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Fixality. If the new link is too small, just d/l the pic and zoom in manually.

Thar be an editorial in the December PC Gamer about Fallout 3. Scan! Gonna have to zoom yourself. Nothing really new, but apparently it's going to be set on the East Coast. Reaction from the Fallout camp looks to range from skeptical to positive. I remain skeptical.

I'm anxious because the time NWN2 should come out is the same time my schoolwork will get more hectic and involving I don't want to neglect my school but GOD**** IT I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME. NWN2 should hold me down till Bioshock and Mass Effect make it to me. And I'll have my HDTV to play them with and everything :D It's going to be good. I just have to keep up till then.

I +20 levels. I like epics, and not "epics" in the sense of a grand adventure like KOTOR, but the kind of epic BG was, which was the same storyline extended through 2 games and 2 expansions. I don't know if anybody has the balls to pull that off these days, but I'd like to hope that they do. It was pretty wild and risky to make a game with a level cap of 8. ToB paled in comparison to the other games, true, but it fared admirably for what it was (an +18 level 2nd edition campaign) I might be the only person alive who enjoyed SoU / HotU It was odd of them to make a non-traditional expansion, and then release an expansion of the expansion. I thought it was cool that they linked the OC and the expansions through the NPCs and such. I would have loved it if they had explored what had happened to the Hero of Neverwinter after Aribeth died. I had always envisioned him/her becoming an end-game villain

Aphex Twin - Acrid Avid Jam Shred Coil - The Lost Rivers of London A Perfect Circle - Let's Have a War I used to listen to this stuff when I was in Paris. Got the Coil in the Virgin Megastore up there, which is lucky, because Coil is ****ing nowhere in the US. I can still listen to it and think of the Ecole Militaire, going to bed at 10 and getting up at 6, croissants in the morning and walks to the Eiffel Tower. And the food court at the Louvre, because I wouldn't eat anywhere else, being an American :cool: God, I wish I could go back. It's one of those things I just wish I could do, once before I die, but how could I possibly manage it?

The BG1 banter pack for Tutu doesn't work for me :'( I'm also afraid the banter will suck. I've seen good mod banter and I've seen bad with BG2.

To the videos! I'd also have to agree that KOTOR-style death is not very suspenseful.

PnP gives them reincarnation, but I doubt that would ever get into a video game.

So did anybody figure out what C & D bugs were, exactly?

I couldn't care less about killing CNPCs, I'd be perfectly happy if you could simply eject a KOTOR CNPC when they've stopped being integral to the story, ie goto for the entire game. I fully expect that Carth and Bastila would be unkillable, taking them out would detract from the narrative that Bioware had tried to implement. That all having been said, I don't think it's a huge, terrible mistake to make all the CNPCs unkillable. It seems to me like making everybody expendable would take a lot of teeth out the rather linear games that Bioware makes. That's the problem that you face when you make more characters than the PCs integral to the storyline.

You can never go wrong with 4chan's meme-**** machine.

It's pretty natural for people to waffle on why we went to war. Cognitive dissonance explains it all pretty tidily. Sticking to the previous rationale (WMDs zomg) would have made us to be tremendous failures, with and without the problem of North Korea, and we can't very well fight a war for a false reason. So we say we went in to free the people of Iraq, which actually more difficult to accomplish, but we can indefinitely prolong to our liking. The reason the war's become more unpopular over time is because it's not looking like we can ensure Iraqi freedom, either. Heh, it seems a bit odd, doesn't it, that we should support someone who engages in an act we find morally reprehensible? "They do what they're ordered" can only get one so far, reasonably. And it's difficult to criticize someone in grave danger. Personally, I subscribe to the idea that those that join the armed forces have implicitly supported my right to condemn them, if I so choose. That's what we're supposed to be fighting for. Restriction of thought is contradictory to a war of freedom.

Formulating a reasoned argument against puppy kicking, from the standpoint of Aquinas' Natural Law theory. Well, not that I have to find reasons against it specifically, but it seems rational that Aquinas would find the practice of kicking puppies abhorrent This is harder than it sounds.

L&O and CSI are procedurals, and they tend to be self-contained in their episode arcs. The Shield is a serial, narrative show, with storylines that can last much longer and much more chance for character development. The detectives will spend several episodes tracking down rapists or murderers, and it's much more dramatic when they get caught. Some story arcs will be limited to a single episode, some will be addressed over a few weeks, and some (like the murder in the first episode) will keep coming up throughout the whole series. But the focus of the show, obviously, is the fact that the main characters are dirty cops, and the best parts of the show are the ones in which they're in danger of exposing themselves or getting in over their heads. I like to think of it as L&O:SVU if that show had more balls and a cynical view of the law process. The ensemble cast is also very good, as are the characters they play. The first season was kind of meh, the second and third seasons were good, but the 4th season was when the show started getting really good, largely on the strength of Glenn Close, and later Forest Whitaker in the 5th season (and for a few episodes of the upcoming 6th)

that was Gromnir's experience. some folks really want to hate nwn, as if there ain't 'nuff good reasons to hate nwn, but even the bio haters gets tired 'bout complaining of limited party-size and subpar writing. camera views? Camera Views! nwn sucks, so their camera views must suck too. bioware and their freaking worthless camera views. i hate bioware. they ruined nwn with their limited camera view options. whatever. as long as they got topdown and we can unlock and move camera 'round while game is paused we will be satisfied. the other "options" all seemed pretty worthless and largely unnecessary. HA! Good Fun! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Heh, I didn't like NWN because the main quests consisted of retrieving objects placed in caves in the center of 4 satellite areas connected to the main town area. And you did this 3 times. It felt sloppy, like a half-assed PnP dungeon crawl. I was okay with the dialogue writing, and I thought the camera system was pretty ****in' good. Maybe I didn't detect your sarcasm to an adequate degree.

I have no earthly idea why anybody would say that KOTOR2 is more coherent than KOTOR.

Because apparently they've seen what alien robots look like, and they don't look like that. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Eh, they're better than bionicles.

Sounds like MSoft to me. Microsoft Works could only be installed 4 times, at which point the disc became useless.

In the game itself, or on mp3? You'd probably like KMFDM Vitalic - You Are my Sun Venetian Snares - Frictional Nevada Lupe Fiasco - American Terrorist

Yep, when I first introduced the KOTOR series to my friends, the (only) complaint they had was that if you were a sith, you still basically had to ask people permission to kill them. Maybe that was just because of the relatively small amount of NPCs compared to other games. A powerful character would easily be able to wipe an entire planet of its NPCs in a relatively short amount of time.

I don't know yet. Deus Ex a more mature presentation than most Bioware-games. Not only that, but the story seems like a total rip-off from the popular anime Vandread. But the gameplay and the scope of the gameworld seems nice though <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Never heard of Vandread :\ But I wouldn't be surprised if they ripped off a storyline from anime. FEAR was almost exactly Elfin Lied, which itself was kind of cliched (an overwrought sci-fi angstfest) Was there some aspect of the story that got revealed that I don't know about? Because all I've heard so far is "the galaxy has a terrible secret that could destroy all civilization" I'm steeling myself for a Halo-esque "it's actually a weapon that will destroy everything!" twist. I've got faith in Bioware, but I hope either they either clean up the animation a bit before release or get new voices, because the ones I've heard have not fit at all. It really detracts from the otherwise impressive presentation of the game.

I'm looking forward to this perhaps even more than I'm looking forward to NWN2. It all looks very Deus-Exy. I'm just hoping it's not as... stiff-feeling as the other recent Bioware games.

Yeah, they really force your hand. It would have been better had they made the character more useful or kept him in the end-game, but as he is he would have been much better as a Hanharr-type recurring villain. He's the perfect example of the CNPC you should have an option to fight and kill.

Don't knock on a good thing. BSG is good. I don't know about "Best Show on TV" good, though. Seems like a lot of people are split between the Wire and BSG. I prefer the Wire, myself.

I used to listen to that song while playing with my McDonald's flinstones toys in Aspen and reading the Redwall series. God, those were good times. Coil - Refusal to Leave to Land Ours - Broken Mew - Fox Cub / Apocalypso A Perfect Circle - The Noose