Pop

Xard. Pidesco was obviously referring to Mass Effect, just going out and saying it invalidates the humor.

You really know how to ruin a joke.

E3 trailer roundup, seems to ignore non-sequels shown.

On Onderon, the choice of siding with the Royalists or the Vaklu had relatively little impact on the game outside of the outcome for that one mission and of course, light side / dark side points, an easy crutch that Alpha Protocol won't have. AP looks to promise more dynamism in consequences. You can gain or lose allies and resources, and future encounters bend and twist with your previous actions.

Are you sure this isn't for the lulz? I mean, despite being from the internet, I'm also from San Francisco and gayness isn't really all that special or notable. Still, the devs have said that it wasn't in the cards, and despite how we may see it, they know the project better than we do and it's their call. Besides, you might as well petition for them to put a red car in the game. A gay love interest wouldn't add any more value to the game than any other sort of love interest, and you can ask any gamer or most any of the devs on this board and they'll tell you that love interests add very little to a game.

So I've been hearing a lot of talk, a lot of talk about Alpha Protocol. Alpha Protocol has been compared a lot recently to one "Deus Ex". "Deus Ex" was renowned for its branching gameplay, which allowed you to make decisions that would alter (at the very least cosmetically) the shape of the narrative to come. This is all well and good, everybody liked that about "Deus Ex", but "Deus Ex", as some of you make recall, was initially going to be even more expansive, more expansive than it was when it shipped. One thing that got cut was something similar to what is being touted in this Alpha Protocol game. In this Alpha Protocol game, in the example that's been repeated to us ad nauseam, you break / sneak / talk your way into an American Embassy and face enemy forces with the marines, but it has been mentioned that depending on prior choices you could conceivably be on the other side of the conflict, fighting against marines. This is similar to what "Deus Ex" was supposed to be like, in that you were supposed to be able to align yourselves with either the MJ12/UNATCO or the NSF. However, as most of you are aware, that grand vision was cut short, and players were all but forced into the employ of the NSF. Now, maybe I'm being a negative nelly, but AP is looking to be even more ambitious than "Deus Ex" ever was, in the choices department, promising more than a few dilemmas in the last hour of the game to determine the outcome of it. We've already heard of content being cut in the (superfluous) romance aspects of the game, but will Obsidz be able to implement everything they initially planned on implementing, now when we're about 7 months from launch? Are what we are seeing now in fact a truncated version of the original draft, so to speak? I'm writing all this because what's been said so far about the game is very, very promising, and lord knows we've all been promised things in our games that haven't panned out. So how does it look? If you have to cut corners, can you do so in a way that won't damage the ambition of what we've heard about?

Bruce Campbell's done VA for Evil Dead games, and I'm sure he'd be no more difficult to get ahold of than John Cleese.

Half-Life had superb AI. Not so much with 2, but Episode 2 seemed alright in that regard.

Yeah, Gary Oldman all but confirmed that a game is in the works.

Ayuh, Bushido Blade. Like old Rainbow Six, but with swords instead of bullets.

From what I heard they had a few uncredited A-listers (for the time, at least) who stopped in for VA (they even had big-name bands making songs about Halo 2 for seemingly no other reason than the fact that Halo is serious business), but for the most part the VA was all B and C-list, which is just as well. The voice of Captain Anderson was heavily used in 2 and 3.

Ron Perlman's only really a "big name" if you consider acting in movies a big name makes. He's a cult actor, he's seen his share of Direct to DVD films and even a Troma picture or two. His profile's relatively high these days what with Hellboy, but that film didn't do too well opening a week before the record-shattering Dark Knight.

I thought John Cleese worked pretty well. The character was schtick to begin with.

I'm talking about the achievements you get for completing a majority of the game with a certain companion. Chances are you'll have to complete at least one or two of the collection quests with the character in the party to get the achievement.

The collection quests only really matter if you like achievements, in which case you not only have to complete the collection quests for several of them but complete them in a certain way (basically, if you complete a collection quest from the Normandy by surveying a planet or asteroid, it doesn't count)

There was some Red Wizard sub-PrC that specialized in demon summoning. Can't remember what it was called.

The holographic in-game inventory / UI is a nice touch. Otherwise it looks like RE4 in space, which isn't all that bad, really.

The one non-combat related preview I read was pretty promising, and it wasn't an obviously slavering sort of review in the first place.

They installed a "you must be this short to work on our games" sign at the front door and he's been turned away ever since.

Well, he's a character actor, like Perlman. He just works. It doesn't matter what the project is.

Don't forget Macgyver. We can probably expect some veteran VAs for various characters, maybe Perlman, maybe Jennifer Hale, maybe Brian Cox, maybe even Luke Skywalker (don't know about his ouevre outside of Lucasarts games). I imagine they'll get a relative unknown to voice Thorton to cut down on costs (I think the male Shepard in ME was some Canadian comedian) Someone expressive, who can cover livewire, suave and curt personalities effectively. A-listers don't usually appear in games, even in tie-ins. Obsidz likely doesn't have the clout to snag a Neeson or a Stewart, even for a few lines.

So now that there have apparently been presentations of the game, can we assume that VA has been recorded? Or is Obsidz using placeholders at this time?

You didn't really need to rest at an inn in BG2. Whereas in BG1 you could be interrupted during any of the 8 hours it takes for a full rest, in BG2 if you paused the game you technically couldn't be interrupted in the cities (actual enemies excluded) and you could just spam the rest button until you succeeded (though if you unpause it after 18 failures there will be 18 guards telling you off)

They're probably referring to the fact that (certain?) conversations happen only once. So there's no "choose the same options", really. Only if you reloaded the game from an earlier point.

Praise the lord, I can't even begin to imagine an Obsidz RTS.