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When I was a kid I had a computer and I had a Sega Genesis. Nintendo never appealed to me. My favourite toys were - Commander Keen - Raptor - Biomenace - Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (!) - Rise of the Triad And other assorted Apogee games. They're all dead / freeware games now, ahem. On the Genesis, I had: - Toejam & Earl - Soldiers of Fortune - Desert Strike - Streets of Rage 2 (!)

Was playing GTA: San Andreas, but I got to the part where learning to fly is required to further the game, and I just can't get the hang of it. Otherwise, I'm trying out the first NWN custom module (Tragedy in Tragidor?). Noticed a few bugs here and there, and a lot of bad punctuation, but it seems to be designed relatively well. Last part I played was the goblin caves, which were exceedingly difficult for my 6th level barbarian. They don't stop coming.

As long as this isn't an "epic" written by a teenager, I think we're set. Wait, you went to see Eragon?

That's a beefy-looking vampire.

It was never a good idea to take James Cameron seriously. At first he made pretty good B-movies, and then he started making Summer blockbusters like Aliens and T2, but then he made Titanic, and he was "an important filmmaker" all of a sudden. He hasn't directed anything since, but he's produced a few documentaries and IMAX things. It was just announced the other day that he'll be returning to action epics. Avatar or somesuch. Starts in April. Anywho, without Cameron T3 wasn't bound to be any good as a "fun" movie. But it did pretty well for itself, all things considered. Arnie didn't even want to be in it without Cameron attached, but he asked Cameron what he should do and he said "ask for a ****load of cash", so Arnie asked for $30 million fully expecting them to refuse, but they didn't, and he made T3. It was a big deal, back then. There was talk of possibly replacing him with the Rock. Personally, I find the Rock to be a better choice, if not just because he's not nearly as much of a **** as Arnie IRL. But it's perfectly reasonable now, having seen Cameron's super-expensive CG phantasmagorias, to see T1 and wonder why it got as much love as it did. Nothing from the 80's will ever trump Christopher Lambert's excruciating accent from The Highlander. Plus, the badass villain listens to Queen. You can't beat it.

I guess if it's animated, it could be okay. The less said about the live action D+D movies, the better. Still, having never read any books beyond a Salvatore compilation, I don't think I could watch this unironically. B-list cast hooray! Can't go wrong with Phil Lamarr.

Should've named him "Rock". If you can throw people through the walls of shacks, does that mean that the shacks can collapse? That destrection looks exceptionally clean. Destructible environments have been done before in FPSs (Red Faction 2, which I'm still embarassed to have played all the way through) but not very well. I'm guessing they just marked a specific place on the wall that could be destroyed with flying bodies.

I could throw guys through walls all day long and not get bored with it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Maybe that's why they didn't make you The Hulk instead of David Banner. You wouldn't have the same internal conflicts. Damn it all, now I can't remember if it was David or Bruce Banner that was the original Hulk.

That'd be a gamble, though. Most players would have no idea what radiant AI is or what it entails. Given the supposedly drastic difference between having it on and having it off, and given Bethesda's desire to make their games as relatively accessible as they can be, I don't believe they'd institute a permanent toggle that would no doubt greatly affect the difficulty of the game. At the very least they'd have to have an option down the line to turn it off, after the player has had an opportunity to explore the full ramifications of the difference. Maybe the risk of people using the AI to metagame is acceptable enough to make it something that can be changed at any time, like the difficulty slider.

I've used Gamespot since I was a kid, for reviews and patches and such. It has an ever-so-slightly shorter grade curve than IGN. These days, I get all my news/rumors from Joystiq and dedicated fansites (DAC, NWVault, etc.) and still use Gamespot for the odd patch or walkthrough.

My first thought was "If the PC is competing with NPCs for loot and such, wouldn't a toggle for radiant AI mean that a player could turn it on, wait for the NPCs to clean out a place for all danger, and then turn it off and take the loot that the NPCs are now uninterested in?"

It is. And on that note, HD-DVD has just won the next gen format wars. HD-DVD has support of the Porn industry. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's weird, I thought Blu-Ray had also gotten porn support. Worked for DVDs and VHS. We'll see how this does. Who wants expensive porn in high def when there's plenty of free, SD porn on the internets? Amirite?

Seems they didn't learn from Apple either. Whne you make bad design decisions, you pretend that they don't exist, and then build a scrappy counterculture around your "perfect" product.

If it is indeed a trilogy, it could work as 1-8, then 9-15, then 16-20, perhaps allowing for prestige classes. But that's going a bit too far into the future (I'll probably be out of college by the time the second module came out, if it gets made).

Filmspotting. Like Siskel & Ebert (they're also from Chicago), but online. If you like movies, and have itunes, you can't go wrong with them. They come in episodes of an hour each.

I don't really own 99% of the music I have. And I don't use itunes. I get a lot of gifts.

my update utility didn't pick it up.

Project Georgia is an original IP, as Mr. Holmes pointed out elsewhere. So if it's a vampire game, it's not that vampire game. Or Bloodrayne. Welcome to the boards, Raymond Holmes.

Have you been reading the thread?

So will the reputation system work towards a balance ideal, where, say, if you complete a quest for the progressive thayans, you get +2 reputation with the progs and -1 with the tradionalist thayans? Or is it a +1 / -1 dynamic? Because if you do it right, playing with the +2/-1 system would allow a careful player to be more or less in everyone's good graces. That is assuming that you don't have to choose sides right off the bat (and commit to a set path of quests), and that extensive work for one camp wouldn't preclude work for the other. In other words, would the PC be able to play both sides of a conflict (prog vs. trad Thayan, or Thayan vs. Simbian) or would he have to throw his lot in with a single faction?

I dunno about that. The Fedex quest required to enter the thieves' guild was in competition against NPCs. As I remember them, one was an idiot that did nothing, and the other knew exactly what to do and made a beeline for the needed item. It was an adequate feint. The point of the quest was to lift the item off of the successful thief, not get to it before her. The PC couldn't possibly do what he needed to do (in this case, bribe the location of the item out of local bums) in order to complete the quest before the competitive AI, who didn't need to investigate anything. I metagamed past it to avoid hassle, since I wasn't that great of a sneaker and thus not a good pickpocket. But if that's what Radiant AI meant to most of the gameplay of Oblivion I'm glad they took it out. It wasn't really all that dynamic or exciting.

Second-Party Developer. They're getting more and more rare with the increasing cost of game development. Obsidian was a second-party developer for the Xbox with KOTOR2 up until the PC port, and is technically a second-party developer for the PC with NWN2. But the article doesn't seem to connotate PC development with the term. The thing is, porting a game from a PS3 to a 360 or vice versa is relatively simple compared to porting to a Wii. For one, there's the obvious difference between controller types and accomodation of the Wii's motion-sensor capabilities. And the Wii doesn't have HD capability like the others, nor does it have near the processing power or rendering power. Games look different and play more different. So we're going to see over the next few years a lot of games that come out for the PS3 / 360 and not on the Wii (like Oblivion) and if we see games that come out for all 3 platforms the game is either going to be gimped on the Wii or is going to be different in many basic ways (Madden, for example, which actually turned out pretty well on the Wii)

IIRC the "special edition" of Morrowind that came out after the initial release of the main game was priced at $20 or $30, if not just because by that time Morrowind was already out in another, "platinum hits" edition. Considering the 360 is next-gen, none of their games, except for the neglectable ones (championship poker, etc.) have been under $30, even the platinum "hits" like PDZ, and if they didn't cut prices during the release of the PS3 it's hard to say when they will. Tentatively, I'll just predict a $30 special edition for the 360 when it comes out. Technically, $40 would probably still be a deal, as at this point the core game, plus all the XBL points for the extra content, costs at least $60. Also, it might be worth noting that Bethesda has given first official dibs on the new expansion to the official Xbox magazine, hence the atypical Bethesda silence here in the face of people trashing Oblivion. By some accounts, the Xbox magazine will get first dibs on F3 news as well.

Children of Men. Pretty savage, bleak movie. Reminded me of HL2 most of the way through, 'cept for the hopelessness. Cuaron uses a lot of conceits from the beginning, namely and the random, spontaneous violence of the first scene, and idea that Kee is humanity's last fragile hope for the future, to set a palpable tone of tension that stays throughout the whole movie. When nothing's happening, you're bracing yourself for the inevitable shattering of the peace. Track shots were amazing, too. They must have had a big budget for firecrackers.

Weren't you the guy that refuted the Hobbesian conception of selfish human nature?