Whipporwill

Kingdom Hearts. Never played it. The existence of this game offends me as a consumer. The success of it shames me as a gamer. If you do not understand, I cannot explain it to you.

Diablo 3 is not isometric. It's a fully 3d engine. Doh. It's 3d isometric as opposed to 2d isometric which the original Fallout was. Isometric point of view has nothing to do with whether or not the engine is 2d/3d. Isometric projection is a method of creating an image in which there are no vanishing points. It's a simplification that allows 2d graphics to more easily appear 3d, because there's no need to scale the sprites as they're moved around the playfield. With 3d graphics, there's no need for it. The engine automatically handles perspective and produces vanishing points for everything.

Diablo 3 is not isometric. It's a fully 3d engine.

Patrick Stewart actually did pretty well. An actor's only as good as his material.

Fallout and Bioshock are interesting because they aren't the modern look. The modern look, when it's not simply called "modern," is called the international style. It's the source of those boring and ugly steel, glass, and concrete monoliths that infect every city in the world. I don't know how you would subvert it. All the levels in Oni were done in the international style and people complained because they were so boring.

Fine, then. The engine wasn't designed for squad-based tactical combat and handles it badly. It was designed as a single-character action game with an emphasis on giving simple commands in real-time, and the farther it gets pushed from that concept, the more clumsy and frustrating it's going to become. This is not a defense of the infinity engine or of any other engine that you may have lodged in your ass. Multiple characters cause problems with camera positioning and with setting the order in which characters will execute their commands. Plus, switching characters causes all the other characters to act like someone hit control-alt-delete on their brains. Tactical combat does not work well because you have only limited control of even your one directly controlled character. You can say, for example, "cast this spell on this monster" but you cannot say "watch this monster, and when it reaches this point, cast this spell on it." You can only guess at when the spell will reach the monster and where the monster will be when it happens. Quite likely, the monster will be right in front of you, chewing on your face, in which case you have likely just nuked your entire party. Alternatively, the monster may be too far from you, in which case you will go haring after it, flailing your arms, running right through the front ranks of the enemy while they all laugh and swing their weapons at you. Trying to do squad-based tactical combat in NWN2 multiplies these problems together, with the result that even a moderately-sized battle involves constant pausing, switching characters, and reissuing commands, not because the battle is inherently difficult, but because otherwise your characters will do stupid things and then die.

I don't recall mentioning IE. I don't know why you're bringing it up, except that you obviously think it proves something or other. In fact, you haven't addressed what I wrote at all, other than to quibble over my use of the word "action."

The engine wasn't designed for squad-based tactical combat and handles it badly. It was designed as a single-character action game, and the farther it gets pushed from that concept, the more clumsy and frustrating it's going to become.

The only ones I can say I'm looking forward to are Fallout 3, Sims 3, and Spore. I'm not looking forward to any Obsidian games -- not to say I won't buy them, but I don't really care when they come out. I haven't bought Mass Effect, and probably won't buy Dragon Age. I got very bored and annoyed with KOTOR and stopped playing long before The Big Plot Twist, and when I found out about said twist, it guaranteed I wouldn't be back. The whole thing made me very unenthusiastic about Bioware.

I can think of two explanations: 1: These sites are written for fourteen-year-old kids, so anything older than two years is before their time. 2: These sites are written by fourteen-year-old kids, so anything older than two years is before their time.

I'll have the glass bathroom vanities, new york movers, spam, spam, tomato, and spam, please.

Wikipedia on Isometric projection in video games

Without comment, I post this link: www.battle.net

This proves my chaos theory.

And a "storm of zehir" is what happens when the zehir hits the fan.

She is also Bastila and Fall from Grace... she is a busy woman Jennifer Hale is the Grace Kelly of CRPGs.

They didn't stop being MUDs, though.

CRPGs and GMUDs are completely different types of game. It's distressing to see companies abandoning CRPGs to go chasing after the monthly fees that GMUDs bring. I take comfort in the fact that most of them will throwing money down a rathole because they don't know how to make a GMUD, but it doesn't change the fact that there will continue to be a surfeit of bad GMUDs and a shortage of good CRPGs.

So I picked up Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich for about ten bucks and I've gotten about to the point where Freedom Force is getting ready to battle the Third Reich, which takes longer than you might think. While I'm enjoying the game as a whole, one thing that I'm not enjoying is the dialogue. Freedom Force is a superhero game, you see, and since superheroes come from comic books, the designers thought it would be amusingly campy to have the characters talk like comic book characters. And it was, for a while, amusingly campy. But it's rapidly becoming tooth-grindingly obnoxious. The characters are just idiots, and babysitting unlikeable morons is never much fun. Given that I'm only now reaching the Third Reich part, I'm wondering whether it will join the pile of never-to-be-finished games on my shelf. I hope not, since it's a fun game otherwise. The heroes all play differently, and I've had a nice variety of challenges so far. There's some trouble with the camera and interface, and the game does not seem to be as difficult as the setting would advertise, but I've really no other complaints.

My reaction to Fable is that it was made by a bunch of really talented and creative people who fundamentally didn't understand the genre they were working in. There's lots of great stuff in Fable, but none of it has anything to do with what makes a good RPG.

If Vince didn't want to hear people's opinions on his game, he shouldn't have come here and asked for them. When you ask for feedback, people always tell you what they don't like. Always.

NATIONAL DEFENSE: YR DOIN IT WRONG

My copy came with a "soundtrack album." The title track is OK, but the rest is a complete snore -- dull and repetitive. Most game music just wasn't meant to be actually listened to, and the Deus Ex "soundtrack" is no exception.

"Baba Yetu" from Civilization IV.

These are not necessarily the best EVAR, but they are ones that I particularly liked. Archipelagos Civilization II The Four Crystals of Trazere The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Impossible Mission Pirates! The Sims 2 Starflight Torment Zak McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders