Leaderboard

Should just link to Tim directly.

I'm a huge, huge, huge Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks fan. Was a fan of their music even when I was a kid back in Asia in the '70s. I think I even posted something here when Christine McVie died. Sometimes, with songs like Go Your Own Way, Say You Love Me, Second Hand News, Seven Wonders, etc., I put them on repeat on my old CD player and just listen again and again. Takes me back to when my life was simple and carefree.

I find that, even if the gameplay or setting don't appeal to me, I still appreciate the writing and character development that goes into most Obsidian titles. I've seen enough of my favorite developers go under that I figure I'll do what I can to support their art.

Once upon a time, there was a great UK psychedelic blues rock band that moved to the US and replaced some of their staff with the locals. I remember Fleetwood Mac from the 70's and early 80's as just awesome rock music. For me, Tango in the Night was the beginning of the end. Mostly pop music. But before that... (deja vu warning, I may have posted one or two of those in years past) For me, approx 4:30 to 6:30 is just Stevie Nicks being one heck of a front "man" of a rock band. You can feel that she "feels it"

What a treasure trove of fun this article is. Really, a bank? A bank demands ethical behaviour from its employees? That has to be the joke of the century. Oh, wait, they mean towards the bank and their bottom lines and bonuses, not towards customers. People shelling out 10$ for mouse jiggling software is also hilarious, that is something you can just download a free Python script for. Speaking strictly from a very limited efficiency and personnel cost perspective, it makes perfect sense. If employees work only half their time and still get their jobs done, you can either assign more work to them, or fire half the staff. If someone underperforms, you can replace them with someone who does not. Never mind that in real life application and depending on the job done it is much more complicated (to cite an infamous example, like rating developers on written lines of code), but when has such minutiae ever stopped middle management and upwards from doing something dumb in the name of maximizing profits? Obviously this assumes we are not talking about piece-work, where, for better or worse (well, mostly worse for everyone involved), task completion can be readily measured, but for that one does really not need to keep track of mouse movements. In a banking environment, that would probably only apply to jobs that were replaced by automation twenty years ago, although, who knows. Back during my school days we had a simulated bank to work at, where most of my time was spent going through huge chunks of accounting orders on paper and posting money transfers in the bank system. Somehow I doubt that banks still employ Oompa Loompas like that, but who knows. Bank often still run on ancient COBOL software.

Gott sei Dank, nun ist's vorbei mit der Übeltäterei.

What would've made more sense as a vestigial aspects of a 4 person co-op game is a party of four. Not four wholeass companions for the whole game.

First, Summons (Ancient Weapons especially) do a freaking lots of damages. You need a very well built fighter to beat that. Unbending does not make you resistant to Dorudugan status that reduces max health. Summons, who cares ? They will be gone soon. At some point, this becomes annoying. But the issue for a fighter is to NOT RUN OUT of Discipline. Tactician works, vs Doru at least. Chanters (and monks) basically an get infinite ressources to power their summoning. That's quite a big deal. Ancient Memory will help, but then it becomes the work of 2 characters, not one.

My parents are huge fans of Fleetwood Mac, and I don't doubt I've heard all of their songs atleast a hundred times.

Yes! I'd like to do a series of videos where I go class by class and rank every single possible class combination. That seems much more thorough to me than doing separate multiclass and single class videos. Don't you think? I did read the entire thread you linked. It was helpful! Thanks for drawing it to my attention.

I stated it above. Because the tier list vary a lots whether you consider a class for Single Class build or as a part of a Multi Class combination. You have many more details about the reasons why under the link above. Feel free to dig it. I don't get it. You plan a Tier list for the 55 multiclass and 11 single class combinations ?

What criteria do you take in account for your tier list? I don't really understand why the cipher and the fighter are so high, while the paladin and the chanter are so low....

Wow, that looks excellent. Definitely very interested

I was goaded into watching a video by The Critical Drinker while writing my posts about Star Trek: Picard. It took about five minutes of him making a semi-decent point about why it is bad until he came to the conclusion it is because diversity and because that woman admiral was allowed to yell at Picard. I stopped watching and had YouTube never recommend me a video of his again. Picard was bad for a myriad of reasons, that old, cantankerous admiral yelling at him certainly was not one of them. Gee, unfriendly and unsympathetic female admirals in Star Trek, what a novelty. Must be this woke crap.

All this talk about age appropriate literature reminded me of a "recent" post I made about an illustrated book I read when I was really little, so I went and looked it up. Turns out recent means five years and three months ago. It was originally written because the author bemoaned the lack of decent literature for children and was intended as a gift for his three-year-old. It contains the usual child favorites, really, like girls burning to a cinder, thumbs being cut off with giant scissors, a child starving to death and a kid who had nothing better to do than to go outside during a raging storm being blown away clinging to his umbrella, never to be seen again. I guess it is pretty positive. Only two of the kids die, one gets maimed by a dog, one maimed by a tailor and the one blown away by the storm could technically still be alive, although it seems somewhat unlikely. Why are we not allowing kids to read Asterix again?

https://www.gameinformer.com/exclusive/2024/06/18/a-deep-dive-into-dragon-age-the-veilguards-combat-abilities-skill-tree-and

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" except instead it's just The Critical Drinker, Star Wars Theory and other YouTube "personalities" telling you that this is it, they're "done with Star Wars". Until the next video.

My own anecdotal experiences based on 30 years working as a developer, generalists always have it rough. Little demand and low pay. Specialists (I'm one of them) are typically in high demand and considerably better pay. The challenge is, the specialist areas in demand changes over the years....

looks really nice, apologies if it was shared already, and I missed it

Not sure whether to post here or in the anime thread... The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an official feature film coming to theatres somewhere near you this December... ...No, this isn't a joke, this is really what a Lord of the Rings feature film is actually going to look like...in theatres. Well, until it horribly flops and they release it to streaming shortly after, anyway.

There's a thread at Obsidian Entertainment that stretches all the way back to Black Isle and Troika Games, and I'll always tie them together. They have long been some of my favorite studios, and I admire them for maintaining such a high level of craft and creativity. Obsidian games I play: KotoR 2: I loved the first game and the sequel is at least as good. I didn't delve much into the gray and stuck to killing Sith. There are some nice UI improvements that make it hard to go back to the original. NWN2: NWN was not for me, so this was a nice surprise. It's a solid, party-based RTWP RPG, hampered by the early years of 3D graphics. The camera and UI are aggravating. I restarted several times but never finished it or even tried the expansions. I'm thinking about starting again. Alpha Protocol: This is a great game and I'm glad it's available on GOG. Severely underrated, partially because of release day bugs. Bugs were part of their reputation back then, but I'll give Obsidian credit for patching their games into a good state. Fallout NV: One of my favorite games ever. I love Fallout 1 and 2 and I thought Fallout 3 was incredibly immersive. Fallout NV added good writing and a better setting. I can breathe under the desert skies so much easier than down in DC's subway system. Pillars of Eternity: Kickstarted and happy about it. Isometric, party-based RTWP RPGs are my favorite style of games. I like a lot of turn-based games, but RTWP feels more alive to me. I was hooked with the promise of 2D painted backgrounds and the extensive spell list (the best since Baldur's Gate). I badly wanted this game to succeed, and it did. I also credit Obsidian with helping to reignite an interest in crunchier RPGs. PoE 2: I waited for the complete edition to come out before I played it, and it's a masterpiece. The first game was really good, but also felt a little limited by its budget. This one takes the good from the first and makes everything bigger and better. The Outer Worlds: I was really into this for a while, but something weird threw me off about the level design. I'd run right by doors and stairways and not see them. I'd wander through the same building and keep discovering important stuff that I'd already walked past over and over. Now I'm wondering if the FoV was set too low for me... It was great that the companions had unlimited ammo. It was so freeing that I could give them giant machine guns and not go broke in 2 minutes, that I went back and played FO:NV with a mod that does that and its hilarious fun. Obsidian games I've missed: Dungeon Siege 3: Not Obsidian's fault, I didn't like its predecessors either. South Park: I didn't have the console at release, and by the time it was on PC I was over South Park. Tyranny: Don't want to play the bad guys. Grounded: Great concept, but too resource collection/crafting heavy for my taste. Pentiment: I planned to buy on day 1, but then I read a Josh Sawyer interview describing how the murder can't be solved and you pin it on whomever you choose. Something like 'the truth is what you make it', and I thought, "that is bull****". It's possible I misinterpreted this badly, but it killed my interest. Feel free to correct me.

Donald Sutherland

Maggie Smith played a...very different kind of teacher in this film. Very different. From a certain point of view, I think you could perhaps say even the complete opposite. Heck, her character in this film might even be a Voldemort supporter in the Harry Potter world, though probably not for the reasons one might expect. As I said, I have some unclear feelings about the character Maggie Smith played here, but it was a marvellously played character nevertheless. I also have no idea why this "Miss Gaunt" is named so, when it seems as though no-one else I can see in the cast list has anything even vaguely approaching something so on the nose. I should find another Maggie Smith film to watch, maybe one where she doesn't play a school teacher. The only two Harry Potter films I particularly like are the first two, but that makes sense, they're the silliest and lowest stakes out of the lot: by the time you get to Half-Blood Prince, there's barely a single speck of fun left in the whole series, because it's been completely drained in exchange for all the drama and serious plot stuff, and as someone who read the books when I was young as they were coming out, that just never really felt like a strength of Rowling's writing in the first place. Bleh.

Rest in peace, Willie Mays.

There will always be a need for COBOL developers

Reading this thread I just realised something: I only really like one Obsidian game, Fallout: New Vegas. I do like it a lot though. I've played a few others but only South Park: Stick of Truth and Outer Worlds held my interest for very long, and none of them are memorable. Alpha Protocol was a fantastic idea, but the jank killed it for me. I have no idea why I'm here. Maybe I'm still waiting for another one-hit-wonder from them. Maybe nostalgia. Who knows.