Nyarlathotep

I seem to recall Spring mentioning that it has to do with the recent switch to the city watch rig.

Yeah, but how smart are they? How's their path-finding? I suspect that they're not very good at routing based on where they can climb or jump. Routing for wall-climbing should be fairly easy, as it's essentially vertical floor with obstacles, but I'm not seeing how they could handle jumping in the general case--or for that matter, mantling. They could be using special AI flags to mark jumping, rather than relying on good path-finding or preprocessing.

Clearly NOT, as you using the wrong terms to describe whatever the hell it is you're talking about and not enough detail to infer what it is. Read it again, and tell me where you describe in detail what the hell you're talking about. That's funny. I grew up on those same games. I remember having exactly the same attitude about using the mouse to look around. It was just so unnatural. Done well, full body awareness is one those things were you go back the old style and wonder how you ever managed. The problem is that so very few do it well enough to write home about.

I...what? Are we even talking about the same damn thing?

Self-shadowing is already on everything that doesn't look like crap with it on. If by "self-shadowing", you mean the player's shadow, it is available but unsupported. Edit: You can try it out in Thief's Den with "seta g_showPlayerShadow 1" in the console (remove the quotes). You can bring the console down with ctrl+alt+` or just ` in Linux (the tilde "~" key).

I was speaking of OoT, but I've since played Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess and some of Wind Waker. I typically use kid to mean anyone who is not an adult, but in this case I actually did mean pre-teen (albeit only just). With the exceptions of Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess, I agree with you. The point I was trying to make was that my imagination read those adult themes into the game. Very, very few games inspire me the way the Legend of Zelda series does. That reason alone is enough for me to hold the series in highest prestige. I attribute part of OoT's ability to send my imagination into overdrive to the somewhat bare-bones presentation of the plot. By providing very little, I was able to read into it more, turning a short story into a virtual novel. (As a side note, I think that Peter Molyneux was actually trying to do this deliberately with Fable.)

OoT was released when I was a kid, but I didn't play any of the Legend of Zelda series until adulthood. The only encounter I had with LoZ before then was Super Smash Brothers; I hadn't even heard of the series. What hooked me to the series was how it set my imagination on overdrive. It wasn't just a fairytale anymore. There was tragedy. There was romance.* It had adult themes that were hampered by the technology of the day. It wasn't just a child's story; there was actually something to it. *Knowing that Sheik was a woman probably significantly affected my perception of the game. Speeches about "friendship" became a teenaged girl wanting what she cannot have (Link is supposed to think she is a man, and romantic relations gets in the way of that) instead of the sappy, childish Aesops that it would have seemed otherwise. This is where voice acting would have helped significantly. An adult would recognize Sheik as crossdressing, but a child would still take those friendship speeches at face value, even if they noticed that she was actually female.

I certainly didn't know! I have to admit, I know it's almost certainly going to wind abandoned or crap, but I can't help but feel a little excited. Multiplayer Thief!

My ex-girlfriend filled me in on the rest of the plot, along with most of the plot of FFX 1 & 2. Why are so many women obsessed with Final Fantasy?

I got to the end of the first disc on PC before I quit. I'd liked the story enough to trudge through that far, but by the time I had to insert disc two, the monotony had caught up to me and I couldn't bear to press on.

If I ever see an FM full of long-haired bishounen wielding unrealistically oversized weaponry and trying to destroy the planet, I think I will go an hero myself. I couldn't stomach a retelling of the nth iteration of a fantasy that proclaims itself to be the last.

Today is Monday.

Yeah, but I find it a bit harder to fix after you screw something up. Usually this is because of the auto-update software deciding to replace the changes you made to repair your install with what was broken.

That's true. I'm merely pointing out the fact that with hard work, the job of a GM can be virtually duplicated. In terms of plot progression, GMs really only have an advantage in adjusting for sequence breaking. Their stories (with fairly rare exception) are still preplanned to a very large degree, and much of the dynamic adjustments they provide can be duplicated with careful pre-planning (and branching). I'd argue that except for the best GMs, games are actually better in providing the backdrop world for you to freely wander in (like Oblivion or Assassin's Creed).

Congratulations.