Enoch

And this is where Bioware succeed. it's the only Bioware game I am interested in anymore. While "only" is probably too strong for me, I don't disagree with your general point. Sure, I often find myself wishing that Bio would aim a little bit higher in their narrative aspirations. The script they're clearly working from for ME (and other games) is one that would suit an above-average summer blockbuster film, and I do think they're capable of more. But I can enjoy a summer-blockbuster-type plot when it's executed well. And, in ME2, I did. Yeah, the overall story is rather hoary, they sometimes indulge the egos of their audience to a near-embarrassing degree, and a lot (probably even a majority) of the characters are relatively uninteresting, but they execute the plot cliches pretty well, the worst of the fan-service can usually be avoided, and the better characters are good enough for me to want more. Lastly, lets be real here. The standard of prose quality, plotting, and characterization in classic science fiction isn't particularly high. Sci-fi is niche-popular because the ideas that the stories contain have a peculiar appeal to a particular type of reader. ME's writing doesn't hit those notes all that often (and when they do, it's usually in a throw-away description of a random scannable planet), but in terms of writing believable characters, I'd put ME ahead of a good number of classic sci-fi authors.

Yes, having segments of completely absent gameplay is neglecting gameplay, even if the rest of the gameplay is well done. If the player is putting his controller down, you have failed interactive media. If someone mixes completely crap character models with good character models, you call them out for it. You don't excuse mix and match. You can take that logic to some pretty ridiculous extremes-- no work of interactive media is being interactive 100% of the time. Is having a player select a dialogue response and then doing nothing while the conversation flows to the next decision point "absent gameplay"? How about the space of time between pushing the "reload" key and when the reload animation finishes? Should the game have a pong tournament going on off to the side while the player is checking the map screen?

I like my solution better. Don't underestimate the calisthenic, cathartic, and theraputic effects of repeatedly hitting something as hard as you can with a very large axe, and then seeing it split in half. That's about as satisfying as physical labor gets.

Yeah, in some of the origins in particular, Duncan can come across as something of a manipulative bastard. Find someone in a desperate situation (maybe even helping him into said desperate situation), and use it to recruit him into your "2 of 3 die a painful death, and the rest kick off around middle age" club. Still, he's at least a little bit likeable based on the lols generated from his talks about how Grey Wardens "master the taint."

What does electric power and machinery have to do with cleaving firewood?

Somewhat related: Dream Jobs that You're Glad You Didn't Pursue. Also, .

Weren't there some hints about the 3rd DLC having something to do with investigating how/why the mass relays actually work?

Weirdly, I've been having lots of odd and memorable dreams lately, too. I'm generally pretty good at sleeping through the night, but these have me waking up pretty frequently, with my mind racing such that it's not easy to immediately fall asleep again. I can't figure out why they've been so consistently notable lately. Diet related? Something to do with the change in seasons? Voodoo hex?

It would be super rad! Also, Fargo is following both MCA & Feargus (And he is following only 18 people on twitter) Couldn't that be just as simple as that they know each other from way back in the Interplay days?

Both for content and name: If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. (The blog's name was the pre-release title of a Charles Mingus composition, the title of which was eventually-- and unfortunately-- shortened to "Gunslinging Bird." And anything quoting Mingus earns huge points with me.)

Rock, Paper, Shotgun's John Walker has some early impressions up. Generally not positive.

Birthday was yesterday. And the U.S. transition to Daylight Savings Time cheated me out of an hour of it! I am now 100000 years old.

I think you're letting nostalgia color your perceptions-- even when they were a "labor of love," they weren't all that good. The current "Lovin' in the Uncanny Valley" cutscenes are certainly no improvement, but even early on, "soap opera" was a pretty good description of the writing. (In fact, I think I may have seen the "my husband was just tortured to death, renegade members of the secret society I'm in are trying to kill me, but I'm still going to jump into an interracial relationship with my boss just as soon as hubby's body is cold" character arc on The Bold and the Beautiful.) The best thing to be said about the BG2 romances is that the character themes that played under the dialogues (particularly the Aerie & Jahiera ones) were some of the best tracks in the game.

I felt like that during Origins, the world was generic, almost teeth pullingly dull, all the while you're picking up codex entries telling you about distant lands with far more hardcore **** going on, I was pretty glad to find out Kirkwall was a Tevinter city, character designs are a big step up too, now I can actually distinguish between attackers at a glance. I haven't played more than the demo of DA2, but I do mostly agree with this assessment of DA:O. The coolest stuff in the gameworld that Bio dreamed up was mostly well off-stage in DA:O. That's the tempting thing about DA2 to me-- the accounts of how the game explores some of the messier conflicts in the DA setting. DA:O hinted at them, but mostly hewed close to its core Darkspawn v. Everything Else conflict.

I don't remember the difference between hur- and gen- but I did see a screeny of an Emissary, who looked a bit different, could've been a Genlock Genlocks were basically Goblins. The Emissaries I've seen are definitely not Genlocks. I'm thinking this might be the consequence of higher detail and consoles. They can't have that much model variety, so it's just Hurlocks. I'm probably wrong, demon/undead infested areas get plenty of variety. IIRC, Hurlocks = corrupted humans Genlocks = corrupted dwarves

When you say that DA2 sidequests are "cheap filler," does that mean they are more or less developed than DA:O's series of "just grab a quest out of that sack over there" assignments?

Well, the "wave" encounter design does provide a corresponding nerf to AoE attacks. You don't have to worry about your AI-controlled fighters charging right into your Blizzard anymore, but you also can no longer eliminate an entire encounter with one Storm of the Century cast from extreme range. (Or stun everyone with a single Mabari Howl, or Sleep, or Walking Nightmare, etc.)

I'm guessing that the 'wave' structure and the nearby spawning are their ways of dealing with memory limitations. That lets you avoid having too many characters on the screen at once, but still have fights that last more than 6 seconds.

One skeptical take on the announcement. Really, it's a pretty big red flag that a "NASA scientist" didn't announce this through official NASA PR channels or through one of the most reputable scientific journals.

You've got it all wrong, Gromnir. If you really want to send a message that Bioware will pay attention to, you've got to buy the game, play it for 5 minutes, and then quit. (Edit: Seriously, though, I am of a similar mind regarding this title. At some point I'll probably get bored with the games I have and order it, but I'm in no hurry.)

I doubt that the DLC will affect those kinds of mods.

I actually found the cloth map that came with M&M6 the other day. I did revisit the series a bit a year or two ago. My taste for such Old-Skool fare has waned over the years, though-- I just don't have the time to indulge the level of obsessive behavior that the games require to get anywhere. And, nostalgia aside, M&M games don't really have much beyond that to recommend them. But I do have a wholly subjective soft-spot for M&M, generally-- Might and Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum was the very first CRPG I played, on my uncle's C64. I do occasionally still play M&M 4-5 (which allows your party to travel between the two settings when both games are installed on 1 hard drive) on my netbook. It's a good airplane time-passer.

Hollywood isn't out of ideas. Partly, we all overstate the originality of whatever period we think of as the 'golden age.' But mostly, it's just studios being very conservative. It used to be able to count on a huge audience of people who habitually went to the movies on a weekly basis. Over the last 20-30 years, that audience has dried up, which meant that each new film coming out has to sell the audience on laying down their cash to go see it, rather than just have a better-looking poster in the lobby than the other films out that week do. Individual film marketing is crazy-expensive, and it is absolutely necessary to get any kind of return on your production investment. All these sequels/remakes/adaptations are great for studios because they make the marketing cheaper-- the target audience can hear the words "Ishtar 2" or "Air Wolf: The Movie" and instantly know what the film is about and whether they'd be interested in seeing it. That makes the ad-buy a lot cheaper-- it takes fewer iterations of an ad to make an impression on the audience, and they can be shorter. Plus, you get a lot more free media coverage when you're working with an established property (see, e.g., this thread). Also, the international audience is bigger than ever. Nuanced dramas and comedies don't always translate well, but explosions and slapstick need no translation. Or maybe the original audience had aged to the point where it has become jaded and hypercritical.

Rest? I thought that your standard prescription for these kinds of things was "hot curry + good ale"? Today I did a rare bit of weekend work, as I had a couple reports to review that I didn't get to on Friday. Now that that is finished, I'm having some ale, cheese (a fontal), and crackers.

So I guess I should look up how to overclock my ancient e6400...