Humanoid

Progress isn't nearly as fast as it was early days, most of the current products bar the very fastest were release a full two years ago and perform pretty close to the halo products just released. So the answer to the question is "the same for most of the range, except the most expensive one will be maybe 30% faster." Can't say I particularly mind, though, leaves the cash available for more important things like storage. Dammit where are those 5TB drives we were promised last year?

Silvanus inherited Bhaal's murder portfolio in 4E then?

Lords of Magic was a 1997 spinoff so it'd fit the normal sequel timeframe pretty well, and I remember positive reviews from print magazines back in the day, not sure how similar the gameplay would be to its parent though.

Can't say I could tell because I it was forever after the cave cyclops that I found any other ones - primarily because I missed getting both the Water and Air shards when I was supposed to due to inadequate pixel-hunting skills. But I've heard that the purely physical damage cyclops do is relatively easily overcome by sheer armour rating, and that Defenders can reasonably early get to a point where they are completely immune to cyclops (cyclopi?). Not necessarily a good idea to solo them due to the silly XP lockout system, but still, an amusing thought - cyclops wailing uselessly at a little dwarf, the dwarf in return mostly whiffing at thin air and getting blocked but slowly landing enough hits to kill it. I've heard a few reports of people describing their first kill of the cave cyclops working out like that. I assume the hunter trap works like the rune priest's fire rune thing? I've, erm, managed to burn myself a few times with that spell, sometimes due to oversight, sometimes due to inexplicable (buggy?) placement.

Yeah, I like Caesar's idea of synthesis and god knows it might work but I can't get into the end justifies the means mindset required. No doubt I'll try the Legion one day, lack of quests was another thing that concerned me but the options for NCR sabotage open it up a bit. So Kaizar's ending was a green explosion? I only fairly recently had my first playthrough of NV in which I actually accepted his invitation, and started doing some quests for him. And even then I still wiped out his entire camp (sneak sniper rifle kills) except the named NPCs - he didn't mind though, and the game proceeded as normal. I could tell myself I did it for moral reasons, but in reality it was for the gold and XP. And the Ballistic fists. Especially the Ballistic fists. As for Lords of the Realm 2 - I've never played any games in the series. Were LotR3 and Lords of Magic bad sequels or something? Incidentally I've been thinking of playing Warlords 3 lately, a game I only ever played the demo of back in the day, but am curious about now that I have the capacity to understand its arcane-seeming rules. But I don't think it's available for sale anywhere. (And irritatingly, searches are polluted with a majority result for the Battlecry games, screw RTSes) And (geez this post is wandering all over the place in topic), I think I'm going to retain my Roche playthrough as my 'canonical' one. It was my first taken option, but I also felt it fit better into the game - a pressure-packed siege situation as opposed to the alternate path which felt like the "here's a town, go do some random sidequests" feel typical of RPGs for the past 40 years. Plus killing the fat king, which is to say, allowing it to happen, was one of the better moments in the game. I liked that there was limited exposition of what I missed in Chapter 3, including having no investment in not killing the dragon. I killed it, because it was some dragon that happened to try to kill me, open and shut case.

Nitpick: You start as the *son of* a Blacksmith. Strict as the rules were, I don't think they banned blacksmiths from having daughters.

The game just expects you to stumble into your class promotion quest during the course of playing. You need to be promoted before being able to GM any skill. But the quest starter is: A few, but far from all GM trainers also have their own quests you need to complete before they'll train you in that particular skill. The arcane discipline one is a particularly big offender in its stupidity.

Hmm, so even Civ4 which is DRM-free these days (they patched out the CD check) is only being distributed as a key? Though it's a moot point since only Railroads! would be of value to me, and even then for curiosity more than anything (I know it doesn't even attempt to be Railroad Tycoon). Guessing the addon games if they happen would be Pirates 2004 and, er I don't know what a second game might be. Still waiting to pick up the new MPS games on GOG. But Civ2 and Gettysburg/Antietam still nowhere to be seen.

Spears are two-handed and do benefit from the two-handed skill. Also, they are awesome. The biggest downside to spears is that you can't train to expert level until Seahaven. Where do you get the relic spear? It's reported now that it only mostly works. Specifically, the Master bonus of 2H does not work. That is, you don't get the bonus 0.1% crit chance per point of Destiny.

I am pleasantly surprised by that (but not much, since I assume it'll be Steamworks), but on the other hand have also been pleasantly surprised by some of Uplay's functionality (but also have been exposed by some terrible brokenness) in the course of having just one game on it. + Offline mode stays offline mode, and doesn't bug you about it like Steam's prompt every time you start it. Even if you go online for a session, it'll start again in offline mode the next time you launch it. + Global toggle for cloud syncing, which is great because.... - Cloud syncing doesn't work for me. At all. Progress bar fills up a bit then it errors out. - Installing a game didn't even work until I ran the Uplay client in admin mode, and there's no obvious way of knowing this other than Google. It's at a level where if I had the choice of Steam DRM or Uplay DRM, it's a coin toss given the same price.

I remember being surprised at encountering a Kiwi in FO:NV. One of the Great Khans, I believe, don't often hear the accent in games (or more generally, in media other than the Hercules/Xena TV shows).

I feel the same, but am not so sure that it would have really impacted development all that much, for much of the game they seemed happy to just pay lip service to the setting, and the more finicky stuff probably happened post-review. The long-winded intro for example seems to be as much a post-hoc add-on when a suit somewhere cried out "this game isn't selling our new setting enough!"

Baa was pretty prominent, yeah, spanning two games. But they were well integrated into the game and didn't seem out of place, as opposed to the current free-DLC type implementation. I get that they want to be a lot more serious in the new setting, but eh, their attempts, earnest as they may be, are rather dull. And it makes the heavy reuse of the classic names feel a bit out of place. Sure, it's nice to see references to famous characters like Maximus, Kastore, Crag Hack, Kastore, Kilburn, Haart, etc, but many of them are both very prominent characters in the game but bear no resemblance to their predecessors in anything but their names and (sometimes) portraits. And in puts some weird preconceptions into play - like half-expecting Lord Haart to turn out to be a secret necromancer when you get sent on a quest to find him. Another old thing I wish they had retained was the animated frames from the old 2D engine. Back then, one of the gargoyle or whatevers that looked like frame decoration would animate if you were near a secret door for example, which is a handy visual cue. In the current game, all you get is one of your characters barking something like "hmm" or "what's that?", which is both unreliable and prone to getting turned off because their regular speech is annoyingly repetitive. Hint: Don't select the cynical voice in the current game, unless you want to hear the "who forgot to take a bath?" line every dozen steps or so.

Even in death, surely John Edward would have contacted you about it?

Yeah, for the shrines, each corresponds to a day of the week, the day being named very similarly to the god that the shrine is dedicated to. Can be done in any order except that the final one, the one near the Forge, must be done last. The reward is a relic armour, heavy armour I think? The best weapon in the game are randomly generated ones with the Relentless tag, which gives them an extra swing. Didn't find any myself, probably would involve a bit of camping outside weapon vendors. The extra swing from the Dual Wield skill is at Grandmaster. Barbarians can't GM it.

Cast an ice spell on your potion before consuming it. In icy pop form it'd be so much more convenient to consume.

I didn't mind it, and indeed I'm forever disappointed at the 'fans' that caused NWC to backtrack on making the dark path in MM7 canonical and creating the Forge faction in Armageddon's Blade. Instead we got the last minute, half-arsed Conflux faction full of recycled units. But yeah, finished the game. In hindsight perhaps I needn't have bothered, it was a two-legged slog of a repetitive dungeon crawl that rivals the Deep Roads for tedium, and had about the same monster variety. If I ever do replay the game, I certainly won't be finishing it. Perhaps the strongest illustration of how much I wanted it to just end was that it was the only force powerful enough to defeat step-on-every-tile OCD gameplay; and I also completely dispensed with looting, leaving dozens of unidentified magic items behind with my bag full of white rubbish. So that's that, Act 4, completely soul destroying, and a bitter end to a decent game. If only they had given me laser gatling guns for that last bit so at least it'd be over more quickly. P.S. Blademaster did more damage per turn than the rest of the party put together. The Barbarian was bitterly, bitterly disappointing. Also couple numbers: ended with 630,000g and level 33 (and quite a long way short of 34), did not do Meow (will decide later). Careful management of XP had all characters within about 100xp of each other, ignoring this in the final dungeon blew out the difference to 6-700 in favour of the Blade Dancer.

Just got cursed by an Elite Facehugger. Clearing out the final dungeon now. Pretty standard fare so far, and repetitive enemies.

Oh god the air puzzle. It's perhaps the one thing in the game that highlights more than anything else the weakness of the grid-based system. Conceptually, on a piece of paper that they were designing it on, it might have made sense. But in practice, you can barely even see anything.

Ironically at a time the PnP is said to be more videogamey than ever. Can't say I miss it because it's just a set of behind-the-scene numbers - I imagine the various settings would be somewhat hard to recognise given the changes in the meantime anyway. What would be modern FR game look like? Probably half the cities destroyed, a majority of the gods dead, stuff like that?

Good on them for integrating DLC properly in Skyrim, but in the interest of fairness, it's the first time they've actually done that. Fallout 3's DLC is notoriously bad, and not just talking about the quality of the content, but how haphazardly it's bolted on. Hopefully the Skyrim way of doing it becomes the new norm.

Blarghraargh, the KS website itself is now falling into the trap of hiding information behind more clicks. One of the fun parts of visiting KS was seeing the nice activity indicator with a nice number next to it showing that there's something to read. Almost as bad as where MS hid the Shut Down function in Win8.

Fuji Golf in the Windows Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.1. But then Microsoft was also responsible for murdering the Links LS series. I've been informed that the golf game in Wii Sports Club (Wii Sports for Wii U) is mechanically superb and is arguably the best game to make use of the gamepad so far. You place the gamepad on the floor where it displays the ball on screen, and you can actually position your golf club head visually with it.

I am told Meow was in the very first game, so they've come full circle I guess. There's also been Eep and Yak along the way. And yes, there is a relic spear I've acquired normally.

Try dragging if right clicking to sell doesn't work. I've found that you can sell multiples of a scroll by right clicking on them, but if you want to sell a stack of one, you have to drag it over to the shop's inventory list (right clicking does nothing). EDIT: For those wondering why there's no relic dagger, well, there is one, it's just unobtainable because someone typed in a period instead of a comma in a plain text file. Fortunately as a result it's easily user-correctable, though being very early in the game, most have probably missed out on it (though with clever editing you can assign it to another quest that you haven't done).