Enoch

Clearly we need a reviewing scale that goes all the way to eleven.

Do we really need to turn this into another one of these threads? The Constitution doesn't say a lot of things. It doesn't say that Congress can buy ICBMs or fighter jets or vaccinations for enlisted personnel going overseas, but that authority can be fairly implied from "provide for the common Defence ... of the United States." It doesn't say that Congress can spend money on education or health care, but that authority can be fairly implied from "provide for the ... general Welfare of the United States." Yeah, you and the 5% of Americans who agree with you get offended by all this, but does it really have to be a part of every discussion of national policy? And, yes, the abstinence-only conditions on federal education grants are a silly idea.

Masochist. (Seriously-- how many hours can you spend swatting kobolds in near-identical generic outdoors maps?)

Rahsaan Roland Kirk -- Once in a While Kirk actually makes playing 3 (modified) saxophones at once sound cool and not just a lame novelty act.

It runs on minimum settings on my laptop (XP, Radeon Mobility 9000, 512M RAM), but lags when the machine gets hot. I installed it on my desktop (Vista32, 8800GTS, 2G RAM), and it launches fine (once I replaced the mss32.dll), but I can't get any sound to work at all. (Using my mobo's onboard sound and a Realtek driver.)

Is there any reason why every category in the poll options is a 4-year span, except for 18-22 (5 years)? (29)

I repeat: They're not as dumb as you hope they are. Seriously, do you have any idea what would happen if an african-american candidate with the lead in delegates, popular vote, and victories is denied the party's nomination by party elders? Looking at past elections, there is no correlation between a state's support of one candidate in a primary and their support for that candidate in the general election. People voting in the Dem primaries are a pretty small subset of the electorate as a whole. And they are, by and large, Democrats: Faced with the choice of either a candidate whose policy positions are virtually identical to the positions of the candidate they preferred in the primary, or a candidate who stands for 4 more years of the Bush economy and Bush foreign policy, they're not going to switch sides. Pennsylvania did nothing but prolong the process. Hillary won by a large enough margin to stave off elimination (for now-- the media blitz in PA has left her campaign broke), but not by a large enough margin to change the overall picture.

Does the paycheck muddy the waters? Sure. But that doesn't mean that it makes the endeavor "fundamentally incompatable" with acting based on moral beliefs. Lots of people take low-paying jobs that do "good work" (social work, non-profit entities, clergy, some government work, etc.) because of their beliefs when they could be more highly paid with less morally-centered employment. Their sacrafice is of a lesser degree than that of pure volunteers, but that doesn't make it non-existant. I am far too plagued with self-doubt to take any particularly significant action on behalf of my beliefs.

I always take a Druid along in BG2 because the "Insect Plague" spell is basically a win button for all the mage battles. My standard BG2 party was Keldorn, Anomen, Jahiera, Jan, and Imoen. Although if I'm playing a cleric, I'll swap Anomen out for someone else (probably one of the Rangers). I liked that BG1 was a lower-level adventure, which I generally find more compelling. But besides that it was pure tedium ("mowing" the FOW away on yet another mostly-empty wilderness area) with a ridiculous storyline and cardboard-cutout character design.

Well said. Oddly enough, I thought that IWD2 was actually the strongest of the IE games in this regard, because the grinding was broken up by interesting set-piece battle at fairly regular intervals (at least for the first half of the game or so). On this count, IMO, it was a stronger game even than the first IWD-- it had a significantly higher ratio of interesting, satisfying combat to "another freakin pack of cold wights" combat. I'm not saying that all combat is tedious in RPGs. Interesting fights that someone actually sat down and designed to be an appropriate challenge to the player are one of the things that keep me playing (the example that pops into my mind is the party of adventurers you find early in BG2 in the temple sewers). It's the lazy "here's another half-dozen ogres to kill" fights that make me wonder if there's anything good on TV. Plus dialogue and narrative aren't the whole reason to get through the less-than-interesting fights-- it's also about the time-honored RPG tradition of XP and loot gathering. (I agree that, particularly in the BGs, much of the plot-related dialogue was silly. But, post-BG1, at least, the central mystery of the plot was still a pretty strong motivator on one's first playthrough.)

On Bioware, I haven't played NWN1, JE, or ME, so I'm not particularly well-informed. Their other games were at least solid "B"s, though, and I'm cautiously optimistic about ME's PC release. The problem is that if I were picking up a BG game or KotOR for the first time right now, I probably wouldn't finish any of them. Now, I enjoy story-based games where player choice has an important role in the development of the story and characters. I appreciate what Bioware has done in this area, and I want to see more of them. But games like this tend to have a gameplay problem. In far too many games (including all 3 Bioware games I've played), the bulk of the game is boring combat that you have to suffer through in order to get to the satisfying character-building and story-advancing parts. At one time, this didn't bother me much. But it does now. As I get older and my free time gets more scarce, I've become a much more harsh critic of games that I loved (or would have loved) just a few short years ago. If gameplay, on the whole, stops being fun, I will shelf the game and find something else to do with my time. MotB was as strong in the character/story area as any game I've seen since Torment, but I never finished it because epic-level D&D combat is a snoozefest and all my curiosity about the story was satisfied early in Act 3. On reports of BioShock's strong atmosphere, art, story, et al., I picked the game up even though I don't normally enjoy shooters a whole lot. After about 4 hours of playing, I realized that my distaste for repetitively shootin'/shockin'/whackin' stuff, being constantly in fear of being ambushed (although many people seem to as a positive making the bame "tense" and "exciting," I despise it), and straining my eyes looking at a fast-moving, dimly lit, first-person game far outweigh my curiosity about the setting and story. So, getting back to Bioware, my problem is that all of their games had way too much uninteresting grinding combat. (IMO, this stems from fan-service: fans seem to demand that a game that can't be drawn out to 50+ hours of gameplay isn't worth their money, so developers dutifully pad out their good parts with long stretches of time-sinks in between.) The current trendy solution to this in the world of CRPGs is to use more action elements imported from shooters to keep the combat interesting (ME, FO3, etc.). There's nothing inherently wrong with mixing game mechanics, but I think it covers up the real problem. Sure, the bulk of players probably prefer mediocre FPS grind to mediocre RPG grind (see Pop's earlier post). But I think both of them are a waste of my time. The real solution is hard work (for the developers)-- either replace the grinding with combat situations that are interesting and inventive, or skip them entirely and risk the fanboy wrath that you dare to publish a game that can be completed by someone with a full-time job.

Not sure but I think Redemption's go at it was more a DM client than a true editor. AFAIK you couldn't make your own scripts or maps.

Governments have to fund space exploration because there's no real business case for anything out further than communications satellites. Human space flight in particular is an enormous money-sink. When you send people up, 95% of what you send up with them is there just to keep them alive. Unmanned space flight can achieve pretty much everything that human space flight can (exception: moon golf), at a fraction of the cost. In other words, HAL was right.

R.E.M. -- (Don't Go Back To) Rockville

It launches fine for me in Vista, once I replaced the mss32.dll. Never got one "invalid disk" error. But I have no sound, and everything I've tried to make sound work has been ineffective. C'est la vie, I guess. It runs (barely) on minimum settings on my old XP laptop, so I can play it when I want to.

It's worth playing. The game prominently features two big stonking turds: the lousy NWN2 engine (performance is better than NWN2, but still pretty shoddy) and the craptacular epic-level D&D ruleset (gameplay isn't challenging at all or particularly fun, and the super-high-level stuff feels really forced and cheesy). However, the rest of the game is strong enough to make me give it a hesitant "thumbs-up," at least for the first two chapters. The characters are very well done, and the storyline is quite interesting for the first 2/3rds, until they made the silly mistake of revealing the answers to all the big questions and thus taking away the player's main motivation to keep playing until the end.

No, you are not. Thelonious Monk -- Epistrophy

In honor of the untimely passing of E Street Band keyboard/organ/accordian player Dan "Phantom" Federici yesterday, I queued up The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle for the commute home today. It reached by the time I got to my apartment. RIP.

5 series of 13 episodes versus 2 plays? That's probably a 4-1 difference in viewing time-- I hope whatever it is you bet on had appropriate odds!

Well, I think that guys like Yahtzee would agree that games that try to scare you in lame or cheesy ways aren't well designed. My point was more that I don't enjoy games whose goal is to scare the player. Caution-inducing mystary? Fun. Getting a bit frightened during your first encounter with something that you don't yet know how to handle? Also fun. Making the player constantly feel as if the game is just waiting for its opportunity to ambush them? Not fun (to me). Part of this is also just me not enjoying shooters very much, whether horror-based or not.

You know, listening to Yahtzee go on and on using "pant-wetting atmosphere" as praise for a game has made me realize that I really don't enjoy the same things he does in games. Much in the same way that I don't like to watch horror films, I don't enjoy it when a game makes me feel like there's some horribly diseased monster creeping up behind me. Sure, achieving some emotional response is better than none, but the inspiration of feelings of revulsion, horror, and fright strikes me as a rather cheap way to do so (this is akin to "tearjerker" films inspiring sympathy by showing a cute little puppy getting stepped on). If a game (or film) is going to make me feel that terrified/horrified/weepy, it has to earn it by being excellent in other respects (see, e.g., The Shining). Otherwise, I'm just going to deliberately prevent myself from empathizing with the characters, which makes it more likely that I'm treating the game/film as farce than as what the developers intend. On the other hand, he's absolutely right about game developers making the dumb mistake of explaining all the mysteries in their games. I hate it when a game has some good mysteries that keep me interested, but answers them all at the end of the 2nd Act, leaving the player with no further motivation than "now that you know who it is, go kill the big bad guy." (MotB did this, and I still haven't bothered to play on past the conversation with Safiya's mother.)

A related case decision, Baze v. Rees, was announced today. The SCOTUS has upheld the state of Kentucky's lethal-injection method for administering the death penalty. Not a surprising result-- the petitioners' argument (that the risk that maladministration of the procedure could cause intense pain made the method "cruel and unusual") was pretty weak.

The difference, of course, is that those games aren't RPGs. I think this kind of reward for progress at in-game missions and goals is less necessary in an RPG, where the real rewards you get are on your character sheet (XP, feats, perks, whatever) and in your inventory (100+!). Sure, it's important that the player gets feedback from the game on what a badass his/her character is becoming. But I think the more RPG-style rewards like feats or perks (like the "Gigolo" perk in Fallout 2 or the "Dragonslayer" feat in NWN 2) or useful unique inventory items (like the special tatoos you could get from Fell in PS:T after completing certain quests) are a more meaningful way to give this feedback than tchotchkes on the mantle in character's apartment.

If it makes sense in the course of the story and gameworld, I don't have a problem with it. But if we're spending our time urgently trying to exonerate ourselves of the crimes we've been framed for and hunting down and taking out/exposing the real villians, adding options to get new drapes for our safehouse and spinning rims for our car detracts from the game rather than adds to it.

I tried to get KotOR to work on my Vista desktop this weekend. Following the procedure described here, I got it to install and run fine, except there is no sound. (I installed it on my older XP laptop instead, where everything works well on minimum settings until the GPU gets too hot and the framerate nosedives.)