Pidesco

I'm looking forward to the Thundercats game.

For emphasis. Also, I noted earlier in the thread the problems with Quaritch's character development. FernGully, I saw many, many years ago, so I don't really remember it.

While I can imagine, I don't know how Mass Effect 2 will turn out and how the bigger budget will affect it, that was a comment on the first game. As for the writing and graphics distinction, you'll notice in my previous post that I didn't say that better writing required more writers, rather what I was referencing was writers having to write around the cost of voice acting. So in ME1, for example we got loads of encyclopedic, descriptive monologues, instead of full, reactive dialogues. Or, apart from the few pivotal, choice conversations, most main character lines were simple, direct basic questions which set up the aforementioned monologues. Seriously, half the NPCs in ME were like those VI guides in Citadel Station.

It's called money and allocation of resources and making game design follow after the visuals and the audio instead of the opposite. The writers in Mass Effect had to adapt dialogue writing to the fact that full voice acting costs a lot of money, for example. I also remember a Bioware guy explaining how Citadel Station was designed before the actual content for it had been done. What that meant was that Citadel Station's content was limited by the fact the 360 could barely keep performance in those empty open areas, much less with a significant number of actors in it. And that's how the Citadel became a mess of disjointed, shoehorned side quests and a bare hub for assigning quests developed elsewhere. Finally, I'd imagine the giant amount of resources and time taken for the creation of such impressive production values had something to do with the dozens of side planets being 2 or 3 empty, incompetently designed locations repeated ad nauseam.

That really shows how Mass Effect is really all about the production values. You say it like it's a bad thing. Depends on what someone wants out of their games, I guess.

Avatar also has the character depth of a kids cartoon, so I thought Ferngully would be a good point of comparison. Almost everyone is either pure good or pure evil with no nuance to them.

That really shows how Mass Effect is really all about the production values.

Ferngully

Thread closed due to length.

I've cleaned the thread a little bit, and I've reopened it. I've done this mostly because I find that expecting people not to append their arguments in a debate with useless insults is not entirely unreasonable. So don't do it. Carry on, and we'll be watching.

I ****ing hope not. That's so annoying. Screw realism. If there's no gameplay difference between a lethal and a non lethal takedown, the choice becomes essentially meaningless.

It's a classic, actually.

Many North Korean soldiers have fake wooden guns. North Korea wouldn't give America any real trouble in a war (any more than Afghanistan or Iraq at least) - it'd be the massive influx of refugees to surrounding countries which would cause massive trouble (and be massively destabilising). That's not in America's interest, and it certainly isn't in China's, South Korea's, Russia's, or Japan's. I suppose there's the risk that North Korea could get off a single nuke, but from what we've seen so far that risk is low, and they'd probably manage to miss any densely populated areas. North Korea's relative strenght lies in their missile capabilities and in their intelligence services. Besides, modern conflicts are only rarely decided through conventional warfare.

Good old meta.

Yeah, but North Korea would give the US actual trouble in a war, and furthermore isn't sitting on a bucket-load of oil, or run by a bunch of Muslims.

His Bioshock review was completely spot on, despite the fact that he was being overly critical.

Tthat wasn't why the US attacked, and even if it happened to be, it's not like the Iraqis were rolling out the red carpet in welcome. Besides, if Bush's governemt really wanted to get rid of dictators, they would be invading half the known world, starting with Saudi Arabia.

Big love goes out to Mr. Lazenby.

What if it's a redhead?

Who, in the US, would be willing to receive an item through snail mail, and then post it to me?

That's pushing it. I liked The Witcher a lot, but his criticisms of the combat, the generic, "collect 10 of these", quests, and all the running around back and forth were very valid.

Mortal Kombat "Tournament" . http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1925555 "We don't use the R word in front of Goro."

Harry Potter is mostly bad.

The mute button on the remote control is broken and we have really thick walls?

If you do a non-lethal takedown, do your enemies get up again, a while later?