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So it's like how all rock stars are orchestral composers who just couldn't make the cut.

I'm going.

That's the publisher's call. Alpha Protocol will definitely be available, don't know about Obsidz' other games.

Violence is largely acceptable in the Den. Find Tubby and Flick and kill them, and then take their inventories. Some junkies might flail about (turn up your combat speed or you'll be waiting for awhile) but there will be no real resistance.

That's great, especially since before this AvP was incompatible with anything greater than Win XP.

Depends on your armor choice, apparently.

When is this game coming out?

Honestly I think most gamers won't care about reactivity in a demo, just the appearance of choice. You don't even need the promise of consequences down the road - the average gamer's understanding of choice and consequence begins and ends with the choice. I see tons of people lauding the choices you make in Mass Effect even when there's no resolution to the choices in the game itself. If you had a demo that let you get to the arms dealer, for example, having the demo end with that branching situation will be a good enough pull.

They're not changing the title of the game, no company is that dumb. As for the AP agency emblem, that's a pretty small thing for Sega to get involved with, isn't it? And at this late stage? I'm betting the cover art is changing to give it more "zazz" with unfamiliar customers.

new box art maybe?

Convenient bull****. Google's kowtowed to Chinese censorship for years, and only now that China's state-run service is mopping the floor with Google's chinese affiliate and google.cn is crashing and burning, now Google has found its voice against this oh-so-awful government oppression. Gosh, how brave of them, and crafty too - they're betting that global public pressure will give them leverage to get China to lift its censorship restrictions, thus handing them an advantage in the market. Ethics - for that one time in a million where acting completely without it doesn't give you what you want.

1. Sporadically. It should pick up here soon. Generally an update every 1-2 weeks is the norm. 2. Nope! 3. I assume you mean weapon types. There are pistols, submachine guns (dual-wielded), shotguns, and assault rifles, as well as unarmed combat. There are also a number of non-combat skills. 4. That's a good question. There's a knife but I think it's only been shown to be used in stealth takedowns. Maybe one of the devs can say if it's usable in hand-to-hand combat. 5. Nope.

bugs?

Let's move this thread in a less rote direction and talk about MCA's new blog post on game writing vs. other sorts of writing. Uploaded about 45 minutes ago.

I don't know, I mean Fallouts 1 and 2, with their random encounters, were in no way hurting for firearms of any sort. It was Van Buren that was supposed to introduce scarcity.

I'd agree with that, and I'm wondering how they'll change repair in NV. Where I think Bethsoft really dropped the ball was in normalizing merchant repair skills across the board. I think that your proposed system could really work - the CRAFT mod (I think that was it) addressed it pretty well. You could repair guns with other similar guns, but there were also misc. items that counted as repair parts (wonderglue for leather armor and clothing, abraxo cleaner for firearms, etc.) and you could create all-purpose "repair parts" at a workbench. Where I think they (or Obsidz) could take it a step further is by making the use of repair parts restricted to relatively skilled Repair Boys and merchants (you give the merchant the repair part, they apply it with variant degrees of efficacy, for a fee) The problem with this is that it's a little complicated for new users, and it'll be difficult to properly convey at what point a Repair Boy can do it all himself. As usual, balance solutions invite yet more balance problems.

By contrast to all of that, the Dragon's Tooth pretty much owns the game as soon as you get it, no matter your build.

Well, there are 10 joinable NPCs. Conversely there are 9 achievements for recruiting and 1 achievement for "acquiring Geth technology". Make of that what you will.

The circle of life continues.

I'm actually hoping they keep the easter eggs to a minimum with this game, or at least, if they have easter eggs they shouldn't be things you actually use but things that are just in the world somewhere, like some of the impromptu object sculptures in Fallout 3. If they're going to include a hidden weapon it'll have to be the gristle gun.

Not necessarily. One of the things about SPECIAL was that in terms of fighter builds the only really good one for the beginning and middle of the games was a Small Guns build. Every other build - big guns, energy weapons, melee, unarmed - paled in terms of efficacy because they all either had only top-quality high-power weapons (big / energy), or there was no sensible progression in power from weak to potent (unarmed / melee) Up until the point where the higher-tier weapons were introduced (all big guns and energy weapons, super sledge, power fist) Small Guns were much better than any other weapons skill, at which point there was either an abrupt leveling off or even a massive jump in efficacy that made other builds even more effective than Small Guns (energy and melee builds specifically) Breaking that pattern with Energy Weapons was rather easy, since even in the original Fallouts laser weapons and pistols in particular were pretty weak, so in Fallout 3 they did an admirable job of positing energy weapons as a viable alternative to small guns by introducing laser pistols very early. Big guns by their very nature are much harder to balance, but they had to include something. The Rock-it Launcher was actually a pretty good idea in terms of introducing a Big Gun that wasn't super-powerful at the beginning of the game (really, what Big Guns needed was a single-shot weapon that wasn't explosive), but it takes a lot of hoop-jumping to get. All of this was the reason why Sawyer saw fit to condense gun skills in SIMPLE. I'm wondering what they'll do in NV.

Have you ever tried using a black character in ME? It doesn't work at all.

Edmonton's got to be looking more attractive than Orange County these days. California's in a bad way. Any idea what he was working on when he left?

It's good to know the aspies have fans now too.

To be perfectly honest, retailers listing a game as coming out on the 30th or 1st of a month can be safely estimated to be guesswork. That's just kind of how it is.