metadigital

Disco. I had lots of fun playing great games, but none of them changed my life like the full-on OCD-attack Civs. Unless you consider all that time I spent in video arcades playing Donkey Kong might have been spent on bouts of self-improvement ...

Any good?

:D I thought about that too. I'm just about to load it on my PC, but I think that game is perfectly suited to a telly-console.

http://www.planetdeusex.com/dx2/files/mods/ Makes level loading take about three times longer. Aren't particularly complete for any PC except the main male one (Dark females look silly with white flesh stripes ...)

That's what drivers are for. There were over ten driver updates for ATi last year. Bugs in PC games due to platform issues are numerous, but not significant. The worst can be a card-based, sometimes, like ATi's notoriously inferior performance utilising OpenGL format. Still, the latest drivers released have narrowed this inefficiency significantly. Bugs in games due to poor design implementation are equally distributed across every platform. Obviously. It's not like a console developer team has the A-team.

Most bugfixes are tiny scope: a particular (usually high-end) graphics processor function isn't working to greatest effect. Better than not having the option to use a better graphics experience. Steal one. :ph34r:

I like patches. Patches to me equal more content, better polish. I have broadband I just dont have the inclination to knowingly buy rubbish just so I can patch it to make it playable. Wow a dozen games , guess I have more free time :cool: ... Dont forget the defintion of crap here which is a game that requires patching in order to be functional. Not a game that someone thinks is bad because they cant stand a particular type of game. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> 1. Please read my posts. 2. Crap is anything I don't want to play, whether poor quality content or execution. Not sure why you are making a meaningless distinction. 3. If you don't use broadband to update content (whether to update bugs or not) then that's your own look-out. 4. Who said owning a PC means having to buy rubbish games?

Here is a list of stars, by abstruce name. Also try Googling results. Pretty picture: No names Galactic Navigation ... Galactic Latitude and Galactic longitude ... and this might help (check out the yellow dots: they are individual stars).

Whipping is a central tenet of that conviction based on that film.

*gives candy*

Sanity is relative, you know.

Sitar music is very underrated.

Where is your prefecture?

I do. :Darque: Economics 101 Marketing: the concept of a loss leader. ... One use of a loss leader is to draw customers into a store where they are likely to buy other goods. The vendor expects that the typical customer will purchase other items at the same time as the loss leader and that the profit made on these items will be such that an overall profit is generated for the vendor. ... So, to apply this logic to the console: selling the delivery platform (console) at a loss provides the revenue stream that would otherwise not exist (sales of games). That is the benefit of capitalist economics. Be sure that these companies wouldn't put out an expensively advanced console loss leader if they didn't have to fight tooth-and-nail for the same demographic. Halo? Who plays f**king Halo? 1. More crap ≠ better choice. 2. Broadband is your friend. Apples and oranges. Some of us like to play different games, like TOMBS. Oh theres certainly a lot of crap out there regarldless of platform. Of course it's important to make a distinction between stuff you dont like and hence call crap. Or stuff that is actually crap because it's flawed, buggy or what have you. Since I'm not in the habbit of buying games I dont like anyway the former doesn't matter. Since I've never had to patch any of the console games I've played where as PC games have frequently required patching I think I'm safe in saying the PC has way more of the latter. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Fallacy. I buy more than a dozen games a year for my PC, I spend a not-inconsiderable amount of time playing them, and I have barely enough time to play all the games I buy as much as I want. Just because there are more buggy games on the PC platform doesn't mean that more games that we buy and play are crap, as a total percentage, for the PC. Yes, I'm sure that the quality of games produced through a similar development cycle is significantly different on one platform to another.

Hmm... why didn't you like PS:T, pray tell? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Boredom, as I recall. <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Interesting. Standard chosen-one fare, giving plenty of scope for rich character development. (Good thing Magical Volo's got you to proof read his typographical dilettantism ...) I liked Llyranor's idea (<{POST_SNAPBACK}>); it treats the whole "chosen one" device with the genial contempt it deserves, whilst performing a community service. You should try to incorporate that idea now it's an orphan ... "

Too often player development is just a euphemistic phrase for a single dimension array representing some alignment quality (LIGHT-DARK side of the Force, for instance). Choose the first option and get bonus LIGHT points; choose the last option and suffer DARK demerits. Still the same story pans out and the only difference is the immediate reaction of NPCs (i.e. the storekeepers still trade with you regardless of your homocidal megalomania). Poor utilisation of a Reputation attribute can turn out to be just an extension of this single dimension. (Now the simple tactical response from the shopkeeper, above, is tempered by a global response to the PC's overall treatment of NPCs throughout the game). Blaise's example demonstrates the subtlety that can be employed with a little more effort in the planning side. It's not that big a step up from the minimum level available at the moment in RPG narratives, and the development costs would be not dissimilar to the game without the extra Weltanschauung sophistication. I really don't know what you are talking about here. If you are saying that themes must be appropriate to plot, then I would tend to agree. I'm not at all sure what your anthology metaphor is trying to say ... a series of narratives (e.g. films) centres on the same core characters experiencing different stories, which ideally demonstrate the length and breadth of their virtues and vices, and the depth of their characters. So I don't know what point you are trying to make: please elaborate. That's really difficult, in my opinion. There is just so much creativity, insight and possibility that the audience could bring to a game, that no matter HOW big the game is, the audience will still feel restricted. And the bigger the game, the more expensive it is: so I don't think this will be happening anytime soon simply because of monetary limits. It's an ideal, though, and I too wish that games could evolve to a level of such sophistication. But sadly, I doubt that's going to happen in our lifetime. That's because the more the player can affect, the more variables are involved, and with more variables involved, the content required to cover it all grows exponentially. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> How is this any different from creating an RPG NPCs that only team up with a like-minded alignment, with magic weapons and items that can only be used by a certain class, or subquests for NPCs that are unlocked by a specific trigger? I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill. Sure it involves a certain amount of work, but no more than is done for standard RPG development of a decent game. It's a geometric relationship, not exponential. Think of Onderon, for example, in K2. Depending on how the planet is played, the NPCs react totally differently (allies or enemies), yet they're all still there as part of the story, and the story is still an integral part of the narrative, even though it can be told in a dramatically different way. All the same artwork (backgrounds, characters, etc) has to be completed, so graphics expense is negligible. VO and scripting is more complex, but these costs are dwarfed by the graphics. If anything it is a quick win for the development team: easy money for the invested artwork, making more efficient use of the same graphical assets. Seems like a no-brainer, to me.

Geese?

What if they take either role, depending on mood, subject and volition? :D

Bloody Portugese! It's a conspiracy! :Darque:

Hmm... why didn't you like PS:T, pray tell? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Boredom, as I recall. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That made me laugh. Edit: I laughed because it was a Snappy Answer to a Stupid Question, just as if it Al Jaffee had jumped from the pages of MAD to entertain us on the forum.

Yeah, I really liked his sarcastic wit, like when he cuts the Russian Witch (and the fourth wall) down to size about how locking a fortress should be done from the inside ..! )

Natch. It does my little black and shrivelled heart some good to be complimented on my writing by someone who writes much better than me. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Your English is a damn sight better than my Portugese. Oooooooooo. Do tell ... I appreciate the list, thank you very much Unfortunately I was egged on by some people to submit my review to a couple of sites in the meantime, so many of those corrections and improvements were not made. Nonetheless your input won't be wasted as I'll take it as reference for future reviews <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I could see the writing discipline tailing off in the last paragraph and assumed time constraints were to blame ... apologies for not being available to deliver Six Sigma advice; damn pesky real world intrusions ... "

Sounds like a half-baked, ready-to-be-perfected TOMBS report. I concur, though, even my eyes are starting to bleed when trying to catch up on that reading. And please remember to use tags where appropriate. :angry: I skipped all your collective posts on the last three pages (which seemed to go on for thirty-four pages) because I didn't want to accidentally read any stuff I might encounter should I pick up and play Arcarnum again ...