Pop

How is Mass Effect not a hack'n'slash? To me, it seems that the planets are shaping up to be self-contained little dungeons full of third person shooty combat. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Aside from that bar scene, they haven't shown a lot in the way of interaction, true. But as far as far as pretenses go, this doesn't look as thin as, say, Diablo or Dungeon Siege, where your quests are loot-expedition excuses initiated by merchants. That's what passes for "Action RPGs" these days. I don't expect it to be PS:T or Arcanum, either. But I'm expecting something like a KOTOR weighted more heavily towards combat. That doesn't bother me. I don't expect anything less out of Bioware these days. As for the chick's voice, I don't like it, but I don't like any of the voices I've heard so far. But I'll get used to them.

I don't think the KoS made any plans, per se. To use an overthought comparison, the KoS is akin to a Lovecraftian god, potent but remote. The shadow priests are cultists who revere the KoS in the same way Lovecraft's cultists revered Cthulu. They follow him because they know he'll come anyway, and when he does they might be spared destruction. But like Cthulu, the KoS doesn't really concern himself with his cult's aims. The cult worships him, but their interests aren't his. Black Garius sought out the KoS out of a lust for power. He knew that the KoS was powerful and overestimated his ability. He thought he could steal the KoS' power and discard him, and instead he became enslaved.

With this and (in a certain sense) Bioshock, I'd say 2007 looks pretty good for RPGs that aren't of the hack-and-slash variety. If some kind of NWN2 expansion is released towards the end of the year, we'll have had a pretty good crop. Certainly better than this year.

The KoS was evil, but not through any fault of his own. He did what he thought was necessary to protect the country he obviously loved a little too much. His actions weren't evil, but they led to him being evil by chance. That's supposed to illicit sympathy from the player. It doesn't work very well. I can tell this without my usual overanalysis, so I think it should have been obvious. The silver sword and the Ritual powers were both supposed to be needed to beat the KoS, but the general consensus is that the Ritual powers were not terribly useful. As for the sword, I believe the shadow portal that appears during the last battle can only be destroyed using it.

Autechre - Second Peng Aphex Twin - Domino Both of which are too big for the gallery. So, uh, sorry?

*SPOILERZ* I think what Obs was trying to convey was that the KoS was not really evil. He was a blind idiot machine. The Shadow Weave stuff makes sense given FR lore. When Karsus magicked himself into Godhead and caused the Netheril cataclysm, the Weave from which all magic drew dried up for an instant. All the mythals that had been maintained by Netheril went haywire. The flying cities crashed to the ground, dead and wild magic zones popped up, all that jazz. The KoS was basically a walking mythal maintained by the weave. When Karsus initiated the cataclysm, the KoS got ****ed up just like all the other sustained spells. I'm not completely sure about the whole story story, but I think when the Weave was weakened by the cataclysm, it stopped being able to provide the magical fuel that powered the war engine that was the Guardian. Without the sustenance, the Guardian started wasting away. But the thing was that normal magic doesn't draw from the Shadow Weave, so when the cataclysm took place, the Shadow Weave wasn't weakened in the way the vanilla Weave was. The powerful spells that drove the Guardian were no longer sustainable by the Weave, so instead of failing, they took the path of least resistance as some manner of magical physics, and started feeding off the robust power supply of the Shadow Weave. But the Shadow Weave, while powerful, was a corrupting force, and thus not only was the Guardian's purpose corrupted, causing him to turn on those who created him, but the walking mythal that the Guardian was became this tremendous beacon of negative power, and he became the KoS. There was an immense amount of epic Shadow Weave magic emanating from the Guardian, and he became like a natural open conduit to the negative energy plane, thus by his very presence the land became barren and the dead turned to undead. It's all still kind of confusing, and I agree that he wasn't that compelling of a villain, but I don't think it's because there was any inherent flaw in his design. I think had Obs elaborated upon the story and the nature of the KoS he would have been. The fact that the KoS threat is completely the result of chance rather than hubris or dark design were kind of beside the point in the game. There wasn't much of an element of tragedy. I didn't feel bad about having to destroy the KoS, nor did I get much sense that I was supposed to, despite this backstory. He might have well have been some inscrutable menace from a distant world who didn't need explaining. There are still some things I was confused about. What exactly was causing the KoS to "come back"? Was it the efforts of Garius? Was he naturally waxing in power out there under the Mere?

Only get GoW if you've never played Halo, fancy MP arena combat, or put grfix in the top 3 considerations as far as what makes a game great. Oblivion is better if you prefer to play solo, and you have a lot of time you need wasting. Just don't go into it expecting an RPG. It also has the best as far as downloadable content goes, as far as any 360 game is concerned. Double Agent is probably the all-around best of the three, if not just because there's not a lot of bloated hype around it. Basic Splinter Cell gameplay, 400% more story than GoW or Oblivion, good MP. More stealth than action. I'd urge you to get Dead Rising if you want to play the best exclusive 360 has to offer in the way of sheer gameplay awesomeness, though. But only if you've got an HDTV, because otherwise you can't read **** on it.

ya, well, I think the band is supposed to subjugate the realm of pop music under an oppressive quasi-leninest bureacracy. I'm all for that. :cool:

a Fake hipster band name database. One of them is "The Pop Stalinists", so I ran with "The Pop Stalinist" on my first forums, and after awhile people just started calling me "Pop".

Meh, I haven't made a "pack mule" character yet, meaning a character with an initial >14 strength, so I have to rely on Khelgar to carry most phat l007 (that's how you spell it, right?) like weapons and armor. And when you're a spellcaster with a 10 strength, you push your limits if you hold onto all the essences you make. I'll probably run a half-orc or a fighting class here after my Warlock's done with.

If our intent is to stop participation in a war, a draft would theoretically be effective. Boys get drafted, and families who don't want those boys to die at war then exert pressure on the legislature to have restraint when declaring it, and war is not declared. This was the point of the draft legislation that was recently "considered". Since war cannot be declared without an okay from congress, if more congressmen had children in the military who didn't volunteer, the logic goes, we wouldn't be at war. But that doesn't work, obviously. That craftiest of the governmental branches, the executive, discovered after Vietnam that war can easily be waged without congressional approval. Thus we had all kinds of "police actions" that committed troops to foreign soil, and there was about **** all anybody could do about it. After 9/11 congress virtually issued a mandate giving Bush freedom to do whatever he wanted. I can't fully blame the bastards, at least they gave it up with the intention of not being useless, like they usually are. But yeah, drafts are bad for ongoing war efforts, but the point of the draft in this case would be to get us out of a war effort, not bolster it.

I remember a few parts being unskippable (like the NWN-style interchapter movie ), but I never had much problem with the concept of wordy cutscenes in the first place.

Bah, Ministry was so much better during their totally ghey new wave period. Definitely the hardest band ever to open for Boy George. I've seen them play a few times. Seeing them the first time was an experience. Met Al too, he was a charming drunk (signed my car door and high school press pass) but without Paul, Ministry is less industrial metal than it is straight metal, and it isn't terribly interesting to me. An unsettling number of neo-nazis show up for the shows, too.

I was under the impression that she wasn't necessarily a Vampire. She doesn't seem to regard herself as such. Certainly she's some kind of undead since she was "alive" at some point (and a lesbian, no less) but the fact that she eats flesh as opposed to blood would make her something different. Also the implication was that she wasn't embraced, but achieved undeath through her necromantic pursuits. That's what I gathered, anyway. If she is a vampire, she's of some incredibly obscure bloodline. I haven't read of any strains of vampirism that fit the bill, but then again all the materials I have are post-Masquerade.

Of course no temporal power was established by Alexander's conquest. In that he's just like any other great conquerer, be it Temuchin or the Vikings. Besides, I'm pretty sure he did commit a purge or two. What he did bring was Hellenistic culture. Hell, they have greek architecture in India. If there was one thing (I'm aware it was a confluence of things) just one thing that allowed the greek epics and Aristotle to survive past the death of Greece, it was Alexander's Conquest. Culturally, Alexander left an epic legacy.

I haven't played The Longest Journey, but Rojsberg mentioned his idea being like Half-Life, and I imagined the interesting but rather detached Half-Life opening sequence multiplied in length many times over. That's what I responded to. As much as I liked that Valve had the balls to include a quiet beginning to the game, I recognized that it was all flavoring, a prelude to what the real game was (personally, my favorite parts of Half-Life were the transitional phases, where you had a crowbar and a gun with one clip and you had to figure out what the hell was up). I'm saying that if we're going to make a game with a long, quiet beginning, then we have to do a better job than that of making that part just as relevant as the part with all the fire and action. Maybe The Longest Journey does that, but Half-Life surely doesn't.

Ooh, that's harsh. I'm not fond of that "rawk" mix of the song. He mangles the chorus. The original is much better, he doesn't force it. Okay video, though. Better than the other ones I've seen. Buck 65 was apparently a pretty good baseball player back in the 90s. He had a whole series of songs about baseball. Hey look, there's one now! There's one about shoeshining! There's a weird rapping Johnny Cash impression!

What? Big cutscenes? Sure, they were big, but they didn't particularly unnecessary to me. The cutscenes involving Black Garius were obviously written like a novel that shifts between the first and third person. The player is let in on info so they have an idea of what is going on beyond their character without the character being privy to it. I personally found the BG2 dream sequences to be much more annoying than the NWN2 cutscene dialogue. I can't expect NWN2 to not have a lot of text because I can't expect every RPG to be like KOTOR, with full voice acting for every line. That would add a LOT to the already large game. And I read faster than I listen to voice actors. If I can get subtitles, I will. Most of the time I'll cycle through dialogue pretty quick. Not usually if I've never heard the VA before. As for not being able to leave your computer, the cutscenes provide a pause option, they always have. I don't remember that being a required dialogue. And I'd probably hate an RPG in which all dialogue was strictly functional. NPCs are supposed to be characters, and I'm not sure of a way in which to establish a character without dialogue. I think the point of the Blood War guy was that he was a windbag. He was also explaining the context of the game. I don't know if you noticed, but there are several running themes to PST, and the Blood War is one of them. If I had never played D&D and there wasn't a lot of dialogue, PST would have been intolerably confusing from the outset. Hell, it was pretty confusing even with my broad foundational knowledge of the conventional D&D universe.

HL took about 20 minutes to get to the action. After about 40 minutes, most people are going tell you to get the **** on with it. It implies that you don't know what kind of game you want to make, since in most cases the game would be radically different from the pre-apocalypse to the post-apocalypse. If you're an office drone or a tax auditor or something, you'd just move around the gameworld, soak up the foreshadowing or maybe play mini-games till the world ends and you can pick up a gun and all of a sudden you somehow know how to use it and you're off like Gordon Freeman. Even if you can make a compelling tax-auditing section of the game, it would be irrelevant to the rest of the game, and an irrelevant hour and a half is a bit much, eh? It might work if the character is a beat cop or a detective or a soldier, chasing around criminals and getting into firefights and whatnot, and then BANG the setting changes. But then the first part of the game might seem like a distraction to the meat of the game. A stealth-type game, though, that could be cool. It'd be more compelling if you were a weak character or the setting was hyper-realistic, like a Tom Clancy game or maybe Thief. You wouldn't go running around and shooting things, you're just some regular guy under extraordinary circumstances. You'd have to rely on prudence and stealth to make it out alive. No running and gunning. That's how I'd see that going, anyway.

Moar sole dominion of the "Music We Listen To" folder. I would have thought more people would have partaken. Anyway, I've been forced recently to find "wintery" songs. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - As Sure as the Sun Editors - Open Your Arms

I sorry, honestly, you lost me here. Can you break down that argument? Not kidding. I'm just missing it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, "there is no absolute truth to ethics" is an ethical statement (we are describing ethics) and thus we can rephrase that statement accurately as "the absolute truth about ethics is that there is no absolute truth to ethics". We are, in effect, saying that something is both true and false at the same time. How can it be absolutely true that nothing is absolutely true? It's like saying the truth is false. The truth can't be false, it's true. It's a contradiction. That doesn't strike you as a bit odd?

Killing someone in the defense of others or in self-defense isn't murder. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's true. But there's no contradiction. Tarna says Which does not presuppose killing in defense. For example, tarna might want to kill a father who beats his children every day such that they are in constant danger of being killed. and Metadigital says which supposes that tarna's intent to kill, regardless of good or bad reasons, is tantamount to support of murder. I was trying to point out that this was not necessarily the case.

If morality is subjective then it doesn't matter, as you're essentially defining the question away - "it's all a matter of perspective." But that's unacceptable. Moral relativism leads to dead-end arguments like "it's just as valid to kill a person as it is to hug him." For a moral system to be legitimate, it must claim to be - at least for the most part - objective. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Claim to be? I claim to have a Lotus in my driveway, that doesn't make it so. Neither does declaring something unacceptable make it untrue. The only way for morality to have a base is for it to be agreed apon by a group with the ability to enforce it. It's still subjective, however. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> There are plenty of reasons why relativism doesn't work even as a theory, though. The primary reason being that it contradicts itself. "There is no absolute truth to ethics" is itself an absolute statement. In effect, it's saying "there is absolutely no absolute". That's like saying "this statement is false". On a deeper level, though, normative relativism preaches tolerance for other ethical points of view, but it contradicts itself further in that it preaches tolerance for intolerant practices, so long as those intolerant practices are accepted by a society. Of course it is difficult to create an ethic that applies to all people (I don't have one), but it doesn't necessarily follow that an account that could can't exist.

If you're talking about realpolitik, it's a term that is german in origin. Even if it was latin, I don't see how it's being used to win any argument or make anyone look smarter. We should be winning arguments using our reason, not our language. *edit - Ah, n/m. Nevertheless, I'm still a bit confused as to this whole discussion. I'll have to look back on it from the beginning. Gimme a few.

I don't get your definition of realpolitik as a "moral system". If anything, realpolitik requires the lacking of any moral considerations. But I don't really know if acting on what's "right" by our own standards is really an option. If that were the case, we'd be "liberating" North Korea and Iran, and thus putting ourselves at some risk of nuclear attack, which isn't very wise.