Pop

Good lord no. HIM? What next, Zeromancer?

I think that's intentional.

yeah, I don't think shooting somebody in the arm did anything special if you weren't using the sniper rifle.

The combat in the video looked tedious. The way the characters moved about in relation to each other I'm surprised they decided to have leg movement animations. It looks like an animated board game, it wouldn't seem out of place if you just had the characters hover around each other. There's nothing wrong with all of that, I suppose, but it is pretty antiquated. Good lord, I can't imagine going through that combat with 16 or 20 enemies. It can't be any funner to play than it is to watch. But then, this isn't so much of a game as it is a thesis, right? Enjoyment is a secondary goal.

Uh... He wasn't.

Normally I'd just say that if you're rich enough to afford a computer that can run Mass Effect well, you're rich enough to afford a continuous internet connection, or at least a connection that can be put up every 10 days.

have you read any of the previews?

I wouldn't think so. All 360 players would be contained within XBL, all PS3 players would be contained within whatever Sony uses as a multiplayer platform. They don't even have any crossover play with consoles and PCs, usually. That was one of the big things with Shadowrun. I hear it wasn't well implemented.

This Enon Zool guy is apparently the composer for Fallout 3's music. Have a listen-see here. Main theme is still pretty awful. Megaton has a slight Redding-ish vibe, still awful. Into the Wasteland might as well be out of a between-battles portion of Halo.

Hey, it's a new guy.

I'm curious as to whether they'll implement big guns, if we'll get the option to go Rambo with grenade launchers and RPGs and miniguns and flamethrowers. If anything, I'd probably expect such weapons to be used only at certain points in the game.

There aren't bicycles. There are still scooters, though.

If you're in the position where you have to shoot somebody to get info, you're either desperate enough to risk the noise or in a place where the noise doesn't matter.

Couple of questions. Is your position a new one? How did you come to get the job? Did you come into contact with Obsidz whilst working for Gamespot on the game guides and such and they sought you ought once the position became open, or did you discover yourself that the position needed to be filled and decided to leave your job at the time? Moving on, there was some concern here over SEGA's record of keeping up PR for its games. We saw the AP Game Informer front page, which was certainly significant, but some people are uneasy as to the extent to which SEGA was going to support the game through advertising and publicity and the like. Are you taking over for (what we assume was) the SEGA effort? Are you working in tandem with them? How do you augment and improve the way things normally run? What about the more, oh, let's call them "informal" media sources? The blogs and such? What about showcases and cons and events? Is Obsidian in that racket? How do you feel you can best present Obsidian to potential consumers of their product? Also, give us a sense of what your day-to-day duties and responsibilities are for the company. How would you describe your relationship with the games that are in production? Is it your job to make sure just that they get noticed? Do you do much hands-on stuff? Are you a recent transplant to the OC? What sorts of things do you do in your spare time besides gaming? Do you own all the current-gen consoles? What games have caught your eye recently? What sort of music do you listen to? Favorite sport or pastime?

Roman can't die. If he gets "injured" the mission you're on is over (if you're driving him home after an activity then nothing happens) and he calls you a bit later to pick him up from the hospital.

Sweet.

With greater console connectivity it's become easier to bitchslap console pirates. The only way you'd be able to pirate console games is by keeping your console off of the network, and if, in the future, they start doing a Service Pack sort of service where newer games require newer updates to console firmware / software, you make it considerably more difficult to mod consoles while staying under the radar.

A handful. There's an MMO being made off the Farcry engine if I'm not mistaken. And the army bought the rights to the Crysis engine. Crysis was a pretty fun FPS if you approached it from the same POV as you would have approached Independence Day when you were twelve years old. There are a number of **** yeah! *fist pump* moments that you have to open yourself up to. Particularly the "I'll walk on water if I have to" spiel from the old marine. That having been said, I only played Crysis because I got a sweet-ass new rig. It's actually distressing because aside from Crysis, NWN2 and STALKER there's not much I have that wasn't already running reasonably on the old machine.

It's times like this I wished I saved screen caps of Frank in a megaman helmet and blue dress.

Now now, most people here probably didn't find it quite fair when I characterized The Witcher as a "tittytastic grindfest" even when the game did contain lots of hand-drawn nude art, lots of opportunities to live the PC's sex life vicariously, and lots of grinding. Though to be fair to myself, I actually did play that game prior to passing judgment. The first and second game didn't have any story to speak of, they were missions-for-the-sake-of-missions games. The third game was about a nameless, mute tough running missions for various criminal organizations. Vice City, which is probably the best of the series, was about an expatriate gangster in 80's Florida and thus immersed itself in ridiculous fashion and the cocaine trade. It heavily indebted itself to Scarface and Miami Vice and so on. San Andreas had a slightly more serious tone, being about a guy who comes back to his home in the ghetto to find his mother dead and his family in trouble. Generally the tone of the games has been light, with lots of jokey side characters and slapstick violence. The core characters in any given game have generally been pretty well written and are almost always given great voice actors. Ray Liotta was the voice of the PC in Vice City. GTAIV is to depart from the norm in that the main character is an immigrant who is initially innocent and is pressed into crime. So in a nutshell, GTA = Crime opera.

I seem to remember some IWD2 portraits being made into BG2 custom portraits, but it wasn't all of them.

http://www.mediafire.com/?0og4g9gmnnj

Kelsey's the only really decent NPC mod I've played with. Fade would have been the best, but she's got no content for ToB. Whatev. There are a lot of NPC mods that add lots of content but are either badly written (Soulafein) or badly designed (Soulafein, that drow chick, the aasimar paladin, etc.) As far as unfair mod adds go, I think that drow chick takes the cake. The party is teleported to a small room with a number of assassins who have permanent improved haste, 15 hp/round regen or thereabouts, 9th level spells and munchkin weapons. Even in late-game ToB, ctrl+Y was just about your only recourse.

That was the Salvatore mission, and the guy's name is Lloyd. That line was taken from What About Bob.

Exactly. When an olympic diver gets a perfect 10 nobody suggests that they shut down the sport (even though in that case 10 might very well mean "flawless"). Likewise, the next person to get 10 doesn't render the previous 10 a 9.9 or whatever. Hell, there are usually a number of 5-star quality movies that come out every year. Unless you're into the Oscars or some other competitive thing where you compulsively must put them in order, the fact that they're all 5 star movies is not inconsistent. Most people would probably say that even though No Country For Old Men got best picture last year, There Will Be Blood is just as worthy of viewing. Likewise, populist gaming mags can recommend GTAIV, MGS4 and SSBB while giving them all astronomically high scores as they are wont to do. There is nothing wrong with this. Reviews are far more protected from questions of objective value than, say, Top Games of All Time lists, which don't say anything about games and are there just to move units. Rise of the Triad. First playthrough of BG2 I'd give a 10 to. Fallout as well. The problems were mainly cosmetic and not all that troubling.