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Sammael

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Posts posted by Sammael

  1. FWIW, all the middle-class Brits are talking about Croatia's Adriatic coast as if it's the next Tuscany. I have to laugh, as their understanding of Balkan politics seems slightly....optimistic. Personally, I'd sooner buy a chalet in ooooh.... Haiti.

    Well, I dunno. Croatia seems reasonably safe at the moment*, and its Adriatic coast is beautiful (sure as hell beats Italy and Greece).

     

    *the moment being last year, considering that the ultra-nationalist HDZ party won the last parliamentary elections over there... and that's not a good sign. Neither is the 28% that the Radical Party got here on the December 28th elections.

  2. Console games are only slightly more difficult to pirate than PC games (which are incredibly easy to pirate). I was pretty surprised to see the console companies move on to CD/DVD format from cartridges, which were a lot more difficult to pirate (you had to have some pretty damn expensive equipment to do so, meaning only big-time pirates could do it).

  3. If you're in for some action, Serbia is definitely the place to visit. You are bound to find yourself in one of the following: A) a football riot; B) anti-government demonstrations; C) pro-government demonstrations; D) friendly Albanian crossfire (if you go too far south); E) a NATO bombing; F) a mafia showdown (somewhat less frequent nowadays, but still happens occasionally, like three weeks ago).

     

    We should advertise ourselves as the extreme country for all the extreme sports lovers.

  4. Piracy is stealing. You are robbing the publisher and the developer of that game the revenue that they deserve for making the game, not to mention the retailers and the distributors of that game. Just because many people in Asia do it or have done it doesn't make it right.

    *I do not condone or encourage piracy in any way, shape, or form*

     

    However, equating piracy with theft is a logical and legal fallacy. It is a violation of intellectual property laws, which are murky at best. If pirating a game is theft, then so is borrowing a magazine from a friend and copying an article from it. Or recording a movie from TV. Or taking a camcorder to a concert. Or whatever.

     

    Contrary to popular belief, piracy does not have as great of an effect on revenue as publishers (and software security companies) like to claim. In fact, the vast majority of people who pirate software wouldn't have bought it anyway, and the rest usually do purchase a legal copy if they find it useful. If this was not the case, companies that make shareware products with unlimited trial periods (such as WinZip or Paint Shop Pro) would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

     

    Furthermore, equating piracy with theft is diminishing the severity of actual theft.

  5. Lazenby's Bond was a much more believeable character... which is why he wasn't exactly the true Bond. I wasn't aware that it was Lazenby's first role, but I think he did a really good job.

     

    And it's one of the few Bond movies without a happy ending, which makes it pretty unique in its own right.

  6. It didn't, it was almost completely a new game with completely new characters. They got around the loophole of having a BG name by - just like Dark Alliance - having a setting around the city. There might have been direct, indirect or even no relation at all with the Bhaalspawn saga, and there may have been cameos of various levels from the chracters of that saga, but the story itself was almost completely, if not completely, new.

    Huh? The Black Hound was not set anywhere near the city of Baldur's Gate, and (to the best of my knowledge) all cameo characters were from the Icewind Dale series...

  7. I once had an idea for a multiplayer strategy game in which you can play three different roles: a general - your job is to devise the strategy, plan the supply lines, negotiate with other generals, etc (this would play like a large-scale strategy game); a squad leader (this would play like a standard RTS, pretty much, but without resource management - that would be handled by the generals); and a mercenary (this would play like a RPG - you would negotiate your fee/terms with a general and then get enlisted with a squad, where the squad-leader could communicate with you, but you would be free to do your own thing).

     

    It would be insanely complex to design, though.

  8. I've heard that a lot about KOTOR controls being better on x-box. That sucks; as they were horried on PC.. Talk about unfair.. :angry:

    OMG I agree. The interface in general is horrible on the PC. Don't know exactly how well it works on consoles, as I don't play console games.

     

    In general, though, console controllers have a limited set of buttons and a joystick/joypad thingie, no? I can't imagine playing an IE game with a console controller, since I used hotkeys a lot, and the mouse offers much more movement precision. Imagine trying to find the hidden ankheg plate in Nashkel with a console controller, and you'll see what I mean.

  9. A console game must be simpler than a PC game because of the controller. Thus, including a wider variety of options from the d20 system would have probably made the interface too convoluted.

     

    One other point is that the current KotOR class/skill/feat setup doesn't allow the player to make a sub-optimal character build, which is probably also a function of the console origins, since a player who rented the game and made a sucky character probably wouldn't last long, and would probably conclude that the game sucks (and wouldn't buy it).

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