Gorth

Sounds like Socrates' cave (one of my favourite stories)

That is titles that bring back memories

That rings a bell somehow... wasn't that the whiny emo boy that you felt a dire need to put over you knee and give a good spanking? One of those FF games had a PC demo a long time ago (can't remember if it was VIII, but that guy together with the horrors of the control scheme made me swear never to touch a FF game again in any shape or form As for games with good stories, I mentally seperate them into two categories, one where you experience the game writers story and the other (my favourite) where the game provides you with a setting, mechanics and freedom to experience you own story (which may vary from one playthrough to another). As for the best of the former kind, that is about as subjective as asking if Coke is better than Pepsi. It can be technically brilliant, yet utter dull if the subject matter doesn't interest you. The latter leaves it entirely to your own imagination whether the story is worth experiencing. Sadly the latter type of game is as rare as an honest politician in an election year

I picked Gothic II Gold. Never tried any of the 5 games up for grabs, so it was a bit of a hard choice.

How about a list of the worst internet lists... here is my contribution: Listverse: 10 "Best written" video games

I think this thread will feel more at home amongst other game related threads...

It isn't always just about money, but sometimes also about time. Anybody working in software development knows that you can only throw so many resources at a project, once you pass the "sweet spot", additional resources are pretty much wasted and wont help you meet a deadline. I haven't played the game, but it sounds ultimately like a deadline issue to me, grab a dungeon that works, replicate it and change the scripting depending on context. Artists can be notoriously fickle when it comes to working to deadlines (I'm looking at you Kaftan), or the asset pipepline simply was the slowest link in the development cycle. Could platform restrictions play any role in the selection process of what goes into the game or not? Maybe resources simply got diverted to other projects with expected greater return of investment per man-hour? Maybe they expected people would be too busy pressing the awesome button and watch the gore fly? Could be a number of reasons for why they didn't throw more man-hours/money at it.

My 'why not' guess explanation: TIM has always been on the side of the Reapers. But the Reapers aren't monolithic. The Reaper handling the Collectors was part of a splinter group, going off the reservation with their "human reaper" experiments. TIM, allied with the main horde, was working towards the same goal via a different path-- making Shep into badass zombie cyborg. That he could test this badass zombie cyborg by using it to capture/destroy the work of a rival Reaper faction was a nice bonus. There is, as I see it, a certain similarity between both the Collectors' and Cerberus' pre-ME2 activities (sampling different weird galactic species and experimenting on them, etc.). Ah yes, makes sense. It's the faction that wants to build bigger and bigger reapers versus the faction that wants to build small, flexible Sheperd sized reapers. He is the 'prototype' without knowing it, getting pitted against the evolutionary dinosaurs of Reaperdom. There can be only one

Do re mi fa so laaaaa.... [/fat lady] More stuff here >_

Start of old thread End of old thread Looking forward to getting tomorrow (Monday) off. Was supposed to get 10 days off as time in lieu that I had accumulated since January, but it looks like I'll have to live with getting paid off instead for most of them. Ah well, one day is better than nothing

I think you got it 180 degrees wrong in there somewhere... at least older crpg players tends to share a common ancestry with wargamers and appreciate good game mechanics more than the latest emotional sob story. The best story is the one you create for yourself through your experiences through the game universe and all that, not the prepackaged "junk food" that somebody else wants to serve you Non crpg players seems to favour the "entertain me" approach, where they crave more and more cinematic experiences that gives emotional involvement rather than cerebral involvement. Just my own, completely anecdotal impressions.

I will no longer be pre-ordering ME3. I now have lost all interest. WHY ARE YOU RUINING BIOWARE EA!!! STOP! "some of the features that you'll see at E3 to put this in a genre equivalent to shooter-meets-RPG," he said, "and essentially address a much larger market opportunity than Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 began to approach. " Yeah, I thought so. Combat was way too complicated in ME2. You sometimes had to push other buttons than the 'Fire' button... I see great things happening

I don't think it matters that much whether the game was good or not, peoples expectations based on previous releases would make them buy it. Interesting is to see how expectations may or may not change after DA2 and affect sales of future titles. The powers that be knows that there were things in ME2 that made your face and palm best friends, but then what matters is the overall experience (i.e. a positive experience in my case). How Bioware interprets and use (abuse?) player feedback is still baffling sometimes, as is the conclusions they seem to arrive at.

Hand him over to a taxidermist and then exhibit him in some cabinet of horrors?

How about appreciation for those intelligence people who found his hiding spot? The powers that be knows they have been slammed a lot (and maybe deservedly so) since 9/11

Thread ran out of Awesome. Press A

Start of old thread End of old thread Still waiting for Grom's review

Getting past the imaginary finishing line... Continued here

Start of old thread End of old thread Blah blah blah, blah blah, etc.

Just wondering if you might have more success asking on the NWN2 forums? (the old link http://nwn2.obsidian.net/expotron_plug.html is deader than a blue norwegian)

Isn't that what democracy has been all about the last 10-20 years?!? It was particularly noticeable during the last election here in Australia. Just for fun, I watched a bit of the campaigning. Not a single politician, not a single one, actually told what he wanted to do, only what he wanted to prevent others from doing. I can understand why people are forced to vote by law, because nobody in their right mind would vote for any of the current politicians if they could just ignore them all together.

Finally got around to start my first game of Fallout: New Vegas (yeah, a bit late, I know). My tech savvy explosives/energy weapon expert followed this girl around for a short while to learn basic survival in the world of FO:NV and promptly got himself killed by a pair of Geckos I got so distracted by the hilarious animations that i forgot to keep shooting at the critters. Hit it in the head with a laser pistol and it will bury its head in its "hands" (paws, claws, whatever) and go 'Ow! Ow! Ow!...' while rubbing its eyes. Hard to keep a straight face after that

Ok... where is Worstusernameever?!? I'm here, I'm here, just rather busy. Quick summary: s'cool, looks open but is linear (they count it as a positive "no backtracking), cool hybrid combat system, dated graphics with interesting art direction. Excuses, excuses... thanks

Watch this space for the new reality TV show... Survivor: The Government. The audience vote who leaves the parliament every week until there is a winner and he/she becomes the Tyrant until next election period

Am curious to hear your impressions after mandatory reflection time etc. Still sitting on the fence. Need a new time sink when finished with FO:NV, but the demo left me "uninterested" (boring corridor combat and not much else shown). I'm probably going to wait for the second boxed set with various DLC's and patches included.