Tigranes

What is this identify issue? For which game?

some stuff from my folder: I'm sure most people have found the eviiil cheekens. A celebration of AI: the opposing army stands still and does not move AT ALL for 15 minutes.... while in the range of my onagers. Best part of a siege, RTW.

Didn't PS:T eventually sell a lot through persistent sales? Meaning even if the returns for the original were diminished because of their belated nature, the argument could be made that a flashy remake is not entirely an exercise in financial idiocy.

Superman for N64?

NWN wasn't that buggy, there are plenty of bad things (and good) about NWN without dragging such a nonentity up.

Wait, wait, STARTS in 1453? Meaning no Byzantines? travesty.

Pretty much. EU is much more exciting if you like reliving history (or alternative history), whereas no civ, while fun/addicting, could ever give me that sort of immersion.

Actually... page 10 of results seems to be rather... eh... different.

An FMV of TNO having his noggin' cracked and searched for loot....

I'd sonner recommend Europa Universalis II for historical simulation, but I suppose RTW is more 'fun'.

And the two cronies. Biggs and Wedge? Not as much a tradition, though.

The thing that worries me is that they've broken out with the "Our AI is so smart" stuff, nearly every example they give is one of the AI *exploiting* the game, and then breaking it (to a degree). They aren't "dumbing down" the AI because it's too "smart" for the player, they are giving it artificial restrictions because now they are finding that it does things they did not account for. On one hand, it is a hopeful sign of what Radiant AI could be... but on the other hand, it's not "smart" at all, just random.

Well, icecream IS emo.

Personally, there's nothing really hateful about Drizzt, and the clones are much less irritating than Legolas clones anyway. I just think that he is a bad character. Salvatore is a fairly entertaining writer, since I don't really expect much depth from the genre to begin with, but Drizzt is really... well, boring.

well, i feel like i'm repeating myself, but here's a go at being more constructive then: You claimed that KOTOR and PS:T had very similar dialogue, PS:T's being more long-winded (which is true). I say that sure, there are some similarities, because they belong to the same subgenre of RPGs, but I thought they were different enough to avoid such a claim as yours because: -> PS:T's dialogue had at many points very diverging dialogue choices, either for quest outcomes / stat alterations or simply for roleplaying (e.g. Mourns-For-Trees). I felt KOTOR's was much more superficial (e.g. +200 credits) and much less frequent. Sure, you could say "KOTOR just had less", but then we could say the same for BG, IWD, and many other RPGs in the subgenre. -> PS:T's dialogue was unique for the fact that it read more like a script, or a dungeon master's ramblings, than dialogue we are used to - that is, it often included observations and descriptions of the situation. (e.g. "You approach a blue room with banana-patterend wallpapers.) In KOTOR, like most other RPGs, this was absent - good for some, bad for some. -> PS:T used dialogue as a means to solve disputes, resolve quests, etc, etc - and yes, that happens with every damn RPG out there. But it happened to a very great extent (so much that people who ignore dialogue options would miss out on a huge proportion of the story). I think the degree to this happened in PS:T, as opposed to KOTOR, is so great that to call it 'similar except more' is like saying UT had similar combat as Morrowind, just more. Hm. Also, we shold probably clear up if we are talking about KOTOR1, or 2, or both. Since you've tacked on a "2" in there occasionally, Ive just been talking about the series as a whole. True, although my position is not that PS:T > KOTOR, but that they are not similar. The former I reserve as my personal opinion.

Gromnir, I think I did recognise all your 'similarity' examples. My point was that they weren't, in fact, similar. (e.g. KOTOR dialogue is not similar to PST even if it was longer.) Anyway, I felt that Morte became fairly interesting once you find out about the Fortress of Regrets stuff.

Very well, rephrasing: " some of the same kinda dialogues". My point is that PS:T and KOTOR can't even be called similar games apart from the fact that they belong to t he same subgenre. edit: and that by no means is this true: "like it or not, bioware essentially remade ps:t in a more popular setting and simply added more appealing combats and shorter individual dialogues... and they made lots of money doing it."

Missing reply timing due to timezones suck. Again, you are the only one calling them "the same". KOTOR/2's writing was definitely different than PS:T. I honestly don't see how they are similar apart fromt he fact that the two games are both in the same subgroup of RPGs. Melissan's entire dialogue database was over-the-top, etc, doesn't mean that every IE game evar was the same with different reception.

Population Control?

Your comparison is selective, though. For example, PS:T's story and KOTOR's story - personally, the KOTOR story was crap. Most others probably don't feel as negative about it, but a comparison is still forced. Same with the setting of Sigil, and how it was executed. Maybe it wasn't popular, but it was one of the reasons for why PS:T became so critically acclaimed. Oh, and you also seem to equate "poor writing in some cases" with "poor writing" - or, rather, equate "PS:T with less words" with "KOTOR dialogue". To which I would heartily disagree.

Guns?

Don't risk Starforce unless you absolutely cannot live without the game. No telling if your computer will handle it fine (as some do), or screw up in all sorts of ways (as many do). That, and the official "removal tool" they released doesn't even remove everything or fix the problems in most cases. Besides, they are a company that denounces everyone that reports problems as eith 'crackers' and 'pirates', or idiots that just don't know what they are doing. Starforce should be kicked out of the industry soon enough as rootkit was, unless we're rather unlucky.

Theoretically, yes. In reality? Depends on if the weight of my guts outweigh the risks.

On a personal level, of course, something going against my morals and general ethis would qualify as a no-no. I don't know what I would do if it concerned the governance of a country, and if I ever was offered a job in one (heh, right) I wouldn't take it until I knew. Can I impose my own morals and ethics upon the arena of rulership?

Europa Barbarorum has finally released its Open Beta. It is a total conversion mod that shores up a lot of the problems with the original Rome - Total War (which I know at least some of you have). New building / unit system, inclusion of a governments system, new map, new factions, etc, etc. Definitely worth a try, especially if you got hacked off by the shallowness of the vanilla version. Meh. Now we will see how many care.