Moosferatu

http://www.psychonauts.com/memory.php Few new articles; no new info. I think there's a new picture in this one (bottom left).

I got a confirmation from Majesco. He was referring to Psychonauts. Mid-April, he says they're aiming for.

Yeah, the more I think about it the more I think you guys are right. It'd have to be one heck of a newsletter if it took them four months to write it.

I think he was referring to the newsletter and not the game itself, but I could be wrong.

Has anyone played it yet?

Actually, I usually go for fighters over weaker, mage-like characters. In fact, my first play through of KotOR I was lightside jedi guardian. It's just that it's hard to resist the coolness factor of choking a guy or decimating a party with a couple of lightenings. Also, the combat really isn't that hard no matter what way you go, and the AI likes to try to take over everything. I really wish there was a way to turn of the damn character AI. It takes the fun out of fighting. It was really bothering me as I was playing today. I would issue orders to all party members before the battle started, unpause, and all of none of them would do what I told them to do. Argh!!! So annoying.

Hmm... I just e-mailed Majesco and this is what they had to say.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66195,00.html "Steven 'Harley' Davidson said, 'If Microsoft keeps on pushing back the dates for Longhorn and removing features from it, they might as well just promise to bundle Duke Nukem Forever with the OS.'"

I like your version a lot more, Jake. One thing, you missed a little purple in the center of the brain.

Most of the faces are the same. I couldn't tell you if the added any new female faces, but it doesn't really matter if they did because they all look like crap anyway. They added a few new male ones that are pretty cool though. In fact, I'm using one of them. He's got this awesome full beard. Can't wait to see what it's going to look like when he's completely evil. Come to think of it, he reminds me a little of the stereotypical Jesus... The character creation in general is pretty much the same, but they've changed around what different attributes do so you actually need all of them, so it's a lot harder to pick what you want. For example, CON now also determines what implants you can use. The higher your CON the better implants you can wear. It's also important to note that this is only modified by your actual CON, so if you're wearing a belt or something that raises your CON from 15 to 16 when it comes to what implants you can use it's still 15. Another example is that charisma now lessens the penalty for using force powers of the opposite side. I'm not exactly sure how effective this is, though. Other than that the rest of character creation is pretty much the same. Besides, you know, a couple of new feats and jedi powers. Oh! At level 15 you can pick a prestige class, but I haven't gotten there yet. Also, there appear to be a number of different lightsaber styles, but I can't really say much about that because I'm just now finding out about it and haven't yet got a lightsaber of my own, though you do, thankfully, start out as a jedi.

I've played about 8 or so hours of it now. I'm quite liking it. So far I think it's much better than KotOR. The Sith Lords has a lot more roleplaying to it. There's a lot more choices and, hey, they even made skills useful (and needed) this time around. The beginning is certainly more fun than KotOR, which I thought was pretty boring. It was such a relief to finally get off that first planet. A few things do bother me, but they're probably more of annoyances with RPGs in general than The Sith Lords specifically. Why do developers seem fixated on making the main character unable to remember something about his past? It's getting so bloody old running around having to listen to old farts give these long-winded speeches hinting that they know all about your past (or something else of interest), but then not fucking telling you anything. Cut the crap for pete's sake! Then there's just the plan old, long-winded, and drawn out conversations. I just escaped the mining colony and what do we do? Why stand around talking for 20 minutes, while actually saying nothing, of course! They did that in the first one too. Do something awesome and then discuss it to death back on the ship. Fun. It was sort of disappointing too because they were doing an excellent job in The Sith Lords of explaining what was going on while you were playing the game instead of beating you over the head with it in dry conversations. But, alas, they couldn't leave well enough alone and ended up sticking in the fun little plot recaps, etc. in anyway. Oh well, I don't suppose it's really all that bad, and it could just be that it bothered me so much this time because I was suppose to be somewhere and the stupid conversation was making me late. It's always possible that they intended it to be that way too, because you and one of the NPCs actually make fun of the old jedi/sith bat for talking so much but not actually having anything worth while to say. I'm playing darkside because I want the cool powers. This also bothers me. I don't like playing the darkside, but the lightside powers suck. Sure, they added a few new powers. Now they lightside is unstoppable with Force Barrier which protects the character from 4 points of damage at its first level form and a whopping 15 points at its 3rd! Wow. Hold me back! 15 points of damage! Yes! I mean, sure Force Lightning can do like four times that much damage in one go, but, come on, who's counting? What bothers me more is that, for some reason, they always make it so that if you're evil you have to be a complete jackass and piss everyone off. This can lead to you missing important background info, because the person who'd give it won't talk to you. Granted, I haven't run into this yet, but every time I select something to say I'm always trying to figure out what will get me darkside points with out pissing the person enough to not tell me something or give me a quest. To make matters worse, they introduced something new called influence. Depending on how you treat your companions you can gain or lose influence over them. Again, I haven't had any problems yet, but I'm hoping that I don't have to do anything really stupid to any of them just because they've got skewed ideas of dark and light. Here's an example or what was running through my mind once, "Would it give me lightside points if I showed concern about how her hurt hand is doing? I'm sure it'd increase my influence over her. Darn it! Why can't I be evil and still be concerned about the health of my party members? Just because I'm evil doesn't mean I'm a fool. It's not even a moral issue! ... " I'm not sure if I would have gotten lightside points or not, as I ended up not asking. Finally, what's with the women PCs that you can choose from? I was thinking about being a woman this time, but decided to stay male after seeing that they still looked as horrendous as they had in KotOR.

Very hot.

I can't remember everything that Ragnar has and hasn't said about Dreamfall. That article that Remi linked to on Mojo got me thinking though. It only listed Dreamfall as coming out on PC this year, but Ragnar has clearly said that it's going to be a multi-platform game. Does this mean that the PC version is going to be the only version coming out this year? If this is the case, could it be that the reason Ragnar hasn't announced what other platforms it will be for is because it might be next generation, or is it just because they're waiting for a publisher to sign? Do they already have a publisher? I can't remember! bah! I can't remember anything.

What? Didn't I get it?

I'd have to go for Spaff with a funky fur coat at a store (I couldn't find that old pic of him. Was it lost in the big crash?), or Bronstring with an EyeToy at E3. I win.

"Due for the PC fall 2005, Dreamfall is a third-person action-adventure set in The Longest Journey universe – a continuation of the saga begun in the bestselling and award-winning game." From the official site According to Google there is no instance of 'xbox', 'ps2', 'console', or 'platform' on the site. Interesting.

My monitor is messed up and is too dark. I adjusted the gamma settings not too long ago, but apparently I didn't do it enough because I couldn't see the stencil you were talking about. How visible is it on a normal monitor, so I know how much more I still need to correct it?

Supposedly there are rumors that they might make a sequel, but how could they? Doesn't Disney own the rights? A sequel could, potentially, be quite awesome, but not if it's some Disney hack job.

Since I started using Firefox I decided that I should probably get around to fixing Tim Fandango so it displays correctly. I managed to just get that sorted out (that CSS Edit extension is incredible), but I've got another question. Can someone please tell me why it's displaying question marks where apostrophes and quotes should be? How would I go about fixing that? Yes, Jake, I'm going to try to get all of the Psychonauts stuff worked out today. ¬¬

ah, I bet Andy wrote that in Word (thus the curved apostrophes) and then copied it over. Good to know. Thanks!

Last question, does Firefox always ignore javascript set window sizes or is it just my computer? It's quite annoying.

Bah! I never noticed before that the character bios are messed up too.

I purpose a name change "Idle Penis". It just seems to fit.

Completely off topic, but are you really in South Africa right now?

Love the new avatar, by the way.