AGX-17

I am on the level of a consumer wanting to see the apple, so I know it's fresh, before buying the apple. And no I am not perfectly informed, nor am I completely rational. That can not exist. But I can come as close as possible to make an informed decision on which product I like the most. If I believed in a free and perfect market, I would also be against copyright laws(which I am not in principle, just the way they are now). I do not believe that copyright laws regarding video game piracy need to change much, though. I believe the publishers and developers are more to blame for trying to market products that are faulty or just not what the ad promises. Best way to sell me a game is to let me try the game. You may call me a hypocrite for not applying the same principle for, for example, flour. The difference is that I have never seen a store sell bad flour. I have seen plenty of bad apples and bad games, and until the games are all of similar quality I will test them before I buy them, unless other sources(reviews, youtube vids, etc) manage to convince me. Which they usually do, hence only 10 games pirated. I have some issues with how copyright laws are put to use in some areas. Like SEGA's recent rampage against fanmade youtube videos about their Shining series where SEGA flagged multiple accounts for copyright breach that led to many accounts being shut down. These accounts committed such horrible acts like "Let's Plays", "Reviews", and god forbid a guy talking in his webcam about the game without ever showing a single snipped of the gameplay. Truly a terrible breach against SEGA's rights. I do hope, however, hope that both video game piracy and copyright abuse are dealt with in the future. I just hope that video game developers and publisher get their act together before that happens. But if you eat the entire apple and only then decide whether it's good or not, you're a thief. Legally speaking. I mean, I personally am a pragmatist who would steal gleefully (except from intelligent, attractive women,) if there were no threat of justice coming down (or while drunk,) and I have pirated a few games in my time. I'm still a thief. A criminal. A fareless rider on a mandatory fare public transit system. If they're not offering free samples the samples aren't free. Everyone breaks laws, it all comes down to magnitude. A pirate with 40tb of content is worth the FBI's resources, a pirate with 3 games from a defunct company is irrelevant. It's all arbitrary. Like I said, humans take what they want for free if they can get it for free. I make no moral judgments here, just observations. That said, I am a P:E funder so I expect some degree of ethical compliance on that front from everyone on Obsidian's forums. The world must have more games by J.E. Sawyer (according to the gaming social network Raptr I'm the #1 player of New Vegas on planet Earth, that is how much I love his games. I canot get enough of that folksy Wisconsin accent.) MCA and Feargus are cool too, though.

Honestly, I would sacrifice all that I hold dear to be the leader of the alien conquest of Earth since I've seen all the movies and I know what works. ORIBITAL ****ING BOMBARDMENT. And also not running MacOS on your mothership. Of course, there's no need for a mothership in my civilization. Like I'd be fooled by Jeff Goldblum's pretty face or something. Okay, maybe I would be somewhat seduced.

That's not a chemical diagram of Tali's sweat! A true bioware fan would be disappointed. Bioware. I'm already fictionally a human/alien hybrid clone so it doesn't matter, because it's only for infiltration purposes.

I was not impressed by the force users' stories or the trooper one. The bounty hunter one I foudn the pasing on the starting planet to be off and completly failed to connect with the story. I had a lot of laughs with my smuggler (not wearing cowboy hats. though you can see most of what Ronja looked liked in this thread: http://www.swtor.com...ad.php?t=234058 ), though she had a lot of moments where she would facepalm againand again. Sith side I found the agent most agreeable with me to the point I played sith side, as I could play them as someone who does their duty in a state that is messed up. I'll try to put in a little while a day and see if I'll get to the story within a week. If not... Well... I'll be busy playing the **** out of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOV9fos7Q3I ...whilst quietly telling Daenerys "Stormborn" to eat her heart out.

So you're complaining about an aspect of the game Obsidian has released zero information on? Bravo. Slow clapping is called for, here.

Well, I was expecting some sort of Gregorian chanting of some kind but I guess that's not going to be the case. Though it couldn't hurt to have THE POWER OF ROCK defeat Lovecraftian abominations beyond human comprehension. *mad guitar solo from Brian May*

A Storm of Swords, Simon Schama's Power of Art

Career counseling appt. at school, twatted on twitter, played video games. Good to be done for a few weeks. Also sold an old model to a French on ebay.

Tin-foil hats are generally responsible for these sorts of things. Or the History Channel. What's odd is how eagerly some conservative christians cling to the "false religions" of "heathen savages" because it vaguely fits their desire to see the world end.

Pay $10 to watch someone's let's play videos? ....Naaaaaaah. On the subject of TOR: I smacked a bunch of red guys with a play lightsaber for a while while other players did the same thing and still wasn't particularly impressed. Still waiting for the story to start. Got bored and went back to CivV GODS AND KINGS (caps lock necessary) and either my game is bugged or Carthage's Harbor bonus is not clearly explained because i'm not getting trade routes between coastal cities here. FIRAXIS. TELL ME WHY. I NEED GOLD. And I don't want to waste any on road maintainence. Road maintainence is for those losers in Rome. Speaking of which, that's why I got GODS AND KINGS, to right the wrongs of history and have Carthage conquer Rome. Incidentially, I just now built a city in between Cerro de Potosi and a river. No coastal access, but getting Cerro de Potosi is worth any (non-10 gold per turn) cost.

Which would be well and good if it were true, which it isn't. ...Why would this be a factor? Every party member would give off odors. Anyone using poisons and potions and the like would be giving off odors. Did they announce some kind of scent system for P:E? No? Then what's this you're going on about?

As I said here I personally believe the Glanfathan will be based on a Celtic culture (based on very little evidence, admittedly) and as such they'd look a bit more like this The Celts were renowned for their berserkers. No, berserkers were a norse/viking thing. Not celtic. You're attributing a quality of the rapers of the British Isles to the then-native denizens of the British isles, who by then were a mix of various celtic ethnicities, ethnicities from around the Roman Empire (there were Syrians manning Hadrian's wall before the fall of Rome,) and the previous invaders, the Angles, Saxons and co. And why are you saying this in response to a post about Saxons? They were Germanic, not Celtic.

Yeah, I'd like to see a high density of little/non-interactive NPCs and buildings in the "big cities" to make them actually look and feel big, rather than the standard, mostly interactive hamlets that pass for "big cities" in RPGs.

Dinosaurs were not mammals. Rats are not descended from any form of raptor. Rats are not birds.

....What? Either you're not familiar with the concept of a Ranger or you've confused the tradition of a Ranger having a trusty animal companion with the Druid class' traditional affinity for shape-shifting into animals.

Last time I checked, Final Fantasy 13 and Skyrim weren't Infinity Engine cRPGs, why would you have any expectation of literal linear geometry? What's even the point of your hyperbolic reaction to a non-issue? Just adding doors willy-nilly to every room is pointless excess. Unless you have a reason and a believable justification for something, why put it there? Did you just play Dishonored while doing cocaine or something?

You mean the end of the Mayan calendar. The Mayan apocalypse already happened a thousand years ago. If their civilization lasted long enough to be around today they'd be buying a new calendar at Walmart.

No, the basis of our economic system is human belief in the system. You're following the confirmed-for-not-true economic model of the "perfect market," which is an idealized thought experiment that has fallaciously become the basis for conservative/chicago/austrian school economists. There is no aspect of the global economy or any nation's economy which adheres to the model of the "perfect market." You are not perfectly informed if you pirate games to gain information about them. You are not perfectly rational if you are aware of the laws and flaunt them. You are making an emotional decision to take what you want because it's free, as humans are wont to do, something that the "perfect market" model dismisses as a physical impossibility as it assumes emotions do not exist. Morality is an abstract. It's a construct of the society to which it applies. Morality is just the same as social rules and heirarchy in a Baboon troupe but at a dramatically increased level of complexity. On a moral scale, he is not "completely morally wrong," from which I can only infer "genocidal sociopathic sadist," he's on the level of purse snatcher or incompetent identity thief in terms of morality.

I can't stand the Sith. They're just moustache twirling villains with no depth whose only purpose is to be as hand-wringingly eeeeeevil as possible. I was completely turned off from that side when I saw someone post on another forum a rant about how the Sith are the "real good guys" who fight against the fascist light side for freedom and love and blahblahblah on another forum. The reason people play Sith is because they want to play a cruel ***hole (ass is still not a four letter word, Obsidian forum management, at least make it a three asterisk censorship,) I had it when I see this guy talking about how they're an anarcho-syndaclist commune of misunderstood freedom fighters. If that's who's playing sith now, I want no part of it. Regardless of KOTOR/2, Lucasarts/Disney isn't going to be saying there's a canon grey zone where Jedi can take lovers or Sith are misunderstood freedom fighters. Star Wars has always been a world of black and white morality, canonically. For all the cynicism I display, and an affinity for well-designed/written villains of the "magnificent bastard" variety, I'm "good" at heart; which traditional law/neutral/chaotic alignment varies. Maybe that's why I'm so cynical. The smuggler thing was appealing until they had cowboy hats in Star Wars. That was it. I wish there was a free trial mode where you could play the full game without restrictions for a limited time, sort of like how TF2 lets F2P players use drop/achievement weapons temporarily on a trial run basis to entice them to make a purchase (and get upgraded to "premium" status for as low a price as $0.49) so I could see if the game was really worth paying for, but... you know, EA. For the record, that WWI helmet they gave to all the people who bought the game was not valid compensation for having bought and supported the game in the face of the conversion to F2P/micro-transaction economics. Since most players are still people who bought the game it has no significant value in the TF2 economy. And it's considered ugly, which hurts the value more.

To be fair, the reality is that militaries create military men (and women, despite their not being allowed in combat in most Western militaries.) The Normandy is wildly unrealistic in many senses, especially in the way that its commanding officer conducts him/herself. Romantic or sexual relations between a ranking officer and subordinates is grounds for Court Martial in real-world militaries (I don't know all the details of every military regulation of every military in the world so it may well be permissible in some country/ies.) As an Alliance officer, Shepard engages constantly in conduct unbecoming an officer. Even in the future where you can have sex with anything that suits your fancy and homosexuality is not a controversial issue (still waiting for Bioware to appeal to the transgender community, not because I personally want it, but because I expect they'll eventually do it for political correctness' sake,) a commanding officer engaged in a sexual relationship with a subordinate is a slippery slope given the fact that real world militaries are rife with misogynistic social orders in which females are raped and terrorized into silence, sometimes by superior officers who use their rank as leverage to keep the victim silent or their reports go ignored by superiors who believe it to be untrue or not an issue. Many of these incidents have been reported in the US military, and I'm willing to bet they're just as common, if not moreso, in other militaries operating under governments with less/no governmental transparency and less journalistic freedoms, like Russia and China. And honestly? Shepard is frequently just as flat as Vega. Vega punches people and makes risky moves. Shepard punches people and makes risky moves. Vega isn't much less than a semi-renegade Shepard. At least Vega is more fleshed out as a character with a past and connections beyond the characters surrounding him. Most of the companions talk at some length about their pasts and their lives outside of the Normandy, but Shepard is almost entirely restricted as a character to the bubble of the Normandy and the Mission. That wasn't true of ME1, but it was of 2 and 3, to Shepard's detriment as a character. "But wait, Spacer Shepard has a mother who sends him/her an email!" - Afterthought, Shepard has no words or reply. Mass Effect 3 is just plain problems. Characters, narrative and spacebars. I got 99 problems and ME3 is one of them. Although EDI's robobutt isn't one.

Value is subjective. People over-value their own posessions, and undervalue the posessions of others. Currency has value because people believe it has value. When people don't believe in its value, inflation or hyperinflation occur. The value of that currency is dictated by human emotion, not by markets or rational thought. Resource rich countries that should be vastly wealthy are impoverished and undeveloped because of human greed circumventng markets. Gold miners in west Africa sell the gold they mine at great personal risk and effort for far below the international market price. The market doesn't set the prices, the men who stand at the top of the market exploit them just like the oil industry exploits consumers. They're price makers, not price takers. They overprice their own posessions while demanding lower prices for the goods of others. It's irrational, just as most human behavior is (contrary to the fallacious dogma of neoclassical/Hayekian economics and its proponents.) Conservative/Chicago/Austrian school economists continue to cling to outdated, early 19th century theory (which has been thoroughly disproved by two centuries of scientific research into biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other sciences,) that humans are perfectly rational, emotionless calculators of economic efficiency and utility, but humans are living creatures dominated by emotion. "Markets" are an abstract construct of human society and react irrationally to news all the time. Financial and commodity markets frequently panic irrationally over news without waiting to hear the whole story, and most often it turns out to not be anything to panic over. Markets react the same to a paper tiger as a real tiger. I've said as much in another thread, just as I said this: Alfred Nobel never established a Nobel Prize for economics, for he believed (and rightly so,) that economics (at least at the time, I say this because more realistic, more scientifically sound schools of economic thought have emerged but the world of economics is still dominated by fallacious 19th century beliefs, thanks to the political conveniences it provides the ruling class,) was not a science, but a dogma. The "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences" which is now commonly mistaken for a true Nobel Prize was established by a Swedish bank in 1968.

Whoever necromanced this thread, thank you for giving me the opportunity to chide this sentence. "Platypus cactus or whatever" PHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, oh wow.

Yes I'll eat manflesh too. provided it died of natural causes and was prepared well In the frozen wastes, there is no shame in taking the strength of your fallen comrades.

And you never replied to my question about it, Repeat: Since you were scared of little critters or big critters or what have you mobbing you in a dark area but otherwise playing the same as you would in the light (with an accuracy penalty,) and I was not, and I was scared of fumbling around a pitch-black nightmare rust hospital with only a flashlight and a radio whose static increases the closer an unseen monster is to you. An isometric game can't have the atmosphere of a scary horror game unless you are cowardly and easily frightened (no offense.) No amount of writing can change the fact that it's not an immersive perspective. They can try to give it a scary atmosphere visually, or narratively it might say in the lower left hand corner that you're fumbling terrified in the dark by the sound of skittering skitterers, but you're still seeing a team of capable combatants with some vast array of tactics and skills at their disposal. And torches. And possibly light spells. From on high. There's no visceral fear when the player is a god-like observer above the action with the ability to command many characters with many effective combat capabilities and the power to stop time itself, as compared to fumbling in the dark only to run into an unkillable foe that can kill you with one swipe of his giant razor blade. When you run into an enemy who's stronger than you in an IE game my response is "oh, I need to find some quests or encounters to level up and find better loot before taking this guy on," or if it's some special enemy who requires a special weapon or item to defeat it's "I must need a special item to defeat this enemy," not "OHMYGOD OHMYGOD OHMYGOD TURN ON THE LIGHTS SOMEONE HELP OHMYGOD RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN IT'S COMING THIS WAY OHMYGOD" Especially when the player is used to being in combat, being successful in it and understanding the game rules. Scary is Silent Hill 1-3, Amnesia, etc. Scary is not Fallout, Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. The perspective is fundamentally not immersive, it's detached. You can imagine yourself seeing through the eyes of your character, but then it's you doing all the work of scaring you, not the game or its perspective or its atmosphere. The fundamental truth is that cRPGs are not Survival Horror games, period. It's right there in the name. "Computer role-playing game." That is decidedly not "Survival Horror game."

You don't see the value in kicking your companions' asses and showing them once and for all who's strongest? Oops, doble poste.