Amentep

I'm not sure Red Queen was ever an "official" board related to Interplay or BIS, since I think it was Josh's personal board connected to his website. As I recall the original Interplay boards were threaded and I never posted there, but they had BG1, PST, Descent to Undermountan, Fallout 1 & 2 on it. And Gorth's link confirms it! The BIS forums seem to have went up around April 2001 (which seems to fit with my memory of it being around while I was playing Heart of Winter).

Well, the closest and easiest way of seeing a restriction in the "press" is to type **** or **** or **** on this very board and see what comes up. We have no such restrictions on any media channel in Sweden, for example. USA has lots of those, hypocrites as you are. To be fair to the US Press, that would only really be restrictive if communication was impossible without using ****, **** or ****.

To be fair, they'll probably show Barak Obama accepting the Nobel Peace prize on Finnish TV, as paid for by the Media Tax. So its not as off-topic as some of the other stuff in this thread!

Not realy, all they need to do is not to make it on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, and release it only for DS and PSP... Was the JA DS port a big seller? Because I'd imagine that would be the litmus test whether anyone thought a new DS game would be worth it.

Party systems in general are kind of silly. Like saying "I want to elect an entity to represent me in this other entity."

Dark Fantasy, as a genre, is supposed to be a combination of Fantasy genres and Horror genres. Dragon Age is described as "Dark Heroic Fantasy"; the lack of a comma between dark and heroic meaning that it is Dark "Heroic Fantasy" which I believe would be more described (to borrow a bit from L. Sprague De Camp) as a story of action or adventure in an imaginary world with magic (heroic fantasy) and the world itself is a grim and brutal one (dark). "We describe what we

I think there is always the "does what doesn't work for you outweigh what does" in subjective analysis of what you like. But any game should be evaluated for what it is rather than what it isn't, I think. Not liking Fallout 3 because it doesn't seem to fit the setting or continuity established in the first I can understand (although I can't see myself letting discontinuity trumping fun gameplay). Disliking Fallout 3 because of VATS, or level scaling or how the dialogue and quests works I don't get. Disliking Fallout 3 because its not isometric and turn-based like the previous entries I don't get, because IMO that's something it was never trying to be.

Well yeah, that's my point. There's an inherent understanding with the lower numbers that can't be fathomed with the larger numbers. But I think even if you knew all the numbers it'd still be difficult to see the whole thing. That's why most solutions to problems involve trying to solve some small part of it rather than approaching a total top-down perspective.

This begs the question: why make a sequel to a game that has a small hardcore group of fans, and change it to appeal to more people? Then why make a sequel in the first place? (Beth gets bonus points for making a sequel to their own game and disguising it as another.) Well I think there's two parts to this question. One is any game that has a hardcore group of fans probably has something that is probably appealing to gamers in general. So the question is, if a good game could be made to appeal to more people and still be a cool game, then why not try it? The other part is a bit more nebulous and its "what makes a game?". Is it the setting? Is it the mechanics? Is the it the graphics and gameplay elements? Is it a gestalt of all of its elements? Does changing one element change the game into something else entirely? Or does it just make the game different but still connected? What if you change 5 or 6 things? 10? I loved the SSI game Phantasie and for many years wished for a 4th sequel. But at no time did I expect the gameplay/graphics to remain totally unchanged had they done it!

I actually think this is true for a good number of people (if not everybody). I don't think humans on average do well with large numbers. Say you owe ₤1,000 you understand that amount. Saying your nation owes ₤1,379,987,321.02 is most likely to make people shrug, or afraid or outraged but not really understand what it actually means to have that kind of debt.

Personally, I'm not sure that any game is setting off on the right foot if its goal is to please fans. Make a cool game that looks good and plays better and hopefully the fans will come.

Going for the "exploded face" look from Oblivion?

As I recall, at some point in the last ten years the US government actually repealed a lot of the regulations that had been put in place after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 that was aimed at keeping the Real Estate market healthy (part of what contributed to the crash). Estimating a bit because the graph is small and my eyes are old - 1940-45 FDR, Democrat (.5T to 2.5T) +2T 1945-53 Truman, Democrat (2.5T-1.75T) -.75T 1953-61, Eisenhower, Republican (1.75T-1.75T) 0 1961-63, JFK, Democrat (1.75T-1.75T) 0 1963-69, LBJ, Democrat (1.75T-1.75T) 0 1969-74, Nixon, Republican (1.75T-1.75T) 0 1974-77, Ford, Republican (1.75T-2.0T) +.25T 1977-81, Carter, Democrat (2.0T-2.0T) 0 1981-89, Regan, Republican (2.0T-4.2T) +2.2T 1989-93, Bush, Republican (4.2T-5.5T) +1.3T 1993-2001, Clinton, Democrat (5.5T-5.5T) 0 01-09, GWBush, Republican (5.5T-7.5T) +2.0T 09- , Obama, Democrat (7.5T-???)

Apparently I can't spell his name WITH looking either.

I'm no where as posty as I once was, so I'd no longer rate. Also I remember Sir Buliwfy - I still can't spell his user name right without looking.

What a nonsensical and unprofessional way to converse. Its a post from a message board not Shakespeare. Alternate question: why do dragons fly around in random directions and attack the non-hostile environment (in this case snow and ruins) instead of their enemies? Might as well ask why the bad guys are just standing around waiting to be pushed off a cliff or until an arrow hits them in the forehead, or attacking the power-armoured generic Hero Dude one-by-one in Pterry fashion. The people pushed off a cliff was trying to swarm the party; the guy hit by the arrow was the spell caster lobbing spells (and, I guess because his hands were glowing about to lob another). Its a convention of any mass fight in entertainment that people don't dogpile their opponents. For one it'd ruin martial arts films, for another I'm not sure I'd be that eager to jump on a pile when I had no clue where everyone's swords were. EDIT: I'm pretty sure the dragon was frying some of the swarming "orc" horde in the ruins, not flaming the ruins for no good reason. And if it wasn't the orc horde it was flaming, it probably just wanted to warm the land up a bit before setting itself on it and giving itself a chilly willy belly.

I remember the Red Light District. Where the men were men and 1/3 of the barmaids were women.

Personally I just advocate people buy what they want to buy because they think they'll enjoy it. Anything else (IMO) is madness.

By either not buying the product when it becomes available, or punatively not buying other products by the company/companies involved, I'd guess.

That's the kind of mental imagine that you can't unsee.

I'd agree with that if DA's keywords would be 'cool' and 'awesome' instead 'dark' and 'epic'. Maybe they're going for cool dark awesome epic?

What's so bad about it? Every second is cliche (there's a difference between cliche and badly done too cliche), the characters are cliche (they may have more personality in-game, but what we got here were some defining characterestics, which, presented this way, made the characters seem shallow), the whole thing feels like a bad Advent Children clone (OH HEY, WE'RE HIGH BUDGET B****, LOOK HOW COOL 'N' AWESOME WE ARE), and to crown it all, it made a WRPG look like a JRPG, which is the worst thing a trailer can do. I dunno, I understand where you're coming from on one hand, but on the other its a teaser trailer designed to entice people, so naturally it'd be chock cool of "LOOK HOW COOL 'N' AWESOME WE ARE".