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Phaedra in Blades of Avernum
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #52
See, the problem is that the Avernum graphics are just way too vivid and realistic. All that glowing, airbrushed beauty bypasses our forebrains and acts directly on our reflexive, animal hindbrains. This is exploitive and assaultive, and fatally undermines the true purpose of a medium like BoA, which is to produce profound literature for the detached intellect.

Well, I'm glad I was able to learn this disappointing truth by reading this topic. Now I can avoid wasting my time getting into BoA, and pursue the more promising project of porting Proust into Pong.

[ Monday, April 11, 2005 11:07: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ]

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Display Warrens and Crumbled Lab [SPOILERS] in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #0
What's it take to turn Display Warrens green? I believe I have squelched everything that moves in the place, and in its bug-infested basement, except for our learned old friend. I have also cleared all the neighboring tiles. It's tedious to have to walk through that one area all the time.

Is there any way to get into the room you can just see in the far northwest of the Crumbled Lab? It seems to be blocked off with rubble, but I can see these doors, taunting me. Actually, if there is a way in there, I want to find it for myself; but if not, I want to be told so I don't waste time looking.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
The Universe in General
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #119
Thuryl's right, Custer. Creating the black hole and letting it decay wouldn't win you anything, but keeping it fed would let you convert matter God left lying around into heat. It would be just like combustion or fusion, only a heck of a lot harder to get going, but also a heck of a lot more efficient once fired up.

It is far from obvious that black holes should really behave as radiative black bodies. Hawking himself was quite surprised by this result, and it appears to be something of a mathematical fluke (though everyone hopes that it's really a profound and necessary truth that we don't yet fully grasp).

I'm not actually sure whether a charged black hole radiates charged particles preferentially. A similar question is whether a spinning black hole tends to radiate angular momentum; I'm also unsure about this. These are the kinds of calculation that somebody ought to have done by now, and may well have. It has been about ten years since I was really actively following black hole physics, but I don't remember any papers about these issues though. Good questions.

For what it's worth, I'd bet the answer is, no. But if the answer is Yes, you'd just have to keep feeding charge to the black hole as well as energy. Tending and feeding a Hawking furnace might well be as fussy a business as keeping a campfire going in a storm. Could be well worth it, though.

About antimatter in the universe: I have taught this stuff, about how we think there is hardly any antimatter anywhere, but I have to admit I don't quite understand myself why we are so sure that distant parts of the universe are not dominated by antimatter. Matter is thought to have (very slightly) outweighed antimatter in the early universe, through a statistical fluke. But it is common in such cases to have a domain structure, in which the chips fall differently in different places.

We know virtually nothing about the intergalactic medium; if there were genuine chasms of vacuum between matter and antimatter regions, there might be very little in the way of annihilation radiation for us to detect. And I'd be surprised if our spectroscopic resolution was good enough to rule out lineshifts, in very distant galaxies, due to CP violation. I guess I know people I could ask about this, but I never have.

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
The Universe in General
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #110
Thanks, Thuryl, for the info on tumors.

Making a Hawking furnace would really be a lot like starting a fire -- perhaps it is a problem for the boy scouts of advanced species. You'd need to apply enough force to compress stuff within its Schwarzschild radius, which probably means overcoming neutron degeneracy pressure, if you use ordinary matter. But once the horizon formed, I guess you could just keep shoveling stuff into it, to keep it from shrinking as it radiated.

One really good thing to shovel into it would be a high net electric charge, so that you could manipulate the thing with electromagnetic fields. Hold it from falling through the floor with a nice E-field, though, and you could sit back and toast your tootsies.

Well, kind of. The temperature of a Hawking radiator is inversely proportional to its Schwarzchild radius, so a tiny black hole would be really hot. Depending on how tiny you made it, you might be dealing with gamma rays here too, in which case you might want to keep your shoes on.

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Things missed on Dhonal? in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #5
Why, the dirty so-and-so. Thanks very much for the tip.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
The Universe in General
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #100
Dammit, Jim, I'm a physicist, not an oncologist.

I believe, though, that the crucial feature of a tumor is that it manages to fill itself with blood vessels that connect to the rest of the network, so that its interior cells get supplied with oxygen. Without that nasty capability, a mere mass of cells could not keep on growing, because the inner ones would starve and die.

So since the universe does not seem to have any blood vessels, or anything like them, I'd say the tumor model is a bit off.

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Things missed on Dhonal? in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #3
Thanks, Dolphin, that's as much as I wanted to know. A bit more than I wanted to know, Stugie, but it won't really make any difference because I always rob everybody I possibly can.

Anyone know about that one viciously trapped box?

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Things missed on Dhonal? in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #0
I've gotten through Dhonal Island having found recipes for the Infiltrator's Ring, the Emerald Chestguard, and the Creator's Belt. I've got the stuff for the Belt, and everything for the other two except Demon Claws and a Pure Crystal Shard. I'm pretty sure I haven't passed any Claws because I think I would have noticed the attached Demon. But I'm worried that I might have overlooked the Shard somewhere on Dhonal or even an earlier island. I just don't want to take the time to scour the whole place again. Could anyone tell me whether I've missed the Shard or not? If it lies ahead, don't tell me where it is -- I'll find it myself. If I have missed it, please tell me where.

A few other things -- again, if the answers lie ahead I don't want to know any more than that.

Is there any way to get into the spooky door that makes you want to run away from it? Is it possible to get into that 2000 point trapped chest (i.e. what level of Mechanics does it take)? Is it worth pumping Mechanics incredibly high to get into it?

I can offer in return the small observation that it's really quite easy to rob the Keep blind if you use Speed, and the Lord and Lady's bedroom has got to be one of the most lucrative rooms in the game.

One small bug report: I overlooked Jane outside the Keep until after I had cleaned out the Mighty Creator, but she was still all freaked out about the poor old General. Well, maybe it's not a bug, since she might just not have heard yet; but at that point General Greiner had been up and at 'em for many weeks.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Actual gameplay questions in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #15
There is a way later in the game to get rid of the canister, if you want. I did that, but haven't yet gone back to talk to Lankan to see what happens. I'm hoping he'll chill because I've killed all his rogues, but I can't confirm this yet.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Are their stll codes? (MAJOR SPOILER(POSSIBLE)) in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #7
Evidently Jeff can cheat, too.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
The Universe in General
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #90
Yeah, air molecules at room temperature are going at around the speed of sound (not a coincidence), but hit each other so often that they don't actually get very far very fast. (I don't see much sense in the mm/s figure, though. Diffusion is not described by any steady speed, and average drift speed of air molecules can be as fast as the wind blows.)

Even the productive collisions of high energy particles still conserve energy, though. Collisions per se do not produce energy, so neither temperatures nor speeds increase. Chemical or nuclear reactions are another story, of course; they conserve total energy, but release a lot of potential energy into heat and light. There are nuclear reactions that can occur at enormous temperatures and densities, which can release a lot of energy. One of the two types of supernovas happens this way.

Black holes are even more of another story, though, I'm afraid. Our current theory of spacetime, Einstein's general theory of relativity, prescribes a singularity at the center of a black hole. Probably the theory is wrong at this point, and in reality there is no singularity; but we have no idea what there might be instead. As far as current theory goes, though, none of the ideas mentioned in the posts above make any sense for a singularity.

A singularity has finite mass, but infinite spacetime curvature, and hence I think one could fairly say that the force of gravity is infinite there. But even referring to a singularity as 'there' is misleading. The singularity in an Einsteinian black hole is not an infinitely dense object. It is not an object at all, and it is not composed of any kind of particles. It is not even a place.

The singularity in the heart of a black hole is an instant in time. (In technical language, a spacelike hypersurface.) It isn't heaven or hell, it's judgement day. That's why, once anyone crosses the event horizon, they cannot resist moving inwards to the singularity: if you are inside the event horizon, then the singularity is your future, and it is the flow of time itself that moves you towards it.

The theory of Hawking radiation, as it has been developed so far, does not really deal with singularities. It could well be that this is reckoning without our host, and the Hawking effect fails because of some singularity feature.

[ Wednesday, April 06, 2005 15:38: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ]

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
LOOK!!!!! in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #10
Mmmm, ornk bacon. Genetically modified meat from a mutant monster, which was created out of the personal essence of a genetically modified farmer, and then lived only a few seconds of unnatural life, before being slaughtered with magical acid. Ought to just fly off the meat section shelves, where it is stocked right between the soylent green and the green eggs and ham. Oh Spam, where is thy sting?

But I believe we are confusing the Ornk Lord of G1, with the Create Ornk canister of G2, which may for all I know be found also somewhere in G3, which takes places thousands of miles from Barzahl's former fortress.

[ Tuesday, April 05, 2005 09:05: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ]

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
General thoughts and comments in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #9
[Decides to interpret this thread as giving license to state the obvious.]

It doesn't have new spells or player creations. The new plot stream of normal humans resenting Shaper dominance is an excellent development, because it seems to tie everything else in the GF world down to reality (as it were). So far, though, it does not seem to me to be the eye-popper that the 'Taker way' of bootstrap godhood was in G2, for example.

Instead the big step in G3 is a lot of engine development, with a lot of ingenuity and variety in tactical challenges, and in lots of other game events as well.

This is fine by me. It's not at all what I was expecting of G3 -- I was expecting a fifth tier of creations, etc. -- so it's a surprise. I'm enjoying it very much so far (about halfway through Dhonal's Isle for the first time, with a singleton Agent, of the traditional speed-and-violence build, on Torment). At this point it looks like I could also enjoy replaying it a few more times, making different major decisions.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
The Universe in General
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #85
p = mv does not hold in special relativity, at least not if 'm' is the rest mass. In terms of the rest mass, the relativistic particle momentum is
p = m (1-v^2/c^2)^(-1/2) v. One alternative notation is to define M = m (1-v^2/c^2)^(-1/2) as the velocity-dependent mass, in which case one can preserve the form of the equation p = M v. This is just playing with notation conventions, and all the relativists I know prefer to use 'mass' to mean 'rest mass' always, and let the relationship between momentum and velocity be different from Newton's.

In neither case does the formula make sense for the case of zero rest mass, because then v is always c, and one has p = 0/0 = ?. The resolution is to work from the alternative formula for momentum, p = (E^2/c^2 - m^2 c^2)^(1/2). This gives p = E/c if m = 0, with no ambiguity at all.

Quantum mechanics does change the notion of momentum in one sense: it makes momentum the primary quantity, rather than velocity. One very rarely writes v in quantum mechanics, but p is everywhere. So one is more likely to write p/m instead of v. But apart from this subtle shift of perspective, Kelandon is right that the relationship between velocity and momentum is not changed by quantum mechanics.

That's in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. It is possible to combine relativity and quantum mechanics, but the startling consequence is that it becomes impossible to restrict oneself to considering only a single particle. Photons appear and disappear all the time, for instance. Relativity plus quantum mechanics automatically creates the possibility that particles can appear or disappear, and this means one must use quantum field theory. Quantum field theory is an appallingly complicated subject. It is notorious that there are no really good textbooks on quantum field theory, but the best ones are all massive great tomes. So QFT is usually reserved for graduate school.

Kelandon's comment that F = ma survives in quantum mechanics is also interesting. (It isn't true in special relativity; what remains true is F = dp/dt, but p now depends on v in a more complicated way than in Newtonian physics.) F=ma could certainly be preserved in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. But nobody ever uses it. In quantum mechanics one works directly with potentials, rather than with forces. It would be a pointless appendix to a completed quantum calculation, to go back and work out what all the forces were, just so that you could have something to say to a Newtonian who really wanted to know them. It would be just about as pointless to work out what all the accelerations were, because the point of a quantum calculation is to find the wave function, not the trajectory of a particle. But if you did both these things, just for the hell of it, you would indeed find that F = ma, in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics.

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
The Door *SPOILERS* in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #8
Ahh, maybe I'm just genetically predisposed to like these games, or something. I was hoping it wouldn't be anything _but_ a dragon; I had settled on that as the ideal solution. It felt so incomplete that drayks and then drakons were only wanna-be dragons. I mean, it's great that the GF world is full of unfamiliar fantasy creatures; but drayks and drakons were always just close enough to dragons that you couldn't help thinking of the comparison, and it always made them seem smaller. (It didn't help that drakons are kittens compared to the other two fourth tier creations.)

So I thought it would be great if those powermad Taker drakons were finally going to pull it off, and go all the way. That was my idea of how it should be, and although I'm far from meeting Ghaldring, it sounds like I won't be disappointed.
Yay.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Actual gameplay questions in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #5
In the top right corner of the 'statistics' screen there's a spot that says 'show abilities' or something like that. It doesn't obviously look clickable, but it is, and it toggles the 'abilities' vs 'statistics' screens.

[ Thursday, March 31, 2005 09:37: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ]

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
The Universe in General
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #82
But the photons do contribute to the energy of the box as whole, which has zero momentum (by assumption). The individual photons are massless; yet the aggregate of all of them does have a mass,
correctly given by the formula you quote, but with p = 0 because the aggregate has no net momentum.

Of course, with the huge c^2 factor now in the denominator, the mass of the energy of any reasonable intensity of light is very small. But a boxful of light does weigh something.

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
The Universe in General
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #80
Energy is not an alternative kind of stuff. It is a property. You have energy in the way that you have height, not in the way that you have blood. So things are never 'made out of energy'.

Anything massless must always move at the speed of light; anything moving at the speed of light must be massless. The two properties necessarily go together.

It's quite true that photons have momentum but no rest mass. This is not quite the same thing as having no mass, though. A box full of light (for instance a box with very reflective insides, or a hot box that was glowing) would actually have slightly higher mass because of the energy of all the light inside: For a motionless object, like the box, E = mc^2 cuts both ways.

Heat is not only vibration of molecules. Heat is the amount of energy that is tied up in random motion or vibration or whatever. It's the randomness that makes it count as heat. Randomly bouncing light waves carry heat; a laser beam does not. Exactly what counts as 'random' is a very subtle question, though. Extreme cases are easy to classify, and it is fortunate that practically every case of practical importance is either extremely random or extremely non-random. As an issue of principle, though, the nature of heat is still rather puzzling.

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Is GF3 worth for the waiting after you play it? in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #8
Yes. I like the 'shapers versus power-hungry maniacs' theme. It's a big theme. It'll hold up for a few more games beyond this one even, as far as I'm concerned. The developments in G3 seem to be interesting but inevitable in retrospect. I

like the technical elaborations in the engine.

And I like how the various NPCs all seem closer, somehow. Maybe it's just that more of them have more in common with the PC, but folks like Master Hoge and Diwaniya seem more understandable and sympathetic than people like Barzahl or Ellrah. Maybe what it really is, now that I think about it, is that the mid-level NPCs are given a lot more personality than in the previous games, where practically only the sect leaders had anything much to say.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Actual gameplay questions in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #3
1) Yes, you can. Click the check mark to get out of the dialog about your hot canister. It will come right back up in a moment. But if you hit 'f' immediately after clicking the check, you enter combat mode before the dialog can come up again, and you can walk out of there without dealing with the issue one way or the other. Then just stay out of Lankan's face, and out of his house, and you can wander around everywhere else without either killing the rebels or supercharging them.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Appreciation with [SPOILERS] in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #0
The idea is to have a thread to point out things in G3 you like, without the subject line giving anything away at all. Since I'm not going to finish the game for a while, I'm not actually going to read this thread for a while.

So, my contributions:

That Venemous Artila was an elusive bastard. Just as he got low, he'd take off, and by the time I fought my way through a few more normal Artilas, he was back to full health. Well done, I thought.

I made the mistake (as I now think it was) of picking up the small, nasty canister in the San Ru tunnels. Then when I went to the rebel camp, it kept revealing itself and getting me into trouble. I had to enter combat mode immediately after clicking out of the dialog to escape it. Only by doing that could I manage to leave without either fighting the rebels or turning their leader into a monster. This is the main thing that gave me the feeling that I was walking a razor's edge to stay neutral.

Best thing so far, I think: chasing Master Hoge. I don't know what happens if you just let him run; maybe it comes to the same thing. But I had the impression that I was getting more info out of him only because I dodged his Clawbugs and clung to his tail. Took a couple of save-loads to do this, though, because the first couple of times he baked me with Aura of Flames before spilling any beans. Maybe that was only because I (ineffectually) attacked him, though.

I also really liked that I could choose whether to give the dusty notes to the refugee or the creepy tavern alchemist. Turns out you can get the alchemist's full reward just for a handful of living tools, while the refugee's seems to be quite a bonus (speed items are my favorite). That was good, because I felt like the alchemist was an arrogant jerk like my insufferable shaper teachers, while the refugee was a self-reliant fighting magician trying to save civilians from the rogues, like me.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Why does no-one notice you're a prodigy? in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #16
Yeah, G3 presumes that you are an exceptional student. Discriminating people go out of their way to chat up you in particular. It also explicitly keeps track of time, and now I see that it has taken me nearly two months to get to Dhonal's Isle. So I'm gaining about two levels per week. If we assume that my periodic bouts of intense combat and strange discovery are being complemented by days of study and reflection on my previous training, days which pass while I rest in town, trudge through green squares, or sail the ocean blue, I guess this isn't so unbelievable, within the logic of the game world.

So, I'm happy now.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Which class first time? in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #0
Which shaper class did you opt for in your first run through G3?

Poll Information
This poll contains 1 question(s). 43 user(s) have voted.
You may not view the results of this poll without voting.

function launch_voter () { launch_window("http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=poll;d=vote;pollid=EgDPSNonDYjU"); return true; } // end launch_voter function launch_viewer () { launch_window("http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=poll;d=view;pollid=EgDPSNonDYjU"); return true; } // end launch_viewer function launch_window (url) { preview = window.open( url, "preview", "width=550,height=300,toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status,menubar=no,scrollbars,resizable,copyhistory=no" ); window.preview.focus(); return preview; } // end launch_window IMAGE(votenow.gif)     IMAGE(voteresults.gif)

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Geneforge 3 available for Macintosh in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #39
Since this is a busy week for me, I will not be able to submerge myself 24/7 in G3 like some of the young whippersnappers on this forum. So to avoid spoilers I will be disappearing from here until I finish the game at my own slow pace.

I believe I have avoided spoilers in what follows.

I'm starting with a loner Agent on Torment, and I believe I'm approaching the end of the demo area (though those nice folks at Spiderweb got me registered almost immediately). I'll be at level 16 in a couple of ticks.

So far I'm very pleased. I'm trying not to burn my bridges with any faction, to keep my options open as long as possible. This is proving surprisingly difficult, which is quite cool. In G2 you could string everyone along pretty easily, but now I feel much more like I'm sitting on a powderkeg. Some of the 'no turning back' options that I have avoided so far are things I will definitely want to try out another time. Also the new engine seems to allow quite a few wrinkles we didn't see in G1 or G2, and this is nice. Finally the AI seems to be able to play smarter, but the fact that (minor) Daze now affects everyone in sight keeps saving me from certain doom.

[ Wednesday, March 30, 2005 06:50: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ]

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Geneforge 3 available for Macintosh in Geneforge Series
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
Profile #2
Gracias.

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We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00

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