Wrath of Dagon

Written by a true fanboy. He even speaks for everyone in the world.

Now you're fighting against Ob...er I meant a collectivist.

Why doesn't Bioware just go all the way already and start making alien hentai?

To be fair, Srebrenica is not in Kosovo, and was not the work of the Yugoslav government to my knowledge. Something to consider also is that Kosovar terrorists purposely tried to provoke the Serbs into atrocities to gain international support.

Diamonds are easy to make artificially now, no big deal.

It's probably because the developers feel they need to stroke the pathetic little egos of social reject gamers.

Jordan Thomas also did the Fort Frolic part of Bioshock 1, so you can judge how much you liked that.

May be, it was before I started playing games, or at least I wasn't aware of it at the time. Maybe you have just become jaded over time, or you've placed the early games on a pedestal? I'm not sure how you can possibly put JE over DA on the quality scale. I liked JE, but I think most folks agree it isn't their best work, whereas DA has gotten quite a bit of positive reaction from the community. I certainly don't put JE on a pedestal, I see plenty of problems with it. I think what it comes down to different people look for different things from a game. In an RPG I look for well designed quests, as they make me feel I'm fully participating in the game world and story. JE has plenty of those (though not all), DAO hardly has any. As far as quality of execution, DA probably is better than JE (although the art design is more generic). It's in the quality of design, specifically quest design, where it really falls down. To see that for example, compare the haunted orphanage quest in DA with any of the ghost quests in JE (like the ghost children, or the liver transplant, or pretty much the whole sunken city).

May be, it was before I started playing games, or at least I wasn't aware of it at the time.

I thought what I said was quite clear, but I'll explain further. KOTOR was my favorite game ever. JE was also good, but incomplete (in retrospect, the start of the fall of Bio) ME was extremely disappointing, DAO a little better but still crappily designed. At this point I'm unwilling to continue to give the benefit of the doubt to Bio. OK, but for it to be interactive storytelling, pounding the pegs would have to be an important part of the story somehow. Edit: And OK, you're talking about interacting with the narrative, not interactive storytelling, so we're not really talking about the same thing. The best I can do here is point to Age of Decadence again, and I'm assuming it'll live up to its promises.

I don't buy their games anyway, I bought their last two games, didn't like them, and not planning to buy any more. So far as what they do from now on, I care no more than what the rest of EA does.

To me, the best thing about games is interactive storytelling. There should be no conflict there at all. The problem is many developers treat story and gameplay as separate things, but to be a powerful medium games have to merge the two. Of course there's a conflict. The more choices the player is allowed, the more difficult is becomes to present a well-structured narrative. If the choices are trivial ones, then it is less of an issue, certainly, since the narrative doesn't have to alter grearlt to present a trivial choice. But major choices require major alterations of the narrative. Good luck with that in this day and age of inflated game budgets. Down the road, if AI becomes better at responding to player chocie and altering narrative flow dynamically, then it would be much more possible. Interactive doesn't just mean you occassionally get to make a "big" choice, although that's what Bioware is now defaulting to. In fact the best interactive story telling I've seen are games like Call of Cthulhu, Shenmue 2, and Thief: DS, where you hardly make any choices at all. Of course it's also possible to tell a story in a choice driven game, which is what Age of Decadence is trying to do, so we'll see how well that works. As far as mainstream developers, let's just say their priorities lie elsewhere $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

It was an air war, not a ground war. I read Clinton and Albright thought Milosevic would fold as soon as they started bombing, but they miscalculated and it turned into a protracted operation.

To me, the best thing about games is interactive storytelling. There should be no conflict there at all. The problem is many developers treat story and gameplay as separate things, but to be a powerful medium games have to merge the two.

I think Yugoslavia is a different story. There was no threat to us from Yugoslavia, and we had good relations before the conflict. The public in the US never supported that war, and most of the Republicans in Congress were against it, while the Democrats only supported it because Clinton was from their party.

My first RPG was KOTOR and it was very newb friendly. You had the preset characters and you could auto level up until you figured out how things worked. It also did a bang up job of a beginning tutorial, introducing urgency and drama right at the beginning to get you involved in the game, while pointing out all the basics you needed to play. KOTOR2 also had a good dramatic intro on Peragus. Newer games seem intent to bore you in the beginning, you kind of have to persist until things get interesting.

We didn't let him get away, he got away on his own, take a look at the satellite picture of Tora Bora. The ironic thing is, all this talk about oil, yet we sit on huge reserves of coal we could easily convert into gasoline, yet stupidly refuse to do it.

I think "blockbuster" here is in the sense of style over substance, e.g. big explosions and car chases instead of a plot in a Hollywood movie.

Anyone know how to aim the ballistas on the consoles? You can aim with the balista? I never could, but then how do you use it to fight the dragon if you can't?

Bioware is dead to me.

Anyone know how to aim the ballistas on the consoles?

Actually I read one article that said what they were really afraid of was the smallpox Saddam was thought to possess, which they realized after the anthrax attacks US had no defense against. They were even going to order smallpox vaccinations for everyone, until the Disease Control people convinced them it could cause several hundred deaths due to vaccine reactions. As to the other points, no one is disputing the invasion of Iraq was mishandled. There weren't enough troops sent and they failed to control the situation from the beginning, letting things spiral into chaos. Both the military and the civilian leaders bear responsibility for that.

If Saddam was such a swell guy, we could've just bought the oil from him and be done with it. The oil embargo was necessary to contain him and prevent him from financing his WMD program. We certainly gained nothing monetarily, as we spent far more on the war than all of Iraq's income from oil for many years to come, and we still have to pay for any Iraqi oil we get, same as everyone else (we get almost all of our oil from the Americas btw). And the devastation was caused by the terrorists, not by us (and by Saddam himself before that).

Well the Soviet government certainly thought so, as they wouldn't let any Russians out, except the rare few they deported. Really LOF, sometimes you're shockingly ignorant, but I guess that's the only way you can hang on to your beliefs. Religious fanatics have nothing on you.

Clearly the better the presentation, the more expensive it is to do content, else why would modern games cost so much? Having said that, a lot of problems with ME had to do with the buggy engine and unfamiliarity with the engine, plus a design process unsuitable for modern games. Supposedly all those issue have been fixed, so ME2 may very well be better quality than 1. However, based on ME and DAO, I have to think the design of the game will still be crappy, as Bioware has either lost the recipe, or thinks it's good enough for the target audience.