Tale

The original Ghost Rider was an evil demon who possessed a man. I don't think there was any "Devil's Bounty Hunter" thing going on. Then the Johnny Cage one seemed less evil, but was never explained the origin of the demon aspect by the time I stopped reading. If they ever retconned it to like the movie, then it's reasonable that Mephistopheles doesn't take the power back because Ghost Rider is actually doing his job. That's probably the main reason I don't read comics anymore. Too much retcon going on. Everytime a writer, new or old, decides he has a neat idea he takes a character and pounds the square peg in the round hole, bastardizing sometimes decades of history for a dramatic shock of "everything has built to this moment!" That ultimately does nothing and only makes the history confusing and awkward.

This is most likely the main cause of the retraction. "Video game addiciton" is way to easy to mistake ADHD for. Someone with ADHD, or even perhaps other disorders, can be drawn to gaming for excitement that regular activities can't give. Many with ADHD are known for being attracted to novel activities and being able to excel at them despite the condition. While, at the same time, their other daily actitivites may suffer it could be attributed to the video games and not the actual underlying condition. They need to ensure that what is percieved as "video game addiction" is in fact a disorder and not a symptom itself.

I honestly see nothing of value in this idea. And your description seems a little nonsensical. You want age to be based on accomplishment? How does this benefit anyone? How does it encourage anyone to enjoy peak years? All you've done is shift endgame from level 60 to level 25 and encourage players to start new characters over. Most will simply be frustrated at constantly having to start over and not bother playing long. Levels are not equivalent of age. They are the result of experience. A man can live in a room for 60 years and experience nothing. Another can go out in the world and experience in but 4, during his peak, what most others never do in a lifetime. It's a measure of accomplishment and learning. Nothing about that makes you weaker. If you wanted to make it based off time, you're still facing the problem of nonsensically forcing everyone to constantly reroll characters and AFK through the early years. Low levels have no advantages because inexperience has no advantages. Everyone is assumed to be at their peak age in most of these games. To salvage the idea you'd have to do two things. 1) Make the aging mechanic entirely seperate from levelling. The gaining of experience and strength do not make you older and weaker. Nor does experience and strength come wholly automatic with age. 2) Find some serious benefit for maintaing an aged character. Something people will actually want. Keep in mind, MMOs are a competitive market. It'd have to be more interesting to people than simply not having the age mechanic at all.

Maybe the same is true in Texas. I think he got a Liberal Arts degree before his BA in Psych.

It's not, psychology is a miserable profession to actually get a degree in if you want to make money. It's like being a pastor, teacher, or police officer. You do it because you want to help people. Or in the instance of a police officer you might also do it because you're a prick that enjoys inflicting power on other people, but I digress. My dad's an MFT, I was majoring in it before I switched to the computers, and my sister's going for a degree in it. Trust me. 2 things. 1) DELIVERING PIZZA 2) In this area, if you have any degree at all, you can make more than that. There's a difference between 12 dollars an hour doing data entry and entry level accounting with a college degree and doing, hell, police work. Police get paid significantly more than that around here. I'm not knocking the fact that he's not making 200k a year. I'm knocking the fact that he's doing data entry and pizza delivery. He's doing jobs typical of 17 year old high school kids, 4 years after he got a bachelors.

Her and Julia Roberts's character are only referenced in 13, never seen or otherwise involved in the plot.

You know you're the only one for me, Meta.

Sierra seems to like to do that. Half-Life: Opposing Force, Alien vs Predator 2: Primal Hunt (originally made by Monolith as well), and now FEAR: Extraction Point

I played Extraction Point. It's not made by Monolith and ultimately does not explain anything. But I actually found it scary at times. Monolith made a point to ensure that you knew enemies were there before you saw them or they first saw you, this gave you the opportunity to decide how you want to approach a situation. This other studio doesn't make as much a point to do that as Monolith did, so on occasion you could walk right up to an enemy without knowing he's there.

The developer is unannounced as of yet it would seem. Could be anyone from THQ. Perhaps even Relic as they have experience with strategy and 40k.

I'm not sure how I feel about what they did with Fettel. He was originally two villains. The guy who eats people to gain their knowledge (who wore the jacket Fettel wears). And the clone commander. It might have been nice to see the knowledge vampire (or whatever you want to call it) as a full fledged villain. It was never explained how it worked with Fettel. Some aberration of his psychic powers, maybe.

I love adventure games. I practically consider them my favored genre. But I could not get into Syberia.

Hiro and Matt die.

Yeah, apparently Monolith was bought by Warner Brothers during development of FEAR and due to the most awkward licensing agreement I have ever heard of, Monolith keeps full intellectual property rights on FEAR, except Vivendi Universal gets the name FEAR, and can make games using that name. Which is where the FEAR expansion, Extraction Point, comes in. It's almost like the Interplay -> Baldur's Gate deal, except the company who owns the related intellectual property is developer owned by another media group. I imagine there's a limit on it though or else we'll be seeing FEAR Dark Alliance coming out with Sierra labels and no connection to FEAR proper.

Let me just get this out of the way: turn-based isn't fast and it doesn't sell. Other than that, sounds cool. Turn-based sells just fine. If it didn't, Square wouldn't be releasing two additions to the Final Fantasy Tactics line, Advance 2 (on GBA) and a remake of the original Tactics (on PSP). Firaxis and 2K games wouldn't be releasing a secon expansion for Civilization 4, either. Games that don't sell don't have a habit of getting sequels, expansion packs, and rereleases.

If it's to include Throne of Bhaal, I'd recommend improved Bhaalspawn powers.

If you come across a phone with a blinking red light, it means there's a message you can listen to. Also computers, usually laptops, with orange screens you can upload data from that your boss (forget his name) will describe to you.

Fascinating threads.

How do you "hazard a guess" of your own opinion? Well... I don't really know what I think, but it's possible that I think this.

l There's actually a mod that fixed that by lowering the armor rating of the Dark Brotherhood armor and decreasing its value. However, in a way the Dark Brotherhood armor wasn't so bad since the other light armors, fur. leather, and chitin were so awful. I always wanted to mod it so that Dark Brotherhood kepts it's armor rating, but nobody would buy it, and wearing it would cause guards to attack you. I thought that fit with the theme of them being an illegal group of assassins.

Which contains many retrothemes as well as being a spiritual successor to a game released in the mid 90s. So by Morgoth's criteria, Bioshock should not be creative either.

He got it right with Toriyama, though. I'm playing the Playstation version that was released in the US as part of Final Fantasy Chronicles alongside Final Fantasy IV.

I am such a bad person/bandwidth leech.