unfriendly_cat

Agreed; I certainly missed a few. Bob Wayne, Dale Watson; also on the bluegrass side (which I'm not that familiar with) Del McCoury, Bad Livers, The Meat Purveyors..

True, the mainstream Nashville stuff sucks, and has sucked for a long time. However, there is a LOT of really really good country music around these days. Not much of a country fan myself, but this is a short list of artists/bands (current or recent) that I like:

Robbie Fulks
Wayne Hancock
Hank III
Joe Ely
John Hiatt
Shaver
Steve Earle
Kelly Willis
Neko Case
Iris DeMent
Jason & the Scorchers
Supersuckers
Junior Brown
BR5-49

No, I think it's this stupid thing:
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/26/mirrors-edge-dev-bummed-over-curvier-faith/

Yeah, I was surprised to see Chuck Rock on that list. Is it supposed to be bad now somehow?

One of the big challenges is to improve the overall quality of writing. By this I don't mean the plot (there definitely have been some original and imaginative plots recently, even if it isn't the norm), but the prose itself.

Even the best-written games (such as Planescape) read as higher-tier genre fantasy (think R.A. Salvatore and the like). There is no reason why top-notch writers can't be involved in writing games, except for the unvillingness of development studios to take the risk and commit the necessary resources.

As it is, we have a medium reaching an incredibly wide audience (including segments which, overall, read little or no literature), immersing people in amazing and epic stories written at a high-school level.

In the early days of computer games there was more of a willingness to experiment with the writing. One of my all-time favorites in this respect is Circuit's Edge, which sadly nobody seems to have played.

I'm not so sure. For many gamers (myself included) Planescape and Baldur's Gate 2 are the pinnacles of storytelling in games, in large part thanks to their size and scope.

Sadly, due to the amount of resources that would be required to make a similar game with graphics and sound up to current standards it has become all but infeasible to pull off a similar project again.

"...death has been pushing up daisies for years."

Just as H.P. Lovecraft predicted.

Maybe it's because English is not my first language, but for me finding new words that the parser understood was easily the best part of early Sierra games. Of course that was before the internets, faqs and walkthroughs made this kind of thing obsolete.

While playing through Space Quest again on Gametap a while ago I found that I don't really have the patience for those games anymore, which is a shame because because they are funny as fuck. I might end up giving Scribblenauts a try just for the sake of nostalgia.

Agreed. I still don't understand why the Infinity Engine was abandoned.

What really saddens me is that the future of western RPGs looked so bright around 2000 with BG2, Planescape and Fallout 2. Since then not a single game with similar scope and quality has come out.

I mainly blame MMOs for counting on player interaction to replace the hard work of writing quality dialogue trees for characters.

Not getting my hopes up yet, but between Dragon Age and this announcement about revisiting Baldur's Gate it looks like by 2010 or so we might finally be back to where we were 8 years ago. Hooray, I guess