Let's play Knights of the Old Republic 2, because games with endings are for jerks.

At least all the gear isn't as butt-ugly as the first game. I kept everyone in their starting clothes the whole time because actual armor made everyone look ridiculous (ESPECIALLY the head gear). There are a lot of silly outfits in this game, but there are also some really cool ones.

Why would you want to avoid combat in a Star Wars game? At least once you get a lightsaber. I don't even care about the points where combat is a bit of a slog, because waving around a lightsaber is just so stupidly fun.

I did this exact thing and it didn't help I played TSL first, so when I got my first Jedi robe I was really confused. Carth's orange jacket is not a very attractive piece of clothing, but it beat the hell out of the alternatives.

At certain points I'm rather snarky with Atton, but not if he's actually coming out of his shell a bit. There are some truly awful things you can say to him when he's really vulnerable and that's when you feel like you've kicked a puppy.

Also, Atton was my first Bioware love (even though not technically Bioware but whatevs). <3

And that's why I'm modding the shit out of my newly-acquired PC copy of KOTOR 2. There are some lovely clothing mods out there (when they aren't fucking up and messing with the lightsaber-holding animations >:|).

Combat in this game is a little... bad. It's not particularly challenging and it's not particularly fun, at least not until you get your lightsaber and some force powers. (The challenge level never changes, though.)

I was bored so I drew up a chibi Atton in case you aren't able to find one.

*gasp* That's adorable! You're the best, Kringlorr!

*saves*

Alright, here's the last of the screenshots I've got saved on my flash drive. I'm at work right now, so no new developments until my shift ends in a few hours.



We kill the droid in one hit with our vibrocutter and continue on. I mentioned that the combat in this game is easy, right?



These guys take two hits apiece. The Exile here is using her Matrix moves to duck under laser file. Making a balanced character instead of min/maxing pays off. :3



This door looks important, but when we try to open it Kreia interrupts us.



Probably because of the CRAZY DROIDS.



The narration cuts in to tell us to find a terminal. Thanks for spelling it out, game, it's not like we've already used a terminal to open a door.

Oh wait.



We go through the open door...




...and find a corpse and a terminal.



Hm. Maybe we can find some answers here?

Is it bad I can hear in-game sound effects to every single image there? The vibroblade, the noise the droids make, the combat music...

On the upside it makes the screenshots seem so lively!

Nah, I can hear it as well. I could hear Kreia's voice while typing out her lines, too.

In fairness to us both the game has a great soundtrack and many of the characters have truly stellar voicing. No wonder it sticks.

Same here. It's like she's in my head...(waitaminute)

For anyone wondering what we're talking about, read all the Peragus updates with this playing in the background.

I still remember it by heart.

I went LS because I wanted to avoid some combats - and Atton. I'm so bad at duels.

Goddammit, I keep reading that as vibrator.

Nice sneakers, there, Misty.

I prefer games like Ultima VI, where the karma meter is broken by sloppy signed to unsigned integer math and so wraps around to (255 - n) when you drop below 0.

Hee, Ultima joke. [Tallulah Approval +10]

I guess this is my way of saying that if you go Sith I understand.

Daggerfall had a similar bug... you could be so hated in a particular town that, eventually, it would wrap around to the highest possible value (Revered). Then again, Daggerfall's generally buggy to begin with... there's a reason it's informally called "Buggerfall". The official patches fixed some of the issues, but not all...

For example, whenever you move in a dungeon (though it's more common when going up steep slopes), you have a chance to glitch under the level geometry into an inky blackness (unofficially called 'The Void')... where you will eventually loop around, pop back through the ceiling of the dungeon, and instantly die from thousands of points of fall damage.

Ha. Morrowind has the exact same bug; with a completely different, third party, engine.

Maybe when they were shopping for features "can you fall through the world?" was on the list under the wrong column.

It's actually kind of funny the first time it happens. The second, third, fourth, and fifth times however...

Doesn't help that the first dungeon (Privateer's Hold) has a passage you pretty much have to go through to continue. The passage contains a steep upward slope. The first time it happens, you also likely didn't think to save. It's... yeah. And the dungeon's tough enough without the level geometry trying to kill you.

Despite the general bugginess of the game, I still love it (hell, I love all the Elder Scrolls games). Need to get around to beating it one of these decades (again, this applies to all the Elder Scrolls games)...

I'm really bad at actually finishing open-world RPGs in general. I just get distracted by sidequest after sidequest. Once you add mods into the mix, my chances of doing the Main Quest rapidly approach zero-sum.

I got off a day at work fixing computers only to come home to a computer that needed to be fixed. Bah. And then TSL kept shitting itself and crashing every time I tried to load my save for this LP, so I had to do some doctoring. Everything should be good to go now.

EDIT: Just kidding, everything's not ready to go. Steam is borked and won't take screenshots. Apparently fixing TSL broke Steam.

EDIT2: Okay, Steam just hates it when you try to run a program using compatibility mode though it. Good to know for the future, I guess.

I've played it a bit, I know exactly how ridiculous that dungeon gets.

I suppose we'll just go down the list, yes?



That's the second mention of this Coorta guy. Sounds like a troublemaker.



I like this guy. Also, you can't hear his voice acting, but it's very "angry drill sergeant."

: Why? Because in case you forgot, Peragian fuel explodes at high temperatures- that's what blasted that chunk out of Peragus II and created this asteroid field.

Waitwaitwait... are you saying that we're chilling out on a mining station nearby planets that are highly flammable and unstable?

WHY?



Wouldn't burning someone blow up the fuel? This is a very important question.

Alright, on to the accident report logs.



Droids again?



Why do you have sonic charges so strong they can vaporize people on the station near the highly flammable planet?

: The blast wrecked the internal components of the droid that set the charge, though, so we can't even dissect it to see what happened.



Hey, don't blame the Exile. She wasn't even conscious!



This story doesn't have a happy ending, does it? :(

Alright, on to the mining droid maintenance logs.




I'm not too familiar with the term but I'm fairly certain binary decay relates to nuclear physics and the like. I hope you're referring to a meltdown of the physical behavior core, not its programming. If you're trying to refer to perhaps a change in the rates of error probability in binary linear code, that's... not that.

: Well, that's reassuring. It isn't happening. So the next time we nearly have a breach in the ventilation tunnels, I can just close my eyes and pretend it's my imagination.

Sounds like a good plan. :3

: You better give me some answers- I want to know how much damage these droids can do if they start mining us instead of the asteroid rock.

About 3-4hp per shot if you're a Jedi. Oh... you're not a Jedi? I have bad news.



Ha. Hahaha.



: So I want you to find out how these droids are being sabotaged. That'll tell me who's trying to clear a path to get that Jedi off the facility- and stop him.




Well, he's dead.

Alright, this guy has two more logs to go through. They're mostly thinly-disguised explanations of what the player has to do next, but we'll watch them anyway.



That was a surprisingly sensible thing to do!



"Kill all the enemies to open the door." Got it.




Hey, if that door's so secure, why not lock as many people and supplies as you can in that room and send out a distress call while you wait it out?

No?

Okay then.

Time for the last log on this console!


All I need to do is equip the belt- and some skill with stealth in order to use it. As long as I don't get too close to the droids, they shouldn't detect me.


"You can sneak by the droids and disable them if you suck at fighting." Thanks, game!



Note: doing this doesn't really matter.

We can also look at the security cameras in upcoming areas to see what's coming.



.___________.



Here are those consoles again, just in case you forgot where they were.



Who's this guy? Heh, he has silly hair. I bet he won't become important at all! We can safely ignore him.

I love Angry Security Guy. He's my favourite Peragus character - and it's amazing how much personality he can have just spitting exposition.

Yeah, I love him too. It's kind of funny how much personality can be packed into, what, five logs?

EDIT: I also love how he actually does things. He doesn't just sit around wondering what's happening. He may not know what's going on, but dammit he's not going to sit around with a thumb up his arse waiting for it to happen! He's Angry Security Guy!

That's something I feel like Obsidian got just right: subtle characterization. It's most obvious with T3 (especially on his solo missions, the Droid Warehouse in particular), but even with the NPC holograms you can tell that everyone has their own agenda.

Lady in Medical logs: making reports, doing her duty, and probably not too terribly aware of what's going on
Angry Security Guy: trying to keep track of what's going on and stop it
Mechanic: baffled by the mining droids malfunction
Facility Administrator in the dormitories: trying to get a signal out
Coorta: we all know what he's up to

Whited out the Facility Admin's thing since it's technically a spoiler.

Maybe that doesn't really give them any more depth, but for some reason I feel like it gives them some semblance of personality (the medical lady is nice and friendly, the kind of person no one dislikes; the angry security is an angry security guy; the mechanic is the closet they have to Peragus' resident sadsack; the facility admin is the leader type; and Coorta is a stupid bastard).

... Then again, maybe I read too much into this game (no, I definitely do). But I also like how you actually have to dig around to find out what's going on, instead of having it all laid out for you.