Hurlshort

Anyone else feel he has more point than he should? I really do agree with that. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy sophomoric humor and frenetic action scenes on occasion, but the older I get the less tolerant I am of that stuff. The fact is the age demographic for gamers is getting older, but games still seem to resist growing up. LA Noir is a great example, that game would have been better without the numerous chase scenes. A well done crime drama should be enough. Dragon Age is another example, the whole blood soaked thing is just silly to me, it isn't funny silly either. It's just bad.

I haven't really seen EA do anything very negative in a number of years. This Origin offer for Kickstarter developers is another smart move.

Today I've been getting the house ready for a beer tasting party we are having. Basically you bring a large bottle of something you think is interesting, and then we all taste them and rate them on a 100 point scale. I'm serving sausages and pretzels with the event. It's also been a great excuse to clean up the house. It is also my 9-year anniversary with my wife, so it's a fun way to celebrate.

Rift and Trion Worlds seems to be doing quite well. They can join Turbine on the list of developers who figured out how to make an MMO without breaking the bank.

Personally I have just been varying the class split by faction, so my Inquisitor is a sorcerer and my Consular is a Shadow. My trooper is a tank and my Bounty Hunter is a DPS class guy. I plan on continuing that. I'm not really worried about how they play at the end game, given that in time I'll have enough characters there to choose which are my favorites to play.

It's not like she was at some park enjoying herself. She was clearly part of a protest. I'm actually curious if it was even the bubbles that led to the arrest, the camera cuts out and then cuts in later. As for any type of charge, it is most likely an illegal protest and that would be the biggest charge she would face. It's more likely they took her information down and then released her, which is standard procedure for protesters. edit: When she said "My heart bleeds" am I the only one who wanted to punch her?

Yep. The sad thing is that is a fairly reasonable number for a new IP, especially in the RPG genre. That basically should have been their expectation, but it looks like they were banking on a million plus in sales. A new studio with a new IP shouldn't expect to sell Bethesda/Bioware numbers out of the gate.

Very true, I'd say the MMO is to blame for that overly large team. Turbine manages multiple MMO's with a team of about 100. It should be possible to run one with a reasonably sized group, they don't all need to be WoW/TOR sized.

Sure, in presentation. The CGI videos, sound and voice, and overall art of today's games have definitely come a long way. Of course this doesn't replace a solid game play experience, which has little to do with giant budgets and people.

Wow, the main bit that stood out in that article is that 38 studios employs 378 people full time. That seems way too big for a studio like this. It's a shame because KoA is a solid game and I think they have potential, but they basically put all their eggs in one game and hoped it turned into a blockbuster. Bad business. They really should be running with about 100 employees, I would imagine.

Dumb hippy. He explained to her exactly what was going to happen. Don't antagonize the police, yo.

Eh, I'm on my 5th character. While there are a few quests I rush through because I've done them enough times, the unique character plots keep it pretty fresh. The trick for me is to alternate imp/republic characters. I also haven't taken one all the way to the cap. Also I'm pleasantly surprised how often the dialogue changes with the quests available to all. My Mercenary elicits a very different reaction from quest givers than my Sith warrior.

I've gotten back into Skyrim a bit. I'm still not totally in love with it. I think it's the pacing, it just feels a bit too slow, and I'm a bit tired of climbing around in caves. There sure are a lot of people living in caves. Maybe it's the damp air that makes them so irritable, because they also like throw themselves on my sword, and it is getting a bit dull. I had a nice vampire quest where a family was burned alive in their home, and I did some investigation to find the culprit. I found her and took care of her in the basement of her home. For a second I thought this was finally going to be a quest where I didn't have to crawl through a cave. Then they made me go crawl through a cave to kill some master vampire.

I didn't even know it was slated for release this year.

I voted for Hong Kong in the second round. Your vote is now cancelled out Shady!

Huh, I really haven't found a storyline that didn't appeal to me in some way. But I'm a sucker for the Bioware pulp fiction machine, so that helps.

This game is completely designed around the idea that you need to focus on multiple characters. Independent storylines, unique companions, and the legacy system mean that if you only play one character, you are completely missing out on content. THat's why I was surprised so many people leveled one character and then quit.

Yeah, I've enjoyed the crafting system more now that I have a solid understanding of how they all work together. My first couple characters stumbled through it and eventually stopped progressing, but now my characters work together a but more naturally. It's fun to set aside stuff for my legacy characters too, and really the best way to keep all your orange gear up to level is to craft the mods.

My guess is TOR will take at least two years before it enters a free to play stage. You might get an amalgamate system earlier, like free starter worlds or something similar.

But it becomes a civil rights issue because married couples are afforded more rights by the state than non-married couples, no? In the case of straight people, you could argue this doesn't matter, because they have the choice to marry and receive those extra rights or not. But in the case of gay people, they have no such choice. Actually they do. No one is preventing them from getting married, just getting married to someone of the same gender. That is the fig leaf that makes this not a civil rights issue. ASFAIK all States support a civil union that grants gay couples equal rights even if the do not call it marriage. Once again that makes it just a word. I wish we could trust states to move forward on this issue and give equal rights to everyone on their own, but North Carolina just passed legislation that gets rid of both marriage and civil unions for gay couples. Arkansas used the national guard to stop black students from entering Little Rock in 1957, without federal intervention who knows how long we would have kept schools segregated? Much like your claim that gay people can get married, just not the way they want, black students could go to public schools, just not with white students. That's why I call this a civil rights issue.

No it only means that you like gay black women. Not only that, he is their champion!

I feel like Volourn and Oner kind of miss the point of the thread.

Well there is already plenty of data to suggest that gay parents do not result in tons of gay children. I'm actually surprised to hear you say that at all. Do you think homosexuality is a choice? I've just never understood that position. Why would you choose that, given the discrimination that will come with it? I know I've never had to convince myself I am attracted to women, it is completely natural. It takes no effort, if anything he effort lies in not staring at every pair of boobies I come in contact with. Given that, it is easy for me to believe that someone who is not attracted to the opposite sex is not making a conscious choice.

If I am seriously religious and married to a woman, how does gay marriage force me to do anything? It doesn't affect my beliefs at all, it doesn't lessen my personal experience in my wedded bliss. At least it shouldn't. As I said, if you are concerned about marriage as a religious institution being attacked, then you should be going after the atheists and the folks eloping in Vegas, not just gay couples. C'mon Hurlie, can you seriously not see how the entire concept is undermined by allowing same-sex couples to get married? I used the word existential for a reason. As someone who is utterly devoted to my wife I fail to see how anyone else's marriage affects me at all. It is between me, my wife, my children, and God. No one else matters in that equation. That's the way it should be. If I did let this stuff affect me, the problem is I know a lot of man-woman couples that are terrible. You see it on TV regularly, it seems to be a requirement in order to get a reality show. Those folks would seem to do a lot more to undermine marriage than the gay couples I know.

I dont get it either. Because you CAN be gay and deeply christian. Radical concepts I'm spouting, I know. C'mon, try a little harder. Since the very book their beliefs are founded on openly calls homosexuals sinners, one would expect these sinners to not feel so good about that and not want to be associated with an organization that finds them to be unequal to others. You might be surprised to know the bible is anything but clear when it comes to matters of homosexuality. Here is an interesting wiki on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_the_New_Testament The point being that the bible is fairly vague on the matter. It is much more condemning of those who worship money, for example. Not to mention their is a laundry list of stuff the Old Testament rails against that has become accepted by modern society. A literal interpretation of the bible is not something that any major church goes by today.