J.E. Sawyer

Actually, I'm sorry. It doesn't run at 60fps at 720p. It runs at 60fps at 1080p. With self-shadowing. Booyah.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma is almost identical to NGB as far as the demo is concerned. However, it does run at 720p @ 60fps, which is worth a lot unless you're Adam Brennecke.

One of my classmates in college (working in the same field of study, no less) was a German woman named Meike. When she first came to the country, she went to a party where a mutual friend gave out presents to everyone. She became very alarmed when the host gave her a box and told her it was a gift.

I had cut a lot of pictures out of them. Also, they were from the late 80s, early 90s -- not rare enough to really be worth anything, but old enough to be archived in the Dragon Magazine CD compilation.

Jeff Husges also posted in that thread. After the prologue, none of the companions are required.

To be honest, I always loved the plain-ol' Dragon Sword. But Lunar is a close second. I never jumped through all of the hoops to upgrade the Wooden Sword to Unlabored Flawlessness, but using it certainly is challenging.

I just sold a bunch of my D&D books and I threw away all of my Dragon/Dungeon mags years ago. I don't have the room for any of that stuff anymore and I'd just as gladly use .pdfs and print out selected pages when necessary. I mean seriously, who really needs all of these taking up shelf space? http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books01.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books02.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books03.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books04.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books05.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books06.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books07.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books08.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books09.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books10.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books11.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books12.jpg http://diogenes-lamp.info/images/books4sale/books13.jpg

Devil May Cry 3 Opening http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvkBDL3DoOA Full Throttle Opening and even though it's just a trailer, it's in-game cinematics: MGS4 Go down to E3 2K6 15 Min. Trailer HD http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=1743

Just start doing it. It's really pretty easy. The creative part is what's time consuming as far as dialogues go. The NWN2 toolset's coversation editor makes the technical aspects of conversation really simple. Scripting is kind of tough at times, but if I can do it, most people should be able to do it.

The new races are awsm. Hopefully Kevin will reveal the mysteries of the expansion soon.

You know, if the issue was really that Saddam Hussein was a bad leader who did bad things to his people, we had plenty of opportunities to take him our prior to the second Gulf War. E.g. the first Gulf War and the many years leading up to it. There were also really bad, really oppressive leaders in other countries before him. Many of them are still around and they (or their replacements) will be around after our involvement in Iraq ends. Phil Ochs wrote "Cops of the World" in 1966. The U.S. has been in love with selectively knocking over leaders and invading countries for a long time. Our selection of whom we knock over and when is motivated by our national interests and capabilities. Our inaction with regards to Darfur is good evidence of that. Hell, our involvement in Vietnam and subsequent inaction with regards to people like Idi Amin in Uganda are good examples of that. No one is going to argue that the world is better off without leaders like Saddam and his sons. But please, let's not act like the invasion of Iraq was the noblest of causes done at our earliest and most selfless opportunity.

I can tell from this demo that the game is eastern European/German in origin. Each element of the game is actually very deep and very complicated. Looking at a single panel of the strategy game interface borders on being overwhelming.

D&D manticores pretty much look like that. Whether details are Monster Manual-accurate are kind of irrelevant to me because ultimately it looks rad.

I like your hats.

The NPC heads were built with hair integrated into the head mesh. It's not a separate piece as it is for PCs. The heads that currently exist certainly can be modified, but getting them to look good would be a solid amount of work. That said, I've seen some pretty nice new PC heads recently. Knowing how to use the engine and having features fixed helps.

I thought it might be interesting to make a Fallout game that was about the collapse of Europe prior to "the big one", during the Resource Wars. The UK and a few other countries were the only European nations that had not descended into anarchy, and that was only because their governments had effectively become totalitarian/police states. These countries were trying to secure resources in the Middle East while continental Europe was tearing itself apart. Nuclear "accidents" had occured in several European countries, and anarcists, gangs, and other crazy people were running all over the place.

Fallout: Tactics 2 for PC and Fallout: Dusk of Steel for the Nintendo DS. Yeah I went there.

I'm not a super "U.S.A. IS THE BEST WOOO!" guy, but let's be realistic. As much as the U.S. military may screw up, and as ill-prepared as they were for occupying a nation boiling at the edge of total chaos, they are very good at moving into places and destroying anything that gets in their way during the process. The UK doesn't have the same numbers as the U.S., but they have excellent training and equipment. Any sort of short-term assault would practically be a no-brainer victory for UK or U.S. forces. I mean, there's more to 21st century warfare than destroying things (as we've already seen), but when destroying things is on the menu, Chef Western World is serving up heaping platters.

A lot of Iran's population is surprisingly liberal. Ahmadinejad isn't exactly universally beloved by the population. The size of the invasion force would depend on the goals of the invaders, but I don't think the invaders would face a fanatical horde of Ahmadinejad zealots. To be honest, I'm not really sure what would happen if he were removed from power. Iran's political system is really weird.

An element that is strangely absent in many RPGs is that of agony, in the olde tyme Greek sense. Choices should be difficult because each option has some potential good and bad effects that aren't just superficial. That won't necessarily mean that each player will weigh these sides similarly; in some cases, they might ignore one path of potential "bad" equally because of their personal biases. But I think it's really rare to see anything like the dilemma of Orestes. He's obliged to avenge his father, but that would mean killing his mother, which is extremely taboo. Orestes kills his mother (omg spoilz), goes crazy, and is pursued by the Furies. The alternative would have been to leave his father unavenged, the murderer walking free. We need more choices like that in games, even if they aren't on the same scale.

"Balance" isn't something inherent to RPGs. All games strive to have some measure of balance, whether it's in the application of one skill or another, the timing of an attack vs. its damage output, or the cost of a car modification relatively to the cost of other car modifications (and their net effect in the game). And "gameplay" is even more broad. Yes, RPGs should have good gameplay. So should action games and racing games and tactical shooters and sims and RTSs and My Little Pony: The Game. They should also have a good framerate (if they have any real-time aspect at all), because framerate is the gateway to fun. That is, it does not make the game fun, but it is the opening through which fun may emerge. If the framerate is low, the gate is small and very little fun emerges. If the framerate is high, the gate is large and much fun can come through. Of course, if the gameplay is terrible and moronic, you could run at 120 and it would still be bad. Of the things that definitively make a computer game an RPG, I think that meaningful choice should be one of the most important elements, if not the most important element. Yeah yeah yeah, make no mistake -- the game has to have fantastic gameplay at a solid framerate or it's dead in the water. But when you get around to focusing on all that "RPG stuff", I think it's less important to make sure there are 5,000 suits of armor in the game or to have elves with super pointy ears or really bloody super mutant deaths than it is to give the player a lot of meaningful choices. And meaningful choice should not be conflated with freedom, as the latter is a pretty impotent term that could mean just about anything. I don't want to allow players to do anything or everything. I want to allow players to do interesting things that make them run off and say to their friends, "I DID THIS AWESOME THING IN THE GAME AND THE STUFF TURNED OUT THIS WAY AND IT WAS FUN AND I LOVE OBSIDIAN SO MUCH OH THEIR GAMES ARE PRECIOUS TREASURES."

yeah check it out it

If a madman says that 2+2=4, it's no less true because the speaker is mad.

Because I enjoy playing a wide spectrum of games on various platforms and I often find that there are good things to learn from them. I enjoy games like Animal Crossing: Wild World, Front Mission 4, Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Forza Motorsport, Oblivion, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Hitman: Blood Money, Devil May Cry 3, Alien Shooter 2, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and Jagged Alliance 2. These are games that I have played in the past six to nine months (in addition to R6V and GRAW2). I have not enjoyed all aspects of them, but I enjoyed them enough to play them. And in every one, I found interesting ideas that could be applied to other games. I've also sent data restructuring documents and bug reports to the NWN2 team to address issues ranging from custom content integration to spell table development to toolset modifications. I've posted some of these ideas in the NWN2 blog and also on the BioWare forums. I don't post those things in this blog because they have more appropriate homes elsewhere.

It should be said that if some semblance of realism is your goal, Fuzion (Sand's suggestion) may be your best bet. I don't know Fuzion well, but I've heard it's the closest thing to Friday Night Fire Fight, which was the combat system from R. Tal's Cyberpunk 2020. Quick and lethal.