Darth Drabek

You, sir, are a hero of epic proportions for giving all those dogs a loving home. Dogs are fantastic. I've always had a dog in the house growing up, and I love 'em. Once I get settled and get a house with a yard (for room to run... gotta have room for them to run) I'll go get one from a local animal shelter. Probably won't be for another year or so, though. I feel the need to assert that dogs are great.. probably because the denizens of this board seem to favor cats.

Maybe I should... usernames with "Darth" in them are so last year.

The Who - Squeeze Box she's playin all night and the music's all right mama's got a squeeze box daddy never sleeps at night

All of those things you mentioned do indeed make RPGs great, and I agree with you that the graphics don't have to be cutting edge for a game to be enjoyable (hell, I'm playing Baldur's Gate a lot lately, and that game is eight years old). I just think that it was a probably a lot easier to flesh out a wide variety of storyline options back when the general audience expected to read most of the story, instead of watching it unfold in a cutscene with voice actors synched to the the animations. And the more NPCs that can join your party, the more work it would be to fully integrate them into the plot, or create alternate plots in case a vital NPC gets food poisoning and dies along the way, rendering them unable to deliver their epiphany to the PC before the final battle. And please don't call me Darth. DD or Drabs are both fine. :D

Right now I'm reeling with college nostalgia, thanks to all you young'uns with your coffeeshop study groups and your last minute research papers and your drinking cheap red wine on your roof with your buds and watching drunk girls try to walk back from the bars in their high heels. Well, maybe that last one was just me.

They did not allow Imoen to die in Irenicus' Dungeon. If her HP went low she ran off screaming and you met up at the end of the dungeon. It was a developer-implemented trigger to make sure the story progressed as it needed to. I agree with your points about the design of the companion stories and their optional supplement to the main story arc. I think each NPC should have their own quest, which dovetails in some way with the goals of the PC. Otherwise, If you want to kill off everyone you don't like, as some here seem to enjoy doing, you should be punished for it. NPC quests give you XP and cool items to make your NPC better, like Anomen's knighthood challenge. If they want to lose great NPCs by killing them off or never picking them up in the first place, fine. No problem. But that age of gaming is gone, guys. There's just too many variables, and a current game with that kind of freedom would probably take a decade to make. And that's why there is a need to compromise, because in the current generation of games you need the animated cutscenes. They've become expected content in video games, but they're expensive and time consuming to create (not that I have any practical experience, but I'm pretty sure I'm correct on that). And no development studio has the budget to make 12 different versions of the same cutscene showing all the different variables of who died and who didn't. At least not yet. If they choose to implement permadeath but don't make the changes in each cutscene, the player would be left scratching his/her head at times: "Hey, didn't he die in a grease fire back on Dantooine?" That's why I think Kaftan is spot on with his assessment of the problem. And no, I don't have any solutions, except spend more money and time on a game to implement both the cool in-game movies we've come to expect and the freedom of NPC choice. But a game like that would take so long to develop the engine would be obsolete by the time it was released, so its sales would tank anyway.

I'm chatting about how much I hate AFI (they're like an unholy union of emoz and goths!) while having a few too many beers for a Sunday night. But they are very, very tasty tonight.

I moved the original music over, so I've got that goin on. I tried it vanilla first, just to see what it looked like. Didn't like the stone interface, either. If the story and gameplay are the same, I don't see why I should spend 40 hours playing a non-improved version of the game. So far, I can't really tell which banters are BIO-made and which are added by the modders - and that's the thing that worried me the most when I started my playthrough.

Ah, classic. Have you heard the Joe Strummer version? It was on his last album with the Mescaleros. Paul Westerberg - Waiting for Somebody Man, this song rocks!

The Afghan Whigs - The Temple Yes, from Jesus Christ Superstar. Covering ALW/Rice takes some serious maaa-balls in my book.

Baldur's Gate... for the first time. Got my shiny new copy a day or two ago, and installed it with Tutu and the NPC banter pack. My first thought? "Damn, that's a big box." Welcome back to 1998. So far, I actually like the low-level adventuring (as opposed to BG2). I don't have to worry about dispelling this spell and that spell, I can just skewer 'em with arrows! )

I was making my leaps of logic based strictly on the lyrical content. You know, the whole "God is bad. He makes people fight each other" motif that someone seems to inject into every thread. Anyway, The Cars - My Best Friend's Girl Edit: and I forgot to note that Kirottu is taking a little walk to edge of town and across the tracks... to where the viaduct looms like a bird of doom, etc. etc.

Yeah, unfortunately I had to make that past tense. During my YouTube searches of five minutes ago, I ran across a more recent video (on Lifetime TV, no less ) that makes it look like poor Ann went crazy on the buffet line. The Ventures - Pipeline

There was a time where I could adlib the entire acoustic intro to that classic. Not THIS extended acoustic samurai intro, of course. Seriously, there have never been any better female rockers than Heart. And Nancy Wilson was one fine piece of tail, so that's another point in their favor. Stereophonics - T-Shirt Sun Tan

Wow, looks like Hades found his new theme song. I'm surprised he's not listening to Slayer yet. Ryan Adams - My Winding Wheel

Yessssss.... Not bad for a audience recording. Not bad at all. The Twilight Singers - Forty Dollars mangy dog without a collar find me love for forty dollars i got love for saaaaaaaale come on, get some before it gets stale

I smell ya, homeslice. The only RTS's I ever got into were Warcraft and Z. I think "casual" would be a good description for my forays into RTS gaming.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - God's Hotel

I gotta say, you guys totally lost me. What with your "necrons" and your "zao" and all.

DMX - Jukebox Hero

there are things i'd like to do but i don't know if they will be with you As for me, I'm listening to: The Wrens - North to Nothing

Afterhours - The Thin White Line My friend and I had a conversation with the keyboardist and guitarist for these guys over a few beers after their show had ended. It was a mixture of broken Spanish on our part and broken English on theirs. My buddy is a worldly fella, so he was actually able to have a decent conversation with them about Italian politics. I mostly just smiled, nodded and listened through that part, heh. I hear they are very big in Europe. Can anyone confirm or rebut this? I'm curious, because I saw them in a very small club here in the U.S.

Chris Cornell - Also, Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros -

That makes sense in my book. I kind of like it when you're forced to stray from your chosen running crew. One instance that comes to mind is the Leviathan in KOTOR, where the more plot-centric characters accompanied your PC, but you needed to pick someone who might have spent most of his/her time polishing the ship for the daring rescue. Also, splitting the party in KOTOR 2 was a really cool way to force utilization of more NPCs while adding to the "large-scale conflict" feel of the endgame. Of course, it would bug me if I had to use a character who hadn't built up any XP from adventuring with my PC. That wasn't a problem in KOTOR, where all party members gained XP whether they were in the fray or not.

Heh, I like seeing the various responses on the BG1 NPCs. I kind of expected Khalid to be a wimp, just from the one line in BG2 when you release J-heezy from her cage. "Maybe we'll find Khalid hiding under a bed along the way." The fact that members of your adventuring party would snipe at each other to the point where they would actually leave the party to settle their differences in battle was something I had never seen before, and it really adds to the role-playing immersion. Now if only Lloyd Bridges was still alive to voice a character, preferably a CG knight errant with a penchant for telling long stories about how he lost various limbs in various battles ... We'll settle this the old Navy way. First guy to die... loses!