Recent content by lanoger

Well to be fair, Oblivion did have serial killers. They had a guild and everything. But trying to make a killer the bad guy that you have to stop for the safety of the good citizens of X, smacks of hypocrisy. If you make the bad guy a necromancer, or a vampire or whatever, then at least...

I'd like to add to what Petromir, jez29 and others have said, the problem isn't so much the borrowing of the elf/orc/dwarf/whatever structure because the writers can take those structures and breathe life into them. The problem is when the writers don't and we end up with a flat, dead trope...

A sure sign you're using the wrong sort of mods :D Most games I don't change from the vanilla/official patches/DLC, but if it's a good game with a good modding community that is suited to that sort of tinkering? I go for it. Sometimes even when it's not - I remember Morrowind and its...

Some people might enjoy spoilers - case by case or as a general rule - but taking the decision away from the person is a really asshat thing to do. The perpetually wrapped gift analogy is false. It would be more true to say on christmas morning, after days of anticipation, the child's...

Yes, this. And where is the love for all the little indie adventure games? The ones like Machinarium which was witty and beautiful and died a horrible death from a 90% piracy rate.

I always choose female during the first play though, but after that, it depends on the game. If I roll a barbarian type - dump charisma and intelligence for strength or whatever - then I'll go male because it works better. If I'm rolling a Lara Croft type, then I'll go female. Also, if...

Hardcore gaming certainly has masculine attributes (competitiveness etc.) whether you are talking about the types of games or how they are played, but the reverse is not true of casual gaming. Casual means 'occasional' or 'haphazard' or perhaps 'non essential' to daily life. None of those...

This. The article goes on about how it isn't really the fault of the game when people give up on the combat, but it really is. Balancing game difficulty is tricky but there are some things that are quantitatively worse, such as how monsters scaled in Oblivion (if you didn't manage your points...

I've never had a problem with the romance genre as compared to, say, comedy. I'll admit that good humour is difficult to write well and I rarely read it in original fiction, but as a primary genre in fanfic, it should always be avoided. And by 80% being 'romance', surely you meant 'porn'?

The way it sounds here (I've never read the comics, I haven't seen the movie) is that the author was too busy giving a 'screw you!' to his copyright holders (who would be the ones to authorise any such spin-off) and the industry than resolving his story arc with finesse and good writing. Is...

It really depends on what you're after. Ffn is a reasonable first stop if you just want an archive to park it, but, ah, don't expect high quality constructive criticism from just posting blind. There are some excellent fandom-specific sites - including a ton of LJ communities - that also have...

There is a big difference in the quality of fiction not only by archive, but by fandom. It's pretty clear that what you get from a cross section of Harry Potter fic is going to be very different from fiction based on, say, the Silmarillion. The Tolkien movie-verse sort of exploded when the...

So you would approve of KOTOR but not of the Obi-Wan-as-a-child YA novels? Yes both of them had been approved by George Lucas, but the Star Wars universe is not their IP. Really though, I read this as Peter Parrish's Guide to Terrible Crackfic rather than an attack upon fandom. If fanfic...