kalimeeri

I'm in a kind of limbo... I finished the game, and decided I'd go for NG+ when the expansion came out. Not that I would be looking to change things up in my choices or style of gameplay, but I really did enjoy the game that much. So when I started that everything seemed fine ... and then I put in patch 1.10. Whatever they did in that patch hosed my game (seems only to affect NG+ ... CDP is aware, but no patch for the patch is available yet). So my choice is to wait some more for the fix to continue NG+, or just to go on ahead and play the expansion post-Wild Hunt questline. TBH, I'm kinda 'meh' now about the whole thing, thinking I'll just play the DLC content and be done with it.

Has anybody tried killing Falanroed after she's been possessed by the dragon? That'd be the ultimate cheese for the dragon fight... although I think it may be impossible as she's scripted to walk off screen and disappear.

Among the "backer" headstones is one from Malcolm Reynolds: We have done the impossible, and now we are mighty. So appropriate!

Is there any way to replay just the slideshow after the game is done? Unfortunately it was very late when I finished the game, and I nodded off a couple times while it was playing, so I don't missed/don't remember some of the endings. The last save that the game will recognize is just before the battle, which I don't want to replay again without seeing where and/or if I went wrong. There is another save (game complete) in the save folder, but it was obviously meant to be used by the future expansion, because the game doesn't recognize it; it's as if it wasn't even there.

My Hiravias can now cast 17 first-level spells, without using any wearable items or any spell boosts during level-up... whereas I am playing a druid, who feels quite slighted by his measly 4. Because I didn't really need another druid, Hiravias spent most of the early game on the bench, until Twin Elms opened up and it was time to start his personal quest--so I don't know exactly when or how this happened. It may be during the leveling up process, as it keeps increasing as the game goes on. But it's kind of funny, actually--with my own character I find it hard to use all 4 spells of any tier during a single battle ... let alone two druids with 54 spells between them. Talk about a wrecking crew. Regardless, by level 11 the game certainly seems to treat the druid player character (Savannah Folk, White-that- Wends) differently (19 total spells) than the companion Hiravias (35 total spells). Broken down, my PC has: Level I (4), Level II (4), Level III (3), Level IV (4), Level V (3), Level VI (1) compared to Hiravias: Level I (17), Level II (4), Level III (4), Level IV (4), Level V (4), Level VI (2)

@Oerwinde How about the first three: Terror from the deep, UFO defense, and Apocalypse? I really appreciate it.

Been here almost 10 years, so I'm guessing my request was overlooked. Have always wanted to play the XCOM games, if they are still available....

Updating Dark Souls 1 is a simple process, and once you switch from GFWL to the Steam beta, all of your save games and progress are just as they were before you made the switch. They are saying, though, that GFWL will only be 'live' until February; and they strongly recommend you make the switch before then, because your GFWL setup will no longer work. There appears to be no difference in the way the game starts up and works, but I haven't played enough lately to judge the speed or consistency of multiplayer connections. The DSFix graphics mod works as it did before, but the DSC connection fix for playing with friends thru GFWL is no longer useful.

Count yourself lucky--I can't get the newly reinstalled game to run at all on my Win 7 machine. It ran perfectly fine on WinXP. I've played it through several times and wanted to run through the restored content at least once, but I can't even get the vanilla game to run; it crashes right after character creation when the first video tries to play. The only thing I haven't tried is disabling CPU cores ... after spending several days hassling with this thing, it's probably more trouble than it's worth at this point.

Huh. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I've got to wonder who has cameras set up like this so they conveniently catch all the footage.,,

Sigh. I switched to Chrome. I don't like it, but I suppose I'll learn. All it has to do is load my pages correctly, after all. And it mostly does that I guess. FF has screwed up my sites so badly I can't read half of them or open links; and I don't have the patience or time to spend on reverse engineering a POS interface that somebody apparently thought was a good idea, but nobody can remember asking for or wanting. Way to go, Mozilla.

You horrible cold-hearted person, you! I've been hearing the same thing from my daughter... (but unfortunately for her settlement, she let them in. Yes, within minutes they ate all her stockpiled food, and the rest were soon history.).

That video looks a bit staged, if you ask me. No dog would calmly sit there with such a thing over her head when it was so easily gotten off, unless she was told to. That said, I did see a version of what I think was the same dog... in which she had her head legitimately stuck in a box, and the poor thing bolting off across the house in terror (only to land in the back yard swimming pool--not very funny at all). So far I haven't been able to re-locate the link, but the clip was part of a video montage. Maybe this family wanted to recreate the incident in a less dangerous way.

If you're talking figuratively about a punch as 'slings and arrows' (i.e., the inevitable consequences of an ill-considered action), I think the hardest part of parenting is knowing--or rather deciding--when to stop jumping in to take the arrow to the knee yourself. Yeah, you told them and they didn't listen, and here it comes. Jumping in to deal with the damage is so ingrained it's second nature--first, because you've already been there done that yourself as a kid; and second, protecting your kids for the past 17-18 years has become your existence. You've got as many scars as The Nameless One and one more won't matter, but at some point you realize you have to stop trying to reason and stand back, or they'll never learn. And isn't character defined by adversity? Regardless that it hurts terribly worse to watch when it's your kids, and even more so than if they'd only listened to age and wisdom ... you have to draw the line somewhere, sometime. At that point about all you can do is hope that you've done your job well--you gave it your best shot, they've made whatever they will of it, and apparently now they think they're done. For all your pains, you might even be regarded as a 'controlling' and evil creature. But you're not a god or a demon; you're still just you, stumbling along without an instruction manual. It's the biggest relief, and the sweetest sound in the world, to finally hear your own words coming out of their mouths ... as wisdom.

Nah, mine are 30 now--I can look back and laugh, and overall I think I got my money's worth for all the gray hair. My point was that it's a good theory that you can pass on your own collected wisdom and knowledge, but that often doesn't work because the young often don't/won't listen (although on some level I do believe they hear). And in fact I recall my grandmother had said the same thing, about the impossibility of putting an 'old head on new shoulders'.

You're talking about children. The cute little innocent things that hug you in exchange for food. But ... they grow. And when they get to be teenagers, they stop listening and start doing stupid **** that makes you tear your hair out. They don't become 'functional' at least until age 30 (at which time you can at least teach them the words 'I told you so'.)

So... exactly how many WOW subscriptions did our taxes buy for our friends at the NSA? Now THAT's what I call a real job perk!

Doesn't that end up taking away from the value of adventuring in general? If all the good loot exists only along a beaten path, then a large part of the reward system is lacking. I may be old-fashioned, but I personally don't care what 70% of players who rush through a game have done or will do-- and I don't like the thought of game designers attempting to reduce or restrict their creative art to a formula.

I've never been able to get it to work online, and I'm in the US. But I'm not much invested in multiplayer gaming, so I'm happy enough having it log in via an offline profile. Just don't let GFWL update itself, because it won't read the previous version's gamesaves; you'll end up starting over.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/dog_how_see

They pretty much did a find/replace on the script of Die Hard, I kid you not. It's that obvious. Only Olympus' grand-scale reboot scenario didn't work at all logically, and the majority of the characters were 'meh' (Morgan Freeman is always awesome). Need to watch Die Hard again to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wis-man-76-guilty-fatal-shooting-teen-19692102#.Uefn122YDYU Judging by the relative lack of media hype (in comparison with the Z case), there seems to be nothing here for radical pressure groups to see and spin. Why? White man? Check. Black teenager? Check. Racial profiling? Probably, check. Guilty verdict?

I think the jury made the right call--the prosecution was unable to support the murder charge based on the available evidence. They probably knew from the beginning that this case would be problematic, if not impossible, to prove in court ... a fact which accounts for the delay in bringing charges in the first place. The police very likely consulted them that very night about the feasibility of bringing those charges (common practice, and what's known as covering your a**), but Prosecutors do not like engaging in cases they know they will lose, because it reflects badly on their track record when it comes to keeping their jobs. Plus, if proper evidence might be slow in coming, charging Zimmerman immediately would be the wrong thing to do ... because the trial clock starts ticking from that moment. So if the prosecutor's office turns thumbs down, the police let him walk. That situation is what they made Grand Juries for. What cracks me up is that from the beginning, Martin was portrayed and referred to as a 'child'. The photos that were splashed all over were obviously him at an earlier age (12-15 yr old); whereas at the time of this incident, Martin was now a young man of 17, who stood at least a head taller than Zimmerman. His background indicates he also liked to be a bit of a bully at school, bragging about fistfights he'd had, or intended to have. (He'd also been known to carry what are commonly (and legally) regarded as 'burglary tools' in his backpack.) In short, should the situation in this incident have been reversed, in Florida he would very likely have been tried as an adult. As for Zimmerman... where do I start? As a (self-appointed?) neighborhood watch captain in a gated community, he should never have been carrying a gun. This is sleepy little Sanford, not Miami. Police officers are taught various means of defending themselves and subduing suspects; that their gun is always the last resort. Short, pudgy Zimmerman had none of that going for him. He had no more legal standing than an average citizen; he was untrained, inexperienced and out of shape; and when he reported a suspicious subject to the police, that should have been the end of it. Instead he refused to follow their direction, continued to follow and ultimately confronted Martin. I can't help but believe that it was presence of the gun itself that changed the entire dynamic of the scenario. First, it emboldened Zimmerman into believing he had the power; had he not been carrying, he might have used a little more common sense. He failed to realize that in a free-for-all, that gun becomes more of a liability than it is a help; i.e., it belongs to whoever is stronger/quicker. And once Martin realized Zimmerman had it, he wanted it ... badly. The fight then became a struggle for the gun, and I think either one of the men would have used it. Would Zimmerman be dead if he'd not had the gun? Possibly. But I do wonder if he'd have put himself into that position in the first place, had he not been emboldened by its presence. Sadly, the media and political groups have blown the entire case into a racial bias circus, when all it really was, was a fight between two men (who each had something to prove) that went bad.

Staying neutral is possible in TW, but it's obviously not what the devs intended ... playing that way is pretty boring, once all your friends give you up as a lost cause and turn their backs on you.

I have one, and never noticed a marked non-uniformity in daily use. It's there, but hard to see unless I was really looking for it. I keep the backlight down, though, because I mostly use it when the house lights are off--it's possible you might see more if you jack it up to full brightness.