Magister Lajciak

I think we are getting into technicalities. "Terror" rather than "horror" is good enough for me! Let's get some Aliens! Orson Scott Card had a good essay about the difference between dread (anticipation), horror (primal fear), and terror (shock at something that just happened). Interesting read if you can find it. It would be interesting to see whether these three types of fear truly use different neural pathways or are just variations on the same emotion. In particular, horror, defined as 'primal fear'... I wonder whether there are some things we fear genetically without having to learn to do so. Hmm, it is interesting to think about.

Color me confused! The first link doesn't work, the second linke is about unnaccusative verbs and the third link talks about overclocking!

i only kept up with NMA during the development stages, i never read the documents. not because i don't care...but because the entire situation was far too depressing to me. should we hold a bet? because i bet you're wrong. just on a hunch. even the FO3 DLC's have bits of VB. Well, not having read VB design documents, I would not recognize such content even if it appeared there.

What's so bad about IE? I am not some sort of "advanced user", so for me it's an ease of use issue - the 'ease' of IE being that it is already on my computer and I am already used to it. Barring auto-archiving, it does most things I want it to do, so why switch?

Well, I don't really use bookmarks and 'favorites'. As you say, the page might well disappear in the future, so why bookmark it? Instead, I tend to download it.

Well, I think you are partially correct. I return to the information I collect very rarely indeed (though I do occassionally return to some of it). As such, it is to a large extent a waste of time, yes, though it leaves me with a large archive of materials that are indeed no longer available online (most news articles, for example, have a limited life-span on the net) as well as the ability to use all the materials offline (though it is true that I make use of that very rarely). I guess my recognition that such archiving is a considerable time-sink is one reason why I would want to at least partially automate the process.

Has there been any indication that they might? I really doubt they will reuse much from Van Buren - time has moved on since that project. Time may have moved on, but there's still a chance they're using some stories/quests and characters from VB. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they're integrated in a sensible manner. I suppose that's true, but they might not even have the old design documents any more and probably have a lot of other stories to tell. A little bit of Van Buren might appear in Fallout: New Vegas, but I wouldn't expect it to be significant. Well the issue isn't about the availability of the VB docs, as basically everyone can download it from the net (or Bethesda provides them). The point is just whether Obsidian wants to reuse VB stuff. Whatever makes sense for them, I'm not worried about the final result. I am not really worried either. Obsidian will surely make it work well. I hadn't realized that the VB docs were so freely available.

Was DX2 really as bad as I keep on hearing it was? It was a crappy shooter and an even crappier RPG. It had nothing really going for it, but it was fun to play for the couple of hours it lasted. Fair enough - put that way it does sound pretty bad.

Not bad at all

I really hate time limits in RPGs, so I am definitely with you on this one. If there are time limits, I feel time-pressure and I have enough of that in real life and have no desire to feel it in games too.

Has there been any indication that they might? I really doubt they will reuse much from Van Buren - time has moved on since that project. Time may have moved on, but there's still a chance they're using some stories/quests and characters from VB. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they're integrated in a sensible manner. I suppose that's true, but they might not even have the old design documents any more and probably have a lot of other stories to tell. A little bit of Van Buren might appear in Fallout: New Vegas, but I wouldn't expect it to be significant.

It is also the fact that Van Buren was being made with a different engine; was being made long ago; the design documents are probably no longer available; new people are on the project with their own ideas and so on and so on. A little bit of Van Buren might make it into the game, but I doubt it will be significant.

Has there been any indication that they might? I really doubt they will reuse much from Van Buren - time has moved on since that project.

Wow, that's a pretty huge list of games you are looking forward to!

Was DX2 really as bad as I keep on hearing it was?

I was referring primarily to the information about the world, the Commonwealths in particular. Given that he's the lead on F:NV and the original surviving lead of Van Buren, I think he is in the position to make such decisions. http://pnp.fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Simple:_Main_Page I doubt there will be any connection between Van Buren and Fallout: NV. It has been too long a time since Van Buren was shelved and I am sure Obsidian has other ideas they want to implement by now...

Hopefully, they will release it on a disc (absent online activation and install limites), or perhaps make several XP packs and release them as a compilation for $30-$50 (depending on how many they fit on the disc). If not... too bad.

I think we are getting into technicalities. "Terror" rather than "horror" is good enough for me! Let's get some Aliens!

Actually, thanks for posting these links, I learned about some nice new songs I hadn't known about before.

We can only hope. Maybe we will find out some neat stuff soon, I have a feeling with the new generation of gamers playing Kotor 1 and 2. Is there a new generation of gamers playing Kotor 1 & 2? Actually there are quite a few people I have met on my forums, that are teens playing it. They want to know what happened to Revan, too. That's good to hear! Let's hope, however, that they won't be satisfied with the MMO as providing sufficient explanation/KOTOR fix...

That will probably help speed up development quite substantially.

As I said, it's not quite horror... but it has elements of the genre.

The songs you posted are nice. That said, I still think the most appropriate soundtrack is some sort of variation on the Star Wars theme.

I think it has more to do with simplicity. Not everyone is a control-freak/tech-geek who cares about or would even use/utilize all the stuff that pc's supposedly are "better" for. (Edit: ie, they don't care about "performance" but functionality/ease of use in what they use a computer for, and that's it ) Now, I'm just generalizing here...I'm sure there's lots of Mac users who pant "ooo pretty," as well as those who want more Mac software support and like to tinker, but well .. then they'll either buy a PC as a 2nd rig or switch to the type of computing that works better for them. I think this is spot on. Most computer users are not gamers, they just don't care about raw performance. They just want to get their Excel spreadsheets and Word docs done, upload photos to Facebook, surf the Web, check their email, sync music to their iPod. They just want a system that is responsive and does not get in the way. For them, performance is not how fast their video card renders triangles, but how quickly they can get things done on their computer. In fact, ever since I stopped gaming, I move closer and closer to this category of users and I see where they are coming from. If I tinker with systems all day long at work, sometimes it can get very tiring, so I begin to just want everything to work out of the box and not put a tiny bit of thought into making it work. As an side thought, the fact that most people need so little from their computers actually explains the emergence of netbook market. Yes, but I just don't see the ease of use argument going in favor of the Mac, although it's oft repeated as some sort of eternal truth. When I tried to use a Mac, I did not see any improvements to its ease of use over a normal Windows-based computer. For me it was actually considerably more difficult to use the Mac, because I was not aware of where anything is located - even the "x" for closing a window was on the other side of the window. Sure, that is just dependent on what the person is used to, but if we were to take somebody without any experience with computers and thus not used to either system, the ease of use factor would be about the same for both PCs and Macs.

Horror RPG... Perhaps Aliens? Not quite horror, but having aspects of horror in it...