opponents, and at any time you can steamroll over people or get creamed. Why is it necessary to do the partial scaling, so that players are able to feel good walking over their artificially weakened opponents? That's NOT what people were asking for after Oblivion's horrible level scaling. Why not keep impossible areas impossible till the end, easy areas easy all the time, no matter what your level is when you enter? Most people never traverse even an open-ended world in so haphazard a way as to make a fixed level world stupid, and Bethesda's solution has zero advantages. God, I hope there is some in dialogue and descriptions of items / etc, at least.

The lack of groin targeting forecloses all other arguments. What the bloody crap? On minigames, I think Thief 3's worked well because it happened in real-time, and trying to jiggle that lock on the chest next to the sleeping guard you were always nervous about the sound waking him up, or someone coming up behind you - that had a degree of immersion and excitement, and an unspoken time limit tension. In Oblivion you sit there going ting, ting, ting, ting, click, and the persuasion minigame was a joke because it both broke immersion massively and because it was so easy and so repetitive, that it didn't even qualify as a minigame - it was a stupid chore, and if theres a choice between a dice check and a stupid chore.. I'm just not sure what kind of minigame in such circumstances could fit into the Fallout atmosphere and also not be stupid / boring. For example, picking locks in the Fallout universe. How would that be done? For the speech % check thing, I think it'd be okay if instead of putting in actual percentage values, they put in things like [Very Likely], [Likely], [unlikely], [Very Unlikely]. Just three or four categories. Or not have those at all, but that's probably unrealistic to ask. I think the good part to that decision is that when you fail, there's no return (you can't just 'try again'), and you can irritate the person. I think that's a good step for Bethesda to make, at least.

1/Radiant AI is totally freakin' awesome if they do it right. They didn't in Oblivion, mostly. It was still cool in places. So if they've improved (which they should have), then it should be something to wait for. 2/Minigames suck, let's hope there isn't a Persuasion one. 3/Graphics are good. 4/We've seen very few lines of dialogue, so it's unfair to judge. The dialogue on the screenshot up there... it could well be in a Torment. 5/ What partial level scale? Oh, that does sound pretty damn stupid.

Both...?

If the critics truly do have the Koran in mind when criticisng the fellow, and their doctrines do rule out this particular activity, then there's nothing wrong with that and the man deserves the criticism. I rather suspect this is not really the case, though.

Trust me, it's in every country.

I see, some context is good to have. But if all that is the case, what does this new directive change, effectively?

That really means that the determination of the conditions in which the president shall assume completely dictatorial powers is up to the president himself. A tsunami could wipe out a few thousand people in India or something, and Bush could say that the tsunami could strike America, at any time, anywhere (next to water). Of course, he'll need something more plausible than that to prevent a mass insurrection, but it's still a frightening law, and I don't know much about the American government so I have no idea how this was passed either. And wonderfully, no major network has picked it up, though it was passed May 9. Is Worldnetdaily respected or widely read? I haven't heard of them before.

Half the Koreans don't know the etymology for Korea/Corea anyway. But I do, so I like meta.

Got a million in the first round, but I hate how it uses American spelling. I have the backspace thing too.

I've given up on Hayate no Gotoku (Hayate the Combat Butler) around ep9... the pacing is really bad (in a technical sense), the jokes are too overdrawn and none of the characters are really good. For me, anyway. Osaka does get the best 'events' but I still hate Osaka. I wanted to find a youtube of the scene just after the one I linked to - um, the one where Tomo smacks Yukari in the face and there's the war drums - but I can't find it. That's just an awesome awesome bit. Currently watching Darker than Black, Nodame Cantabile.

Yeah, I believe it's fiscal '09.

Because in the World of Sand, all games he proclaims are crap are crap for everybody and will fail miserably, and you're wasting your money buying them. By the way, there's another stupid Fallout walking around, it's got screwed up things like crapola graphics, a freaking prehistoric tribe, talking animals, nukes, the President of America and a man about four metres tall looking like he just crawled out of a gundam's rear. We'll see what happens with combat and dialogue, since we have, like, one vague sentence of info each.

Been reading this all the time and never posted, I think. Thanks for the updates Cant. How uptight/relaxed, hard-working/etc is your tester environment ocmpared to some of the other 'office' jobs you've been in? More? Less? Same? Different? Is there generally a high turnover?

2 is a reference to Sakaki's secret love of all things feline, and dolls. Later she'll pop up with drawings of neko-neko (cat) dolls and stuff like that, but she's embarrassed so keeps it to herself. The girl just caught a glimpse of a sketch or something I think. I skip the Chiyo things. Sometimes there's a fine line between what's silly but still cute / funny, and something so silly/cute that it's not funny but just blagh. For example I freaking hate Aria, cause all the voices are those super-high bubbly "oh my"s, and instead of jokes its everyone saying stuff like "Oh, what a nice day and life it is". And I skip the cooking scenes. And Osaka, I hate Osaka. Azumanga is already way too slow-paced, and Osaka makes it worse. I love the crazy girl (Tomo) and the crazy teacher though. Best part of the whole series.

Blank has just escaped an emo-knife to the balls with that edit. 1 - Sure. Once travel gets cheaper and local women get uglier. 4/5 - I'm one of those people that get really un-conscious of who's posting what, and end up responding to each post randomly. That said, Cant is a nice fellow, the Scandinavians are cool by default, and there are other people but I assume they're all Scandinavians, cause they're cool.

We don't have any information on FO3 dialogue, except "conversations with NPCs use a similar style of dialogue tree". Which sounds bad, but could mean anything. We don't know at what points its similar to Oblivion and at what points its not. I hated Oblivion dialogue as well, but there's no need to make a thousand posts about how Oblivion with Guns will rape innocent virgins of Uganda. From random intuition that will probably be very wrong, though, I expect the same first-person closeup, possibly topic-based player responses (but probably more multi-choice like than an encyclopaedia), similar NPC responses, and probably a toned down version of Radiant AI Rumour, which will be even funnier. "Oh man, that's some good dope right there." "You hear about the handheld nuke cannon Joe found in the dumps?" "I grew an extra toe yesterday."

To be fair, the only difference between BG and Oblivion is that the character responses are written out, not topic'd. Oh, and yeah, that you have multiple choices. That's pretty damn crucial and I really don't see Bethesda leaving that out for FO3.

That thread contains no information though. We don't know anything about FO3's dialogue system - it may be ES-style topic-based, back to the old tree-roots, ME-style, or something else. I don't like the pure aesthetics of the Oblivion style zoom-in, but that's all we know at the moment. I honestly don't know why Jorian linked that.

This is interesting because the New Zealand Censorship authorities banned Manhunt the original when it came out. I had the opportunity to speak to the head of the government institution that did so at the time. From memory, he stated that Manhunt was banned not because of its violence or gore (or a thousand films would be too), but the fact that the user was continually encouraged to commit the greatest feat of violence possible in order to progress. The problem was that A) violence was the best and only answer to all problems, B) the number of points awarded was proportional to the level of violence exercised by the player, and C) the progression of the game itself was dependent upon the player's execution of these acts. In other words the player had to commit virtual violence of a sadistic level to progress, was rewarded for doing so, and was encouraged to search even 'better' means of doing so. While some present pointed to, say, GTA3, he pointed out that GTA actually had missions which were fulfilled by performing acts such as, I don't know, driving a taxi, and the level of sadism and carnage possible was more 'optional' a component. At this point those present accepted his justification of the banning; what that really meant for me was that everybody accepted a video game's interactive and socially influential capacities, so that if a player is sufficiently encouraged to sadistic, violent deviance within a video game, this would have debilitating effects on society as a whole and the individual, even if he is a fully grown adult. I think the same conclusion would be instinctively reached by many people who read the OP's article, especially if they are not hardcore gamers.

I'm still good, though not sure what times, so if we get something going just PM me or post here.

Item degradation can be done well, yes. The main things it wants to achieve, for me, are: 1) Make you carry around back-up weapons; especially melee weapons or more 'mundane' types. So you aren't just carrying around a shotgun roaming the wastes; if it snaps, then you're going to have to resort to backups which are usually worse and force you into more desperate situations, i.e. taking on some gunmen with a backup sledgehammer. 2) Impress upon the general atmosphere of resource shortage in terms of food, ammo, money, whatnot. Combined with the fact that the Fallouts have less ammo than the typical fantasy CRPG, you will, not often, but occasionally, be put in situations where you can't just go gung ho with the same weapon / strategy you've used the last 30 battles. I think this kind of thing will help the battles become more interesting and your journey more continuous, as opposed to 'refilling' then coming into the next encounter in exactly the same prisitne condition. It also helps immersion. Obviously, not so much that it becomes a chore. I wonder how everyone thought Oblivion's repair was handled? I thought it was okay but rather dreary.

But then, this takes place in D.C., and what with the conditions after the apocalypse, it is possible that there is still little to no contact between such far-flung areas, and completely different stories are/were taking place from similar conditions. i.e. the mutants in the East Coast need not be the same as the West Coast; or different technologies or conditions might have ensured 'breeding' mutants or some other situation in which they still exist. Probably still a ploy to have them still in the game, but you can see that if it was laid out properly and well-integrated, it wouldn't be completely weird - come on, we had talking deathclaws and aliens.