Humodour

Now, now. Their marketers have carefully analyzed the results from their focus-groups and came to the conclusion that the most important segment with purchasing power are the common plebs, er...i mean the SpikeTV viewers. Somebody has been reading too much Marx, Orwell, Plato. Those guys would probably be aghast at how carelessly / inappropriately their names are thrown around. So what, EA is Big Brother now, or the capitalist superstructure? Good lord, the gaming internet's head has reached a deeper and darker depth of its own ass. Hello there Over Reaction, how are you? It was a reference to his use of the words 'plebs' and others in a post for like the 4th time in as many days.

Amen to that. But holy crap I'd be 35.

I generally agree with everything he says, which is a good feeling. Compare that with the Space Siege dev interview. Uhg.

Hmmm... this might be worth figuring out internet shopping for.

Now, now. Their marketers have carefully analyzed the results from their focus-groups and came to the conclusion that the most important segment with purchasing power are the common plebs, er...i mean the SpikeTV viewers. Somebody has been reading too much Marx, Orwell, Plato.

There was an uproar recently here because some government health agency distributed pamphlets to schools educating kids how to stay safe if they did drugs. Supposedly it "encouraged drug use". That's as bad as the Americans banning contraception education because it "encourages children to have sex". Idiots.

And I'd love to see good one. Nothing worse than having to stop to reorganise ones inventory. That's very subjective. As demonstrated in this thread, a lot of people enjoy the inventory system. Why? Because it works fine? A good designer should be trying to think of innovative things, not designating old systems need to be reworked simply because they are old.

Amen.

Wow, that sounds awesome man. Pictures would be sweet.

Awww!

Do you often post in threads without reading a single post?

That's what I'm thinking. I'm not too far off (+200hp at the moment), though. Yeah. You'll probably want 60 str soon enough, too (by about lvl 40) and after that I'd just use charms and stuff if you need more. There's never any point putting more than 1pt in static, of course. It's been a favourite since I started playing back in Day 1 (what, 6 years ago?). Well, for some builds putting 10 or 20 points in static field is worth it because it means you hit the entire screen and then some without them even seeing you. Could work with, say, an enchant sorc or Fire Wall sorc. Yeah, those three are all synergistic IIRC. If you like chain lightning you could pump it instead of charged bolt. Good luck with Big D.

So, it looks like Dragon Age is a highly moddable and extensible game. Edit: And yeah, dumb PR stunt. Very dumb.

J.C. Denton could make flying attack robots inside his skull. What can Thorton do?

I didn't like that. It seemed too lazy a way to have the story progress by presenting an illusion of choice that was all too easily dispelled. Well to be fair, they originally designed it so you could choose to side with UNATCO/MJ12 if you saw fit. I believe time constraints prevented this. Likely they'd already made the MJ12 map and stuff, so decided you'd be captured and sent there as a prisoner instead. A left-over is the sound of a chopper in Battery Park - Jock is actually on the map waiting, like Paul said he would be.

Riddle me this: what's the DSM-IV's distinction between drug addiction and drug dependence? No, really. I've not been able to figure that one out.

Ofcourse it was awesome. The bands were able to play for ME, witness MY greatness, and had the oppurtunity to see ME in person. I am that awesome. I can attest to this.

I started that Fire Wall sorc I mentioned above. Currently level 28 about to kill Mephisto. It's fairly fun. Re Muso's circlet suggestion: gamble them until your money runs out. Then gamble them some more. You get a rare circlet like every 5th gamble, and it's got godly mods on it. Nothing else is worth gambling. Never gamble body armour - way too expensive. It'd be a good idea to gamble gloves, belt, boots, helm, in order to cook up some decent mods if you don't already have nice rare ones. They're cheap, and rares are common (hah!). Look for on circlets: Magic Damage Reduction, Damage Reduction, + life, + mana, + defence, + mana per kill, + resistances, + run speed. And you need more vitality. About 80 to 100 by level 30, and 200+ by level 60, ideally. I'd stop pumping dexterity and energy, and get strength to 50 and then focus on vitality. Static field is your friend (as you seem to have figured) even with just one point. It'll get up to 5 or more probably once you've got some +skills gear. Even in hell it's worth casting it 2 or 3 times to cut down HALF of the monster's HP (at which point it stops working). You can put points in chain lightning, but I'd personally stick with Lightning and Charged Bolt alone... unless you plan to make a pure lightning sorc (Which is OK if you often play with friends and have a tough act 2 merc to tank immunes). And you got a 40% FCR amulet? Wow!

Good. Clearly rating board can see perversion when they see it.

I saw Radiohead last week at Roskilde.. and Muse the year before that - they are superb live! I'm jealous. I've had the misfortune of missing all those peeps at every damn Big Day Out concert so far, which is bad when you consider that it's one of the biggest music festivals in the world, right here on my doorstep.

From memory everyone was avoidable. I'm pretty sure last playthrough I just ran from Walton Simons at the final Area 51 confrontation I'm not counting baton/crossbow/prod as killing, but I suppose blowing up Bob Page as the ending sequence sort of counts... although that doesn't happen if you merge with Helios right? It'd be hard I imagine since you can't knock out commandos, but I've avoided them plenty of times before in a normal game. It helps that people give up their search if you hide after causing a scene. I remember once spending quite a while trying to take out Gunther at battery park. I had taken out all the MJ12, then I took out all his bots and men, but he just wouldn't die. I kind of figured he was invincible after the 6th rocket I shot directly at his head. It was weird having to just stand there and die to progress the game, though. I'd call it bad design but I've never heard anybody complain they dumped the game because of it, and I can't think of a better way to emulate 'game over'/capture (similar thing with the start of NOLF2) without giving the entire thing away prematurely. It was good to be given a choice of approach even in forced failure though - it made it less noticable.

It'd be cool not because it think it's a particularly interesting playstyle personally (I love stealth, but some ****ers just deserve lead poisoning), but because it would be a strong indication of the game's scope and non-linearity.

Would you mind digging that thread up? I have an interest in alternate energy 'cause I studied it a bit in some of my courses at uni. For all intents and purposes, the use of hydrogen as a storage method seems inevitable, so I'm confused how it could be agreed to be "varying degrees of bad". I'm especially befuddled because many of the major car manufacturers and oil companies are pushing it (I think it's BMW or Mercedes-Benz that plans to completely phase in hydrogen for all its cars by 2015), so I don't see how people have a choice, nor how they conceive it would be a bad decision economically (maybe fossil fuels will never run out?). Edit: Oh bugger me, I thought you were talking about hydrogen.

lol.

I don't think you need to worry about the RPG market being dominated by soft RPGs. The growth of computer gaming as an entertainment medium essentially dictates success in the industry is easier, and with that it's easier for a niche market game to be financially viable. Of course, the flood of soft RPGs might give you a distorted view, but really how often did hard RPGs come out in the past anyway? I don't think that rate is any less now; it simply hasn't increased, either.