"Shipping" 4.5 million games is a far cry from "selling" 4.5 million. I'm not even sure there's ever been a game in Japan that sold 4.5 million copies in a day. Maybe the last Dragon Warrior game, but that's about it.

And I'm sorry, but what's the deal with the guy dressing up as an Orc? Does CNN hire spazzes now?

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Personally, being someone who has more of an academic view of the matter (I've read through the DMG and PH for both 2nd and 3rd edition a few times, but never played the pen-and-paper game), I kind of like the newer rules better. I think THAC0 was probably, and rightfully, one of the first things on the hitlist for 3E. It worked, but it was pretty inelegant to have a to-hit system going from one to twenty while AC went from 10 to -10.

I think the complexity of characters has little to do with the ruleset you're using, though, whether you're playing second or third edition rules. I don't see why BG2 couldn't be remade with third edition rules, in other words. I wouldn't hold my breath on future games including 2nd edition rules, in any case; WotC has their baby and will be pushing it to the exclusion of all others.

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I'm sorry, but no event in any MMORPG will ever be able to top Lord British's assassination. I just had to say that. It still makes me laugh when I think about it.... Considering the fairly unique mythology behind the Ultima series, I can't imagine anything that hilarious happening in any other game...unless an overzealous GM in SWG decides to bring Vader out into the game world and winds up getting jumped by a team of Jedi.

I'll be damned if I can find any pictures of LB's assassination, though. Anyone find a link to a news report? Google turns up a bunch of geocities page with red X's where the pics should be...

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Starring Tom Cruise and Tim Curry, no doubt.

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You think they won't?

Personally, if they do make JP4, I want to see a full-scale assault of the dinos on a populated area. I don't care about the logical aspect of it; say one of the islands was picked up by a shift of the earth's crust and rammed into Florida. 100 raptors set loose in Disney World at noon on July 4th. And it should be R-rated.

Granted, that says a lot about my filmgoing sensibilities, but sometimes you just want to see shit blow up. I'd like special effects movies a lot more if there wasn't all that damn talking...

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Is this the SDK that makes the game easier to mod?



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People who make prejudicial, trolling statements are always poorly educated, subliterate, psychologically unbalanced, likely to beat their children, and often think about sexually molesting farm animals. Scientific studies have proven this.

For the people on this thread who can actually comprehend and understand printed matter, I would recommend "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006097625X/qid=1026768777/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-3388473-1374436

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Well, it depends on whether you think of it as an "industry" or an art form. It's undoubtable that the vast majority of comics are driven by profit, so that it's rare for imaginative or innovative creators and works to break through to a large audience, but again, this is true of pretty much any medium today. That doesn't mean that there aren't some incredible people working in the field, though.

If you're looking for long-term collectibles, I'd definitely recommend another hobby. I myself don't even bother to archive new issues of comics; they either get stacked on the shelf as is or thrown away if they turn out to suck. But if you're looking for some good stories, they are out there to be found. It's particularly worth finding writers that are to your taste; people like Ennis, Ellis, Jeph Loeb, Kurt Busiek, Chuck Dixon, etc., are all worth taking a shot on, imo. I don't know if Peter David is still doing comics, but he's another good one. I think he's moved on to Star Trek novels, though. (gag)

My complaint is that most trade paperback and collections are too expensive; sometimes they cost more than the cost of the comics bought individually. E.g., the recent collection of Wolverine's Origin. It cost 35 dollars in hardback for something that was like 4 issues long. And it wasn't even all that satisfying a story.

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Well, actually, comics are quite older than the 1950's. Captain America, Superman, and Batman all date from the 30's or earlier, I believe, and there were recurring comic characters dating all the way back to the Yellow Kid in the 1890's.

http://www.neponset.com/yellowkid/history.htm

And, while it must be admitted that 90% of comics are horrible (as is true of every other kind of medium), there are still some bona fide artists (both writers and illustrators) working in the field. Check out Frank Miller's work, or anything written by Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis. Ellis' work on Planetary is pretty incredible. The current run of Incredible Hulk and a couple of the Spider Man books are really well-done.

Edit: And I would note that the 80's were not all "big hair and neon colors". Miller cut his teeth with some of the best Daredevil issues ever published, and 1986 saw both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns come out. I'd say the early 1990's is more worthy of derision, with all the pompous early Image comics and the massive collector's frenzy allowing some pretty marginal titles to be successful, regardless of writing quality.



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This comment was edited on Jul 15, 14:48.

Hopefully those backstabbing fixes will make it a little more balanced. But I find that the whole Pulling thing, where you get pulled and knocked down, and the person does the Medium-style back attack and slashes at you when you're on the ground, is pretty annoying as well. I'd say just taking out back-attacks altogether would make the multiplayer a lot more fun.

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I remember when games cost 70-80 dollars on release, back when there weren't enough gamers to really support the development of games if they sold for less. Unfortunately, the pricing can only stay the same for so long; prices are bound to rise to a 60 dollar standard sooner or later.

Personally, I hope that more games implement cdkey checks to cut down on piracy, even single-player games. I would gladly connect to the internet to play an SP game if it meant that I might be charged less for the game itself, or games in the future.

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"What is the internet coming to?"

Its senses? You didn't really think we were going to be able to leech bandwidth for free forever, did you?

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They should make a Preacher game, something in a third-person adventure style. Tulip with the guns, Cassidy with vampire powers, Custer with ass-kicking and a little bit of the word to make enemie shoot each other, etc. Could work.

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Catch up on a little history, guys. Better yet, go read War and Peace. (You can read, can't you?) Anyone who knows anything about Napolean knows that it was a pretty impressive accomplishment to build an empire that rivaled the size of the Romans'.

Given the cyrillics in the screenshots, I would guess this is a Russian game. Hopefully they'll give due balance to the battles of Borodino and its strategic importance, it being a simultaneous loss and victory (according to Tolstoy) for the Russians. Will Napolean be forced to retreat from Moscow if he captures it in winter? I'm curious how they'll recreate the x-factors of Russian winters (which was, of course, the reason Napolean retreated, losing most of his army in the process) and the fires that swept through Moscow after the town was abandoned to the invaders.

Granted, I'm not an RTS fan, so I doubt I'll play it, but you guys should at least be intelligent enough to realize that a little variety in any genre is a good thing for gaming as a whole. I guess you're prefer another banal fantasy or sci-fi themed RTS, though?

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IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!

I never get tired of that, sadly enough.

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As a single-player game, I wish I could say this game wasn't a failure, but it really is.... It seems as if the intent was to make a Total Annihilation RPG with humans instead of robots - lots of killing, little justification. There's almost no plot to speak of, and the rather silly method of advancement makes it virtually impossible to get your Nature and Combat casters up to the top levels by the end of the game. I never got to see the most powerful spells; my Nature dude was like 15 levels below the highest level spell I found (45 or something like that). I haven't played much online stuff, but with locally stored characters, it's hard to imagine that it'd be really fun running around with a bunch of hacked gods. Maybe I'm off-base there, though.

NWN is everything it was purported to be, though. Here's hoping for an expansion set with epic level characters.


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This comment was edited on Jul 4, 13:21.

Sounds like the publishers will have a fun time trying to market this thing...

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Finally, a game for all of us fans of Gregorian chants.

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This game is lacking in storyline compared to what? Morrowind? A Bioware RPG? Deus Ex? The story might have been a little convoluted in order to get you to a wide variety of places, but there was always a reason for what you were doing that fit right into the story. It was the action that keeps the player going, sure, but anyone who can honestly complain about a lack of storyline in SOF2, especially when compared to the FPS field at large, is scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for things to moan about.

Not everything needs to be War and Peace...

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and...?

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