Enoch

Not all Treasury bonds are identical. There are different series with different terms (issue date, maturity, interest rate). It could easily be the case that the particular type of bonds these people were apprehended with exceeds the totall sum of said bonds issued.

They're the level titles that were associated with the Magic-User class in 1st ed. AD&D. Magic-User 1: Prestidigitator 2: Evoker 3: Conjurer 4: Theurgist 5: Thaumaturgist 6: Magicician 7: Enchanter 8: Warlock 9: Sorcerer 10: Necromancer 11: Wizard 12: Wizard (12th level) 13: Wizard (13th level) 14: Wizard (14th level) 15: Wizard (15th level) 16: Wizard (16th level) 17: Wizard (17th level) 18: Wizard (18th level or Arch-Mage) (I think the board compresses the "Wizard" part to one level and grants "Arch-Mage" status at level 12.) (This was the best source link I could find.) Edit: Now I see taks' rank as "(12) Mage" and I'm confused.

http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?s=&am...st&p=939686

What? No, I'm not compensating for anything, why do you ask? Actually, this one would be my first choice, just for the awesomeness factor that would come with owning it:

[Dammit, I just wrote up a very insightful response to this thread, and lost it when I tried to open a new browser tab and hit ctrl-r instead of ctrl-t] Here's my attempt at reconstructing it: Creativity is hard to do. Strategy games are good at encouraging tactical creativity (picture battlefield maneuvers in a Total War game). Good RPGs and action games incorporate some of this, and from what I've read, this is a priority for the people working on AP. I want to set some mines to draw guards to a location where I can take them out with tear gas (or a sniper rifle. or more mines. or ignore them and just run by while they're distracted). To encourage this kind of improvisation, good developers give their players useful tools and put them in environments where those tools can be used in interesting ways. But that doesn't get to what I think the original post was talking about. Creativity in resolving quests-- I'll call it "problem-solving creativity"-- is almost always illusory in games. Every option requires some developer work specifically to make it tenable. Either the dialogue lines exist, or they don't. Either that vent is big enough to hide in or it isn't. Either the game lets you buy mountain-climbing gear to escape tall buildings out windows or it doesn't. In that regard, at least, all of your options are "spoon fed." But developers can muddy the waters so that their discrete list of options feels more open-ended than it actually is. As I see it, the important things in creating the illusion of player creativity are: 1) giving a sufficient variety of options; 2) presenting these options in a way that makes the player feel like they have ownership of them (i.e., not spelling every one of them out in a menu choice, and instead letting the player explore and figure out the less obvious ones for themselves); and 3) avoiding situations where an obvious logical solution isn't supported by the game for arbitrary reasons (e.g., the simple office door that you can't open until you get the key from character X, despite the fact that your character is an expert at lockpicking and is carrying 10 pounds of plastic explosives in his bag).

Yes, but prioritizing exploration and character agency is what makes a game an RPG IMO, carefully designed story elements push a game more to the adventure genre. Also Manaan was the weakest planet in KOTOR, that concept was much better done on other planets, especially Taris. The bit about Manaan was alluding to how much bloody time you spend traipsing back and forth across boring concourses. Dantooine would've fit my example pretty well, too, except that they filled the boring wildernessy areas with boring xp farming combat. In both cases, I probably would've enjoyed the game more if they had simply skipped all that walking around and combat grinding and just let us jump immediately (using Manaan examples) from the Hangar to the Republic Base to the Cantina, etc., putting the time they saved into making the gameplay experience at these locations more compelling. You lose a bit in overall atmosphere, but to me that's worth the reduction of tedium. To me, exploration is irrelevant in genre definition. All games place limits on how far the player can wander. Setting those limits narrowly or broadly doesn't really affect the core nature of the gameplay. Character agency, though, is definitely an element in an RPG (well, in a Western RPG-- the JRPGs I've seen tend to keep the story on rails and limit character decisions to whether they want to kill the enemy with a ridiculously oversized sword or an ridiculously oversized gun), but I don't think it limits a game's "RPG-ness" to exclude support for a player's decision to wander off into the wilderness and pick flowers all afternoon, or to add a menu in place of an intermediate area that you walk across to transport from your safehouse to the four possible mission areas.

The first two names that come to mind when I think of the blues harp: Sonny Boy Williamson Little Walter Jacobs If you're venturing more into the jazz side of the pool, I recommend .

Hooray for another ridiculously arbitrary litmus test for genre-qualification! This board is a goldmine of these lately. Anyhow, I'm a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy. As I see it, developers of story-heavy games like this have three choices: 1) Cut out the intermediate areas and take the player directly to where the action is, 2) Add in intermediate areas, but keep the focus on the core missions and don't transfer a whole lot of time/effort/resources to those intermediate areas, or 3) Include the intermediate areas, and allocate resources away from the core missions to make them more interesting. Option 2 just wastes the player's time (remember running around Manaan in KotOR 1 and that station orbiting Telos in KotOR2?). Option 3 is acceptable, but it's risky. You end up with a longer game, but a game whose highpoints aren't quite as polished or frequent as they should be. I prefer Option 1-- when I'm playing a game, I want to be having fun. Exploring large interesting environments can be fun, but only if there is enough cool stuff out there to find to make it worthwhile, and only when said exploration is made a focus of game development from the very beginning (i.e., prioritizing exploration and character agency over carefully designed story elements).

I also generally preferred to hand-write my exams when I had the option. I took all my classnotes and reading notes by hand, and I think that doing the test in the same manner improves recall on some base-psychology level. Also, I tend to focus better when there isn't a computer screen in front of me. Anyhow, while I do miss being a student for a variety of reasons, I am also rather happy that the last test I took (the VA Bar Exam) might well be the last major written test I'll ever take. In writing this response, I did something I now regret-- I poked around online a bit and found a posted version of the essay questions I had to answer when I took the Bar. Bad memories of the summer spent learning all this stuff, for no real purpose other than the jump through the proper hoop on test day. (It really is quite ridiculous to test attorneys without letting them consult with reference materials-- indeed, in most situations, giving advice to clients without looking anything up would be straight-up malpractice!) For fun, here's a sample question: This was one of the questions that I felt pretty good about after taking the test, but today I would be hard-pressed to get half of the available points. And on exam day, we had to get through one of these in about 45 minutes.

Solo missions instead of 3-man squads. No "Press X for Good, Press Y for Evil." Twice as many HAWT CHIX to sleep with.

"There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind." -Duke Ellington

Summary of the above post: Nihilus5078 likes rock. (Seriously-- 11 different varieties of "metal"?)

Well put.

Screenshot from Worthplaying's E3 coverage:

Am I the only one who is continually surprised by the degree to which DRM issues get gamers' panties all twisted? It's a freakin game. Install it, play it once or twice, and throw it on a shelf. If it's such a good game that you want to go back to it a few years later, would having to jump through a few hoops or buy a (by then, discounted) second copy be the worst thing in the world? As long as it isn't screwing with other legal stuff you do with your PC (as certain mostly-out-of-fashion DRM schemes were wont to), what's the big deal?

3 quick points: 1) If a game doesn't manage to frustrate the player a little bit from time to time, then it doesn't offer enough of a challenge to bother with. Where's the satisfaction in beating a game that never frustrated you? 2) [sarcasm]Yes, Fable was childish because you couldn't always easily save your game just before entertaining the townsfolk by making farting noises...[/sarcasm] 3) I above offered examples of successful western RPGs with limited saving systems: The Bard's Tale games, Might & Magic 1 & 2, and (I think) the early Wizardry games.

It's been discussed. http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showtopic=48881

Nobody said anything about primary weapon, though. But NOLF1 and Deus Ex 1 both managed to incorporate decent sniping options. It's a fun aspect of the game, especially if you're playing as a stealth character. The counter-example I was thinking of was Mass Effect. You had a separate skill for sniping, and there were situations where it was quite useful, but in the vast majority of combats, it was far weaker than all three other weapons options. Any character specializing in SRs to the exclusion of other weapons was probably going to be rather gimped, which I think is a balance flaw to be avoided.

No, I bound the hooker's wrists and mouth in case she wakes up in the trunk on the way to the dump site.

It's not one of the core weapon types, so it's probably going to be an "occasional only" item. This is for the best-- given what we've seen of gameplay, it is almost certainly not practical for a character to rely on a SR as their primary weapon, and it's effectiveness is probably tough to scale over a range of ability levels. (Although it's conceivable that a character's assault rifle proficiency spills over into sniping.)

I think the moral of the story is going to depend on what kind of superpowers this kid develops. Edit: Also, today, for the first time ever, I used duct tape for its original intended purpose.

Charles Mingus -- Tijuana Gift Shop

Ooh. In between the terrible audio quality and stupid questions, there's some new info in there on one of the character-creation possibilities, starting right around the 7:15 mark. Apparently there is a "Recruit" option (class? background?) that give no bonuses to skills, but provides interestingly different role-playing possibilities.

Went to the Nats-Reds game this afternoon with a group from work. (This was one of our official events for the summer interns.) Against all odds, given the decrepitude of the local franchise (not to mention the threatening thunderstorms) it was both an interesting game and a Nationals victory. Reds were up 2-1, until the Nats scored 2 in the bottom of the 8th, and held on to their lead, retiring the bottom of the Reds order in the 9th.

This sequence of consecutive posts is pretty entertaining. People do complaining about a save-anywhere systems-- it just gets phrased differently. I.e., they complain about minigames that are easily bypassed by save-reload abuse, or about poor skill design because higher levels of a particular skill offer no benefit other than making the player have to reload fewer times to get a successful result. They're not intending to complain about save-anywhere, but developers reading those complaints can recognize that their game's save-reload system is undercutting their other gameplay mechanics.