Zoraptor

You cannot invalidate a 2 dimensional oversimplification with another 2d oversimplification. Complex buffered systems are resistant to change, certainly, but the tendency is towards 'defaultism'- difficult to change, but equally difficult to change back- not some magic median. That is why you end up with 'Ice Ages' and warm periods, not Ice years/ Warm years, the 'default' position of the system shifts markedly for a period of thousands of years.

I've been playing the Wing Commander series from start to finish, up to the SOs for Prophecy now so nearly finished. Had immense fun with it so I'll almost certainly move on to IWar 1/2 next, or possibly Privateer. Ratings, story wise: 4>3>2=Prophecy>1 Ratings, gameplay wise: Prophecy>3>2>4=1 All worthwhile though, even 1 for fair dinkum Ocker Hunter who was obviously written by someone with a Steve Irwin overdose (and Angel, who actually looks better than her live action 3 version) and 2 for manic depressive french maori Doomsday. WC4 still has the weird inverted difficulty curve where the early missions in hellcats and longbows are far more difficult than the last missions in a Dragon, let alone anything using a BWU ship and missiles are instakills most of the time.

Not really, no. Depends entirely on your preference, as you point. It's not a fact that a controller is better. A controller has clear advantages that translate directly to a racer: 1) Analog steering, allowing you to steer more or less depending on how far you move the thumbstick. With a keyboard it's all or nothing. 2) Analog triggers, allowing you to feather the throttle. Again, with a keyboard it's all or nothing. It is mouse and keyboard that is being compared to, right? Not keyboard only? Because it strikes me that those limitations do not apply to mouse control where you can use distance and speed of mouse movement as an 'analog(ue)' input method, you don't have to use the binary keyboard input. M&KB is not the greatest combo for everything of course, I don't think you could play SSX very well with M&KB, and most flight/ space sims wouldn't work well either. But, of course, space sims don't work well with a controller either.

That sucks major balls. I feel sorry for everyone who bought that game. I think the fundamental question must be asked: if a bad game stops working should you feel sorry for a purchaser from the point at which they bought the game or the point at which it stopped working? Indeed, is the lack of working actually a net positive as it will prevent anyone accidentally replaying it? Hmm. This needs some pondering.

Guaranteeing something that you can not actually guarantee is foolish, even if it does make for good rhetoric. The burden of proof should always be on the person who makes the claim*, as is the case with ravenshrike and his "guaran****ingtee that no liberal org had to answer anything remotely intrusive as them". If that statement was not intended to be a factual statement, that should be clarified. *Imagine what science would be like, if any yahoo could claim any outrageous thing without having to provide any evidence whatsoever. I'll agree that others should be able to prove it right or wrong, but the person who makes the claim should have more proof than "liberal orgs weren't bitching" to support their case. Oh, I agree. This is the internet though, and this is a political thread, not a scientific discussion. A certain amount of rhetoric is... inevitable.

Then guaranteeing it seems a bit foolish doesn't it? Well no, it's eminently sensible in a rhetorical sense. In effect you never have to provide evidence because the statement is constructed so you cannot provide it and means that the onus of proof is moved to the other person.

Prove it then. With evidence from reputable sources and not politically biased blogs. Can't prove a negative. ACORN probably proves a positive, though I suspect that will be Different. I wasn't specifically saying that he had any involvement in the IRS thing, just that it could be seen as part of a pattern. The trouble is that at some point in the political cycle the burden of proof on such things almost always reverses- once there's a sufficient critical mass of problems and the perception of problems it becomes in effect necessary to prove innocence rather than lack of guilt. People just plain stop believing you even if you're telling the truth, in other words. That's a very subjective thing of course, and the threshold will vary markedly from person to person but I've generally noted a decreased tendency to defend Obama in the past few months.

Obama has a pretty big problem with perception now. It isn't just the IRS stuff, it's the systematic spying on journalists for doing their job even if everyone* agrees what they've done is legal, it's prism, it's the persecution of whistleblowers, the unbelievably ill conceived notion of claiming the right to summarily execute by fiat of terrorist label and the overall conclusion has to be that the guy who promised transparency (hey, he's talking about it right now in RSA) really meant that the US public would be transparent, not its government. He looks more and more like a US version of Tony Blair- articulate enough to deflect criticism for a while, but ultimately immensely disappointing and not likely to be remembered kindly. *well, those who want to criminalise journalism would like it to be illegal to publicise a leak as well as actually do the leak

For GOG specifically they have both DRM free and 64 bit compatible versions* which makes them different from others on sale. If the only changes are single bits then its likely to be some sort of boolean true false turning on/ off something that causes problems and that's about it (eg maybe turning off the update system since it's now unnecessary for the GOG release and could cause problems). Doubtful there's any real point asking here for an official response though, none of the support replies say that Obsidian implemented the changes, and anything from users will be speculation. *I've never had any problems running my disk version on 7/64, but Gamersgate for example has securom, and notes 64 bit incompatibility.

Companion NPCs would generally be a special case though- as a designer you would not want them to be 'missed' by players. DAO has Leliana and Zevran as rogues/ thieves and it's possible to kill both of them leaving you potentially without a thief archetype. Realistically you want to avoid that happening very often, if for no other reason than you'll end up with lots of complaints about the lack of rogues/ alternative companions. I'm not particularly advocating authorial imperative though, just saying that it is necessary- something like the Cerberus joining in ME2 is baffling from an 'objective' story perspective given the events in ME1 (and ME3 too really, which was entirely predictable). But while you might be able to rejig ME2 to remove Cerberus entirely and have someone else rebuild The Shep/ not kill her at all, provide the ship etc it would not be trivial and you could not realistically provide both as alternative choices; in effect it would have to be a different story without 'positive' interaction with Cerberus. Once the story has been decided upon outright refusal of Cerberus becomes an impossibility and players just have to Deal With It, or not, as preference dictates.

You don't have to do every permutations, no, which is fortunate since that would be impossible. But as noted, you do do the choices that you think that players will want to make, and even then only to the limits defined by budget and what can realistically be achieved within the confines of the story you want to tell. Ultimately you have to assume that the player actually wants to play your game and if your game has a strong storyline then that assumption includes that they want to follow the story rather than create their own. They may be able to customise your story in some allowed ways, but it remains your story at heart, not theirs, as everything story wise has to be- ultimately- the author's creation. It's like one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. There can be a lot of freedom in how you go about things, but you're still always turning to page 352 written by [author], rather than page 352 written by [player].

I don't think you can design a game with a (strong) story any other way though. A storyline is a set of progressive steps leading to a conclusion, and it is impractical to program every possible permutation, or even a reasonable number of permutations without ending up with some sort of procedurally generated system which will, pretty much by definition, end up as a generic approach. You can basically ignore the story in, say, Fallout- don't bother with the water chip or defeating the super muties- but there's nothing there to replace it with. With the peripheral stuff you have a choice of generally binary decisions like whether to help MacGuyver or help the fat desk guy, you're never going to be able to, say, set yourself up as town store owner and gangsta even if you think the overseer is a complete goober, hate everyone in the vault and just want to settle down with Tandi. End of the day I'd far prefer writers to be writing stuff that they like and they find engaging, and which hopefully overlaps with my tastes as well. Because they cannot ever tailor stuff for everyone and shouldn't try, and getting people to try and write stuff that they don't like just because that's what they think the players will want is the kind of thing that leads to over reliance on focus groups. Then again I have a pretty distinct dislike for Bethesda style games and always find them shallow and unbelievable rather than full of endless possibilities as others do.

Do not lie with a man as with a woman is straight (hoho) Leviticus, iirc, but I will check... ex wikipedia

There aren't really any negatives, no. I'd think that the most resistance to the idea would be the implication that the reviewers would have personal bias rather than being objective scientists about the whole thing, and some won't like that implication at all. Personally though when I was marking university essays I always avoided looking at the names on them until the mark was decided because there could be bias- due to expectation more than anything- and I thought that was a fairer way of doing things.

Thing is for most of the listed games- PST, K2, NWN2/MOTB, even FONV largely- Gaidar's last quote applies "..They get to do what we let them"- and the two examples from Nonek are excellent ones in that regard. Sure, you can make TNO a complete bastard or nice John McNice, you can wade through blood and souls up to your neck or be a LS hippie/ resist the spirit eater or whatever, but that is because that is how the game has been designed. The implication of Avellone's quote is more of an 'emergent' (not a term I like much) story, though I suspect that that is probably not what is actually meant there and he is probably referring to the sorts of choices listed above as being the building blocks for player agency. And 'emergent' story is very much the sort of thing you see BethGS games praised for, as well as games like CK2. Really though, it's pretty antithetical to story in the classic sense. You might want Bilbo Baggins to overthrow Dain and become King Under the Mountain, leading the dwarves in a crusade against the unfair oppression of the Valar but that is not what happens, and it will not be a possibility in a Hobbit RPG because it's almost totally outside the scope of the setting and would simply not be considered a possibility.

It's also justified via Paul, who is NT rather than Leviticus's OT. Jesus himself didn't have any comment on the matter. But then I often think that if Jesus lived today he would be labelled a dangerous liberal subversive by rather a lot of the more strident Christians on the planet.

They don't always share the submitter's name(s)- sometimes articles are reviewed double blind. It's not a common approach and would not work as well as might be expected- I know my dad did a double blind review recently and guessed the author correctly after only reading the abstract. In any small field there is a limited number of people who can produce stuff, and generally their specialities and preferences are well known.

Is that really Ken Levine? He looks suspiciously like Homo Erectus. He's remarkably well preserved since his SS2 days, barely changed in appearance at all. Funny thing is, if you blocked out the pictures I would almost certainly have picked the other two (might have gone Spector for Levine) but I would have picked Todd Howard for Avellone's quote, since it's almost exactly the excuse used by Beth for their lack of coherent story- even if it is probably meant rather differently here.

Well, it isn't a certainty, but equally it isn't false. Maybe it could have been handled through 'proper' channels, but I really doubt it. All the elected officials are running around defending everything as being perfectly legal and having impeccable legal oversight and all sorts of stuff like that, not lining up to get upset at how the NSA has run roughshod over rights and limitations; and giving the moral equivalent of the "we had to destroy our freedoms to save our freedoms!" speech. On the other hand seeing John Kerry squirm when he said that only terrorists were monitored then the interviewer asking whether all the researchers in China targeted were therefore terrorists was outright hilarious.

That was with respect to WoD's link, not Allan's- which I (probably unsurprisingly) near entirely agree with.

That's us, not Aussie. There's a documentary on the subject called 'Black Sheep'. Australia may have an R18 classification now but it seems to be pretty much exactly the same practically as the old MA15- and due to the way most distribution is handled we get saddled with their classification or lack of it as well.

Meh, there's stuff wrong with academic review, certainly. What he suggests won't fix anything though, and is an obvious ideological tilt at science that he doesn't personally agree with- which equally obviously only gets approved because the system is broken and has __ist bias, while right thinking people struggle manfully to illuminate ignorance and battle Big Science. I'd strongly suspect the whole point of that article is wanting to get reviewers named so he can, well, 'name and shame'. Really though, he wants academic articles, some of which may have the number of people who adequately understand their principle numbering at less than a hundred approved within hours of submitting. That isn't just moronic and a recipe for getting a whole lot of bad blog style papers- approved by someone who's had a bad day perhaps, or dislike the author's name; but at least is getting paid to randomly dislike things rather than doing it for free- in many cases it is literally impossible.

Australia protects youngsters from corruption again, despite new R18 rating. Saints Row IV banned for rewarding alien drug use and, uh, probes of a posterior persuasion.

Yes, though not in a while. It's good, and has the potential to be genuinely excellent, great attention to detail and the game system really fits well. Only real drawback is that the time scale is a bit off (ie all the recognisable characters disappear a bit too quickly) and that's unavoidable.

I don't use 'likes' personally. I tend to think that if you like a post you reply- and there's a difference between liking something and finding it worthwhile. Someone can argue a point that you strenuously disagree with well and that certainly makes it worthwhile even if you can't really like it, because that implies agreement. If I think something posted is worthless or I just don't care enough/ have nothing worthwhile to add then I don't reply, if I care enough or think something is worthwhile then I do (with limitations, I do not read a lot of threads at all). Only times I've really been tempted to 'like' something is humourous stuff like the oh so awesome King Spider in the arachnophobia thread. I am kind of curious about what kinds of posts and threads people 'like' most, and whether it would coincide with my preconceived notions.