Enoch

That's what my 11' laptop is for. I've been playing Might & Magic 4-5 on it. What passed for sound on those older games is a bigger barrier to me. Of course, you can almost always turn that off and miss very little.

We had our office picnic on Wednesday. I was one of two volunteers who ran the grill. That meant over 2 hours in front of hot coals, in direct midday sunlight, in about 95 F (35 C) temperatures. I drank about 3 beers, 2 12-oz. waters, and 1 can of soda, and I didn't go to the bathroom once. And the marinaded mushrooms I brought were really good.

Sidenote: Terrorism isn't the only reason the U.S. is involved in Afghanistan. Look at the global players most likely to rival American hegemony over the next 50 years. Look at their supply lines to the well-developed sources of key resources (primarily, but not exclusively, petroleum). Note the U.S./allied control of those supply lines. Now look at where the largest undeveloped reserves of petroleum and mineral resources are located, and look at how the supply lines would run from there to these potential American rivals. It may not be at the front of the President's mind when he's making a decision to commit forces. But there certainly is a memo somewhere on his desk outlining this line of reasoning. It is not a coincidence that the resource sources that are presently most developed are the ones that have to go though supply lines that the U.S. could choke off if it wanted to. Also note that instability serves just as well as American-aligned stability in preventing the development of resource sources and transmission lines. Afghanistan as a functioning nation-state might well be a pipe dream. But Afghanistan is presently a place that long-term strategic rivals cannot develop or pull within their sphere of influence. And, largely as a result of American intervention in the region, that is likely to remain the case.

I actually managed to finish the one game that has given me noticeable motion sickness. But that was Portal, which isn't exactly a marathon. It only really hit me after playing for about 45 minutes, so frequent breaks made it bearable. I think it was something to do with the unsettling feeling of not knowing which way was down. I picked up Beyond Good & Evil and Psychonauts in a gog.com sale a couple weeks ago. (I'm not much of a platformer fan, but I decided they were worth a try based on their reputation.) Haven't decided which one to start with.

Yeah, I've abandoned some games that I've paid for relatively early on, too. Bioshock and SimCity 4 come to mind as only lasting a couple hours. 5 minutes, though, is rather extreme-- a game would have to do something like give me a seizure in the opening cinematic to get that kind of reaction.

"Challenging" or "Frustrating" determined by: 1) How much fun the gameplay is. 2) How "fair" the fail-states that the game puts the player through feel. 3) Other characteristics of the game that serve to hold the player's interest or create a positive or negative attitude towards it. (Atmosphere, art, music/sound, writing, humor, character progression, etc.) 4) General nature of the player (e.g., seeking challenge or seeking relaxation) and how much free time he/she has to devote to achieving whatever goal is stymying his/her progress.

at the naming debate. Vol's trolling usually bores me, but I got a laugh or two out of his efforts here. Anyhow, whatever the name you use, I think it's pretty clear what you're referring to in the thread called "2010 FIFA World Cup." Also, caring about soccer is un-American. If this changes, it'll be more a result of immigrants bringing their sporting tastes with them than it is of changing attitudes among the current population. It's popular as a youth sport primarily because you can throw a bunch of 6-year-olds onto a field, spend 10 minutes explaining the rules, and end up with something reasonably resembling a soccer match. Other sports options take a lot more instruction and equipment. Although, on the other hand, situational enthusiasm about high-drama tournaments in sports we don't really care about is a very American phenomenon. (Compare people who care about NCAA basketball in November to the same in March. The Olympics score huge TV ratings, despite featuring a lineup of events composed chiefly of the most boring spectator sports ever devised.) Really, if the perceived stakes are high enough, a significant audience would find a game of tiddlywinks interesting enough to watch.

I was assuming that Wals was referring to the JAG Corps rather than to the Military Police. A law degree doesn't have much to do with MPs. They aren't all that different from regular military personnel, except in how hated they are by everyone else on the base. All that is more of less true. My objections to law school were mostly based on how freakin' expensive it is in the States. It only works out as a good value for the student if either (1) they are one of the lucky few who get into top-paying big firms relatively early in their career, or (2) they love the work they can do with their legal degree enough that they're willing to endure some financial hardship to get it. And a lot of students who aren't falling into (1) end up discovering that (2) just isn't the case either. (As someone with a good-paying-but-not-biglaw-scale federal job, I'm some combination of the two. I make more than I would with just my Bachelors' degree, but probably not enough more to justify the 3 extra years of schooling and signficant additional student loan debt on purely financial grounds.) A JD may meet the qualification of holding the terminal degree in the field. But I don't know many colleges that are falling over themselves to hire JDs who don't also have some teaching experience and/or publication history. Well, you can always return to law, provided that you don't get disbarred for flagrantly unethical or illegal actions...

This is accurate-- the State Department has a standing agreement with the USMC whereby the latter provides security at major U.S. Embassies. There are about a battalion's worth of Marines on duty at 148 diplomatic posts around the world. Wiki link.

Oh, military can be a very good choice for people who don't quite know what to do with themselves coming out of HS or College. And the JAG Corps in the services provide some damn fine training and experience for new attorneys (criminal law, administrative law, and contract law, primarily). I work with lots of former-military (and some current reservist) attorneys, and they tend to be very sharp, hard-working folks. Of course, it certainly is not for everyone. It requires a certain mindset (a reasonable level of deference to authority and an outlook that is not so jaded as to be wholly immune to the appeals of patriotism), as well as a tolerance for being ordered to various parts of the globe for months at a time. Including some places where nearby objects occasionally explode.

Don't do it unless you really really love doing legal work. (Which generally means lots of rather dry reading, pondering, and writing.) As a value proposition, law school is a terrible deal. There are just too many law schools churning out too many young lawyers. Yeah, you still see some of the headline graduates at the big schools move into day-one six-figure salaries, but unless you've got one of the better academic records in the country when you graduate, your chances of landing in that track are pretty damn small. And most universities treat their law schools as a cash cow-- tuition at the moment is way out of line with what a reasonable person should expect to be able to do with that degree, particularly at the sub-tier-one schools. So be very very sure that you want to go this road before you start. Best case: do some volunteer, clerk, or paralegal work in the area of law you're interested in while you're still an undergrad. Actually even better: get an undergrad degree that involves learning some useful hard skills. Even if you still go on to law school afterwards, you'll be much more marketable if you have a working knowledge of, say, high-level statistics or supply-chain management. (Personally, I went to law school for pretty much the wrong reasons-- not knowing what else to do. But I went to a lowish-tier-one school (ranked in the 25-35 range) that happened to be public, and I qualified for in-state tuition after a year living there. Through the on-campus interviewing process, I fell into a 2L summer job with a federal agency that was a perfect match for my personality and outlook. That turned into the job I have now. Looking back, I was ridiculously ignorant of the whole law business and fell ass-backwards into a great job based on the dumb luck of having the one interview I didn't bomb be with a senior agency attorney who enjoys visiting her alma mater to interview candidates. This is not a reliable course of decisionmaking to emulate.)

Yeah, you get a nice character if you drop the Melee from the standard "Spy" build and go with 7 ranks of Sabotage plus 10 ranks of Tech Aptitude (along with maxed Stealth and Pistols). Basically, earn basic Shadow Op and Chainshot, then go for Brilliance. Add in the Sabotage ranks when you think you're going to need the binary invis, then focus on topping out the Stealth and Pistols. You've got to run like hell whenever a boss character tries to close to melee range, though.

Yes, I meant Los Angeles. Or, actually Lakewood, which is where my in-laws live-- it's near Long Beach in LA County. But, yeah, we're definitely going to take our time and drive up the PCH. The tough part now is deciding what we want to see in Santa Barbara, Big Sur, Monterey, etc., so that we know roughly where we are going to be when we're going to want to sleep. (Since we're flying out there, we'll be going with hotels rather than roughing it.) I know there are lots of options. I guess I was mostly fishing for any "OMG, you can't leave coastal Cali without seeing XXXX" recommendations.

I should add that, if you're interested in designers being "well seasoned," Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart has reportedly been doing some hands-on design work for DS3. He's been working on and/or overseeing CRPG design and production for over 15 years.

That reminds me-- in a month or so, the wife and I are departing the L.A. area in a rented car on a Sunday. We have to be in the Bay area (an event a little ways E of Oakland) by the following Friday. At present, we have only some rather vague ideas of what to do during that week. Any suggestions?

Welcome. Chapman's Mobygames page. For other staff involved, see this thread.

It's quite easy to ghost through the "Prevent Surkov's Escape" mission, but you have to choose the resolution that involves making a deal with Surkov. Take down the first 3-4 guards you see from the shadows. Get to the big room with guards patrolling both downstairs and upstairs on the balcony. Shadow Op over to the stairs at the far side and go up them. As soon as you reach the 2nd floor, a dialogue with Surkov triggers. If you accept his deal (which probably requires positive Influence with him), the mission ends without any enemies being alerted. I can confirm that this counts for the "One with the Shadows" perk.

I love the news summary you get when you let Brayko live but don't bring him to help with Surkov. The news quotes his description of the perpetrator of the assault on his mansion as "an [expletive] American commando cowboy, like the [expletive] offspring of [expletive] Ronald Reagan and an [expletive] American ninja."

Good point. Especially given that every account of the press-only E3 preview highlights how good the game looks-- it doesn't seem like they'd be withholding screenshots because they need to 'tighten up the graphics on level 3' first.

Mostly, I'm referring to how the player would miss a large swath of the backstory in KotOR 2 if they didn't get reasonably high influence with Kreia, G0T0, and HK47. Character-specific information, sidequests, etc., are fine. But don't put information that the player needs to make sense of the core storyline in influence-locked conversations.

No, I think that the downside of hiding the mechanics from the player is greater than the downside of planting the seeds of metagaming. (I remember trying to figure out what influenced the Law-Chaos axis in Planscape: Torment all too well.) My concerns are mitigated by good implementation: -- give the player enough information to make choices rather than blind guesses; -- don't hide important information in interactions that are only unlocked by meeting influence thresholds; -- write the NPCs well, introduce them well, and have them act in accordance with their personalities as introduced; -- provide interesting reactions/rewards both for positive and negative influence; -- provide sufficient influence gain/loss opportunities to let the player achieve the applicable thresholds without hitting on 100% of them; -- provide interesting and apt reactions to players who stick to character concepts rather than alter their approach based on wanting to please/anger each character. AP was pretty good at most of these points. There were some problems, but they got a lot more right than they did wrong.

Sorry, this is user error as far as I'm concerned. If you'd be okay with it without the popups, but the core game content is not any different, then it's a failure on your part to look past them. Pretend it's the internet, and ignore popups. It's only user error if the user can be reasonably expected to be able to figure out what the likely consequences of picking option A instead of options B, C, or D are before they make the choice. In Alpha Protocol, for example, the game is pretty good about informing the player about the expectations of the 4 characters you meet in the Greybox, and other characters like Heck and SIE are introduced in such a way that you can tell a lot about their personalities before you have to decide how to respond to them in dialogue. But you're still sometimes thrown into a guessing game without many clues on how to proceed (Scarlet; Omen; Sung; Grigori). Problems are also caused when the opportunities to gain/lose influence are too limited and/or the thresholds to make a meaningful change in the outcome are too high. The headline example here is Marburg. There's really no margin for error-- you have to figure out the 'right' way to respond to either impress or infuriate him immediately, and then you've got to do that every time the opportunity presents itself in order to . (It is also possible that the player would be blindsided by how he responds to , gaining/losing influence without any warning that those choices could make it nearly impossible to play Marburg the way (s)he wants to.) That leads to frustrated players. But, when the writing is strong, the VO is good, and when the player is as informed as (s)he should reasonably be, I think it works. You have to do what you'd do in a normal conversation-- read the other person's actions, mannerisms, tone of voice, etc., and pick the way you want to respond to that. (E.g., when first meeting Albatross in Taipei, he speaks in a very blunt, matter-of-fact, low-affect manner, which is a hint that he would probably appreciate a similar attitude from Thorton.) Sidenote: I do think this works better in an AP-type game, where being a manipulative bastard is an important element of the protagonist archetype they're going for (i.e., Hollywood-style spy). Throw it, say, into a fantasy RPG where players tend to want to play one of a relatively small number of personality archetypes and tend to view staying true to a particular worldview as a virtue, and it becomes trickier-- the idea that you can extract more benefits and unlock more content from the game by telling the NPCs what they want to hear often makes the player feel like they have to betray their character concept in order to get the most out of the game. A Dragon Age player who wants to play the Righeous Champion of Good probably feels like a dirty stinkin' metagamer trying get Sten's influence high enough to unlock his sidequest. (Or, well, they would if the influence didn't come primarily from guessing the correct tchotchkes to give him.)

Odd necropost. Anyhow, I think Obsidz has been improving the system since the KotOR 2 days. Back then, they hid the ball way too much, leaving backstory that was pretty important in understanding the plot in conversations that you only get when influence is high. That was a mistake-- everyone should be able to understand the story, even if they don't bother to talk to the NPCs all that much. What they've done since then is shift the benefits of high (or low) influence away from unlocking backstory and more towards gameplay benefits (e.g., assistance in the Trial in NWN2, companion feats in MotB, handler perks in AP) or other satisfying scenes (e.g., romances, pissing off certain AP characters enough to make them lose their cool). Let everybody access the backstory, but give other benefits for making friends or enemies.

Screw maudlin. This will make you shake your ass.

Am I the only person who doesn't know what any of the acronyms in this thread mean?