Gromnir

good luck. am aware that you ain't coming in as cfo or anything, but try to convince the bethesda guys that compelling characters is at core of good crpg story... and character development starts with well-written dialogue. so far we ain't seen evidence that anybody at bethesda knows how to write. push 'em in the right direction and you will have our thanks. ... screw it. you got our thanks regardless. HA! Good Fun!

"Yup BG had the best level progression, levelling up was a HUGE deal especially since there were only 7 (iirc) levels in the game." you and hades and Gromnir like slower level progression. too bad, 'cause the handfil of us not mean squat to developers. anybody who read the bg boards post release and the bg2 development boards will tell you that one of the big complaints 'bout bg1 were the slow leveling. so gve it to 'em. you can give the folks who play crpgs primarily to level exactly what they want w/o screwing up the game for Gromnir and others. sure, is more difficult for a developer to come up with balance and options for 20+ levels as 'posed to 7, but that is what they get paid for, right? make sure that the rule system has depth and we doubt that anybody complains 'bout spending 1 minute every hour or two to level-up. and bg1 were a crappy game for levels 'cause we could make almost 0 meaningful choices as we level. HA! Good Fun!

You are assuming that the MAXIMUM estimate of the developers is the correct one. However normally even the minimum estimate is normally an overexaggeration. This is from my experience, at least. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> ... it had to happen sooner or later... roshan managed to be making a genuine point. anybody 'round here live near the ocean? has the seas turned to blood yet? while Gromnir would be perfectly satisfied with a 40 hour game, developer estimates is typical ridiculous. vol points to ps:t as being 40 hours... but estimated hours were 60+. anybody recall HoW? that game were so short and so underwhelming that to salvage some of their dwindling reputation with fans, fergie had bis develop a free add-on to HoW. get josh on the board and get him to tell you what were bis announced estimates of the 10-15 hour HoW. even if you is one of the folks that does every possible quest and dialogue in a crpg, a safe bet is to cut bottom end of developer guestimate by 1/3. 30-40 hours becomes 20. *shrug* regardless, the important thing to 'member is that roshan had a real point. so please excuse us while we go get started on our bomb shelter. HA! Good Fun!

Shins splints are usually caused by an imbalance (flexibility and/or strength) between the calf and shin muscles, the bone bends as a result. If you stretch both throroughly before and after running you should be ok, toe and calf raises also help. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> like many football players, Gromnir played football in fall and ran track in spring. would get shin splints lots in track... asked track coach what we could. "loose some weight." *grumble* HA! Good Fun!

as this is rugby season, am spending 2+ hours in the gym 4-5 days a week. get in 45 minutes o' cardio and then 2 body parts with free weights. when rugby season ends, we go back to 5-6 days a week. have been doing same basic stuff since high school... which were a long time ago. took some time off from almost all excercise earlier this year... for health reasons. go figure. am almost 100% again. however, Gromnir is not a health nut by any stretch o' the imagination. bad work schedule. bad sleep schedule. bad food. etc. working out is for stress relief. HA! Good Fun!

is the first 2 quarters... six months. divide a year into 4 equal parts, etc... not two weeks. six months is a considerable period of time. "Im just sayig that being able to show hat your game has a high chance of continuing to sell for years ater its release opens many financial opportunities if only the publishers were interested." nope. again, like it or not, the game publishers is slaves to the process almost as much as is the developers. they got a relatively short period of time to be showing success. HA! Good Fun!

not make sense... unless sweden education is so terribly socialized that there ain't no ranking of med school programs or law school programs or graduate study course. all the same. even so, some schools, simply because of the profs teaching there or quality/age of facilities or geographic locations, have to be more appealing than others. more people is gonna apply to the more prestigious schools and there has gots to be a way of choosing why swede A gets a seat in class as opposed to swede B. have lottery? even if you not gots your Harvards and your Yales compared to your University of Wisconsins, there has got to be schools that swedelings would prefer to attend. we spent some considerable time in euope cultivating familiarity with higher education in england and ireland and spain, but our knowledge o' swedish education is pretty much nil. just seems so... alien. HA! Good Fun!

"They turn a blind eye to the fact that games like PsT are STILL selling well enough to make the top #20 more than 5 years after it was released. Or that Vampire:Bloodlines is #1 on the RPG sales charts this christmas" they not turn a blind eye. am sure that they do notice where ps:t ranks... they just don't care. first 2 quarters. the realities of the business has resulted in providing games and game publishers with a relatively small window for sucess. that window is 2 quarters. a game can continue to sell for years, and such a thing not really help the publisher in a cost effective way unless the game were succesful in the first 2 quarters. publishers know. developers know. little old ladies know. am always confused as to why a handful of game fans don't know. and we is getting WAY off the trail of chrisA and his interview. HA! Good Fun!

yes, the labeling of url gave some things away to board folks, but even if url had been disguised, it were still pretty obvious that melissan were the baddie once the tradition of picturing the UBG (ultimate bad guy) in adverts were continued by bis/interplay. the rules of character development must needs apply after all. melissan were female. melissan gots sizebale character development. never could interact with melissan save for in controled dialogues (no opportunity to cast detect evil or holy smite or some other spell to test her pathetic d&d good v. evil meter.) *shrug* after seeing the picture of a babe with clawed gloves we knew that some female character would be the UBG in tob. were only a couple of other female characters that gots more than a few moments of game time in tob, and one of 'em were drow. besides which, we knew that Gromnir must needs be correct... even if it were half-orc Gromnir. HA! Good Fun!

anybody who wants to do post-grad had better be concerned with grades n' such. med school, law school, masters program, teaching credentials, grant programs and any number o' other thingies require a person to maintain or excel as far as grades is concerned... but one semester won't kill you. we gradated in three years, and one disappointing semester did not prevent us from following further academic pursuits. HA! Good Fun! btw, there is universiteis in the US that does the pass/fail thing... but if you wanna go post-grad, you gotta request grades anyways... am not seeing how it would be different in sweden.

re-take? only place we ever heard of re-take for exams were stanford, where they figure that if a student fails a course it must be the professors fault. wacky, but we guess if you is paying as much as you is for a stanford degree, you can demand some minimal learning from the institution... or not. is this your first semester? Gromnir recalls our firstest semester. 'tween football and full course load and labs n' such, we managed to get a couple of marks that we were less than proud of. thought we were really good at managing our time... up until we gots to university. we got back on track after semester one, but our firstest experience in college were... humbling. HA! Good Fun!

dunno. when people lists the bestest sw games evar, we almost always see tie fighter at top of the list. battlezone and warhammer: dark omen is also on our list. is two of the more innovative and well crafted strategy games of the last decade... games that it seems like nobody save for game developers has played. lots of NEW stuff we see in recent rts games were things we seen in those games a long tme ago. HA! Good Fun!

I don't think you understand the point. Simply because one likes or dislikes a certain novel does not imply that they believe that everything about that novel is perfect, or that they believe that all works should emulate that novel. For instance, I think Lolita is one of the greatest books ever written. That does not mean that I think games should include long sequences where the characters travel across the story's setting with little or no conflict. I enjoy aspects of the novel and the fact that I like it doesn't really mean anything as to what kinds of games I might want to make. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> what point did Gromnir not understand? we wrote our response to gabby before we read josh's most current response... which is why we replied to him separate from our response to gabby. oh, and we ain't sure 'bout your nabokov comments. we weren't limiting our comments 'bout silmarillion to applicability to games. maybe a bad analogy. the silmarillion, as a piece of literature, were brain numbingly tedious. as a work of mythology we can appreciate... maybe. as an academic exercise in myth building on a scale previously not thought possible... or at least not plausible? but as literature? is not good lit... period. however, Gromnir is willing to accept that josh can appreciate silarillion for more thn well crafted stories and character. HA! Good Fun! ps for the tolkienites we has no doubt offended... we likes tolkien's work on beowulf and gawain very much indeed, but if you is gonna try to convince us that he were a greate writer of literture, you is gonna be wasting your breath. save such stuff for off-topic threads so that we can keep this one 'bout obsidian writers and writing.

I do, but I like it more for how and why it was made than for its stories. It's a piece of literature that I find fascinating, but it isn't full of events that make me go, "Oh man, that part was so great!" or "Oh man, E

if Gromnir could error we might give it a whirl. in any event, josh is a history major, and the silmarillion reads more like some crappy and antiquated history text than it does like a modern prose novel. the writing of the silmarillion is even more tedious and tortured than tolkien's lotr works, which is saying quite a bit. prose eddas were a major influence on tolkien... and so were beowulf, but that is no excuse for copying the style of those works. HA! Good Fun!

as bad as kotor2 were at times, we do not thinks it gets 'nuff credit for what it did well. not long development time, but chrisA gave us kreia and her view of the force that were more complex and compelling than any we seen in a star wars game or movie (and as we ain't never read one of the books or comics...) we got jedi who, w/o being dark, were unscrupulous and less than honorable... though they were doing so for greater good. in other words, we had some jedi that were actually human for a change. atone/atton and scion/sion is the kinda names for characters that one would maybe expect from a harry potter book, but with some notable exceptions, the joinable npcs and main villains had stories that were, if not always compelling, then at least they were intriguing. in point of fact, the combat and stories of kotor2 were usually better than those of kotor. unfortunately, the quests that went nowhere and the characters who seemed pointless, and the dialogues that were just gawdawful and the ending that was almost criminal all conspired to makes kotor2 understandably under appreciated. HA! Good Fun!

we thought our snowflake answer were pretty kid friendly. shucks. HA! Good Fun!

agreed. some writers gots this notion that they gotta surprise a reader, and to a certain degree this is true. unfortunately, they achieves this end by coming up with ever more implausible "twists" rather than some more subtle or deft method. even so, we did not mind the kotor2 twist as did many... did not have us rolling our eyes, and for the most part, we liked the kotor2 main plot (save for how it concluded.) "Bio has improved up to BG 2. Neverwinter Nights and beyond they have stagnated in their story design and writing. We still get the predictable plot twist. We still get the same betrayer scenerio. We still get "role play" options that mean very little in the scope of the game. We still get very linear gameplay." don't be a yutz. you took writing classes and yet you pretend (we hopes) to be ignorant. following a broad formula ain't where these games thrive... ain't where they live. main plot can be archetypical and clich

bio games, and particularly bio writing, has improved over the years. they seems pretty close minded at the moment, but they has shown examples of improvement. on the other hand, chrisA and the other bis refugees... you know, we thinks that maybe chrisA would benefit from checking out the boards on occasion. doing so seems to have helped the biowarians even if it has aggravated them. the obsidian folks, on the other hand, has not really made strides since ps:t. the same flaws exist... the same mistakes is being made. sure, we liked ps:t on the whole, so the things needed to be improved is less, but kotor2 were quite rife with all those things that were bad in ps:t... some of the hokie dialogues that read like strung together fortune cookie responses just being a single such example. compare bg1 npc character development to kotor. compare fallout and ps:t npc character development to kotor2. if vis is honestly suggesting that bioware has not improved, then he is a fool r a liar. we know he got an axe to grind with bio, and cannot be objective, but even he cannot possibly makes claim that bio writers have not improved. bis/obsidian improvement... *shrug* honestly, we not know who the obsidian writers/designers is getting critical feedback from, 'cause we is honestly amazed at just how little they has changed. they is still so damned cose to being good... w/o improving much at all. tragic. 'course the real point of this response is to again note that vis has a real problem when it comes to bio. weren't no mention o' bio direct or indirect and vis gotta get in his shot anyway. maybe vis should takes a pilgrimage to vancouver, (barefoot in snow

not care how chrisA came to realization just so long as he did. sure, folks has been pointing out the various useful ways to approach clich

alternative answer: God likes his scotch on the rocks. unfortunately, when he first made ice that was as dense as liquid water his ice cubes would always sink to the bottom of his tumbler, and that just didn't sit well with the Almighty. ice cubes is 'posed to jingle-jangle nicely as one gently jostles their scotch, and cubes is 'posed to cool the scotch at top from whence one is actually drinking. so, late on the sixth day God made ice less dense than liquid water, but as it were getting close to quitting time he had to scrap the unicorn and dragon projects... and he did a half-arsed job on the platypus. HA! Good Fun!

explanation we got were related to the shape water molecules. when temp hits freezing, water molecules line up in a hexagonal prism pattern... thinks of snowflakes but on a really large scale. instead of flowing together, the molecules is held apart. *shrug* never really spent much time learning 'bout crystallization... that were more of a chemical thing. in any event, gets a nice picture o' a snowflake and show a child just how much empty space the snowflake takes up with it fancy design and ice is sorta a mass of lots of really tiny snowflakes. liquid water molocules flow together and gets less space than snowflakes crystals. is probbly wrong, but that is how it were explained to Gromnir way backs in early chemistry classes. HA! Good Fun!

reply/quote... how quaint. a mod helping a thread die. we will temporary spare the mess, but no doubt you simply reply/quote again. ain't it lovely how people is willing to label one occupying force "peaceful" and another "illegal," based solely on their politics. sure, the folks who is being occupied not think that the occupation is legal... and we loves strategic use of the word "most" by bw. oh sure, 'course clinton did nasty stuff and killed poor innocent people abroad, but he didn't do as much as bush. HA! and the notion that clinton didn't use the military for blatantly political reasons is so delusional as to not need a response. somebody had better go back and read some newspapers or maybe takes a poli-sci class or two at the local university if they is believing that clinton's use of the military were solely for humanitarian reasons. and as to the panic that terror alerts has caused... they ain't nothing compared to what most of us were feeling as we watched planes slamming into the wtc buildings. the anger we felt as we saw those buildings burn and crumble with thousands of civilians inside is what you is comparing to terror alerts? honestly, you should be ashamed at making such a suggestion... embarrassed. you can take this opportunity to apologize for making such a suggestion... maybe salvage some dignity. how many euro countries support terrorist regimes? yup, the u.s. did too, and when they tried to do something 'bout it, the euros balked. but most of your responses is like this. is not even pretending that your beloved fellow euro hands is clean... but you seem to think that as long as you can point to some American governmental institution as being worse, then you and yours has your sins washed away. hallelujah. life don't work like that son. btw, is lots of games wherein players can control european military force, no? oh, and is more than a few european companies that continued to supply military weapons to iraq in spite of sanctions. the frenchies had mr. claude and lura and the bulgarinas used jeff co, and russian arms dealers were even more blatant 'bout supplying arms to iraq in spite of those sanctions you seems to love so much. yeah, blame the US, but ignore the crap in your own back yard. and one of these days somebody is gonna explain to euros and liberals tht perjury is a bad thing. politicians lie. clinton lied 'bout military and economic activities, just as bush has. politicians speaking half-truths and failing to give full accountings is pretty much par for the course. they get caught and usually their reputation suffers (clinton being a notable exception.) perjury, on the other hand, is illegal. perjury carries with it some pretty serious penalties, and perjury is clearly grounds for initiating impeachment proceedings. As to taking pots out of context and not needing to defend bush

"you can be religious and scientfic it is possible " did we ever suggest the contrary? go down the list of nobel prize winners for physics and pick out the atheists. ain't many. Gromnir is religious. Gromnir has a bs in physics from Cal. there is no tension for Gromnir. HA! Good Fun!

don't be such a fool. why not check and see how often clinton used military power overseas before you make such ridiculous comments. yeah, we has seen some o' your more delusional posts in the military thread... if America throws away it guns then the world will suddenley be paradise, right? HA! blame the terrorists maybe? they is the folks who whipped up a majority of Americans into a frenzy. maybe blame some of the euros? they tollerated and even supported terorist regimes. maybe blame hollywood? heck they makes movies that romanticize war. blame obsidian? they makes games that encourages combat. "Far worse than a generation of kids who think that war is a good method of politics, killing is a justified meaning for improvement, thinks the army rocks bigtime" so, how is this generation different from any other? "and lying will be allowed and can help you forward... " they didn't pick that up from the clintons? bah. bush is an arse, but some o' you clowns is exactly why bush gets so much support. Gromnir ain't a bush supporter, but even we find ourself defending him from your kinda nonsense. HA! Good Fun!