Well I'm looking forward to it, no matter what it is. Great game, good port, and I enjoyed BDTS for what it was, a nice little freebie.

Very much agree with eRe4s3r's first sentence, and found the rest of this post very interesting and thought-provoking -- I didn't know any of this.

I do think the Telegraph piece is a bit naive, in fact deliberately crude. Titus Andronicus is spectacularly violent, yes, but in the most stylized, Senecan / Ovidian way - the violence isn't immersive or even imitable, and tends to evoke nervous laughter. It's also worth noting that plenty of alarmists in the 19th century did indeed bowdlerize Shakespeare and that Romeo & Juliet *has* been forcibly removed from school curricula. What do we exist for, collectively, other than to be a laughing stock for the next generation?

People with a propensity to violence are attracted to representations of violence. So are weak, unmanly aesthetes like me. The relationship between life and art is not altogether predictable. And of course artists themselves are reluctant to let go of the idea that what they do actually has an effect on people and on society, so they can hardly object very deeply to this tabloid version of the theory that art is actually powerful. Which, on the whole, it isn't, very.

Depends which one you found lame. I found X-Tension too easy after a while, and X2 so preposterously difficult that I gave up, but X3 Reunion struck me as well balanced, challenging at first as you learn how to pick your fights but satisfying in a range of ships against a range of enemies.

Mmm, and it's worth pointing out that by Egosoft have steadily acted on the complaint that the sectors feel 'boxy' by varying sector layouts; in X3:R the further you go from the core territories into less well-charted territory, the bigger and less 'square' sectors tend to be. And really the spaces between the jump gates are just the built-up areas, the industrial and trade zone. Combat quite often takes you well beyond the confines of the jumpgates into very empty space, and there are some goodies tucked away in remote places, as well as some hauntingly sparse or empty sectors.

So of course there's a complaint that it takes too long to fly from A to B... Possibly from people who haven't discovered the time acceleration options but there you go. Making a space game is quite a good way of earning contempt and hatred if that's your idea of a living!

I'm with Ecthelion, there's all sorts of things that strike me as imperfections, but this is a series of games that has sucked me in and keeps me coming back -- I'm really looking forward to getting home from work and unleashing my new M3+ class Eclipse on some Xenon scum. And I'll certainly be buying Terran Conflict.


This comment was edited on Sep 23, 09:02.

Great idea, sounds like a perfect match of studio to source material. I'm really quite excited about this, especially if Peter Sallis is up for some voice work (he is well on in his eighties after all...)

This comment was edited on Jul 25, 08:37.

I haven't finished it either, even though I think it's better than Season 1. It's something to do with the pace, which is always just about the same, which makes the jokes feel formulaic. Somewhere in episode 3 I started to find it a bit of a slog.

I think "82% of US has sent e-mail" is also a story. But then my view of the US (as a Brit) comes largely from Bill Bryson, so I'd barely bat an eyelid at "82% of US has read book".

I only ever played the demo of Doom 3, and on hardware that wasn't really up to it, but I have to admit, it didn't tempt me to buy the game. Partly the lighting was just uninvolving, but mostly I only had to play half a level to feel that I knew most of the tricks the game had up its sleeve and the rest would be variations on a pretty unoriginal theme. Maybe I was too hasty. I *loved* Doom 2.

I do hope they didn't spend four years coming up with that atrociously embarrassing subtitle.

Agreed - it's worth every cent, a lovely, imaginative game that just didn't managed to find its market. If nothing else, play it for Lungfishopolis: how could any gamer not want to be a giant pre-adolescent Godzilla tramping through the streets of an imaginary city populated by terrified and imaginary lungfish?

This should be good publicity for Tim Schafer's current project. There isn't another soul as generously imaginative working in games.

Personally I felt 'Abe Lincoln Must Die' was the sharpest of all six; very smart idea to offer it as a freebie with Season 2 on the point of starting. Reality 2.0 was fun and has an absolutely, unexpectedly brilliant endgame, but I didn't find all the in-jokes especially funny.

> Porsche Unleashed.

Which I thought was a great game, and I liked the driving model. Anyone able to compare these two specifically, Porsche and the new one?

This comment was edited on Nov 3, 08:53.

Oh, maybe not. Is it anatomical everywhere?

I do think they should consider operating under a different name in the UK, British slang being what it is.

I would nominate Sam and Max Season 1, episode 4: Abe Lincoln Must Die! Can't remember offhand who took the writing credits for that episode. Bioshock is likely to get a nomination I guess, and maybe it deserves to.

This comment was edited on Oct 4, 11:03.

There is no credible working definition of 'art'. It's a pretty modern concept with no fixed identity, whose principal function is to be used to exclude cultural productions that the speaker/writer doesn't want to take seriously, or wants to regard as a guilty pleasure. People really need to get over this sterile, fatuous pseudo-debate.

At the risk of overcomplicating the already overcomplicated, The Last Revelation had integrity too; it had a proper story, plenty of tombs, and made serious improvements to the control system and responsiveness. It had serious flaws too - still ultimately a facelift rather than a reinvention, and had some spectacularly bad voice acting in the secondary roles - but it was a good, enjoyable adventure that doesn't deserve the opprobrium of lazy entries like TR3 or Chronicles, or the misfire of Angel of Darkness.

So there's some sort of Roman theme to this? "Exorior" means "to arise, rise up, rise out of" (the ex- prefix means 'from, out of', and 'orior' is the 'arise' bit, same root as 'orient', 'where the sun rises = east'). As it's a deponent verb I think the form 'exoriare' must be the imperative: "Arise!" But my Latin is rusty so I could be wrong. On the front page 'Quondam' means 'once', at one time - normally in the past, but they probably mean 'coming at some unspecified future date'...

(Edit: the pronunciation would be as five syllables: ex-o-ri-a-re. For anyone who cares.)

This comment was edited on May 30, 05:49.

#28: Run EAX Console from Start / All Programs / Creative / SoundBlaster Audigy 2. The quick way to get rid of all the effects under Windows is to untick "enable audio effects"; I believe that won't affect EAX in games. Alternatively click on "edit" and go to the Source tab, then turn the reverb and chorus settings down to 0%. I do this, so I can have MIDI reverb and chorus effects when I'm playing around with the synths, but keep audio dry.

Also part of tutor life, be it noted.