Humanoid

Tried a bit of Spacebase DF-9. Couple hours in and already out of stuff to do - heck, most of the second hour was me reading the forums with the game running on the second screen, waiting for stuff to happen. Gameplay consists of "build one of each room type, then wait for the next feature release". So yeah, probably will give it another few months worth of releases before going back. It's called an alpha but I think that's being too generous, it's more of a prototype. So yeah, scratching that, which means I'll probably pick up Banished in time for the weekend provided the next couple days throw more positive feedback for it.

Well aside from hoovering up the food. A common balancing issue with children is that it's almost always better to import adult immigrants who are productive from day one, rather than spending 15 years of food and other resources on a what essentially are parasites before you get any return whatsoever on them. Realistic, maybe, but an irritating gameplay mechanic. To an extent you can balance it out by giving large morale/productivity bonuses to parents, making them much more determined fighters when defending, etc, but it rarely works out that way.

Do you see a game lasting reasonably long enough for children to be a good thing? One of my biggest annoyances about King of Dragon Pass were that children were strictly a negative and that it was always, always in your best interests to keep them are rare as possible.

Bit torn on this. I don't particularly care about the specific snipped bits, I can get the censored version for cheaper, most likely, from somewhere like GMG with their usual 20% or more codes (they've confirmed they're selling the AU version). On my other common sources, GamersGate are also displaying the AU version, while GameFly flat out won't sell here. So VPN aside, the only place I think I can reasonably get a rest-of-world edition is Amazon. Which makes me kind of consider nabbing the physical CE for the hell of it. One positive is that there's no Australia tax for the game. Current Steam prices in USD-equivalent (taken from steamprices.com): US: $59.99 UK: $66.70 EU: $54.91 AU: $54.95

Hey, an indie bundle that doesn't include Bastion, unprecedented! :D But yeah, no brainer since the only duplicate I'd get is Monaco, and hey, Monaco was my game of the year so I'm happy to have more copies to hand out to unbelievers.

That's like saying you'll give a show an entire season before you consider keeping it on your Hulu. If you spoil that much, of course you won't enjoy playing it. Nah, I'm generally pretty spoiler-tolerant (heck, I played ME2 before ME1 and still enjoyed the latter more), and not just for games. But at least I have that option for games, no Hulu or anything that comes close in terms of content down here. Not saying it's not better to go with it unspoiled, but that requires a certain degree of trust in the developer that is sadly absent here. I can also put up with a bad movie more than a bad game, it's shorter, cheaper and generally easier to sit through - and even then I tend to go for proven classics anyway. Anyway, I'm not saying it's a foolproof method - previewing that much of DA:O and I probably would still have bought it, though in the end it was a sub-par game for me. But it would have instantly turned me off ME3, unlike the incomplete feedback in text about it (the whole "only the ending is bad" debacle) which proved misleading.

Gave Football Manager 2014 another shot. This game is one that illustrates the value of restraint in that it's the complete opposite of the concept. Indeed I'd say the direction the series has appeared to take is the very definition of feature bloat. Adding various features with zero-to-minimal depth in an exercise of "it's realistic" checkboxes that they can add to their feature lists. There's sort of a faux-acknowledgement that this may be a problem to some people, but the solution is the very inelegant "classic" mode, where a fixed number of features are disabled as a package, no customisation. One would think that the clean solution would be a straightforward options panel where individual features could be toggled on or off as desired.

Normally I'd settle for good feedback from non-journalistic sources such as here too, but in the case of DA3 I think the ground is shaky enough that I'll likely require the sacrifice of spoilers and watch a video playthrough of at least a quarter of the game before considering a purchase.

Kickstarter does payments for campaigns not done in US dollars.

Still no release (but scheduled for this month), but finally a proper change log for the patch:

I assume GOG's version is the DOS version with DOSbox preconfigured. Nowadays DOSbox tends to automatically adjust clock cycles to play games at the 'correct' speed, whereas in previous versions it was set to some default with the user expected to adjust speed manually (not as scary as it sounds, there were convenient hotkeys to do it). You could probably tweak the configuration to return DOSbox to the old user-controlled system, though I don't know how easy it'd be with GOG's wrapper. Failing that, it should be pretty straightforward to get it running in a standalone DOSbox installation.

It's with the properly bad games though that the practicalities of the standalone campaign expansion packs shine through compared to the integrated content (or the halfway house of importable player characters). I don't like that MoTB had any connection whatsoever with the original campaign, and it's actually one reason the only NWN2 module I played for any reasonable length of time was SoZ. Heresy, maybe, but I got through maybe 30% of the OC, 10% through MoTB and 90+% through SoZ.

I'd prefer to view all the work he's doing now (and he's doing a bloody lot of it) as penance for his involvement with that game, yes.

Now that MM9's been covered, I want to hear from someone who's willing to admit they bought Descent to Undermountain. As distinct from the worst games I've played, those two I'd say are the two with the worst reputations as I perceive them.

Since the OP cheated and named more than one, I'll go ahead and name five. Oblivion, Mass Effect 3, Baldur's Gate 1, Fallout 3, Ultima 9. The only one I feel I'm being harsh on is BG, which I only got around to trying after all the IE games bar IWD2, and therefore was obsolete at the time. The others I just consider flat out bad games. I came to RPGs late, but if I had arrived earlier I expect I would have hated a lot of the hack-and-slash dungeon romps that passed as an RPG in the late 80s / early 90s.

Was in my mailbox as of six hours ago apparently. Will probably sit on it unless some really really good feedback comes along.

The Shale cosplay kit is sadly missing.

Unverified post, so I can't say for sure, but it seems magic resistance is both the chance to resist (as in evade) and a flat damage reduction (as in armour). Against something with 0 resist, 170 magic and 1 point in a spell school gives a (170x2 + 1x5) +345% modifier (i.e. 445% damage), compared to say, a GM in that particular school with 50 points in magic giving (50x2 + 25x10) +350. The numbers are not nearly equivalent (GM is eight levels worth of skill points whereas the 120 magic difference is worth 30 levels) but show it's not unreasonable to get viable spell damage with either approach. The GM gets 35% spell piercing, but I suspect most enemies have higher resistances than that, so full resists will still be a problem, creating a situation where you either gamble on that chance (and suffer some flat damage reduction on top) or pick an alternate, weaker school. The other problem is that a quick look at most late-game enemies, and they often have resistance to almost all schools (frequently with a single exception), so it's actually going to be pretty common to find that even if you GM three schools, your target will be resistant to all of them. I'm not sure there's actually much a conclusion to be drawn from these mechanics. GM is as usual incredibly powerful, gaining a +175% modifier over simple masters, but master over expert gains a pretty modest +40%, the equivalent of five levels of magic (versus three levels worth of skill points), but with the single school limitation. Indeed master over novice is only +70%. Remembering that these values are additive, not multiplicative, I'm tempted to say the conclusion is GM what you can GM, but if you can't, spreading those skill points out is probably better than mastering. GM is extraordinarily efficient in terms of investment/return, mastery is the opposite and should only be done if you really need the exclusive spells it grants. P.S. The numbers for the calculation are 2% spell damage per point magic; 5% per point in relevant school; a further 5% per point retrospectively for GM in the relevant school.

Assuming you're going archer-archers and steadfastly refusing to put points in their melee weapon skills, probably 4xScouts, since Rangers, once promoted to Warden, get point blank shot which allows them to do normal damage in melee range. Scouts don't get anything of the sort and will be forever doomed to do half damage.

It counts as a win if you can kill the boss in one round ....but you don't get the ending cutscene.

I wasn't aware that the magic stat countered resistances, since I haven't seen the calculations reverse engineered yet. I wonder if it does, or it just makes the base damage so high that partial resists are still worthwhile damage. I have to say I was disappointed with my GM Fire Rune Priest's damage with Fire Blast, I saw many, many full resists in the end game. I have seen the melee hit chance formula, and though I don't recall it off the top of my head, it was such that hit chance increased linearly for a given enemy up to the value of that enemy's evade value. Once your attack value exceeds the evade value, diminishing returns hits so hard that it makes raising the stat any further a very poor investment. The magic number, by the way, is 85% (a number that can be changed in config.txt), which is your hit chance when your attack value exactly matches the target's evade rating. Some general things to come out of that were that: - The enemy with the highest evade value in the game has a mere 155 evade, and that's the humble goblin. - Any increase of attack value above that yields an increase in hit chance so trivial that it's essentially a waste of points. Even then you'd be optimising to fight a trivial enemy anyway, so the actual ideal value is even less than that. - You get 50 points base attack rating. GMing a weapon is another 50. Add in item bonuses, spell effects and the two-handed/dual-wielding skills and you're already very near, if not over that soft cap. - This has important implications for the value of perception, which would drop to near-zero in such a situation. Might is king, followed by Destiny. - Due to the lower base attack value for the off-hand, and the fact that the dual-wield skill only raises attack value of the off-hand, it means there is some reasonable scope to add a modest amount of points into perception for these characters, making them the ideal perception door openers. You probably won't need to allocate a single point of perception to two-hander type characters ever.

If you have to find the entrance to it, then it's not the final dungeon.

Sure, but when "party isn't set up to find them" means "any party without a Freemage" then we're getting into ridiculous territory. Five classes get access to Light Magic, only one gets access to Dark. Yeah. Not to mention that halfway through the game they do an about-turn and decide everyone gets access to them anyway. Which is better in the long run because around that point they also decide it's a good idea to hide at least Grandmaster trainer behind a secret door.

Magic fabric. Which is to say, Gore-tex product placement.

Nah, opening secret passages is fine. Detecting them is a problematic mechanic, they set up a spell that's both annoying to use due to short duration and is extraordinarily limited to just one class in the entire game, or they make you use a hireling to compensate, except that the first hireling forcibly leaves midway through act one, and the replacement is in act two, guarded by enemies balanced for a later part of that act. Then midway through the game they decide to drop all that and give everyone detection for free. I can't begin to comprehend the rationale behind the system in general. I suppose there is a valid complaint about the stat checks in that not everyone will have the given stat, particularly perception since it's a terrible stat to take, but also might for all-magic parties. The various spells that boost your stats help to some degree, but the harder checks still require investment of valuable actual points that d be best employed elsewhere. But yeah, it's a smaller annoyance than the detection mechanic in the first place.