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You are not making any sense at all.

Thing is, AP didn't really have a profile before this, though Rorie and the gang did try. The early, inescapable comparisons to Mass Effect hurt it considerably, and to use a crude analogy AP is sort of seen as the Haze to ME's Halo, or perhaps more generously, the Sonic to ME's Mario. Now that the game has apparently been delayed indefinitely for reasons that are likely to remain nebulous, you've got the added stink of a Failed Game on it. Outside the confines of this forum Obsidian is known primarily as a studio that can't make functional games. This delay only reinforces that notion. Like Haze, I expect AP to expire commercially right out of the gate, but unlike Haze I'm sure it will turn out to be a cult hit.

Okay who wants to set up a betting pool on when Sega will announce the delay. I'm going for Tuesday. 4 dollars.

Also I don't know if it's been said (just skimming over the thread) but the whole argument over a reasonable age of consent is kind of pointless in this case because the victim expressed a desire to leave and said no repeatedly, which Polanski answered with more and different varieties of sex. You can read the Grand Jury testimony here, and it goes on for a few pages. Not for the faint of heart.

Basically my understanding of the case is that Polanski had a number of different charges leveled against him, including forcible rape. I'm not sure if they had date-rape laws back then but that is, by all accounts, what it was. The victim desired for the case not to go to trial primarily because the defense was likely to bring her entire sexual history to light and she would've been ****-shamed and Polanski might have gone free on that alone. If the crime was committed today, it's hard to say for certain that it wouldn't have played out the same way. So the prosecution worked out a deal with the defense. Polanski attended psychiatric counseling for a period of 42 days and was set to be released after that, but when the deal was sent to the judge of the case it became apparent that he would not sign off on it. This is often held up as justification for Polanski to flee the country (and the major plot point of the highly skewed Wanted and Desired doc) but in actuality, the court is not bound by any agreements between the defense and the prosecutors, and judges have the right to reject plea deals if they feel they don't serve the interests of justice (for example, I believe a federal judge in New York rejected a proposed deal between the SEC and one of the failing banks, as he considered the penalty attached to be too light) So, the play by play: the defense and the prosecution fashion a deal. Polanski pleads guilty to the lesser charge of sex with a minor and is informed that the court is not under obligation to accept the deal. He's on record as saying he understands this. However, when it becomes apparent that the deal will probably be rejected and the case will go to trial, he flees the country. It's often said that the judge was going to reject the deal and send Polanski directly to prison, but this too is a false claim. The judge could either accept the deal or turn it down and send the case to trial, in which case Polanski was free to rescind his guilty plea and fight for his freedom in a court of law. But instead he became a fugitive. The statute of limitations does not apply in this case because it only applies to cases that have not yet been deliberated upon. By pleading guilty and then running, the clock was thrown out on his case. He's guilty in the eyes of the law and he's been awaiting sentencing for over 30 years. His flight is sure to add even more time onto his sentence. There are additional allegations in light of the Wanted and Desired documentary that there was improper communication between the prosecution and the judge. The prosecutor claimed in the documentary that this was the case. However in the last few days he said he lied to the filmmakers. This doesn't mean impropriety didn't take place originally, but it destroys his credibility as a witness on Polanski's behalf, and the original judge is dead, so there's not much way of knowing. Besides, if there was indeed impropriety, the appellate courts would have heard Polanski's case and a mistrial might have been declared and the judge removed from the case. Since Polanski was not willing to stand before the court his demands went unheard. Repeatedly his charges have been met with "come back to the US and we'll hear your case". Ironically enough, the most recent attempts to get the case dismissed were probably the catalyst for his arrest. His lawyers argued that the US had not made any good-faith efforts to apprehend Polanski and thus the case should be thrown out. This lit a fire under the ass of the prosecutor's office and voila, Polanski's now waiting to be extradited. Any way you slice it, there's not much reason why Polanski shouldn't be going to jail now. Even leaving aside the rape allegations (and I wouldn't, Polanski does not deny the details of the case and merely believes that he committed no wrongdoing at all, and that the drunk, sedated 13 year old was hot to trot) there's the fact that he held the law in contempt for so long, and that's bound to bring the hammer down by some measure. Being as rich, famous, beloved and white as he is I don't expect the sentence to be that harsh (he just brought on a close personal friend of the US Attorney General to the defense)

From this point on I highly doubt there will be an RPG made in which you can only play as a female character. Not a traditionally published one, anyway.

That's possibly encouraging. I wasn't aware, before this thread that sega is notoriously bad at updating their website, but perhaps this time the fact that they haven't updated AP's release date, means there's still a chance it'll be out next month. maybe somebody jumped the gun and leaked a "delay til june" message before anything was made official. Gamefly had late October as their previous estimate. I should have made that clear in the last post.

Gamefly has amended their prospective release date to "TBD", and they supposedly only change such details due to direct communication with the publisher.

Dead Space was pretty good. I was interested in the story up until the last part of the game, where it began to get really ****. If you're looking for tension in the game, play on a setting other than easy. It's one of those games where easy is easy, mainly because you're not nearly as hard-up for resources as you would be otherwise.

If that was the case then it would have been pushed back or cancelled months ago. No, this has to have been something unexpected, or something that they've been hiding for a good long while.

Actually I'd say it's one of the better preview articles I've read on AP. Primarily because it mentions Mass Effect but acknowledges that AP is quite a bit different, and also that ME was not the cornucopia of RPG-dom that it's often said to be in game media.

Back in the days of the Aliens RPG forum Sawyer laid out a bunch of the Middleware tech being used. I can't remember off the top of my head, but there were some of the big names.

Tsk. It should be said that it's difficult to speculate what the exact problem is that requires an 8 month bump. How could it be the core gameplay unless Sega was not paying attention to the game until the end of production? Rorie had said several months ago that Sega testers had given the game very positive responses. I don't think the Sony rep had the kind of clout to persuade Sega to push back the game a year. There's something going on, something major. One also has to consider how keeping the AP team on duty for 8 additional months is going to affect the status of Obsidz' other projects. New Vegas is supposed to come out less than 6 months after AP now.

Was there a Blackjack minigame in ME? I totally don't remember that. Quasar (which you could play in the Citadel nightclub that wasn't the strip club) and Blackjack both function around the same basic principle - there's a high limit, 21 in Blackjack, 20 in Quasar. The risk of both games comes from trying to get as close as possible to those limits without busting. Quasar is a much easier game, both because there's no house to compete with and because there's a greater control over the risk of the draw.

In one of the dialogue screenies released there's a conversation you're apparently having with a grungey dude and one of the dialogue choices is "Virus". I'd assume that's what the sickness the twitter feed is referencing.

I've got "Alpha Protocol" tagged in Google Alerts. Today I received at least 13 separate emails pointing to different gaming blogs reporting on Rorie's post in this thread. As far as I'm aware he's the first person connected in any way to the emails to respond to the leak under the pretense that it's real, so people are acting as though this is definitely real.

No, it's a site that has a crapload of regulars even though there are 3 people of the whole staff that are spewing funny lines, everyone else makes you cringe, half the articles are worthless, game reviews are scarce and may or may not be worthless, the forumites are mostly trolls, idiots, thread 100 time repeaters, and for some reason think the place is elite. Oddly enough they were the only "mainstream" outlet I know of that has any sort of interest in WRPGs beyond Bioware. They published a really excellent and thorough post-mortem of Troika that I remember well. I guess the fact that they feature essays as well as reviews is fairly unusual. As for the forum, it doesn't really mean much as there isn't a gaming forum on the internet whose population isn't dumb as **** at least 60% of the time. Even before Halo and the "alpha gamer" trend it's been like this.

In case y'all haven't been keeping track, the game blogz have picked up on Mattie's comments as de facto confirmation of the leaked memo's veracity. I bet he got some angry calls this morning.

Poker is probably too complex of a game to include in F:NV. A better game to include would be Blackjack. It's simple, quick and it's entirely chance-based. Pazaak and Quasar (from KOTORs and Mass Effect, respectively) are basically variations on Blackjack anyhow. If there's actually a minigame you have to wonder how a gambling skill would affect the game. It's more trouble than it's worth, frankly.

Yeah, excellently dreary. Honestly the most fun I had with SoZ was with trying out different party configurations. Beyond that it's pretty sparse and I don't like the economic minigame.

How long is DA supposed to be in terms of hours per playthrough?

They own the art assets. They don't own the rights to any D&D game.

It's just interesting that acceptance of game criticism is applied inconsistently. We have what seem to be several hundred threads about the deficiencies in design of Bioware and Bethsoft games but when that same sort of ****storm attitude is applied to other games it becomes an issue. Taste relativism is only really applied when you like the game in question.

Why people waste so much energy on acknowledging they do not like something? Numerous times? Is it about getting some attention, or some weird need to fix other peoples preferences?

Seriously, you have to be pretty ****ing stupid to think that there's more sex in GTA than The Witcher. There are 24 potential partners in The Witcher. Considering how many named NPCs there are, that's got to be a significant portion of female NPCs. It's probably close to all of the plot-critical female NPCs, if not all of them. That's like 8 or 9 dating sims all rolled into one hack-n-slash. It's really quite something, and the plot contexts in which your PC has sex are sub-Hustler. It's basically fantasy erotic literature. I suppose there's some magical reason why Geralt is so attractive to people, since his personality (and the VA's ability) doesn't really shine any brighter than your average porn star's. I guess that's easier than actually writing characters with motivation. No, my characters aren't retarded, they're just constantly under a magic spell that makes them act retarded! Well this video is supposed to be 6 months old, it was shown to various publishers, so maybe they got one already. Why they did not stay wit Atari? I don't know, don't want to speculate too much about it. The CEO's remarks after the "leak" of the video indicate that it is currently without a publisher.