J.E. Sawyer

Silent Storm.

It's less common for the PS2 to support widescreen or progressive scan and HD modes. Almost every Xbox game I have supports 16:9, and many support 480p and 720p. It's pretty rare for PS2 games to support resolutions above 480p, which are true "HD". A lot of people think of 480p as an HD mode, but it isn't; it's just the standard resolution with progressive scan.

I also play it in 16:9 progressive scan, so I'm actually drawing more than someone playing it at a standard ratio.

It tears often, even in the first level. It's impressive that it holds 60 in some large environments, but it still tears a lot. It's not vsynched. Devil May Cry 3 holds its framerate a lot more consistently and doesn't tear as much. I can only hypothesize that it's mostly because the environments are a lot more confined. After playing a variety of Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube games for the past year, I've come to love the S-controller.

Can you give a few examples? 3E DMs were explicitly told they always have the right to change or remove rules. It's entirely relative, which is why I think comparisons to 2nd Ed. numerical values are misleading. It's still the same thing, not backwards. You've put yourself in kind of an indefensible position here. You dislike 3E because there aren't 3E versions of your favorite settings, but even if there were, you still wouldn't play them because you dislike 3E. That's circular. It is my belief that most 2nd Ed. vets don't realize how much they memorized of 2nd Ed. When they see new rules and tables in front of them, it suddenly seems much more complicated. Before 3E came out, I had virtually every table in the 2nd Ed. PH and DMG memorized. To have the same level of familiarity with 3E, I had to memorize the 3E tables, which I believe were smaller in total volume. Just look at the 2nd Ed. chapter on ability scores. Compare it to the 3E chapter on ability scores.

The core 3E books have fewer mechanics than 2nd Ed., so I find it strange that you experienced this. Attacks of Opportunity were originally featured in Player's Option: Combat & Tactics. How do you define "powerful"? 3E doing the same thing as 2nd Ed. isn't backwards. That doesn't really have anything to do with the system. People can and do run Planescape and Mystara campaigns with 3E and 3.5 rules. I'm always puzzled when D&D and AD&D vets say that 3E was difficult to learn. Outside of memorizing AoO rules, it seemed on par or easier than 2nd Ed. It's strange, because so many AD&D 2nd Ed. fans will alternately say that 3E is dumbed down or too complicated.

C&T was pretty dense with mechanics that slow down combat a lot, so unless you mean AD&D 2nd Ed. with a sixth of the rules in C&T, I can't imagine you actually find such combat to be quickly resolved. It unified a lot of mechanics that were needlessly different (the afore-mentioned thief skills vs. proficiencies being one of many examples) and helped balance broken mechanics (multiclassing, unclear stacking rules, etc.). What was backwards about it? I view it as a system that didn't move far enough forward. Does it surprise you that subsequent editions of D&D and AD&D were easier to learn than radically different systems?

How do you define what is good tactical combat? Most settings created by TSR during the 2nd Ed. days can and are used in other game systems. The systems don't make the settings good, though the use of a crummy system with a good setting can hurt the overall impact of the experience. I don't think you view d20 as an evolution of AD&D. I do. What was the first pen-and-paper RPG system you learned?

I assume you run pen and paper campaigns. Why don't you run your fantasy role-playing games using the Toon system?

What parts of 2nd Ed. AD&D are indicative of genius? I haven't argued that GURPS is better than AD&D or D&D. I wasn't asking you accept other game systems. I was suggesting that you should not to accept the glacial evolution of almost all current game systems. There are matters of taste, which can hardly be disputed, and there are matters of performance/function, which can be quantified and prioritized. I guess you could argue that you like having 2nd Ed. AD&D's thief skills on one scale and proficiencies on another scale, but that doesn't change the fact that they are both measured and acquired in different ways, seemingly for no reason. Similarly, the scales for proficiencies go up and the scales for armor class go down, resulting in two different mechanics. What is accomplished by having them different? Beats me.

I wasn't arguing that one did exist, but I didn't need to write pages and pages of house rules when I ran CoC, Toon, or Paranoia. Planescape: Torment does a pretty good job of avoiding and sublimating 2nd Ed. rules to the point of near-irrelevance. I can take a ride through paradise in a crappy Chevy Cavalier. My environment does not diminish the crappy nature of the Cavalier. An awesome game with a crappy ruleset would be a better game if it had a better ruleset. Again, why grit your teeth and accept fundamentally dumb systems and their dumb adaptations into different media when such things clearly could be designed and executed better?

I didn't have to pay for any of my 3E books, but if I did, I would be annoyed at having to write pages of house rules so the game isn't broken or generally sucky. People pay for goods so they don't have to manufacture those goods themselves. Also, be aware that when pen-and-paper game systems are adapted into computer games, the license-holder isn't going to let your favorite house rules in.

The combat is slower than Ninja Gaiden overall and button input is more forgiving. Also, enemies attack less often, so you don't need to block as much. Lastly, Kratos has a lot of attacks that strike all around him. Ryu's Dragon Sword techniques don't have many of those, which is why it's easy to get stabbed in the back.

Are you asking about my opinion on GURPS, or on d20? GURPS' passive/active defense numbers never seemed necessary to me. There should a value that determines how hard you are to hit and a number that determines how well protected from damage you are once you are hit. It's basically evasion and damage reduction. Pretty simple. I think their extraordinary power in 2nd Ed. was a pretty good reason to tone them down.

I'm pretty sure that at one point or another, a few TSR/WotC people admitted that Athas is supposed to be Toril in the far future. All of the source material relating to Anauroch and the phaerimm seems to support that. More to the point, I also dislike d20. I'm not a big fan of the rules-obsessive GURPS (even GURPS Lite is overkill) rules, but d20 is just strangely structured. For a while, I accepted the WotC line that d20 D&D was weird because they had to preserve certain D&D "sacred cows". The problem is that a lot of those goofy conventions are still found in d20 Modern. One of the nice things about d20 is that it clarified a lot of really hazy stuff from 2nd Ed. Stacking rules are a good idea in theory, badly executed in d20. AoOs sound like a good idea, but really wind up becoming an un-fun, un-intuitive pain in the ass. I won't even go into the old sacred cows like Armor Class. Jesus. I think 3E was better than 2nd Ed., but as with both of those editions, they quickly became worse with additional rulebooks. The problem is that settings make virtually no money in pen-and-paper. 2nd Ed. saw tons of new settings and TSR threw tons of support behind them. Almost no one played them. Most of the sourcebooks I bought were mostly for curiosity. No one else bothered to learn about the settings, so I never used them. Rulebooks, on the other hand, everyone wanted to use. So with 3E, we saw few new official settings and virtually no revivals of old settings (Polyhedron's sad attempts don't count). However, we did see a ton of splat books with wildly varying quality.

I had to stop working on my Fallout rules because the group couldn't consistently run sessions to test them. However, I will say that the direction we were heading with combat was surprisingly well received by all involved.

When DICE is able to make a PC game that doesn't have absurdly long load times with anything less than twice the standard amount of game system RAM, I'll consider buying their games again.

He's still around. He does pen and paper stuff now. He wrote the Testament role-playing game, among other things.

It's important to remember that this isn't an RPG, it's an action game, so your core mechanics will always be oriented around action. Most of the resolution of problems through gameplay are done through action. For example, one of the sorrows is the emperor's theft of the Eidion Stone, a sacred rock upon which the tribes of the Gwaedmae Flesh Eaters anoint their chieftains. For hundreds of years, the imperial governors who rule over the Flesh Eaters have been invested with their imperial office on the stone. It confuses the superstitious Gwaedmae, with half of them believing that the stone confers the rights of rulership no matter who uses it and the other half believing that the stone must be wrested away from the empire, a new chieftain anointed. Naturally, undoing this sorrow involves the slaughter of hundreds of members of the Imperial Legion and Imperial Guard, as well as dealing with two tribes who support the imperial governor, Ayar Colo. Of course, there are other elements around this sorrow that make it a little more involved, but that's the general idea.

The narrator's voice sounds pretty serious and food is not part of Seven Sorrows. Characters absorb the spirits of slain enemies to regain health.

Yes, we have a narrator who currently comments on player health, the appearance of Death, the destruction of generators, and a few other things.

The game is scheduled to come out this winter for PS2 and Xbox. It's not an RPG.

More like welcome to Dragon's Lair in 1983.

By the way, that attack will not kill characters. It will only reduce them to a few hundred hit points.

This guy's going off the rails on a crazy train.