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Atari might not have the capital to make a BG3 worthy of the title. Some sort of joint deal seems like a good idea, if possible.

Buh? Alt+tabs are in fact unsupported. It's sort of pigheaded to expect them to work in spite of that.

Clearly you've never been to Northern Colorado. Summer starts around mid-July.

Mexed Missages! Unless June counts as Summer in Orange County.

There are some modifications out there expanding the race / class list that really spice up SoZ, for me anyway. Modder Kaedrin made massive PrC / feat additions from the PnP game, beyond a new base class, the thug (basically a lightly armored fighter trading feats for sneak attack progression, great for rogue/fighter builds) I think Tale was hemming and hawing ages ago about sneak attack damage not being applied to eldritch blasts and I believe this mod addresses that. There's a mod combining that with another massive mod adding dozens upon dozens of subraces / new races (goblins! lizardfolk! etc.!), but it will only work if you tinker with the code, apparently. I eagerly await somebody upping a version that actually works out of the box. I'm going through NWN2 OC (much better than I remember!) with Kaedrin's mod and it's interesting. I don't know when I'll get back to SoZ and its endless procession of loading screens. Probably when the combined mod gets hammered out.

Lots of blogs "speculating" on a push back to Summer today. I guess what's known here is not known elsewhere.

I've played through all of them (not the retconned PSP titles, but the major ones) and yeah, the dialogue is poorly written, and the characterization is 99.9% monologue-based. Grom greatly gripes about the campiness of Sarevok, and it makes me wonder if he's ever seen Col. Volgin, or Liquid Snake. He would be beside himself.

I wouldn't categorize MGS4 as "aware". Turning your diarrhea-plagued punchline into a dramatic anchor / major character halfway through the game without so much as batting an eye (Merril or whatever her name is actually seems to find the reasons for his constant ****ting romantic by the end. Character depth!) is at best terribly negligent, as far as characterization is concerned, but as with most media, if you make it epic enough, and inject enough of that distinctively japanese melodrama into it, people stop seeing how you sabotage your own creative endeavors. MGS as a series takes itself too seriously to justify its many jarring tonal shifts. As for it being art, I can't remember who said it (Sawyer? Grom? That I conflate the two so much seems to indicate that they may be the same person) but what passes for "good writing" in games wouldn't pass muster in any other media. MGS4's plot and particularly its dialogue (oh lord, the ****ty dialogue) are equivalent to the worst episode of Heroes' worst season, and Heroes is a pretty dismal show with these things.

Having played through all the sidequests, I can imagine it's actually much more exciting.

Surprised it worked for you for that long. On both my Vista and XP machines Mass Effect has a nasty habit of locking up and crashing, and requiring a reboot to start up again.

Witness the effects of cheap arena-sold alcohol. You can't tell if he wants to roar or cry.

Indeed? There have been a number of job postings for the Alienz RPG over the months but in the last few days this ad for a Lead Artist on an "undisclosed project" has popped up. We can reasonably assume it's not really really old. Speculate!

How will that setup handle Alienz?

I love threads like these. It's like walking into a Flat Earth convention.

I'd have a higher opinion of this game if I got some sort of new info. That would be a real Christmas miracle. I don't think that's true. There's a reason 24 became such a huge hit only a few days after 9/11, and why James Bond had such a successful "reboot". There's a reason why "torture porn" horror is in vogue, because it plays to our base fears and impulses, just as zombie movies did with Vietnam in the 60's and 70's and slasher movies did with AIDS in the 80's. In secret agent stories there's a supremely competent hero protecting (and projecting the might of) the western world wherever it's threatened, before it's threatened, and decisively winning the day. The war on terror has made it abundantly clear that this is no less than a complete fantasy, no less escapist than Star Wars or X-Men.

Remember the art assets from Aliens that were leaked some months ago? If those were Onyx assets they looked pretty damn good. The wall tiles they had were highly detailed. The crates and such featured were less so, but still pretty impressive.

Just doesn't happen that often with games like this. I'd be surprised. Interesting. So even if you decide to make a sequel to AP it will be on an entirely new engine? When has that succeeded (ie retained all the trappings of the old game, unlike say DX:IW) with a modern game? Will you be shopping it out to other developers as well?

They really ran with the Vault-Tec-as-social-experimenters to an extent that I don't think Black Isle would have (indeed, Van Buren was mostly free of vaults in general) but it's still fun and interesting to explore the old vaults. The atmosphere in the vaults is 1000x more prominent than that of anything in Oblivion. Would it have killed them to include a vault that hasn't been deserted or raided aside from 101, though? And isn't it a little peculiar that Vault 101 is apparently known to absolutely everyone in the wasteland (Vault 13 was little more than a myth to Shady Sands, which was just as close to 13 as Megaton was to 101) and yet nobody has deigned to try and crack it? Aren't vaults supposed to be tech goldmines?

Gettin' paid Gettin' paid OXM Style

(substitute swearing and provocations with arguments about game design)

The free one, maybe. But you could buy a $10 Deus Ex jewel case at big box stores (Target, Wal-Mart etc.) that lasted all the way to the beginning of Hong Kong.

Worked for Deus Ex. Of course, that demo cost $10 and was the first third of the game, more or less.

Cool. Can we choose to punctuate our combo at any time? For example, let's say I'm melee fighting some enemies towards the end of the game, so they're going to be tough ones. If I go in for a 10-hit combo on one of them or whatever the limit is I'd be opening myself up to ranged fire from the others (this is a problem in other games) so assuming the final attacks are stunning in some capacity could I put in a few hits here on one guy and then dart over and put in a few hits on another, without actually breaking a combo chain?

1. McNulty 2. Lester 3. Kima Greggs 4. Bunk 5. Omar 6. Carver 7. Stringer Bell 8. Slim Charles 9. Snoop 10. Jay Landsman If you don't know who these characters are, you don't watch good television.

Aww, Will's taking this hard.