Humanoid

Obviously a subtle hint that the next Fallout game is set in Australia.

I hadn't heard of the game until you posted the above. So it's not very effectively being marketed despite that.

The thing is, I don't even remember using the Obfuscate abilities in my Malk playthrough. I don't know if it's my faulty recollection, but I'm reasonably confident that in the first chapter alone you can get your mundane stealth abilities easily high enough to get away with ridiculous things already - y'know, the crouching dead in front of someone in a vaguely darkish play and having them totally oblivious. I do remember the stealth tutorial being pretty tricky though, so I guess the skill ramps up pretty quickly, but it shouldn't take much to reach Bethesda-stealth levels of absurdity. It's been a decade sure, but I'd probably say Deus Ex Human Revolution is the closest comparison to the game mechanically - down to the cheesy and improbable sneak takedowns and silly boss battles - with the magic invisibility cloak being strictly optional.

Sort of: the DRM-free version was initially only available to backers as a direct download from the Harebrained website, Microsoft's conditions precluded any sales from GOG, Humble Bundle or any other platform. When the restriction was lifted, the direct download option was removed and backers instead given the option of either a GOG or a Humble Bundle key.

There are many more outliers than that, such as the 5870 also being rated higher than the 7870. But FLOPS are a very specific thing so it shouldn't be taken to have a direct correlation with actual gaming speed.

Toreador has Celerity I believe, which makes gunplay trivial. I remember gunning down a sidequest boss within the duration of one usage of the skill - which was long enough to empty my fully loaded pistol and then some. For what it's worth, I think I played just about the whole game as a stealther (the pistol thing was my second, aborted playthrough), and it was mostly viable. P.S. Yeah, standard combat-heavy tutorial, I always skipped it after the first time, though I can't remember if that was a mod feature.

Yeah, but those always felt like simple line-for-line replacements for the normal dialogue in most cases, the NPCs generally don't react to them. That said, I played Malk first up, and only did 1.5 chapters on my subsequent non-Malk playthrough, so it's not a comprehensive analysis. I'm not using it as a criticism as such, it's probably as far as they could go without creating a wholly separate campaign for each clan - but I've always considered it more jokey than insightful, and am fine with that.

I've always felt the difference in a Malkavian playthrough to be overstated. Rare is the actual encounter which actually plays out differently, usually either you get one extra line of dialogue from the NPC basically saying "hey you must be a Malk" then have the rest of the dialogue proceed as per any other clan; or it's ignored altogether.

Definitely a JB hi-fi price and minimalistic price tag. They always undercut the RRP by, erm, $1.95. Not a game specific thing, the RRP of PC games is $89.95 most of the time, and has been for around a couple of decades despite the value of the Australian dollar during that time having at various times been: a) under half of one US dollar; or b) higher than one US dollar. Sometimes a few ...optimistic companies try to raise the RRP - I remember Dragon Age Origins being a scarcely believable $109.95. Then they wonder why Australians choose to buy tax-free imports.

I paid $140 and don't regret it. If I wasn't a teetotaller though, $140 worth of beer would be reasonably compelling too.

As long as it retains the slower, more deliberate and less chaotic platforming that the series pioneered (then followed by Flashback), I'd give it a look. The Rayman reboot is fantastic but isn't what I'd be looking for in a PoP game. Platformers may be the indie genre du jour, but very few attempt even semi-reasonable physics and are instead usually flat and floaty.

Combat order every turn is fixed in portrait order, but you can drag and drop the portraits to set any order you like.

I know, talking more Wal-mart shelves though. But yeah, also needling a bit because I'm relatively pessimistic about near-future VR.

After dallying for half a year, decided to get onto the job of finishing my NAS + rebuild HTPC project by ordering the final parts required. Italicised old, salvaged parts. The goal: NAS: AMD A4-4000 Silverstone AR01 HSF Gigabyte FM2A88XM-D3H 4GB G.Skill DDR3L 128GB Sandisk Ultra Plus SSD (might rethink this if I'd rather use the SATA port for another spindle, can run OS from USB stick) Fractal Design Define R4 case Seasonic G360 PSU (Don't know what OS yet, Nas4Free, FreeNAS, unRaid, OpenFiler, etc.) ^ Will just run JBOD, don't need redundancy as no critical data stored, just media. Bought a couple new 4TB WD Red drives to start this off, partially migrate some of the ~20TB of data I have on the HTPC to it, then move some of the HTPC drives to the NAS over time. HTPC has 2x4TB and 4x2TB drives currently, plus 2x3TB externals. Desktop has another 4TB which I may no longer need as well. Final tally might be 3x 4TB WD Red, 1x 4TB Hitachi Deskstar, 1x 4TB Seagate 7200.12, 2-3x Seagate 2TB various models (depending on whether I opt for the SSD, board limited to 8 SATA ports currently). View to replace 2TB drives with 5/6TB drives in future. HTPC: Intel i3-4130 Scythe Big Shuriken HSF Asus H87M-E 4GB Kingston DDR3 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus SSD 2TB WD Green HDD LG BD-RW Antec Fusion Black Seasonic G360 PSU Spare box (just the rehomed old HTPC parts): Intel i5-2400 Gelid Slim Hero HSF Asus P8H67-M 4GB G.Skill DDR3L (up to, might have a dodgy stick) 128GB Crucial m4 SSD BitFenix Prodigy Micro White case Corsair CX400 PSU

I've always preferred the Roche path, even though it's objectively less content. It has less explicit exposition of what's going on, fewer sidequests, and you gain fewer levels at the end of it. But it feels more like a proper siege situation rather than a standard CRPG town, and the information that's withheld is done so appropriately, involving things that you couldn't have reasonably known in that situation. Because of that last thing, I also feel it's the better path to take first if intending to play through twice. Anyway, it's been a full week since I last turned my desktop on. I think that's a record for any period where I haven't been away. Part of it is probably that I finally have a decent laptop that's pleasant to use and can use while vegging out on the sofa, but it does mean I haven't played any game since last Friday. It's not for lack of games, there are a good number that I'd started but have on hold - Dragonfall, Stick of Truth, Banner Saga, Broken Age, plus longer-term on-hold saves of older games. But I haven't been in the mood for anything cerebral. Maybe it's time for my annual Privateer binge again.

Mattel vs Bratz, which seems superficially similar to me, took something like eight years to resolve (finally in Bratz's favour). Wonder if Oculus will even have a shippable product out in eight years.

Huh, usually a memory bug looks more like this:

Tides of Numenera, I expect. Blah, I keep typing Numenara. I've almost completely forgotten about the game at any rate since all the focus is justifiably on Wasteland. Heck, completely forgot I had the PnP rulebook from the backer tier, I saw it lying on my shelf the other day and took a while to recall where that thing came from.

I've only meaningfully encountered it in WoW, and in a guild of say 30-40 people, I reckon only about a third used the term. That said, as co-GM I could boot anyone who dared do so.

Could be, just like any other subscription based game these days, but Wildstar is clearly build from ground up for ex- and current wow players and there was, what, over twelve million of them at it's prime? If Wildstar succeeds luring a good chunk of them over they won't be having to worry about going F2P anytime soon. But if that doesn't happen and if ESO also starts losing subbers, I wouldn't be surprised if subsciption based games would be a thing of the past soon. I don't think anyone is luring a chunk of players anywhere these days, some of the paint has worn off from MMO's after WoW... especially with subscriptions. The thing that stuck me first when I was looking at the wildstar website is that the game seemed geared towards younger players.... who may be the last social group to have regular subscription money available. But then, what do I know. What you can do is trade ingame money for gametime, like in EVE. So younger players, who often do have the luxury of time, can buy their subscription from other, time-poor players. Basically instead of gametime being credited directly to your account when purchase it, it turns into an ingame item that you can either use or trade. I don't think the game will succeed with it, but theoretically the model is decent enough. EDIT: http://wildstar-online.com/en/game/features/business-model/

True, real men put it in autoexec.bat P.S. Real men also don't load DOSKEY.

Put a shortcut to the game in your Startup folder, then you won't have to fire it up.

I'm not so sure about the whole positioning thing. I mean, I loathe the infiltration of the role trinity of MMOs into single player games as much as anyone, but bluntly, the potential alternative of having to micromanage my positioning every few seconds to keep safe is even less appealing. Even the use of chokepoints and such is overstated I think, collision detection is only the beginning and only simulates moving around concrete pillars as opposed to actual combatants. Consider sports such as basketball or any flavour of football, just getting past one guy on a wide-open playing field isn't trivial in itself, and that's with the defender being limited in what actions they're permitted to take. (Someone tries to dribble past you? Punch them in the gut as they go by.) So what I'd be looking for is some kind of abstraction of the act of actively blocking an enemy's movement. Attacks of opportunity are only half the solution, it penalises them some health for moving, but often is not a meaningful penalty given a sufficient number of hitpoints to burn. And typically it'd be a lot as opposed to one or two hits worth, a critical problem introduced by the HP inflation talked about earlier. Give up 10% of my HP in order to be able to squash that mage? Easy decision. I don't have a definitive solution for this - most of what comes to mind does tend to come with potentially irritating downsides. At the extreme point you'd have 'sticky' fighting, where once engaged in melee combat, there is no lateral movement - either stand and fight or fall back. Think Zone of Control mechanics in the earlier Civilization games. Perhaps toning it down, you could have a severe movement speed penalty in the same scenario - at say 25% speed, the enemy that tries to run past eats four times as many attacks, which in most systems is something to think about and ought to be far from trivial. A different approach might be an toggled ability by a character to enter blocking mode, which might do something like trade an attack penalty but keep one designated target in place.

And yeah, each enemy has X number of block *chances* per turn - they get used up regardless if the attack actually succeeds or not. I think fully levelled Daggers plus Dual Wield is seven attacks per turn, versus three for swords.