AGX-17

No mini-game, skill based. We're not looking for Obsidian to emulate Oblivion or Skyrim here. What's meant by growth through experience is the Elder Scrolls model whereby engaging in lockpicking causes the lockpicking skill to increase, leading to exploitative/powergaming opportunities for anyone with the drive to grind, not gaining experience points for successfully picking a lock. Yes, fallout 3 had decent minigames, but all they did was make more prominent the fact that lockpicking and science were near-useless as skills. I can't remember a single situation in F3 where those skills gave you access to unique weapons or armor, which is pretty much the entire purpose of locked doors, separating players from those items. They always just led to random loot containers. At least in NV there were rewards for lockpicking and science oriented characters, even if the most prominent one got nerfed (Gobi Campaign rifle,) when the game was updated. And then made worthless by Old World Blues' unique sniper rifle. So yeah. There's that. The mini-games make the character's skill irrelevant and the player's skill the only determiner. Fallout 3's designers' solution was to make tiers of locks and ban players from accessing those locks without meeting a skill threshhold, but that was disingenuous because there's no actual physical barrier to the character making an attempt in the game. It's entirely in the mechanics of the game design, not the actual "reality" of the game world.

Publishers, probably. Also they have to send the games through more, longer tubes. Actually, thinking about it, maybe server costs are higher in Australia or something possibly legit like that. It's not like that's a chilly continent where air conditioners are unnecessary. The Walking Dead game is one of the best games of the year. You really don't know what you're getting into, but I guess we'll find out how you've fared once you come out the other end now that it's finished. btw. How can you say it's not really a game without playing it? Are you referring to adventure games in general? It's not a traditional adventure game. I hated adventure games back in their heyday because they focused on stupid BS nonsense illogical puzzles. TWD is almost entirely about narrative. The first couple of episodes have some of those irritating trial & error puzzles, but you aren't given two dozen items and expected to make some idiotically illogical connections between them. It's more a matter of what order to use the items in. It's really the QTEs that it relies on, which works sometimes and doesn't at others. At least it provides a sense of danger. The later chapters pretty much abandon all that and focus more narrowly on narrative and decisions Lee has to make, which is what the game's real focus is, and which are why it's so much better than the run-of-the-mill 90s adventure game. The end puzzle in Ep. 5 is more for emotional affect than anything else, and it works.

FFX-2 is not bad, if you are able to get over the girliness of the game, the battle system is still imo the best from whole FF series, and that was why I spent long time playing this game and pretty much enjoying it. And yes, you are right, lot of elements of the game made it inferior sequel, but still it was enjoyable experience. Hopefully the HD version Bluray for PS3 will contain both International versions of the two games... Girliness? The entire point was to titillate teenage males. The game isn't "girly" in the way that Lisa Frank school supplies are "girly."

*Cynical antagonism about commercialized celebrations of false promises and broken treaties* On a less jocular note, Thanksgiving is not a Christian/religious holiday. I'm pretty sure you guys have a couple other holidays for that. History lesson, bleep bloop. I'm not taking issue with who or what you thank, but I think that needs to be kept in mind. Historical accuracy. Thank your thanks, I'll thank my thanks. Debts are paid, family is gathered, blood is spilled, that's all that really matters in the end, right? Have a happy thanksgiving.

Strongly Eastern influenced is a bit... strong a claim at this point, given the one screenshot we've seen and the character designs. And a "western flavored monk" would be a chaste man in a hair shirt studying scripture, gardening, copying texts and caring for orphans and the sick, not a muscled he-man shooting fireballs with his Chi. At any rate, this particular image does seem to portray an "Eastern" settng, but it looks to be more "near east." The blocked doorway/portal behind the characters looks more Mediterranean or Egyptian than Oriental. The hanging bells do have a definite "oriental" look to them, but the rest of the structure doesn't. And more pressingly, Chinese and Japanese religious architecture simply doesn't look like that. This honestly looks more Egyptian or Mycenaean than anything else. The stone post & lintel design and arcades of columns just don't fit traditional Chinese or Japanese architecture, which are almost exclusively made from wood. Aside from castles and city/Great walls, stone building was used primarily for military purposes in China and Japan prior to the late 19th century. There is an obvious dearth of stone building in those countries prior to the mid/late 19th century.

Project. Eternity. Updates. Watch. The. Videos.

From what I've read they're people who like to dress up as humanoid-animals and in some instances have sex with one another. Not my thing but so long as they're not harming anyone I don't see the big deal. They're a sexual fetish subculture that believes it is extremely important that everyone on Earth should be exposed to the most graphic depictions of their sexual fantasies, and that any and all intellectual properties would be vastly improved if all the characters were anthropomorphic animals who had anatomically correct animal genitals and had graphic sex scenes.

That is a depiction of elves that fits with real world mythologies, pre-Tolkien/Bowdler.

The Paladins were a Holy Roman/Germanic analogue to King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. Fables about a band of heroic knights who fought the heathen Muslims. There is a justification for the zealous piety associated with them, but there's little more to them than that in reality. Eventually the term just came to mean a chivalrous knight. There is justification for the P:E definition, though. The Protestant military leaders in the Thirty Years War were called Paladins. There's a great deal of overlap there, with the old meanings.

The reason enemy bodies disappear in games is for rendering and memory purposes. Every corpse is another model for the computer to render in realtime, and the more there are the slower it's going to be. If you leave a place full of corpses and you want them to remain there forever that change to the location's data has to be saved, and those saves are going to bloat up like a pufferfish, just like in Bethesda games.

It's not magic if it takes ingredients, that's one of the following: A. Cooking B. Alchemy C. Chemistry Fun fact: That doesn't matter because MAGIC ISN'T REAL.

I think it should say things like "Hammers are used for driving nails through wood, or extracting them! Hold a nail's pointy end against the wood and then swing the flat face of the hammer down onto the nail's head. Watch your fingers!"

Isn't that just a chupacabra? Vampires are overdone. I say that about everything in these threads, but I really mean it this time. I remember how vampire fetishists got all whiny because Oblivion's vampires weren't sexy looking (which is odd considering everyone looked like butt in the worst way possible in Oblivion.) I have to give credit to Bioware for not having vampires in Dragon Age (that I can remember, anyway.) They're parasites, they should be as disgusting and skin-crawling as any tapeworm, bloated tick or those creepy things that eat a fish's tongue and then live in its mouth like a replacement tongue.

Got Civ V: Gods and Kings on sale on Steam. Finally got Carthage back (killin' the **** out of Rome as always,) can't stand the way the narrator (whose name I forget but he was in an episode of Doctor Who so he's cool,) mispronounces Dido, but whatever. FREE HARBOR FOR EVERY COASTAL CITY. FULL STOP. Harbors for every city starting in 4000 BC. Yes Please. Move over Liz, there's a new naval empire in town. You know they have websites for that sort of thing, right?

I haven't played a real JRPG since Persona 3 and 4, and there was a good 4 year gap between that time and the previous playing of JRPGs, for the grinding was never fun, which is what I was getting at. The only JRPG type games I love are Super Robot Wars games, and those have built-in replay value in the form of multiple protagonists with unique storylines, divergent paths in the game story that require replaying the game to see the content of the other paths, alternate endings which are only achievable after completing the game, etc. And no grinding unless you're fighting this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGSt2FsJOdI

Their limitations, of course.

If it's a character I like/rely on, then yes (I am not going to start a new game and play all the way back up to that point to try to get things different, 's why I save scummed over companion deaths in NV, companions in it excelled at being stupid and getting themselves killed. Like how they would crouch in front of you when you were trying to snipe and start rotating a 90 degree arc in front of you so that when you took THE SHOT it hit them in the hand and killed them on account of your carrying a .50 AMR or Gauss Rifle.) If the deceased are "true" companion characters (fleshed out with stories and quests and personalities of their own,) there should be recognition storywise. But not if it's one of your self-made followers from the adventurer's hall. Then you could just make new followers, get them killed, complete your "tearful" pilgrimage to the land of their birth and CHA-CHING! Experience points! From a quest! ad infinitum.

Player Agency.

Team of 4 still can't beat Torgue's raid boss in BL2. Lone Gunzerker can. Typical. Golly mister, you suuuure showed me! Hyuk-hyuk! You are not in any way comparing apples to oranges!

I thought you were being sarcastic but then you said "a man can dream..." so now I have to ask, why would you want them to make an Xbox exclusive title?

How can you go to Little Lamplight and not be overtaken by feelings of disbelief, if not more aggressive negative feelings? The only explanation for these kids' survival are engine-level gameplay mechanics (they are unkillable,) and there's no explanation as to where they come from or any other aspect of their cartoonish existence. It might work for a childrens' cartoon, but not an M-rated RPG. Little Lamplight and the quests "Those!" and "Blood Ties" are the only truly infuriating aspects of Fallout 3. You could even call it a compliment that they've been able to stir up so much emotion in people. It was a great game in the end because it was more than the sum of its parts, and thanks mostly to great level design and atmosphere. Fallout 3 was phenomenal when it was just you exploring the wasteland. It really fumbled when it came to writing. It's just... COME ON. I'm the bad guy for killing the MURDEROUS CANNIBALS? How does just drinking your innocent victims' blood after murdering them make you shining Paladins of Light?!

It was British then Israeli policy that drove the Palestinians to violence in the first place. They were pushing and even fighting for free statehood while under British rule (nobody ever taught Arabs the ways of democracy,) in the chaos after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, then the British started letting Jewish colonists in. Then the British and Americans sent bigger waves of Jewish colonists in with tanks and guns, and those Jewish colonists just barged into Palestinian homes and forced families out at gunpoint and stole their homes and land while justifying it on religious grounds. And that's still what they're doing today with their settlement activity, which has been deemed illegal by every single nation on Earth but Israel. If the Jews didn't want to lose their land they should have kept their heads down and not pissed off the Roman mother****ing Empire 2000 years ago (this was the ROMAN MOTHER****ING EMPIRE. Did you HEAR about what they did to Carthage just for being in their way?) The story of the Jewish loss of their homeland is one of religious extremist factions (the Zealots for which all others have been named,) exacerbating what could have been a peacefully-solved conflict. Sound familiar? The purpose of the Jewish rebellion was just, and Vespasian would have given them some of the concessions they wanted if not for the Zealot faction mucking it up for all Jews. Israel refuses to enter peace talks or entertain the idea of a Palestinian state in good faith, they never intend to make any concessions. They know that there are uncontrollable muslim zealots running around in the Palestinian territories and they know that's the perfect excuse to never make peace, because they can blame the actions of one lone extremist or small cell of them on all Palestinians and cut off talks/expand settlements. Israel's policy toward the Palestinians is all stick. There's never been any carrot. They don't reward Palestinians for concessions or cease-fires, they continue the vindictive punishments. They're still building walls around the West Bank, still building colonies and stealing land, even though Fatah has given them what they wanted. They're still evicting Muslims from their own legally-owned homes in Jerusalem and giving their homes to Jewish families for the sole purpose of removing all Muslims from Jerusalem. The Palestinians who were born and raised and died for generations in that land for the intervening years were not Romans, they weren't responsible for the loss of the Jewish homeland, yet they're being punished as though they were Vespasian and Titus themselves.

You remember how many people made fun of Dragon Age for having characters constantly drenched in blood, right? Generally speaking, it wasn't smart to just stay covered in an enemy's blood until it rotted on your skin and crusted up your armor in reality, so I don't see how it would make sense to have that sort of constant bloodsoaking and no bathing thing they did in DA. Gore that makes sense should be all that's necessary. If some guy with an exposed neck has it sliced off by a sturdy, sharp blade wielded by a strong warrior, who's to argue it shouldn't come off?

I haven't checked in on these threads in a while. Are we (by which I mean people other than myself,) still just nodding in agreement that all fantasy game armor but chainmail and steel plate is unrealistic and should not be present despite the fantasy setting?

What I find unappealing are the furry fetishists it will inevitably attract. I also find unappealing your implication that it's "arrogant to place ourselfs[sic] in every fantasy setting." Every other race in fantasy gaming is so frequently a derivative stereotype of creatures imagined by mankind in the past that they have no value as an idea. They're just a quick and easy way to differentiate between different base attribute and skill sets, and a lazy way to depict different cultures, because every race in fantasy worlds is so often a monoculture. Humans are the creature humans best relate to. That is why humans tell stories about humans, that is why humans play games about humans.