With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
-Calvin
Free speech doesn’t mean what it used to here in the United States, but we’ve so far been able to maintain reasonable confidence that at least our choice of entertainment won’t be silenced or penned. Now, however, with Terminator vs. EMA wending its way toward the country’s Supreme Court, everyone who harbors even a smidgen of faithlessness in the process is getting… well, not panicky, but concerned. It is conceivable, despite massive precedent, that videogames will be denied the level of retail protection afforded to most other entertainment media: that the industry will, in essence, be confined high on a shelf behind the counter, naughty bits covered in cardboard, while Maxim magazine and Hostel III titillate below.
…And gave it a respectable 7/10, complaining about the game’s overall lack of polish and balance while complimenting its ability to keep you playing despite these issues. Obsidian Entertainment has never been great at polish; the company is much more about design and writing than technology, but they’re nowhere near as bad as Troika used to be. For some people, the fact that Chris Avellone (Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, Planescape Torment, KOTOR 2) is lead designer …
“Mike Thorton is a partially written slate. Tabula ‘kinda written but still with room for you to customizus’, if my Latin serves me right. He can’t be a sea elf, an escaped mental patient or a were-cabinet – he’s an educated, multi-lingual clandestine operative, and that rules out being a chaotic neutral Urdlen-worshipping deep gnome bard /cleric.’“