alanschu

Having said that the offensive build let me beat characters like Malak in KOTOR 1 in a single attack round, and same goes for Sion and Traya (maybe not 1 attack round, but certainly faster).

????!?!??!?!?!??! RPGs are not about getting phat powerups and phat lewt. Go play Diablo 2.

That should be a bannable offense!

It's too hard to say which is better, since the game isn't that difficult.

Save the game and try out the various combinations.

I'm certainly not letting my kid play that! First murder simulators, now genocide simulators....what's the world coming to?

I think he goes around and says "What's some of the tedious things we have to do as people?" and then comes up with ideas such as "manage a city" and "raise a family" and then says "Well, I'm going to make it fun because I can!"

www.gameplay.co.uk ships to Canada apparently, so I'll probably go through there.

The Island had a lot of product placement. XBOX, MSN, Aquafina, Cadillac, assorted other cards and whatnot.

I think the simplicity of Spore's beginning is what will get them in, to the point where learning the intricacies of the combat and whatnot is something the [non]gamer will want to do.

Speaking of Bambi...why was it okay for kids to see Bambi's mom get shot a generation ago, but not now?

Another Michael Biehn quote! Nicely done meta

I'm sure that even the rich people that went to Ivy League schools still needed some sort of Academic performance. The schools still have a reputation to uphold and if any of that sort of stuff got out it would be too damaging IMO.

More like a Sim Life or something. It's interesting because the game engine interpolates how a creature would move. The game starts out very focused, with you being a simple creature trying to survive...and once you "lay an egg" or something, you can evolve your creature. Eventually you can evolve them to the state of sentience, and all the design and animation is not done by a team of artists, but buy the game design itself. Eventually you'll enter a more "civ" like nature of the game, and it seems that once the game is "done" you can always zoom out a bit more. For instance, you start just in the water, but then you zoom out and include land. Then you start to create a culture with diplomacy and military and whatnot where you zoom out continent/planet wise. And once you've accomplished "enough," you can zoom out to the solar system, and colonize other planets and whatnot. Finally, you can zoom out to the galaxy view, and use your technology in a SETI radio wave style to find other intelligent life in the galaxy. Providing you have interstellar travel, you can then go and travel to them. Will Wright's demo did this, and it showed him having a blobular UFO type design (of his own custom design) heading to the new planet. He freaked them out and they fired at him, and he showed off a "War of the World" type scene where his technology was too powerful and he blasted the distant civilization with death beams as missiles bounced off of it. The Sim City reference was more in the way the game "plays" so to speak. Describing Sim City doesn't exactly make it sound like a fun game (You just manage a city), and I think Spore is the same way (although I think Spore sounds like a lot of fun to play). It's something you might enjoy along the lines of unit customization. You can customize your species just the way you want it, and how they progress. I believe his sentient species was a three legged creature of some sort.

I'd suspect someone somewhere probably felt the custom units either lacked flavour or was too cumbersome Boo...

I honestly don't think games have become shorter. I can beat pretty much all of my Nintendo games in one sitting. Heck, I can beat a lot of them in under an hour. My SNES games aren't much longer either. And I just played Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and it took me about 10-15 hours to beat. I don't think games like Baldur's Gate were ever the norm. Those Gold Box games didn't seem particularly long either.

I know how you got to hang out with Barrett at the Golden Saucer, no need to tell me. I found the dialogue to be much less romantic. Which I would expect, given societies ways on overreacting anything, they would have had a field day if there was any homosexuality in FF7.

I was thinking more in terms of the movement types (horses, chariots, vehicles, etc), but even then you could still do it I guess.

The enthusiasm of that guy in your picture is contagious!!! I'm all geeked up!

I'm looking forward to Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy, but I don't really care much for the editting that is going to be done for the US release (apparently sex = bad), plus the UK release will be DVD, and I prefer DVDs over CDs. So how and where would I go about importing the UK DVD version if I were to decide to import? What sort of wait times can I expect too? I also live in Canada, not that I think that would make much difference. Thanks!

It was interesting that you didn't get time extensions for checkpoints, but for damage caused

You were a big fan of the atmosphere of SMAC weren't you? Having said that...I wonder why they don't go with custom units anymore. I wonder if there was an AI balance issue that I didn't notice. Also, it could be perhaps that the units that should be in a game like Civ don't lend themselves as well to the customize option as well as SMAC. The chassis and whatnot was pretty much the same for all units of a particular type, with the weapon and the armor being different. It probably would make less sense to have something like that [specifically like that] in Civ 4. However, I think it would be neat if you could customize say you're cavalry once you can get Cavalry. And have a variety of Cavalry units and whatnot. And when you discover tanks, you can customize your tanks and so on.

What would it take? :D The Social Engineering was one of my favourite parts of SMAC, so I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I'm still adopting a wait-and-see policy however.

Woo, finally a farking sticky!!! :D

I believe so. I didn't care for Rise of Nations that much (not my kind of RTS), so I haven't been following Rise of Legends very much. It's quite a spin away from the original Rise of Nations however. And Reynolds does seem to have quite the Midas touch when it comes to games he makes (Rise of Nations did what it set out to do very well....I'm just not its target audience). Looking forward to Civ 4 from Sid and Co. I like how they went with Alpha Centauri's Social Engineering style for its governments, allowing for more mixing and matching. The focus on a fun atmosphere will be appreciated after Civ 3.