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Nay, next Friday.

According to Big Download via the Ossian forums Atari has finally greenlit MoW.

Slow down man you're going waaaaay too fast.

On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being a loop of the teaser trailer ala that G4 "preview" and 10 being all new info and footage, where would this segment fall do you think.

I'm going to roll the dice and guess we'll see more of the Arms Dealer scenario we've been reading so much about for the last 9 or so months. Also, mocap fun from some GTTV lady: pic (you can see some character concepts framed in the background) Google Alerts also flagged down an interview with Chris Parker regarding UE3 that might be old, I can't tell, but it's walled off in an industry-only website.

This could be another one of those cases where the Aussie game market has limited his choice. Importing is apparently a hassle.

His profile shows he hasn't been on the forums since the 19th of February, which was about a week after the rumors of cancellation and layoffs first hit. We wish him luck if it's true.

I'm rolling my eyes at you No that actually did happen. There are instances with army and air force volunteers that are public knowledge, and it's highly unlikely that there haven't been tests performed on domestic and foreign civilian individuals or populations that are not public knowledge. That's how the world works.

Shweet.

I've thrown threads out in all my forums, but most people who are interested want to know about a release date so they can get their hopes up. Cest la vie. We're a ways away from release, I think. A few months at the earliest. So cool your japanese jets why don't you.

Dead Rising Shop Till You Drop!

Google Alerts just threw this at me. A big old list of game developer twitter accounts. For Obsidz there's links to two QA testers and, uh, framerate's twitter too. News flash: AP subtitles are being edited. http://gameindustrytweet.com/2009/03/02/ga...t-update-30209/

In the Play 2.0 preview linked on the main Obsidz page there's a tidbit or two about gameplay.

The mission structure sounds, on its face, like KOTOR or ME's. I'm hoping for more of a hybrid of that and Bloodlines'. Choice of locales, but you will be required to return to those locales at certain points.

Meet the FEAR 2, same as the FEAR 1

I would rather that the gaming press not treat its audience as though they they were stupid, even if gaming boards across the internet tend to support the notion that they are, in fact, stupid. Besides which, I'm not sure the writer really grasps the notion of player choice. Oh hello pagebreak, old friend.

Not using real words is what we in the business of using words like to call "being unprofessional". If you're writing in any official capacity you ought to be professional. Unless you trust the incisive critics over at hipster runoff. On the whole that article is really horribly overwritten. Compare this flowery turd: "Role-players relish character creation. It’s that beautiful blank slate - that special time when the imagination can forge an entire history with a few clicks, where your mental image of a daring rogue hits the page in the form of high dexterity, archery training, and dropping a dozen points into his lockpicking skill." with this: "Character creation is a useful and exciting means of conceptualizing your character, turning statistics into recognizable traits and skills." They convey the same idea, except the second one does not suck.

I don't disparage the fantasy genre as much as some others here, but I far prefer sci-fi to high fantasy. Going from Aliens to another "Tolkien with a twist" game would be quite a step down, in my opinion. I was really looking forward to Aliens :I

Characters in most Alien/s films, novels, comics, and graphic novels rarely have the luxury of turning each other down for support. And I think that all four films had compelling reasons for (most) of the folks to stay together. In Alien, the cast was a ship crew with nowhere to go. In Aliens, Ripley, Newt, and Burke were the outsiders among a (stranded) marine platoon. In Alien3, you had the inmates of the prison in a mutually-loathing bond of brotherhood. And in Alien: Resurrection, it went back to the ship crew. Most of the characters don't have any practical alternative to helping each other. Even if they hate the guts of everyone around them, the best they can do is wait for an opportune moment to screw everyone else over and take off into the darkness of space. That occurred to me, but another interesting feature of the group dynamic in the Aliens movies (and in classic horror films in general, ala Night of the Living Dead) that sort of fouls up possibilities for Aliens and that I cannot get around is the fallibility of the characters. Ripley always keeps it together, and in Aliens / Alien 3 she had a few people with cool heads, but the other people in the group are freaked the **** out, like any actual person would be in their situation, and they make mistakes. Terrible, costly mistakes that only make their lot worse. Now, Obsidz has shown a certain willingness to let their characters have their own wills in the past but you'd be inviting a lot of griping from your average gamer if you follow the films in that regard. Players are used to having control. Horror is very much about having no control at all. I wonder if Obsidz would be willing to allow characters to die abrupt, passing deaths like they do in the films, despite all the player's best efforts. I admit I'm very excited by the prospect.

See that all sounds like a copout to me. KOTORII was not made a thousand years ago. It's doable. It's just that developers expect that they can get away with bad characterization. Most gamers are more than willing to indulge them in their laziness.

I'm interested in how Obsidz is going to go with parties into the future. KOTORII/MOTB/Torment all had well-established mystical universes that made it relatively easy to construct some grand device that made party members' seemingly irrational desire to stick with you into a halfway sensible, even tragic circumstance. Aliens (fingers crossed it's actually going to get made, heh) won't have that luxury.

The writer is pro-party, insofar as having a party makes sense. The writer does not like Bioware because they don't really provide justification for why a party member would decide to join the PC. In most all Bioware RPGs, CNPCs make spur-of-the-moment or momentarily necessitous decisions to join the PC's party and then form extraordinary loyalties in short order, for no reason or in the face of very good reasons not to permanently join the party. When thinking critically about the situations presented it all makes very little sense. The writer likes parties the way MCA did them in times past, at least, he appreciates that MCA makes it a point to actually give a reason (any reason at all!) why your party members would deign to join you and stay with you through terrible danger and repeated death. And that's definitely one of the things you could point out as a strength in Avellone's style. He does not like NWN2, though. Somebody ought to get him MotB. It meets his criteria of a "good party-centric game". He frets that AP, being a solo RPG, will not continue what he sees as Obsidz' admiral pursuit of rational party-based RPGs.

yakkity schmakkity do The writer doesn't seem to relish the idea of going party-less in Alpha Protocol.

Oh hey, it is. 2 years old. Google Alerts is losing its touch.