Amentep

When it comes out I'll get it still. That was my attitude before and its my attitude now.

I loved Archon and MULE, and played a good bit of SCoG and RDS (and Mail Order Monsters - I've been trying to remember the name of that game for ages!!!) Wasn't Sentinel Worlds sequel Hard Nova? And Mars Saga was remade as Mines of Titan? I seem to remember reading an interview with Danielle Berry that Ozark was working on a sequel/update to M.U.L.E. for the Sega Genesis, but she disagreed with what EA wanted added (guns and bombs) to update the game and ended up dissolving the company (I think all four of the people ended up doing other things in the industry).

Lol, I wish that was the case, current sales tax in the city of Chicago is 10.25%(maybe even 10.75%) That was just going by the states, not the city's taxes, so it is a bit misleading. Chicago is 10.25% - 6.25% for the State, 1.25% city, 1.75% county and 1% regional transportation authority (+ an additional 1% Authority tax on food and beverage when one eats out for 11.25% for that particular instance). This leads the country in total sales taxes. Memphis, Tennessee is I believe next at 9.25% - 7% for state, 2.25% for local tax (but there is no State Income Tax, whereas Illinois is going up to 4.5% this year, from what I've read.) New York and Los Angeles are next around 8.5% I think.

No I don't think it ever presented as a "create your character exactly as you want him or her"; of that Obsidian was very up front. Which I think is great since there was never any illusions about what the game wasn't going to be. I am in general against offering one gender (when both are playable) certain options the other doesn't have. To use romance options, your example is one or when the male PC gets three romance options but the female gets two. That said SOME difference - in how NPCs react and such should be there or why the point in allowing gender selection.

I'd love to have wider use of the repair skill or more versatility in it - and I'd really, really like for condition degradation to degrade slower - but I can't say the idea of being forced to go back to town rather than continue on because all of your two century old equipment broke doesn't add in some way to the RPG experience.

Sometimes though they are just better models (although in many cases, they are not) than what the original game had to offer. I the characters in morrowind looked horrid without modelswaps. Was such a long time since I actually played that game though, I cant remember where I got my replacements from. That (and the better clothes and armor that came with the better bodies) was the only reason I got those things in Morrowind. Ah but my character looked good when I was done!

I wouldn't be here if it weren't for JRPGs. In fact if it weren't for Final Fantasy III/VI, I'd probably have gotten out of video gaming entirely. Which would have meant that all that money I've spent on video games/consoles/PCs since then I could have been putting into my savings account.

An approach which worked very well in Deus Ex. SO it's hardly a bad thing. Invisible War, which allowed a sex choice in character creation was a massively inferior game, so there's really no correlation that such a choice makes a game better. I don't think there's any hard coded "this is good, this is bad" approach. Certainly for me, I like being able to make my protagonist be whoever I feel like making at the time of playing, including name and gender. That's my personal preference. I'm also very likely to restart any RPG I play that allows me to define any part of my PC as I try to play around with character options (not in a min-max way, but in a "who do I want this character to be" way), so I might not be the norm anyhow. And there are a lot of games - good games - I've played that don't allow you to change...well anything about the character. You start as a given character with a given appearance and a given gender and a given class and you have to run with it. I say this all to say that I can understand the reaction of the OP (even if it is a drive-by complaint) to being a forced gender character. I understand the same complaint from a number of people whose opinions I respect about Planescape: Torment. I loved PST, volunteered to moderate the BIS forum for it. But I also understand the appeal of having total control to define the visual and gender elements of a character and how some players can be put off by it lacking in a game. Would the ability to change gender or name be a sole reason to buy a game for me? No. But it is a part of the total whole in my completely subjective evaluations about whether I want to spend money on a game or not.

Let's be clear. You can't change the name of the character, or his gender. You can however change his abilities, and to a large extent, his appearance. Saying we don't have character customization is not accurate, nor is it fair to all of the team that worked hard to make sure players can enjoy making their own Mike Thorton. I'm sorry, that was poor choice of words in my case making my point unclear; I was not trying to make light of the effort that has went into the game. The lack of name/gender changeability was what I was referring to; Initially it did drop my interest as its something I've - for better or worse - come to expect in modern RPGs (at least those not developed in Japan). But I didn't lose total interest in the game. I kept up with the development in a vague way and the things I heard - the ability change abilities to make Mike Thorton the spy you want him to be and the unique dialogue system re-interested me in it. Certainly whenever the game comes out, it'll be one that I'll pick up. I'm not against a character who is defined to a certain extent (greater or lesser depending on the game) if the game is good enough to warrant it, and I like what I've seen so far from Alpha Protocol after my initial reaction to the early word on the game.

In this case, I had a reason to look up ST based RPGs (before deciding to wing-it).

Spectral Force 3 and Operation: Darkness were tactical jRPGs and I believe neither got very good ratings. Wasn't Eternal Sonata turn based? I seem to remember it getting pretty decent scores/reviews. I think The Last Remnant was turn based and received mixed reviews. Besides FFXIII I think Square-Enix is going to publish a new Front Mission (Front Mission Evolved) which - I'm guessing based on previous entries - will be turn based.

I would just drop it. Repairing weapons and armor has never been that important to a good crpg. However, the repair skill SHOULD be used in the gameworld, for dialogue checks, quest options, item modifications etc and so forth. But Bethesda has never been about that. their concept of a repair skill has always been nothing more than busywork. At least in Oblivion and Morrowind the busywork wasn't terribly annoying. In FO3, it is. I kinda know where you're coming from - I hate games that have an eating requirement (which explains why I've never finished MotB) as I always feel like I spend all game trying to make sure I have enough food to travel 2 foot from town. I didn't feel the repair stuff was that bad, since it didn't result in my starving to death every 30 minutes. That said I'm all for more use to skill checks. I know there was some talk about adding Gambling back into the game, and to me if it were added as a skill, it would be a good example of a skill which to make reasonable to add would have to have some utility beyond the obvious. Sure you can use it to help the odds in gambling, but it'd be neat to see it applied in other situations as well. Like being able to add gambling to certain skill checks giving you the potential to do really well or really bad at them (with a higher skill lowering the chances of the really bad).

I got to admit my interest in AP dipped when I read that being able to make choices in defining the character (gender) weren't going to be in. I did keep up with the game and how it turned out sounds interesting so I'm willing to give it a shot (which is pretty much how I approach any game without character customization in this day and age).

Well, I gave three reasons why I think the repair system is one of the highlights of Fallout 3's gameplay design. Care to tell me why you hate it so much? It adds nothing to the game yet is highly annoying? I dunno, I didn't mind it that much, but I did think weapons degraded too fast for the most part, necessitating carrying around dozens of weapons and millions of ammo. How would you improve the system? I wouldn't mind seeing some thing like repair allowing a slower rate of decay (indicating maintenance). Or a maintenance option in the menu that would cause time to pass but increase the durability of the weapon, extending its life (but then time passage would have to matter, I think, for that to really work).

If there's one thing that spy movies and television shows have taught me is that the world is full of warehouses full of empty crates, just waiting to be pushed onto someone or broken in a fight.

It should be pointed out California doesn't have a code called "Statutory Rape"; the "Unlawful Sex With A Minor" (PC 261.5) is, however, a subsection of PC 261, which defines Rape. I don't believe that it is unfair to think that "Unlawful Sex With a Minor" is equivilent to "Statutory Rape" whether they dropped the charges related to PC 261 or not. Ergo I remain unconvinced classing Polanski as a "rapist" to be incorrect terminology. He plea bargined to the lesser charge in hopes of getting a lighter sentence, not dissimilar to a drunk driver pleading to Manslaughter so as to not face murder charges. It should also be pointed out that PC 261.5 indicated that those convicted of Unlawful Sex can have a liability in civil trial (hence the civil trial, settled out of court, where Polanski paid his victim).

I have no interest in achievements. Its kinda fun to look back sometimes and see what I unlocked and why, but I'm not hunting them all down. I like replaying a game because the game was fun, not because I want to spend 10 hours trying to perform some obscure combination of things to unlock a new achievement

I never said the judge betrayed the deal; just that was Polanski's perspective was the Judge and DA tricked him and I think its part of why people have rallied around him. As I pointed out, there was no reason why Polanski couldn't have started serving the sentence and fought his sentence on appeal (AFAIK) had it really been an issue rather than running from the law.

From Polanski's side - he left because his sweetheart plea bargain deal was going to be ignored by the judge according to him and he felt like the judge and the DA colluded to convince him to plead guilty so they could make an example of him. Clearly the rape was dispicable and I don't agree him fleeing (he could have fought it under appeal, afaik) and the judge is dead now so can't really defend himself, but I suspect that this, combined with the victim wanting the whole thing to end is the reason why so many people misguidedly IMO back Polanski (well that and he's a famous director, who is apparently fairly likeable in person and his wife was horribly murdered in the 60s)

Personally, I've always preferred to judge entertainment based on what it gives me as opposed to what I wanted it to be. Truth is very little will meet what I want it to be, but what it is can often be entertaining in its own way.

It is against the Law. The Law is the Law and no one is above the Law. If you disagree with the Law that does not give you the right to break the Law. In Iowa those 15 year old boys would be charged and placed on the sex offender list. Hell, sexting has gotten minors prison time and labeled as such. It is the Law. There's a difference between disagreeing with a law, debating the merits of the law and breaking the law.

That's actually just where the victim gives her testimony to the Grand Jury, not the complete transcripts (but I imagine the full transcripts would be relatively huge and cumbersome).

It wasn't uncommon in the early part of the last century for men and women who were teens - often young teens - to marry either. Being older - late teens or twenties - when marrying was typically the privilege of the upper class who had the luxury of being able to complete their education before considering family life. Those in the lower or middle class were more inclined to take a job, work at the family farm or business rather than stay in school. They were treated as an adult, and if they married their wife was considered an adult as well. Our modern concept about teens is primarily a shift in society during the post-WWII era, as far as I can tell, and changed faster in urban areas than in rural ones. Even into the 1950s you have examples of, lets say the marriages of Jerry Lee Lewis (23) and Myra Gale Brown (13) or Elvis Presley (24) and Priscilla Wagner/Beaulieu (14) (as both Lewis and Presley came from rural backgrounds, and neither saw any "wrong" in their marriages; Lewis in particular never understood the near career ending backlash that started in London and continued in New York after his marriage). All this is a side point to Polanski, since he wasn't married to his victim; and since he plead guilty, the only real question to my mind (and apparently his claim as to why he fled) is how much time should he serve (if, at this point, any).

There's actually a GURPS based version of the Prime Directive Star Trek (Starfleet Battles) role playing game (they also did D20 and are planning on returning to D6 as well). I believe its set in a divergent universe, but I'd imagine it would be adaptable to re-aligning with whatever ST universe one wanted.

I don't think its silly. When I was in high school one of the things EVERY teen boy was keenly aware of was the age of consent. And if you decided to date someone who was under that age, you were aware of what you were getting into. I'm not a fan of giving a 16 year old a free pass with a 15 year old just because they're close in age. I think maybe it should be set up with an age separation in mind, something like the two minors cant be more than 2-3 years apart, or something to that effect. After all, I was 13 my first time (as was my gf at the time), who would have been wrong in that scenario? As long as the arbitrary divide exists, then it either needs to be enforced, or made less arbitrary, so to that I can agree. That's the problem with the dividing line though (and I think even with a 2-3 year gap there is still going to be debate; 3 year gap is the difference between a 14 year old and a 17 year old and I can see a lot of people saying that those two time periods are too different.) As a side note, I have seen 13 year olds who looked like they were in their 20s (and 40 year olds who looked like they were in their teens), so unless we expect one another to trade and authenticate ID badges before going horizontal, I think its always going to have a certain amount of arbitrariness that just has to be lived with. Not that it ultimately matters since Polanski plead guilty; apparently the issue was whether or not the sentence being handed down was correct/fair/unjust/cruel&unusual, given a supposed plea bargain on Polanski's case. Not necessarily unlike other cases.