loonyboi

I see no donkey teeth. Okay, maybe a little. But they exaggerated it too much.

Also, she has donkey teeth. What's up with that?

That was creepy. Not creepy good, just creepy. It's like some horrible zombie person. Why would they release that? The best on-screen acting i've ever seen is still Half-Life 2. They got the eyes right. Or The Darkness, but that's not out yet. For that game, Starbreeze did mocap and voice recording at the same time. So the gestures and voice all sync up. It's really, really, really cool to see in real time. They still have some work to do on the eyes and lips, but the body movements are awesome. There are lots of little subtleties to the acting i've never seen in a game before.

Damn, that's a lot of games to play at once. Pick a game and finish it.

This looks okay. Sonic strikes me as the one character I really don't need in 3D. Like all the effort the artists spend in getting this amazing looking backgrounds feels like a waste when you go running through it at a zillion miles an hour. I'm more interested in the PSP game that's 3D rendered, but played on a 2D plane.

The videos focus mostly on the character creation process and the pretty engine...there isn't much real gameplay to be seen. I appreciated the first game, but found the storyline too dull to remain interesting after the first six or seven hours so I never finished it. I recognize the talent of the writers involved, but does anyone know if the story's going to be more interesting this time around? The writers at Bioware aren't exactly slouches either.

Maybe I'm too much of a nerd, but when I wrote IF Quake I did it all by hand using BBEdit. I tried using some of the suites, and found them too confusing. Also they're kinda limiting. I wanted to do all kinds of tricks to make it seem like it was emulating the Quake engine, and couldn't figure out how to do delayed output (to simulate the console) using any of the suites.

I haven't played it, so you're not disagreeing with me, just reviewers I've read. I hope Dreamfall is great. I really, really, really liked TLJ, and like a lot of you, I miss adventure games. If the reviews I've read are to be believed, it's short (not an issue for me...Oblivion aside, I tend to like shorter games), way too easy (I'm not big on super hard, but I like a slight challenge) and the combat is annoying. But I hope that's all untrue.

Sure, I really liked that too, but that's a side effect of it being the imperial province. You won't find that kind of city in Cyrodill. It is an odd bit of revisionist history that Cyrodill isn't surrounded by Jungle, but that's as much of a gameplay decision as anything else. I can honestly say that after 90+ hours of playing (so far), I've never been bothered by any of the voice acting. I've never noticed voices changing in mid conversation. The only thing I've really noticed is that some of the reading is very stilted (clearly reading off a piece of paper), and that within the world, there are only four or so individual actors. But it doesn't bother me.

I don't think we're playing the same game here. Either I'm so biased that it's completely clouded my judgement, or I'm too much of a fan to see what's right in front of me (I was a fan of TES long before 2K picked up oblivion...when I was in a meeting and was told this fact, I giggled like a schoolgirl for about twenty minutes) or you're missing something in this game. I'm surprised at the complaints about the architecture...what more do you people want? Cheydinhal looks different from Chorral which looks different from Leyawin which looks different from Bruma which looks different from Anvil and so on. These look like real, actual buildings, and you can go inside of them. I challenge you to name a game with better designed buildings, either in real-time or pre-rendered. I can't think of anything. The only legitimate complaint against the architecture I can think of is that all the chapels look the same, but since they're all to the same gods, that doesn't seem terribly outlandish. And they look really, really, really good (easily the best i've ever seen in a game), so who cares. Yes, some of the voice acting isn't spectacular, but it's perfectly acceptable. Much of the voice acting in Jade Empire sucked too, but I read most of the text rather than wait for people to speak it anyway. Outside of Legacy of Kain, I can't think of any game that has had perfect dialogue reading from start to finish. You get used to it. The main quest isn't spectacular, but it's decent enough. When combined with full quest lines for the Fighters, Mages and Thieves guilds, plus the Dark Brotherhood (any one of those is the size of most other games), not to mention the hundreds of other things to do, complaints about the story fall flat. If you haven't done those quest lines, I highly recommend them. Especially the Thieves guild, which has one of the best quests I've ever done in an RPG. miffy, it's too bad you opted to get Dreamfall and JE instead of Oblivion. Dreamfall has been largely a disappointment from what i've heard (although as a fan of TLJ, I fully intend to play it at some point), and JE was a solid, but uninspired game IMO. Both are games you'll play once and then put away, never to touch again. Oblivion is a game (especially on PC) that you can play many, many, many different times. Hopefully when you've done your solitary playthrough of those you'll come back around to Oblivion.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I enjoyed Jade Empire, but found it painfully shallow. The combat system wasn't nearly as detailed as I had been led to believe, I didn't find the storyline particularly interesting, and most of the characters were weak too. I played it, finished it and sold it back. By contrast, I've already put about 90 hours into Oblivion, with no end in sight. Or an even better example: KOTOR was a stroke of genius. Deep game, great story, memorable characters. I played through it twice (once good, once evil) and loved it both times.

You don't need to have played one. They've gotten significantly more accessible with each iteration, and oblivion is by far the most accessible to date. There's a connected world with each game, but the storylines are always unique.

That's a terrible idea. Okay, granted, I'm biased. Completely. But Oblivion > Jade Empire. By a factor of 50. But again, me = biased.

Jade Empire was good, but it got really boring about halfway through and unlike KOTOR I wasn't motivated to try playing it a second time to see how it would be different as evil. You got your ass kicked by a Rat? You might not be using the combat system correctly. There are rats in that first dungeon...if you can't kill them easily using the tools you're given (sword, bow + arrows, axe, bare hands) you need to get used to the controls. Rats are never difficult. Ever. Nor are mudcrabs. Goblins scale, rats never do. You should *always* be a god among rats, even if your character is 100% mercantile/speechcraft.

Sure you can. Just don't plan on doing a lot of combat. I don't understand why someone would wait to level up. In my experience (83 hours on character #1, 5 so far on #2), the game is balanced perfectly. Character #1 was a knight, so I carried around a big sword and a ton of heavy armor. After a while I started using more destruction magic (a minor skill) so I used a lot of that and leveled it up. Character #2 is an assasin/thief, so my major skills are sneak, marksman, blade, block, alchemy and so on. These are the exact skills I use, so why wouldn't I want to level up with them?

What class/character are you playing? If you concentrate on your major skills, you should be sufficiently powerful in no time. Just be smart about it -- if you're a knight, don't waste effort with magic, if you're a mage, don't bother with heavy armor, etc. Having said that, you *can* change your mind and concentrate on minor skills, but understand that it's going to be an uphill battle for a while until you get those leveled up to a decent number.

It's a good episode, but as a general rule, I tend to prefer the ones that aren't so heartfelt. I like my shows funny, not poignant. So while I like ones like Jurassic Bark or Leela's Homeworld, I'd much rather watch something that makes me laugh.

Oh, I have lots of them... "Where no fan has gone before" - All-time fave. The Star Trek in-jokes are hilarious, from Kirk ripping his shirt before going into battle to the fanfic stuff, to oy...just hilarious. "A taste of freedom" - No sure why I love this one so much. I'm guessing it's b/c of the "Don't mess with earth" song. That cracks me up. "Crimes of the Hot" - Al Gore saying, "I have ridden the moon worm" is just great. "Futurestock" - 80's gags. Gotta love 'em. Also, "I AM JOR-EL, MASTER OF SCHEDULING." Genius. "30% Iron Chef" - One sentence says it all: "Soylent Green is my kind of people." Also, the two "Tales of Interest" anthologies are great. Again, Al Gore with the great guest appearance (and Gary Gygax, for extra nerd-action). And so on. I could go on for days.

It wouldn't have mattered...anything we came up with would pale in comparison to Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, or Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. By comparison, Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Warlords is practically Pong.

No, it's just called The Da Vinci Code, sorry.

One word, and one word alone. "VICTOLLY!"

Yeah, I have a few... Burnout: Legends is probably my favorite game right now. It's burnout. Handheld. What's not to love? I also play a bit of Lord of the Rings: Tactics, which is bare bones, but fun if you really like turn based strategy games. Lumines is cool, but it makes me feel stupid because I suck at it. SOCOM's well made, but I've never liked the series. Untold Legends 1 is good in an extremely generic and repetitive way. I have the second one, but haven't tried it yet...I hear it's more of the same only with online play, so that's not bad. I hear great things about Daxter and Syphon Filter. I may pick up Daxter, but I've never been a Syphon Filter guy, so I'll probably skip that one.

He's working on the Da Vinci Code for 2K Games. The actual game development is by The Collective, but Charles wrote the puzzles and the adventure aspect of the game design.

You could die in pretty much every Sierra game, from King's Quest up through Phantasmagoria. I'm pretty sure you could die in Gabriel Knight, too. Also as for points, again, Sierra games had points, as did Infocom's games. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let you say that IF isn't adventure gaming.

Generally I consider sticks and buttons traditional. They're just evolutions of the same interface everything going back to the 2600 had (although paddles never took). Had the revo had a touchscreen instead of buttons (as was rumored at one point), that would have been no-traditional. Guns, guitars, cameras, scratch pads, touch screens, motion trackers, microphones, bongos, fishing rods, dance pads and maracas are non-traditional, IMO. But that's just me.