I thought I'd seen it all when it comes to marketing, but New Line Cinema takes the cake. They actually manage to release books based on the film 50-some years before it comes out? Talk about stirring an unboiled pot...

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"Typically, a strong storyline is one of those elements that simply cannot be portrayed in a high-action shooter for obvious reasons -players usually don't want it, nor do they care."

Nice.

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I've got your renegade log right here, baby...

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"what he would change if they had it to do over again"

How about not having the game crash every time I want to skip a cutscene? Granted, it's probably due to my old video card, but sheesh it's annoying.

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Here's hoping they're somewhat successful, and that this isn't just a bunch of talk (but knowing the government...). I think that maybe if they want to make a point, they'll track down some of the end-users and bust them. Not the people in ISO groups, necessarily, but the people who download every program they need and just don't want to pay for. It wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of the way warez is distributed, but it'd be food for thought for casual pirates if they start hearing about people like them getting busted and hit up with fines. I can think of worse ways to spend my tax dollars, at any rate.

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This all sounds like a euphemism for making it an RTS. Bizarro. If someone at Mythos gives the imprimatur, I bet it'll be interesting, but I don't really want an X-Com RTS; I want classic turn-based tactical combat strategy. Hopefully this will all be clarified sometime soon.

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Just played the demo of this on the winter Underground thing yesterday. Looking very neat, and the voices actually aren't half bad. The CG is as stunning as ever. Just hope it's long enough, though I suppose FF games are always fairly lengthy, even if it's mostly just taken up with random encounters and finding items and stuff.

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He's put 'em up there before. It's just been a while.

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Computer games + Tolkien. Nerdom squared. Now if they could only figure out a cross-licensing deal with the people at Paramount and get Captain Kirk in there. I can smell the fan fiction now...

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A ridiculously overpowered crossbow. Sure to be taken down a notch or two.

http://www.diabloii.net/items/uniques/weapons_crossbows-excep.shtml

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this is apparently a brand-new patch, available through the game's auto-updater as well as downloadable. It's 1.09d. Thank god it wasn't 1.10; I want a chance to stock up on Burizas before they get nerfed for good.

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It's also a PS2 game; it got ported two years after it showed up on the N64. And it's not even all that good.

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"GS: Looking at the finished product, is there anything you would do differently if you had your time again?

CY: Yes...of course. I would've added the extra classes and race, maybe had a few prestige classes in there, had selectable feats and skills, added a few more quests, and generally given more time to polish the game even further. However, there's always the next one (crossing my fingers...)"

Might want to cross your toes too, man.

Then again, this did sell 70,000 some copies, even with all the flaws, so what do I know. Maybe something that integrates the 3E rules from the start of development would be a great game. But I'd bet on Neverwinter Nights and whatever else Bioware comes up with to set the standard for D&D games for a long time to come.

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One wouldn't want one's wookies to wait while weeping woefully for carbon. Or something.

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Good thing at least one developer is taking advantage of super-cheap RAM. Hell, make it look incredible; it's not like any real gamer is going with less than 256 nowadays anyway.

As far as the petition thing goes, that's really just sad. Who gives a shit whether you have a collector's tin or a cardboard box? Same game (unless the developer is really "craptastic" and puts in extra stuff for the collectors edition, which is really annoying...cough Bioware cough. Does anyone think there's going to be some vast market for collector's tins of games ten years from now?

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www.afterlifeguild.org/Thott/d2

I love this thing; you can select a certain class of weapons and it'll tell you where you should go and who you should kill to get it.

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SPOILERS...

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"Then again, Kojima probably wasn't too concerned about fan reaction in the short term. After all, if things went according to plan, fans wouldn't even find out about Raiden until they bought a copy of the game off a store shelf."

My goddamn point exactly. To have a character that is the center of the gameplay, and the main character in the game (no matter what Kojima says), and then to never have him appear in the promotional materials is just incredibly devious on the part of a game developer. The game is called Metal Gear Solid, it's tagline is Year of the Snake, all the trailers featured Snake exclusively, and then, when the final product comes out, you only get to control Snake for half an hour? Fuck that. I wouldn't be so upset if Raiden wasn't such a pantywaist in comparison to Snake, but he is. His voice actor is terrible by comparison to the rest of the cast, too. The whole thing about having his girlfriend on his support team was also unbelievable. (Anyone notice it's Jack and Rose, like in Titanic? Christ.)

I wouldn't care so much if Kojima hadn't essentially lied to me, and to everyone who was looking forward to playing the game, but he did. The trailers were edited so that Snake appeared in many scenes and fights that Raiden actually appears in in the final game. So naturally, one would expect to play as Snake throughout the majority of the final product, but noooo, you get to play him during a portion of the game that takes half an hour to beat (some people have gotten through in under ten minutes), while Raiden's section completes the rest of the gameplay, and consists of many hours of gameplay.

I guess it's understandable of Kojima to throw some new blood into his games, and hell, it's his series to screw up if he wants to. But the whole idea of the secrecy behind Raiden seems fairly flawed to me. For such a major part of the game, I would've expected to see him and know about him, at least so the transition which comes in the game wouldn't be so goddamn jarring and upsetting. If you're going to keep a character secret, make it a cool one. Keep Solidus in the dark while you're promoting the game; he'd be all that much more badass when he shows up on the 1-2 connecting bridge.

Ah well. I like the game, and I'd have bought it even if I knew ahead of time that Raiden was the main character (and despite anything Kojima says in that article, this is the case). I just feel like I saw trailers for Star Wars, where Obi-Wan and Luke Skywalker kick ass and take names, and then when I went to see the film, Obi-Wan and Luke disappear after half an hour and the rest of the film follows Jar-Jar and Mannequin Skywalker around.

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I haven't read the article, but I have a feeling that "early plot twist" is the one that has annoyed me so much while I was playing the game. If you've played it, you know what I'm talking about.

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For those that don't check Diabloii.net, there is a major trade hack going around, where your trading friend will place an item in the trade window, which you don't receive when the trade is completed. So trading is pretty much screwed up right now.

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EB must think they're the Microsoft of game retailers; they've been charging 55 bucks for most new PS2 when every other store in the mall sells for 50. I don't really understand that.

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