Humodour

Hahahahahahahahahaha! Go on, fly to China, try and stay there for a while and discuss or encourage violence or terrorism. They aren't even ****ing allowed to see skeletons in computer games. Honestly, if you think the West cracks down hard on potential terrorism, you obviously haven't seen how China deals with it. Terrorism to the Chinese government is every bit of a threat to their 'social order' as democracy because they have so many ethnic groups they treat like **** and thus want independence - some of which would like to follow the IRA's footsteps to achieve it.

Mao is every bit as repugnant as Stalin and Hitler.

ECHELON uses data mining techniques. Most of it is automated.

In order to begin to understand Hawking radiation and black holes, one needs a pretty solid understanding of how virtual particles behave.

That's a cool list.

I recently watched The Boat That Rocked. Bloody epic awesome. Also a big fan of the 1966 BBC version of Alice in Wonderland. It's... not what you'd expect, but very awesome nonetheless.

Does he march with all other people who love tunnel snakes on the "tunnel snakes pride parade"? I think he'd probably like to.

Agreed! I missed that a lot about Deus Ex 2. It just wasn't viable in any fun way.

Yeah, right behind you. So irritating. We "hardcore" (how ever you want to put it) gamers are a profitable niche industry and some developers have realised that (especially indie developers, and also seemingly Eidos Montreal). I guess in future the free market will ensure we are catered to but right now gaming is a nascent teenage industry still trying to discover itself, and that means the unwashed masses get catered to first. I'm not being elitist. I'm simply stating facts: there's a lot of people like me out there who enjoy this certain type of game and our tastes are under-represented in the industry right now.

It's fear of falling into a mindset like this that sometimes nudges me to try psychedelics. I like to be reminded of the wonder, joy, and potential of life that can often be missed or forgotten about in the mundanity of day-to-day experiences. I know some people will be uncomfortable reading this, and to them I can only say: understand what psychedelics actually are and do, and then judge all you want. They are as similar to something like heroine or cocaine or marijuana as caffeine is. EDIT: Certainly I am a zealous supporter of the existence of real love.

BOO: it's all about degrees. Human rights breach happen in the Western world. They always will. The difference is, in the West as free, open societies, we always seem to manage as societies to move towards more freedom and rights over time, not less (it's often a case of two steps forward, one step back I will concede - the Twitter case in Britain with its remarkable similarities is an abhorrent breach of rights... but at least the press isn't all government run and at least voters can kick **** parties out of office). In China, it's a case of, if anything, one step forward, two steps back. They breach human rights daily, consistently, and with impunity. And the Chinese citizens do not have an elected government beholden to voters or a free press to fall back on drive change for the better. So it is up to underground thinkers like this poor woman who was jailed for a joke.

I have a friend who totally adores tunnel snakes.

Never going to happen because of something you later talk fallaciously talk about regarding engine: Much of the atmosphere and whatnot are a direct result of the engine. Specifically, that everything needed to be done via text descriptions. Lets face it though, such descriptions aren't going to work as well any more because the bar has been set. No mate, the atmosphere and feel of a game are not direct results of the engine. If you're relying on your engine to produce your atmosphere you're already way off kilter. Atmosphere is music, plot, dialogue, character depth, art style, pacing - it's a huge gamut of things. I at no point recommended or suggested releasing a game today built in the Infinity or Fallout engines, or anything close to those engines: My reference to "an old engine" meant "a few years old" not "11 or 13 years old", and I suggested it would be equally as valid to use as a modern, state-of-the-art engine. The engine was a tangential detail in my post which you latched onto. If you're arguing that text is bad to the modern consumer gamer, that's a load of tripe and my entire bloody point is that the market for things like text-dense games has never disappeared - developers just stopped making text-dense games because they had lots of shiney new graphical tools to play with to tell stories and develop novel mechanics and generally experiment with, instead of being constrained by their engines. But it doesn't mean people desire text-dense games any less than they did 10 years ago.

Do I though? Spector was one of the core influences that made Deus Ex 2 so bad. He was obsessed with streamlining and reducing complexity. I think people on his team listened to him to the detriment of their own intuitions as to what makes a good game. Very few members of the original team that made FO remain at Obisidan. I imagine the same is true for DX1 and Eidos. But, you know, DX and FO had a good thing going. Instead of capitalising on that, augmenting it, running with what worked and dumping what didn't, they the Deus Ex 2 devs dumped what worked as well as what didn't. I can't comment on FO3 as I haven't played it.

Agreed I guess. Gamers need to be more lenient. A movie will never have 'bugs', so you can't compare games to things like movies or books in terms of how polished you expect them to be. Tangentially to that, complex games (as in, less streamlined games) have emergent qualities (the most common example being metagaming) for different players which often increase enjoyment of the game in ways developers didn't expect or plan. This is an argument for increased complexity in games.

FO:NV should pretty obviously be more like FO1 and FO2 - its roots. Basically, yes. I think we've (for better or worse) moved beyond top-down isometric games, but that's an engine mechanic, not what made PS:T amazing. What made PS:T is how things like dialogue, character development, party interactions, atmosphere etc were pulled off. I'm not saying Obsidian shouldn't leave their own unique mark on their games - DX3 isn't going to be a clone of DX1. My unhappiness with Obsidian extends to Bioware. The NWN and KOTOR franchises simply were not on the same level as their IE games. Why did they lose the ability to produce games of that quality? Haven't played MotB yet. I hear it nullifies some of my qualms, but the fact is it was an expansion to a mediocre game in an aging engine. What could they do if they put their full weight and passion behind an old-school RPG with an original IP in a decent modern engine (or just used an old engine and made sure the game was responsive, stable and well-polished)?

Where did you go? Ever been to Milford Sound? I'm heading to the Blue Mountains this weekend. Woot.

Isn't your solution to heartbreak to eat copious amounts of sausage? I didn't mean to make that sound dirty, but I really have no idea how to frame that question differently. LOL. Yes. Good thing none of us are Freudians. Or Freud. He'd probably pass out. My point is that surrendering to emotion is a lovely notion but utterly flawed in a lot of instances. Not all, by any means, but a lot. Irritation, envy, lust, badgers. All these things can destroy your whole life far more effiiciently than being a bit Remains of the Day. Commit a theft, spread lies about someone, lash out, get an STD... the list goes on. Controlling to me means the classic "Put up, shut up, or shut down". Have the emotion and don't do anything about it. Don't dwell on the emotion any more than you have to. Or lock it down through doing your local cultural equivalent of smoking a pipe and glaring. Yes, you get pressure leaks occasionally, and you may have to go off for a while and have a cry and a beer. But how is that so bad? Hmm. 'Surrendering' to emotion is the antithesis of what I think is healthy. Control and mastery is what I was yabbering about earlier - identifying why an emotion is there (not repressing it for an extended period of time, such as hours or days) so you can eliminate it if it is a negative or undesirable emotion. But yeah, that resolution part often needs to be done during a quite, contemplative time. Heck even positive motions can turn into anxiety when repressed (as we sometimes must do - be ebullient at a funeral is typically inappropriate).

The roots of the universe/setting whose game they are building a sequel to: Deus Ex 1.

They were involved with the Internet's construction and funding, and are still involved with its maintenance and operation. And they have a huge amount of crossover skills and capabilities from previous sigint stuff such as ECHELON and the telecommunications systems which preceded the Internet and which the Internet runs off. Not to mention that even if the Internet came out of nowhere and slammed them in the face, they've still had a good 20 to 40 years to slowly adapt. Whilst I'm sure your view of them is a view they'd love to proliferate because it provides them a measure of security through obscurity, I think you'd be silly to write off America's intelligence agencies as run by a bunch of buffoons and operated by mindless lackeys. That's the US government, not the US government's intelligence agencies.

By non-negligible I mean small but not so small as to be ignored, considering the possible outcome. Right, that's what I figured. I actually thought non-negligible was a word myself... as much a word as anything Shakespeare made up, that's for sure. But are you able to cite anything scientifically peer-reviewed to support your stance? That's basically what I'm curious about here. Because of the nature of science, we'd all naturally have to take a step back and go 'woah' if you could. But if you can't then, again, because of the nature of science, you're leaving yourself wide open to ridicule just like that Paglia guy himself with his unsubstantiated and misinformed claims (assuming you refer to the PDF article I had a look at earlier). I admit I'm writing that paper off. It's just too unreliable and uninformed. Anybody can write up an opinion piece on science and demand scientific response like this guy has. Can you find me some scientists with some peer-reviewed concerns? I can assure you the scientific community is not a single entity and there are wildly varying viewpoints out there on many issues. But what they all have in common is that they get their claims and theories peer-reviewed so flaws and errors are picked up. So if the LHC poses a genuine risk, you can bet your bottom dollar there will be multiple peer-reviewed papers out there on the issue. My predicament is that without such material you're asking us to disprove or respond to nothing. I can find you lots of peer-reviewed papers supporting the notion that the LHC is not a risk. I can't find any claiming it is, because from what I can tell they don't exist.

It doesn't make me erect but it comes close. Get it? Comes? Anyway, it's a shame Obsidian doesn't take a leaf out of the book of these guys and return to their own roots. The market never stopped existing, in fact if anything it got bigger.

I'm going to keep making people (here and elsewhere) aware of news items like this because people need to wake up and see China for what it really is if we're going to do business with them (and even if we're not, because they comprise 1/6th of the world population - they impact on us whether we like it or not) Slashdot commentary: http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/11/1...n-in-Labor-Camp Original news item: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-post...ence_a_yea.html Is stuff like this a recent phenomenon? Not at all - it has been happening since the foundation of China as a communist state, and the number of these sorts of arrests really ramped up once China won the Olympics bid (what a joke). If mods feel this should be merged into an existing thread then go ahead. I obviously feel otherwise but given the spike in China-related threads lately I would understand.

Agreed.