Cycloneman

From 2008:

You mean contradict your brainwashing. Yes, our "brainwashing," also known as facts and evidence. An extremely high proportion of people in the Gaza strip, including children, suffer from negative health effects as a result of malnutrition.

There is virtually no society on the entire planet, quite possibly in the entire history of agriculture, where everyone has food insecurity. Some will have much, and others little; the only question is how "little" little is, and in the case of Gaza, it is very little indeed. The fact that you can post a collection of images of people in Gaza who have much means no more than the fact that I can post pictures of well-fed Germans in 1945, or photographs of Kim Jung-il eating a lot.

Please tell me that you realize how incredibly and obviously dishonest this is, but simply don't care. Because otherwise... you would have to be very, very foolish.

Pretty sure the majority of eligible (not registered) Palestinians don't turn out to vote.

By this quote-unquote "logic," most Americans during the Cold War approved of the systematic overthrow of democratic governments and supplanting them with right-wing autocracies. Check your premises.

The people on board the ship started waving a white flag according to an Al Jazeera correspondent on the ship at the time.

What is the double standard here, anyway? "Hollywood liberals" decry Israel shooting political activists on a boat in international waters, but do not decry Turkey having decent relations with Sudan. My god, the hypocrisy!

In my message to Patrick I said that if AP was not okay, then I'd take CoD4 instead. Hush.

Thanks a ton.

Yeah, but how? He doesn't have any contact information available except PMs, which he obviously hasn't checked. Do any of the devs still know him or anything? ****.

Last Seen: 7th November 2008 - 06:08 AM + no more Dev tag http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?s=&am...st&p=872940 ****.

So how is Renegade Shep/Garrus/Tali chemistry? I have heard it is pretty good. Seeing as how my other party member was Liara and she didn't approve either, I don't think that's true. To the other points: yes, you can opt out... but that's all there is to these characters. In her on-ship conversations Tali is The Quarian Chick. That's it. Wrex is That Frog Guy Who Kills People.

You are wrong.

Blah blah "Hello Shepard," blah blah "Did you know we got genocided? It's true." ****, even this conversation being initiated by Shepard with, "hey, how about that Genophage?" would be better. Let's check up on Tali's convo about Quarians. Nope, still not good writing! Wrex is a boring, two-dimensional character. I guess that the (incidental) writing for him manages to be passable, but that does not impart any depth to his character. You could write out a couple words, "ruthless fighter" or something, and anybody could generally find what his dialogue would be in a given conversation. "Let's kill this guy." "Let's kill that guy." "Let's kill this third guy." Since this is his whole character, it's simple to predict what he does, and his presence thus becomes pointless. Also it's an annoying personality unless you, the player, wants to kill everything. Garrus, having more depth, cannot be so easily predicted. I didn't realize, for example, that he would respond negatively to my proposal to kill the four stupified indoctrinated Salarians, but it makes sense with respect to his character (the four stupified indoctrinated Salarians are not "bad people," they are victims). Garrus's and Liara's conversations work because they aren't constantly defaulting back to "let me tell you about turians/asari." Liara actually does bring up her species and tries to better explain asari culture through the natural course of conversation (she's talking about sex; asari have a lot of stereotypes floating around about promiscuity), so it works. It never works anywhere else, so I'm forced to assume that only happened on accident, or they playtested it and found people expected Liara to be "easy," or something along those lines.

No, Wrex was still just a grumpy space frog. If in my conversations with him on the ship, he went into detail about how he was a Maoist, that wouldn't make him any less a grumpy space frog (though I would probably bother with him if he did). It's actually possible to drop information in without it seeming like an infodump. In the real world, conversations are made on the basis of shared information, mutual assumptions, and one can often discover these simply by listening. Infodumps completely lack this, and it makes it really blunt and lazy way to explain the setting.

Some archetypes are overused and bad. For example, the "reluctant hero" or the "sadistic villain" are common archetypes, and they suck real hard (the first because it's pretty unrealistic and the second because it's so cartoonish). It's possible to make them good, but that would require finesse that Bioware lacks. "Ruthless fighter" is a pretty cartoonish archetype too, and Bioware uses it too goddamn much and just as an excuse to add in ~3 stories that the character tells that are "awesome" and "cool". The "loose cannon cop" archetype is less common and has a lot more inherent conflict (namely between law and order & vigilante justice), so it works a lot better. Plus Wrex is all like "WELL FORGET IT, I'M NOT SOME STEREOTYPE" and then the entire rest of the game his personality (not his backstory) boils down to "grumpy space frog that shoots dudes." I really did not give a **** about everybody talking about their species. It was dumb and silly and shouldn't have been in the game. "Hello Tali, please, tell me about the Quarians. Despite being a badass special forces agent, I don't know **** about Quarians and can't be arsed to wiki it." Doesn't she ask you at one point to like murder your family for some marginal magical bonus if you're an elf? I remember reading about that somewhere.

Yes, boring. A cardboard cut-out character with (like Wrex) little-to-no personality outside of "I like to kill things. Want to hear a story about me killing things?" All Bioware conversations are a bit repetitious. Garrus's worked a lot better because they were drawing on an already existing archetype (cop who doesn't like to play by the rules) that they hadn't used in every other game they've made. Wow. How is that amusing at all? If I wanted an obnoxious violent companion, I'd play Dragon Age and love on Morrigan.

Because Garrus is a badass pulpy cop who excellently embodies Renegade principles while simultaneously avoiding being a pointless douche and whose worldview is cool and which you can positively effect. On the other hand, Wrex is a boring character who you may recall from KotOR as "Canderous Ordo" and Jade Empire as "the Black Whirlwind." Or, as YCS superstar "Dr. Pwn" (yes, she does have an MD), put it:

It's the same planet, isn't it? It's not meant seriously or anything.

Yeah, but Garrus owns. e: OH **** I MAYBE SHOULD HAVE PUT SPOILERS IN THE TOPIC TITLE. WOOPSIE.

1. You can romance Liara while being a bitch most of the time. As long as you don't pick "I'm not interested in you" and suchlike, you can call her obsessed, etc. At least, this seems to be true. Not through with her dialogue trees yet, but Shep seems to make a pretty good butch. 2. If you go back to the Citadel after a mission and go to the Ambassador's quarters, Udina and Anderson might just have a talk with you! 3. You can have Noveria stuck in your quest log forever if you don't go do the Lorik Qui'in quest, and instead simply take the jellyfish's illegal contraband to Anoleis, thus bypassing that entire section. (I still have "Noveria: Lorik Qui'in" in my main quest journal, even though I've already killed Benezia and let the Rachni go) 4. You can leave Wrex behind altogether. Heh, **** you Wrex. You won't be screwing up my mission to kill Kaidan at the end.

No, it lost a game of Chutes and Ladders.

Whoa, this game has been coming out for two years? What the ****, Obsidian?

Uh, pretty sure that the only person who recognized that it wouldn't have a speech skill one year ago was me. Yeah I know we know now that there are no Speech skills, and this wasn't the first introduction of it. But I was calling it way earlier than anybody else. Feel free to point out how I'm wrong. Oh wait, you can't, because I'm actually right! Boom, headshot!