JsARCLIGHT

The quiet voices in ME are a combination of issues having to do with their multichannel mixing. I'm playing ME with my system and it sound superb, with lots of nuance in the muscial inflections (even though they are simple "tron-ish" "blade runner-ish" synthesizer tracks)... But at times the game will choose odd channels to port dialog out of. It's almost as if it overcompensates for character position. Such as when you are in a "talky bit" and the character is fairly centered in the screen in a closeup shot the dialog comes out of the center channel as it should, but sometimes when the character is off center to the left (like when the game shows both Shepard and the person he is talking to) the dialog will come out of the left channel rather than the center channel and that will cause it to sound distant or "muted". I've noticed the same thing happen in the elevators. If you are looking at your characters from the front when your team starts gabbing their dialog comes out of the two respective rear channels and sounds very washed out. Even if you roll the camera around the dialog still emits from the rear channels... but if their little discussion started when you were looking from behind them then their dialog emits from the front channel speakers and is much louder and more distinct. I have no clue why it does that... it's almost as if it's "backwards".

Finding that Grail again is looking pretty darn appealing to Indy right now... mostly to dump over Karen Allen's head and see if she transforms into Margot Kidder.

Edit: Then again I personally think he looks OK. Not as scruffy as he looked in the Young Indiana Jones "Mystery of the Blues" episode.

Edit Deuce: Anyone hear the supposed "title"? Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is what I've heard... has that been confirmed as "true" or is just more internet speculation?

Another issue to put into the pot is that media sales are not really a "point of retail" sort of profit structure for most distributors. Your average distributor makes their money off of the retail establishment, not directly from you the consumer. Basically the distributor sells in bulk lots to retail agencies who in turn sell to you. A distributor stands to possibly "clear" their overhead and even profit right out of the gate in some cases if initial order numbers are high enough.

The pattern these things usually follow is that a distributor has a DVD they wish to sell. They offer this DVD to retailers at a case lot price or a unit price, DVD's generally follow unit pricing by my understanding. For discussion let's use the previous model, that 100 DVDs are to be made at a creation cost of 1K. The distributor wishes to turn his profit ASAP on limited return and he offers his DVDs to the retailers at a per unit price of $40. Let's say in a perfect world the distributor sells all 100 units to four different retail houses for his wholesale asking price of $40 per unit. The distributor gets a $4K payday (above his projections) and each retailer gets 25 units to place on their shelves. These retailers then mark up the price another $5 to make the unit price to the consumer $45.

Time passes and after a year it comes to be that each retailer only sells 15 out of their original 25 units for a grand total of 60 units sold. What happens next is one of two things. First, and quite common if the original distribution sale contracted as such, are the retailers "charge back" their unsold stock to the distributor. This means the remaining 40 units are "returned" to the distributor for a refund. Usually this refund is pro-rated and let's say the pro-rated chargeback amount for each unit is $30. That means then that out of it's $4K payday the distributor has to give back $1,200 and reclaim it's 40 unsold units. The distributor will then dispose of these reclaimed units at lower wholesale prices to "cheapie cheap" stores or they will simply dump them in a landfill somewhere if they are so inclined (ET for the Atari 2600 anyone?). The other options are to price adjust the current shelved units at retail. Some distributors offer a pro-rata "stocking chargeback", which means they will refund a percentage of the retailer's original purchase price but the retailer retains the items on their shelves. Usually if a form chargeback is not possible then sitting stock is "eaten" by retail and they simply mark down their sitting stock until it sells. In other words the retailer takes it on the chin and does whatever they can to recoup some money.

Generally the way this system works is not on a "single sale" aspect. It's assumed that the first "lot" will sell out and further lots will be ordered. The more lots moved, the greater the profit for both entities. Generally a "failed lot" will be eaten by the retailer and a successful series of lots will decrease in wholesale cost over time. This system is also usually the one chosen way to do business by "market bully" companies like Walmart because it enables them to leverage very low stock costs for themselves by requiring certain numbers of stock at a certain price. A situation like this example I'm using where the distributor makes oodles of cash on a single lot deal is not really realistic using this model. Most of the time places like Walmart and Best Buy will demand the lowest wholesale and the highest chargeback amount for stale merch, which usually places the distributor in quite a hot seat. It then requires multiple lots to be sold over a large frame of time for the distributor to show a profit.

There is another system used for high dollar items called the "stocking percentage" system in which the retailers pay a percentage of the item's cost, called a carrying charge, to have it "on the shelf". When the item sells the retailer gives an agreed upon amount to the distributor and keeps the remainder for himself as profit... but this method is usually only used for large dollar capital sales items like cars, construction equipment and the like, usually only in contractual sales agreements between dealers and suppliers and it doesn't really apply to consumer goods like DVDs.

I remember Nadia back from the Streamline VHS days. A long, long time ago in college I remember renting each video from the local indie rental place as they came out. I thought the show was good... at the time. I never saw the end of it because Streamline went under before they could release the whole thing and I only remember seeing up to volume 8 or something like that (which was about 16 episodes). From what I remember the show has a very Jules Verne feel to it and it mimes a lot of his concepts and ideas. I also remember the show being very lighthearted and one of those "feels like an '80s anime but has that weird early '90s patina to it" kind of shows. I'd watch it again if I could see the whole thing this time... but I sure won't pay $80 to see it.

does this still take place in the nazi era, or later...thus explaining the aging?

It's supposed to take place in the '50s and have something to do with nuclear testing from what I've heard.

I have always believed the price of anime had more to do with the theory of limited return rather than actual overhead. The "theory of limited return" states that the maker assumes he is only going to sell X number of his products and he wants to make Y amount of profit, regardless of how many units he sells. So he simply prices his units so that selling X makes his Y. In example, let's say to make 100 DVDs it costs a distributor $1K. So right off the bat each DVD has $10 of overhead in it. Now let's say that the distributor wants to make $1K in profits, but they only think they will sell 50 DVDs... so what they do is price each DVD at $40. That way they have "made their goal" of recouping manufacturing costs and earning their projected profit if they only sell half of their stock. What they have done, in a business sense, is hedged their bets on what they feel their product can sell numbers wise. They pass along the burden of profit onto a smaller group of consumers in order to maintain their profit margins under a "limiting return" sales pattern.

To be honest almost every DVD on the market follows this business model. Why do you think one DVD costs $8 at Walmart a year after it came out when it used to cost $20? Because that DVD always cost $8, even less to make, it's just that upon initial release the distributor wanted to ensure their profit margins. After they met their projected scale everything after is gravy, so the prices start to come down at a distributor level which means retailers can offer lower prices.

A wonderful example is Toynami and their handling of their "masterpiece" toys. Those things don't actually cost $80, they just follow the theory of limited return and price their units so if only a small number sell, they still break even or profit. In the long run it's basically a company's way of limiting it's risk at the expense of it's customer.

Lately I play games one step above what I feel I should be playing them on. Otherwise the games these days just aren't a challenge for me. I got tired of just slamming through games in one or two days because I used "too easy" of difficulty settings right off the bat.

As for ME I originally started on Normal and when I totally wiped the floor with Eden Prime I started over on Hardcore. Right now I am finishing up side quests, my character is something above level 35 or more. I just last night landed on Feros, the "first" "mission world" that I plan to attempt. Early on I was getting taken apart all the time until I found a good niche to play in, which is: keep your distance, snipe until they get too close, then fall back under pistol fire. I generally play the claustrophobic levels of the game in permanent "crouch" inching up until I can barely see enemies then I waste one of them, which "lights the fuse" and I back off, usually into a corridor, and let them come to me. Then it's a matter of sniping them and throwing grenades until they are all dead.

I think most people who have trouble with this game are too brazen. Like most shooters, if you just rush in guns blazing you get lit up just as much as you inflict on the enemy. But if you hang back and try to be as tactical as possible you can breeze through levels without even getting hit sometimes.

The pistol and sniper rifle are great for picking off enemies from cover, the assault rifle and shotgun are better for in your face, run-and-gun gaming.

"In your face" gaming gets me killed repeatedly in this game. I'm playing first time through on Hardcore and let me tell you, running into the thick of it gets me dead very, very fast. My shields will be gone just stepping out of cover and my health will be gone a second or so later.

You know, a very simple solution may exist to this problem.

-Snip-

While that is a feasible solution to the problem, it relies on several "ifs" to work. The first big "if" is advertising in general. The ad world is very fickle and worst of all, cheap. Advertisers want the highest return for their investments and "selling ad time" and "ad space" is actually much harder than it sounds. At the same time keeping those advertisers long term is also difficult. Your average advertiser will want to see a high return on their ad investment, generally in the realm of increased sales/profits from the demographic that advertising is playing to. They will say something like "it costs us X to advertise our product here, we expect Y percent or return on that investment". It sounds bad but lord help you if the first month doesn't show massive return, because then you will have to kneecap yourself to keep them as advertisers.

Ad revenues are also based completely on the place's ability to "turn exposure". You have to generate and maintain a certain level of traffic to justify your numbers to your advertisers. Which would mean that you would have to get X number of fanboys to watch Y number of shows regularly and then on top of that go out and purchase Z number of your advertiser's products to not only justify your advertiser's investments but keep the dollar amount they pay high enough to cover your costs. And then what inevitably happens is you wind up selling so much ad space to so many different "small potatoes" advertisers that your site and movies look like the side of a Nascar... which then creates the second "if". Will fanboys live with that? A constant complaint I hear from people who watch "freebie" movie sites like Adult Swim is that "the site is so glutted with ads". The ads pay for the media but people get really upset that they have to surf through all those ads to get to their media and then they have to wait through those commercials to see their media. For as "commercial" and ad glutted as our world is, people just hate ads and they will do everything in their power to fast forward that commercial or avoid it altogether.

While I also personally believe advertising is the answer, it is also a nest of vipers that will create as many problems as it solves.

It's funny but I'm finally getting around to playing the actual "mission" missions in ME. I've spent all my time so far doing side quests to get them out of the way. It seemed like everywhere I went some distress signal or communication from alliance command would come in and I'd have another system to investigate and another side quest to finish.

It looks like everyone else is finished or near finished... so, what class/alignment did every choose? What was your favorite weapons class and combat style?

I'm not finished playing yet but I went with an Infiltrator

. I've been playing Paragon as much as I can and actually have yet to even get one renegade point. My favorite weapons still are the pistols and sniper rifles, the shotguns and assault rifles just seem so random and inaccurate. I actually use zero special abilities. My squad uses them like mad. I usually walk in, back out then snipe everyone from a distance. The only times I've been killed in the game are when I was "stupid" and just went running into the middle of stuff. I think I've played shooters too long and I know how to bunch the AI up... I'm very fond of fatal funnel tactics and computer AI's fall for it every time.

Well, that is another sticky topic.

"Free" TV is not actually "free". It's free in that you the consumer do not have to pay to view it, but it's free because you are subjugated to viewing the commercial advertisements broadcast interspersed in it. There has actually been a court challenge to this issue with the advent of DVRs and other recording devices that let the consumer "skip" the recorded commercials. A group of consumers got together and sued to get a guarantee by broadcasters that they would not be prosecuted for "skipping commercials" using their ReplayTV DVRs. The suit was eventually heard and dismissed when the broadcasters all agreed to not pursue legal routes against consumers who "bypass" recorded commercials.

Once again though this is all under the auspice of "home use". For a party to record a show off of television and then "redistribute" it over the internet or other means they are in fact violating the '76 Copyright Act. Even if they are not "profiting" from the distribution they are indirectly "damaging" the original rights holder by a practice of profit depriving. The legal boundaries (in the US) of fair use pretty much "end at your doorstep", meaning as long as you the original "user" retain your "copy" you are free to view it in several ways... but if you "distribute" that copy (as in hand it around to people) or disseminate copies of your copy you are walking in thin ice legally.

Now a point of argument that CAN be made is the use of derivative works.

To quote US law for a second:

A "derivative work" is defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101:

A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.

When an independent user takes a foreign item like a TV show and through efforts of their own translates and subtitles it, technically that "product" is cast as a "derivative work" by US law. What that means is that that "fansubber" has created a new legal entity through their efforts, their "product" is legally "theirs" to do with as they please. The problem comes in with the clashing dissemination law in the '76 Copyright Act and the grounds of commercial profit from an original source. The "original creator" of the show can petition to have this new derivative work C&D'ed based on intellectual property violations, but they cannot seize or otherwise claim the derivate work as "theirs".

This whole issue is so mired in legal red tape, but the funny thing is that this maze of red tape is a two sided sword. An original rights holder (such as a studio) can throw a ton of legaleze on their product and do everything they can to scare the consumer into believing they do not hold certain rights... which in actuality they do hold. And on the other hand a consumer retains a lot of rights beyond what they would normally think they hold. This is the way complex law works... out of confusion and fear. People don't understand the law and how it functions so they make assumptions as to how they -think- it functions. Certain folks will capitalize on that and others will avoid it at all costs. Needless to say with the right lawyer and the right loophole nearly anything is legal... the question is do you really want to fight it out in court?

I don't know how the Japanese legal system sees these things, but here in the states we actually had a pretty big legal case about the ramifications of "home recording" and to what ends the consumer had "rights".

The US Supreme Court on Jan. 17, 1984 ruled 5-4 that the noncommercial home use of video cassette recorders did not violate the federal Copyright Act of 1976. According to the video industry of the time, an estimated 10% of U.S. households had VCRs (spooky, huh?) with about eight million machines installed and in use at the end of 1983. The ruling was a victory for Sony (and the US consumer) and a defeat for Walt Disney Productions and Universal City Studios. The studios had argued that the home taping of copyrighted films and television shows violated their property rights and deprived them of revenues and they wanted the home video recorders banned from sale. The Supreme Court, reversing a 1981 ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, held that home taping did not infringe on the copyright law unless the copied material was used for a "commercial or profit-making purpose." This case set precedence and has stood since '84, it is used by the defense (usually successfully unless commercial damages are claimed) in almost every "personal use" copyright violation case I've seen.

What that monumental ruling means for US citizens is that if something is recorded in your home, you have full "rights use" of that recording as long as it is not used for "commercial or profit making purposes". Meaning you CAN record Monday night football and show it to your friend legally (as long as you don't charge him to view it). You CAN record a season's worth of Family Guy and your whole family can watch it at their leisure. This Supreme Court ruling has passed down to DVD and also passes down to DVR and any modern "child" of the VCR or machine that allows the consumer to record programs or movies in their home. By this ruling, the only "enforcement" the '76 Copyright Act has teeth on is the commercial and profit making side... meaning if you record a whole season of Family Guy and SELL the copies, then you are in the lion's den.

Where this ruling gets tested is with modern electronics (the internet) and at what point "distribution" is considered to be commercial / profit making / profit depriving. It's generally accepted that ANY distribution infringes, but single copies made from the source transmission intended for home view are perfectly legal.

Edit: It should also be noted that "home view" means just that, view in the privacy of your home. You can have one person or fifty people in your house watching that recorded material and it's perfectly legal... so long as you do not charge them (like having a "home theater" arrangement where you sell tickets). Places like pubs and bars are public places and as such they encounter public display issues. Most of those places have contracts with their cable / satellite provider and are legally licensed to engage in public display of programming. However pubs or bars that simply pull in an OTA broadcast from an antenna are not subject to those restrictions... but if they were to record that broadcast and play it back then they would hit the commercial / profit making provision.

These "use" clauses also extend to movies you purchase on DVD. By word of law those DVDs are only for "home use" and not public display or rental. Which then raises the question of what "public display" grounds are, which is a touchy subject. Generally the legal system has looked for profit in these cases, in example if you had 100 friends in a big room and you all watched a DVD does that constitute public display? Yes and no. If you charged those 100 friends then yes, if you are just showing a movie to be showing a movie then no. And that is where the law diverges. Heck, you walk into my post office during the holidays and they have a TV cart set up in line showing Christmas DVDs to hundreds of strangers waiting in line... I highly doubt the government will come down on the US Postal Service for violation of the '76 Copyright Act.

And such is the dilemma that no one seems to have an answer for. And the situation only gets worse when greed gets involved and "everyone wants their piece of the pie".

To achieve great things in this modern world we must make great sacrifices. The problem comes in when the wrong person wins or right person loses. Artists need to find a way to reclaim their art from the commodities dealers, but in a way that still allows some vestiges of our current entertainment structure to continue to exist.

The sand metaphor doesn't fit the situation at all. It's arguing that the artisans who create anime initially worked for free, and only big business has ascribed a value and price to.

That is because up to a few centuries ago "retail art" was not a job. Artists made one masterpiece, sold it, and that was that. If someone wanted to see that painting, they went to the museum and saw it. If someone wanted to see that finely crafted castle they went to it and looked at it. "Art" was all about the person and not their works, if you wanted a Rembrandt you hired the man and got his product... or barring that you hired someone else to approximate his style for you. Either way there was a direct link between the buyer and the artist. The artist was all about his art and he would accept payment (food, drink and a place to stay in times of yore... cash today) for his works. The problem came in when someone else, and outsider, came up and started selling copies of an artist's works for them. As the article says this practice devalues that artist's works and shifts the importance off of the artist and onto the product... and over time when the product itself becomes "valueless" it's a hollow ethic that breeds the kind of piracy we see today.

I myself own a graphic design / CGI studio. We are old school tradesmen artists, not "pay for play" artists. You hire US to make you what you want, we don't sell a billion copies of the one thing we did. The end result is every "job" is custom tailored to you. Kind of like if you could hire U2 to come to your house and play in your back yard and only play unique songs to you, for you. There you have something of worth, something unique. Just as if you hired Leonardo DaVinci to draw you a unique, one of a kind picture. THAT is art, it has value and can be traded as such... but copies of it are pretty much worthless. They are only worth what someone is willing to pay and in truth devalue the artist's works into a commodity for people to trade and exchange.

Folks nowadays don't see things like the olden times. They see everything as a commodity, a "thing" to be moved from one place to another. That way of thinking has greatly benefited the middle men, the managers and the corporations. They are the ones who gain and lose selling copies of other people's art. The artists themselves are almost lost in the mix.

In the sand analogy, the salesman is really the only one who profits. The artists are his slaves... they make one thing, he pays them for it once then he profits off of copies in perpetuity. His abuse of the copies eventually devalues the importance people put on the work of the artists which in turn not only hurts him but the artists he hires. When the power of the "copy" comes into the hands of the masses, the salesman is out of business. It's this mass consumerism, mass media archetype that has failed... not the artists or their art.

The internet has changed the world. It has introduced new forms of commerce and made billionaires out of people who by all accounts "should have been paupers" while at the same time smashing old business models and driving some people into the poor house.

The funny thing is that we have seen this all before. If you look at history, technological advances spell the doom of the previous media or conveyance. While in some cases the advance completely obliterated some technologies (the telegraph killed the pony express and was then itself killed by the telephone) relegating them to museums, other forms just had to "change" how they did things to survive. Stage shows were nearly killed by the motion picture, radio was nearly killed by the TV... But they survived. They survived because they found ways to make themselves valuable to the consumer so that even though people had their TV and movies, they still wanted radio and stage plays.

The difference in those past technological leaps was that everyone embraced them, business and consumer alike, and they rode off into the sunset hand in economical hand while the older technologies found ways to remain viable through change in how they did things. The difference with the internet is that the consumer has embraced it but the businesses are fighting it. They want to keep using the old technology, because it makes them the most money, while the consumers want to use the new. Hence the clash we have today. IMHO it's not the consumer that needs to change, it's the business. The people will always flock to what they want, if business keeps up with them or not is their problem really. Suffice it to say smart businesses are already adapting to the internet age and meet people's needs. The problem is that this adaptation is not happening fast enough for many.

Also, folks like me find it ironic how certain "businesses" are complaining to high hell these days about their falling profits. What we find ironic is that these businesses didn't exist 50 years ago... they basically "made" themselves and told us to play by their rules. Now that people are rebelling against those rules these businesses flounder and whine about their down turning profits... It's kind of like a salesman who arrived in a desert years ago selling sand. Before that salesman showed up, sand was free. Sand was everywhere and people who dealt in sand gave it away for free out of the joy of sand. All they asked in return was perhaps a drink and a place to sleep while they handed out their sand. People enjoyed that free sand and enjoyed the people who gave it out for free, but now that the salesman came they all "discovered" that sand had "value". People were eager to buy the salesman's sand. Soon the folks who gave their sand away signed on with the salesman because he promised to make them rich. "Why give your sand away for a drink and a bed?" he said. "Stick with me and we'll all be millionaires". This tactic worked. People who once got their sand for free now paid for it, and they seemed happy to do so. Soon, certain types of sand became more "valuable" to the salesman and eventually only those types of sand were offered for sale. Some kinds of sand nearly vanished from the desert, simply because the salesman didn't want to sell them. After years of this people still seemed content... until one day a man in the desert invented a machine that let people duplicate their own sand. Now the people could get all the sand they wanted... for free... like it was before the salesman came. So now the question became why bother to buy sand from this salesman when sand is free again? Rather than find a way to profit off of this new development the salesman complains. "This isn't fair" he would say. "You are supposed to buy MY sand, not copy someone else's sand!" The desert people then say "sand is sand... we don't care how we get it, we want it and if we can get it for free then that is how we'll get it". So then, who is "right"? The salesman? The desert people?

Just to make sure we are talking about the same problem:

Well for starters this game is supposed to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, and the 360 cannot use it's HD DVD for games, only movies. Now, if they had made it multiple DVDs with HDD writing that could give them more space theoretically.

Oh and the "timed" section you refer to ends in "mission failure" if time runs out. Trust me, I screwed it up the first time through and let time run out just to see what happened.

See, that is what pisses me off about Bioware games.

All this mock sudden reaction and timeliness only to discover you can do it whenever you want. There is a sense of urgency but no requirement to act upon it... a feeling of rapid response but one that is waylaid by the "eternal occurrence" system. It end up about just picking an order to take things in and following that order and things happen the same way regardless of what order you pick. They try so hard to make you feel like you have these life or death pending decisions to make only to find out that the "life or death" urgent distress signal you just got will be there now just as it will be there ten years from now. The whole "well, you DO get to try to talk to them or shoot them when you do eventually get there" thing is "decision making"... but that isn't real priority problem solving, it's just asking which door do you open when you have two weeks to eventually open that door.

It kind of wrecks a game for me to know that I have no time limit to make my decision. It kind of isn't fun when you are not "under pressure" to prioritize your goals at the true sacrifice of others. I like games that tell me "well, you chose to break your pursuit of the dog and rushed to save the cat out of the tree... but the dog you were chasing before has now got away and you have to locate him all over again and begin the chase anew". Instead you can rescue that cat at your leisure without fear of the cat dying up in that tree, or you can rescue the cat knowing that dog you are chasing is just going to wait for you to come to him rather than truly trying to evade you.

I guess this is the point at which a "scripted linear story game" breaks from a truly open ended "choose your own adventure" type game.

This could be a spoiler then again it couldn't... but I recall pulling into a few systems and the pilot patching through frantic distress calls from planets in the system, leaving you with the decision to land and attempt their rescue or ignore them and move on with your mission. And the commercial you are mentioning I thought only had ONE distress call, coming from the other planet. The Normandy is landing on the blue planet and gets a distress call from the orange planet and they change course and land on the orange planet... or that is what I thought I saw/heard.

I always assumed that the game would let you "save" your character's ending position, if not in stats then in story... or that they'd do a patch or update near when the new game was going to come out to allow you to do so.

I recall some old PC games, like Heroes Quest (AKA Quest for Glory) that allowed you to import your final ending character with his game end stats from the first game into the sequel.

Yikes. They must really be cutting corners. I have not heard a new TV buzz since the '90s.

Then again the new TV's that I'm generally around are higher end stuff.

Is that an "operational hum" (like a fan) or is it a possible ground feedback loop?

To my knowledge most sets are supposed to be whisper quiet. If you are getting a buzzing / humming noise -from the speakers- then that is most likely a ground loop feedback issue and not so much the TV's fault. It's been a long time since I have encountered a TV who's normal running feedback was so audible that you could hear it easily.

The issues ARE all minor, it's just that some of us (like me ) have ridiculously high expectations of next gen console games and little graphical blemishes like these drive me up a wall. Then again I work in a visual / CG world so my eye is trained (some might say predisposed) to notice every little tiny issue. I mean, when I saw the ninja turtle movie I was pointing out geometry inter penetrations and other goofs to people who had seen the movie ten times before me and never noticed them.

Oh and COD4 is a beautiful game and quite frantic to play but the storyline makes me want to commit suicide. It's depressing as hell... or at least it is to me, I'm kind of ultra sensitive about certain story choices and wordings that Infinity Ward made.

For the brief amount of play time I had, I liked Mass Effect. The jarring graphics issues start to be "accepted" after a while... you still notice them but they don't bug you as much. Kind of like a scab... it still hurts, but you get used to it.

Another "complaint" that I forgot to list above that kind of irked me about the visual presentation was the overblown depth of field blurring that they use. At times it works OK but at other times it just sort of wert! shows up and you kind of look at it sideways and wonder why an item suddenly "blurred" only to realize it must have gone past a certain distance which the engine then says "ok, you are now blurry" . Kind of like the texture pop-in the blur seems to have two settings, not blurred and blurred, and the abrupt switching between the two is noticable... when you see it.

Also another "praise" that I remembered for the game is the whole "you decide your back story" thing. It's kind of interesting to be able to tell the game what kind of person you were before you play the game and decide what kind of person you are. Even in the minute time I played the whole "back story" thing was quite a regular emergence in the talky bits.

With all the hullabaloo over Mass Effect, and remembering how much I liked certain aspects of the KOTOR series, I went out and bought it last night on the way home. I really only got to play an hour or so (and in keeping with David's request for NO SPOILERS) here are my initial reactions:

PROS:

- the graphics, when they are not popping in or stuttering, look really nice.

- the combat is not as clunky as many reviews say it is.

- the menu system is also not as clunky as many reviews say it is.

CONS:

- the game hides certain loads well yet has other blatant "loading screens".

- the game suffers from massive amounts of texture pop-in and stutter.

Overall even though I am only slightly "into" the game, I feel it's draw will keep me around to the end. The way the game is laid out (RPG element wise) are simple enough yet deep enough to keep you from feeling they dumbed it down. The system it uses I can only describe as a "simplified, streamlined" KOTOR system. The "real time" action game combat is a welcome break from the point and click RPG-ishness of KOTOR and you really feel more "involved" in the combat when you are actively dodging and shooting.

My main gripes with the game so far are mostly technical ones. The game looked kind of crappy "out of the box" and that is because I found out the game "defaults" to having this "grain" filter turned on which makes it look like you are watching a badly encoded DVD over coax cables. Luckily you can turn that off and it makes the game a LOT better looking IMHO. Then comes the other "issue" the game has, massive amounts of texture pop-in. Meaning the character models switch from low res textures to high res textures quite abruptly. It is most noticeable in the "talky" bits, when you are talking to a character they will appear blurry and mottled and then bloooooop the high res textures just swap in in front of your eyes. That "pop-in" is very, very noticeable and the game almost takes no attempt to hide it. It's very jarring and ugly. Also, and this is possibly personal opinion, they use a lot of lower res textures on some characters and it looks bad. For instance you will be talking to someone and you'll notice how your player character's outfit is so crisp and detailed yet the person you are talking with has glaringly noticeable "jaggies" on their costume. Some of the aliens (the race that looks like pissed off cats, don't remember their name) have such wonderful nuance and detail in their faces, yet other characters look like they have 256x256 maps on them.

Another gripe of mine is that the game "stutters". You'll be in a "talky" moment watching this nice, fluid animation and then you'll just see it "skip". A character will be moving smoothly and then blooooop they "snap", almost like the animation jumped forward ten frames, which creates a very visibly noticeable hiccup.

On the positive side I like the music, very Vangellis '80s "blade runner"-ish. I like the equipment designs and how your characters can carry a pistol, a rifle, a shotgun and a scoped rifle all at once in this sort of modular "carry all" backpack. I also am a total geek for the talky bits. They are the thing that "makes" the KOTOR games for me and it's nice to see they expanded that functionality in this game... however it does seem (without going into any detail) that sometimes no matter which response you pick your character will say the same thing which illicits the same response from your opponent.

All in all this game appears that it is going to require quite a long commitment. Which is GOOD because Call of Duty 4 has depressed the hell out of me and I need something to distract me from that.