Phosphor

Canada.

Bush and his administration are loathesome. Given the disaster that the whole Iraq thing has been, I think Americans have an obligation to vote Bush out of power if they want their country to be taken seriously and have credibility on the world stage. The US currently has very little of that, apart from a couple of whacko Prime Ministers and conservative zealots. I don't know if Bush is an idiot or not. He's smart enough to surround himself with people smarter than he is. Intelligence aside, he is a puppet of his administration, namely Rumsfeld and Cheney. Those two, with Wolfowitz, are the real power behind the throne. Cheney gives me the chills he's so evil. There's a saying that you get the government you deserve. Perhaps Americans want/deserve Bush, but the rest of the world certainly doesn't. Please stop forcing him on us!

Is that so? And Gromnir, calm down - this thread is not serious.

Pazaak being in isn't bad news. What would be bad news would be that there's more required swoop racing and gun turret shooting. The only failing of Pazaak has been well pointed out in this thread - there was little point to it and the player always had to go first. I agree it's surprising the AI didn't cheat with the game. It always seemed to do so well. But perhaps all the AI players just have fantastic decks..

Perhaps you could learn to recognise a joke when you see it.

I think the avatar size is just fine... I see no need for them to be larger. It's a text-forum afterall, not a gallery.

I found it terribly addictive at first, but it gets boring quickly. I liked "building up" my Sim, building and decorating the house, but once that was done the game becomes as much a tired routine as real life. The odd thing is, it's a game in which you scramble to keep your Sim's house clean and tidy, keep the bills paid, get to work on time and so on while you neglect all those things in your own life.

Only when essentially forced into an apology by getting caught in the abuses. And Bush did not initially apologise, it was only after he was criticised for not apologising that he later did so. That's hardly an honest apology. And Rumsfeld's known about the abuses since at least January, and didn't say a word about it. It was only when the truth came out he had to scramble for damage control. I believe Cheney issued a few words as well, but again, only after being caught. The whole thing has been a case of "it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission" in the sense that things just kept happening, things that people in charge knew were wrong, and did nothing about it. Only after getting caught do we get these crocodile tears from the US administration. It's an insult to the Iraqis, I think.

Most certainly. Villains with whom you can sympathise are far more interesting than pure evil villains. If you can see the "humanity" in a villain, that makes their actions all the more distasteful, disappointing or treacherous. And if you get a sense of betrayal follwing a percieved redemption, than it's all the better. I find the best villains are the ones you care about the most.

He was the guy who brought coffee and cleaned up afterhours. He also ran errands for the development team (picking up dry cleaning and such).

I haven't really experienced the romance with Bastila in KOTOR (I haven't finished the game yet - though spoilers are irrelevant, I figured out the general story arc ages ago) but there's something very trite popping up in dialogue on occasion that's blandly suggestive of a "romance" (if it could even be called that). I haven;t pursued it because the "correct" responses are terribly lame. If romances must be in, do make them more interesting with more PC interaction, not just responding to the love interest's interrogations with some cheesey line, as Kefka points out.

They've likely got another game in the pre-production stage while KOTOR2 is being developed. It would only make sense to have a second project ready to go when KOTOR2 is finished.

Apparently the "improved" scenes from the updated SW films are being updated again so as to not look as bad as they did. I'd still rather have the original films as they were released, not revamped versions.

I'd like fewer NPCs, there were too many in KOTOR to be of any real impact on the game and as Gorth points out they're more often chosen for combat skills than personality or story. I'd rather have only a few to choose from but that will have a real place in the story and develop in persona not just skill over the course of the game. Something more like the NPC situation of Planescape: Torment rather than the BG games, for a frame of reference.

I'd definately like to play as a non-human non-jedi but that's probably not going to happen. I'd settle for one or the other (a non-human jedi, or a human non-jedi) though. I don't see any reason why we can't have a non-human character unless our character is again some incarnation of another human. Which I hope is not the case. If in the game you start off as an exiled jedi, then perhaps we'll have the option of going off the jedi path? Say screw it to the order and become a bounty hunter or smuggler.. That'd be fine.

Combat in KOTOR was fun? You have a strange sense of "fun".. Combat was one of the worst parts of the game, I thought. And I'd like to add a big NO to the request of more real-time combat and less turn-based.

I disliked the minigames. Pazaak was ok, but it served no purpose. It would have been neat to have been able to gamble for something worthwhile (not quest-essential, but more than a few credits - which you really don't need) to make the game more interesting. Swoop racing I hated with a burning passion and the turret thing was just bloody irritating. But since these things are going to be in KOTOR2, at least they can be made better. Give us better prizes for Pazaak games, have swoop races against other racers, not just times, and give a track that's more than a straight line. The turret game.. well, that one just sucks no matter what you do. Just make sure it stays optional.

The original links to the article are dead, too. We had them up on Winterwind and while the post is of course still there, the links in the post go to page not found errors. Looks like something got out of the bag a bit too early.

I didn't like Olivier's Henry V either, it was so arrogant and utterly made for reasons of propaganda. Branagh's is pretty much it's direct opposite. As for the Ran comments.. Shakespeare never really wrote any battles. The Henriad has the closest to scripted battles, but even then there isn't a right and wrong way to portray "Shakespeare's battles". In Ran, being an adaptation of King Lear, the battles are purely Kurosawa's doing - there are no (military) battles in King Lear, so your comparison isn't all that appropriate. Regarding Henry V "might as well actually taken place on a small wooden stage", that's indeed part of the point. The play is narrated by a chorus, telling of events. If you'll recall the beginning of the film, Chorus (Derek Jacobi) is walking through an empty theatre backstage, giving the prologue ("Oh! For a muse of fire...") before flinging open the doors to "our scene". The play, and Branagh's film version, acts as half actual event and half story told. Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed on that small wooden stage - the action has to be manageable in those confines. With modern cinema we can of course do all sorts of things to the play, but if you're working with the text itself, the action is going to have a stagey feel. As far as small armies - Henry's army was small, and the French army was largely inside the castle walls. It was a siege after all. At any rate, the film didn't exactly have a huge budget for a cast of thousands. Branagh's cast was from the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Renaissance Theatre Company - there wasn't a lot of cash from them, and the movie studio wasn't about to throw huge sums at the project.

It was a Eurpoean magazine right? Maybe that had something to do with it, since they don't have an E3 coming up.

Which one?

I'm by no means an expert in the field of gaming journalism and how exactly everything works, but I cannot see a gaming magazine having such power as to prevent a game design studio and publisher from announcing their game in favour of an exclusive story. Of course the decision as to when the game is announced rests with LucasArts, but in that article there was a LucasArts guy talking about the game - why talk about it in an interview but not announce the game? It just seems very strange to me.

I don't understand how MCA can do an interview and specifically refer to KOTOR2 content and whatnot, as well as someone from LucasArts, but they can't say anything on these message boards?