Humanoid

I didn't know that movie was a thing, so I had assumed the blog was probably just a bunch of photoshopped movie posters with Steven Seagal substituted in for various other actors (e.g. Steven Seagal as the title character in Home Alone). But no, it's the real thing. Huh.

But, but, I only listed three classes! In all seriousness though, I did the usual thing of starting the game with a vaguely RPish party, taking things that looked interesting and such. But the game is tuned such that that approach turned the game into an unfun slog. If there was an "easy" difficulty (call it Peasant difficulty), I'd go with that combination. But yeah, even at Adventurer difficulty, even fights that were no real threat of dying (given enough potions for longevity) took literally three or more times longer as they are now as you chip slowly away at their health. I was already beginning to feel burnout by the end of Act 1 (the castle in particular). If that's the old school gaming experience they're trying to replicate, then it's one I want no part of. So yeah, my general advice to avoid that kind of tedium is, sadly, to min-max a fair bit, especially early on where each point you get is comparatively more impactful. For a second playthrough, sure, spread your wings a bit, but I fear a sub-par party as someone's first might end up turning them off the game altogether. - Pick one *melee* weapon skill that your class can GM and advance it to the maximum rank available to you at the cost of all else. Which means Expert at level 3, except for Spear because of stupid trainer availability. (Spears are awesome but be prepared to suffer in act 1) And keep going to 15. Weapon skill is both the best way to improve damage, and the best way to improve hit chance, to the extent that even if it did only one of those it'd still be worth taking over anything else. If this was a multiplayer game, everyone would call it brokenly overpowered. - For magic, you want Expert Earth and Novice Light as an absolute minimum, and on different characters. You also want Expert Fire on either character (or a third one). Putting all your healing eggs in one basket will make things a lot more difficult. The Fire magic is for the Burning Determination spell, which prevents the most debilitating effects you can suffer, and which makes the curative spells in the Water magic list completely optional (and by extension, Water magic itself). - With that sorted, the only real other threat is Feebleminding, with requires either Expert Air or potions to solve. But you'd want the potions anyway unless you always keep a piece of equipment with 100% Feeblemind protection on your Airmancer, and it happens comparatively rarely enough such that Air magic is nowhere near a priority as the ones listed. - Obvious, but abuse the hell out of rest. It's cheaper by at least an order of magnitude compared to patching up your party on the go (it also cures Weakness and Feeblemind), and there are no negative consequences for doing so. It also maximises the utility of your chef - you did hire the chef in the first inn, right? (But only after the Spider Lair, because you have two free NPCs to take to that)

I've read that there's two of every NPC type in the game, no more no less, so I'd assume it's the same. But he wouldn't be free unlike the quest one I guess. On melee damage classes: Two mercenaries might be painful in by the mid-game when you find that they lag in the weapon skills department. Master weapon gives 5*15 = 75% damage increase. GM gives 8*25 = 200% bonus. So that's 175% damage on your weapon, vs 300%, passive. *Every* other Might class and *every* hybrid class can GM a melee weapon, so that's not a factor. Every one of them, except the Defender, can match the Mercenaries' maximum of either Master Dual-wield or Master Two-handed. This is a very deep hole that the Merc ends up in. The Bladedancer and Barbarian pull even farther ahead from GMing those two skills respectively. Supposedly then, the Merc is meant to make up the difference via their ability to GM Warfare. That gives the ability to crit on demand. But what that's doing is making you spend a non-trivial 25 mana to match what the other classes are doing naturally. And I think that's just broken game balance. Even accounting for the fact that they yield greater benefit from the Sword and Axe masteries, they will still underperform. (But that said, if determined to go that route it means a 2H sword is the best option to take full advantage of the ability, and a 2H Axe next.) There is one niche for them however: the ability to crit on demand means the Master Mace bonus effectively becomes a stun on demand. Interesting, but I wouldn't say it's worth carrying a whole class around for when a spell can reasonably do similar things. TL;DR: Blade Dancers and Barbarians are the god-kings of melee. Rangers and Scouts are reasonably close substitutes and come with the bonus of being able to perform backup healing duties (Earth and Light mastery respectively). The Crusader is a one-of-a-kind class - a hybrid that is almost as effective with either Might or Magic. Mercenaries, Defenders and Hunters struggle to find a place in a well-balanced group. Mercs struggle with damage, Defenders struggle with game mechanics working against their intended role (until very very late game), Hunters because they're a hybrid with no viable secondary role (no access to healing magic)

Gorgon is Prosper? Who'd've thunk?

Had some decaf Diet Coke. It's really not that bad, would buy again. Would obviously have to hand in my man badge if I ever had one in the first place.

I have no idea what an Android tablet would do if you connected a trackball to it, heh. But it'd do movie playback and all that media stuff fine, won't play any PC games outside probably what would run in DOSBox, should do some basic office suite processing with the right app. Going with an 8-10" Intel "Bay Trail" Atom-based tablet running full Windows (so *not* Windows RT) would make it quite a bit more flexible for your purposes, being able to run PC games natively and be a fair bit more powerful, while only being marginally bulkier. A few models as mentioned previously are the Dell Venue Pro 8, Lenovo Miix 2 (both 8"), Asus T100, HP Omni 10 , Microsoft Surface 2 *Pro* (10" models). The Asus has a keyboard dock included, I think it's an optional accessory for the other two. EDIT: It's worth noting that the current models are limited to 32-bit Windows, and therefore only run 2GB of RAM. Sometime in the next month or two the various vendors will be releasing 64-bit capable models with 4GB RAM and Windows 8.1.

The thing with a pure archer party is that rangers and scouts, the only two classes who can GM a ranged weapon, can also GM a melee weapon. (Which, aside, highlights the sad plight of the ineffective Mercenary class even more) Without magic backing, they're going to end up mainly using those melee weapons - daggers and axes respectively. Which would work, but is sort of against the spirit of the challenge. A pure ranged party would therefore necessarily involve magic. Water magic, specifically Frozen Ground, which unfortunately neither archer class provides, and likely with the support of early Air magic, on at least a couple characters to position enemies who get close. You'll want the GM Water spell, Tsunami for sure too. So first off I'd say there's a hard requirement for either a Druid or a Shaman for the Tsunami. Now the Ranger provides one source of Air magic, so you can probably do double Ranger if desired, plus a Scout - or triple Ranger I guess, but that'd be kinda silly. This would be the maximal archery makeup I'd think. More practically, replace one of the Rangers with any spellcaster except Rune Priest (the only spellcaster with zero access to Water) for redundancy purposes. TL;DR: Ranger / Ranger / Scout / (Druid/Shaman) or Ranger / Scout / (Druid/Shaman) / (Druid/Shaman/Freemage)

The orbs/staves are mana-free too. But that said, checking the skill tables the runepriests and shaman at least get master weaponskills. Druids and Freemages have no such ability (and poor druids can't GM magical focus either, so the worst of both worlds). EDIT: Not mine, just a handy reference of the various skills. Checking out the tier bonuses (second tab) demonstrates how narrow your effective choices in character development are, for weapon skills in particular, the difference between a weapon that maxes out at Master compared to Grandmaster is over *double*. That is, 5% times the amount of skill points to max out master versus 8% times the points to GM. Yes, over double damage.

I started off with a notepad and writing down the various details (if you neglect to read what the expert trainers tell you after training, there's no way to get them to repeat the location of the master trainer), but soon gave up and copy-pasted the various lists into a text editor and printed it out. I'd turn in my hardcore gamer badge if I had ever earned one in the first place. Aside, I'm struggling to see the point in raising any weapon skills bar Magical Focus on the pure spellcasting classes - having a guaranteed hit on every attack surely beats the suboptimal hit chances using normal weapons. That said, both my spellcasters have amulets that prevent feeblemind, so I haven't found a situation where they were locked out of spells yet (other than general stuns and y'know, death). But only early in Act 2 so I don't know how it progresses.

Would it be too outlandish to suggest they're being incentivised to produce this type of editorial? Wouldn't surprise anyone.

Put one point in bows/crossbows for everyone but no more. It's just there to use when you have nothing better to do, but the gains from upgrading both the skill, upgrading perception, and upgrading your weapons are pitifully small that it's not worth it for the maximum three turns-ish that you get to use them in the best case scenario. The problem is exacerbated by the encounter design wherein the hardest fights are often ambushes where you can't really get into position to shoot - thus creating a situation where you mostly end up using the bows for fights that are pretty trivial in the first place. Another hint: Perception is a terribly inefficient way of improving you hit chance, as it's only worth one point per, erm, point. Contrast to increasing weapon skills, which increase it by two points, and increase damage by 5% on top of that. The heavy armour skill is also worth two points per skill point. The two-hander and dual-wield skills are only one point per point, but have pretty good expert and master bonuses. Anyway, the point is that if bows were a bit more viable as a primary source of damage, as opposed to just some supplemental damage at the start of encounters, then Perception might be reasonable value, but generally speaking, you're better off stacking Might plus the weapon skills. Miscellaneous hint: Anyway, I restarted the game in order to min-max a bit more, not because of OCD, but because the game was simply turning into a tedious slog with my initial party. Decided on a melee-heavy party, because I hate mana management. Barbarian, Bladedancer, Crusader, Runepriest. Some observations: The notion of tanking with a tough - likely a Defender - tanking character is appealing. But unfortunately until fairly late in the game, this proves to be pretty ineffective due to the unreliability of the skills needed to support this style. On the surface it's easy enough, one point in Warfare nets you the 'taunt' ability to force the enemy to attack your tank. But working against you are the difficulty in actually getting the attack to land, since your tank will have significantly worse chance to hit than a damage-oriented melee character. Both because of stat allocation, and because of the massive penalty incurred from wearing heavy armour. Even if you overcome that hurdle, you will not infrequently find that, for the enemies that matter, the target is immune to the effect. Note that the Master-level Warfare abilities might support this style better once you get there, but that's not available until Act 3. Which brings me to a bit of a rant. The seemingly arbitrary location of trainers. Now, there has always been an element of this in earlier Might and Magic games, but the new version makes it quite a bit worse due to the content gating. You have no way of knowing at the start, but a seemingly arbitrary choice of skill may end up crippling you for some time due to this. A glaring example is the Sword skill. Both Expert and Master trainers are fairly easily accessible during Act 1. The expert Spear trainer isn't even available until Act 2. My 18-might Crusader, mainly built for healing and wielding a *one-handed* sword, is-and-was comfortably outdoing my 40-might spear-wielding Barbarian. It's extra unfortunate because a simple solution would be simply removing the pointless gate that blocks access to the second town, Seahaven, during Act 1. I guess that technically makes another hint: don't take spears. Barbarians can GM two-handed maces and spears, so while in the long term it will end up even, you'll be suffering for a good portion of the early game.

I did end up digging the information up, no thanks to the devs and all thanks to Google. And with actual useful information in hand, set out anew. It's a bit unfortunate that the skill distribution is so narrow, such that for many skills there's only one choice of class available if you want to grandmaster it. And grandmastering generally makes a huge difference, potentially by a factor of two or even more. The most egregious is Dark Magic which can't even be learned at novice level by anyone but a Freemage. As a melee character, the only optimal choices are a dual wielding bladedancer or a two-hander barbarian because they're the only ones who can GM both the weapon and the supporting skill. That kind of thing.

Now that I'm reasonably familiar with the fundamental mechanics, it makes it all the more frustrating how poor nonexistent the game's documentation is. Want a listing of spells in each spell school? Nuh-uh. A summary table of what classes have access to what skill caps? Nope. A simple listing of what each hireling bonus actually is? Haha, no way. I've gone on about this before: I understand why we can't have extensive paper-based documentation any more. But for the love of god, make an effort to produce a reasonable substitute. Right now many devs cynically use digital distribution as a transparent excuse not to bother producing anything at all. EDIT: Another annoyance, though one hard to actually blame the devs for, is that the concept of Early Access games inevitably pollute the usual information sources with outdated information not relevant to the game when it is finally released. Not sure what the solution is, but it's going to be a problem with many more future games.

Yeah, the way the product page puts it, it reads more or less like a total squad tactics game - and assuming it is, I'll probably give it a miss since I'm a bit burnt out of tactical thinking post-XCOM.

It saddens me that every encounter is restricted to be an all-or-nothing affair. Aggro some enemies and you will kill them, or die trying. Even if you manage to get some space between you and them, they will pursue you forever, and you're locked out of interacting with anything, including, sadly, zone transitions. I led some enemies on a merry chase to the gates of Sorpigal - y'know, the gates that don't actually have doors on them and are always wide open - but nope, no entry. It's sad because my primary strategy in MM6/7 mainly involved running away in that fashion.

Yeah, for a low tech game the load times are surprisingly long - and it's installed on a fast SSD.

Hint for beginners: cure poison is a novice level earth spell and available from the vendor in the starting town. Anyway, some more quibbles: - The ingame journal sucks. I understand the concept of the old school 'take a notepad with you at all times', but I remember the old games automatically recording a lot more useful information than what you get now. Such as what colour barrels do what, which trainers are where, etcetera. P.S. Would also have been nice for the local map to tell you what the local area is called, and be scrollable. P.P.S. I wish it would mark down loot containers that you haven't opened for whatever reason, such as riddles. - Did the castle 'dungeon' to rescue the governor or whatever. So far I'd say it's been the most tedious part of the game. "Find the brown switch on a random brown wall somewhere in the level" may be an old school design, but that doesn't mean it makes for good gameplay: not now, and not back then. There's a lot to dislike about modern RPG simplifications, but *making things properly visible* isn't one of them. - The levelling up process can be pretty irritating in that you have to open two separate windows (stats and skills), allocate points in them, close them, then open up the other one. And the windows are *just* big enough that they block you from clicking the shortcut to open the other window without closing the current one. - The night/day cycle has been slowed down since the early access, but I still think it's quite a bit too fast. In summary, the main thing I'd say about the game is that is succeeds at recreating the old school experience, for better and for worse. In this regard I can say the developers have 'done it right'. But all that approach guarantees is the possibility of a good game, and not a great one. It'd be fantastic if the next step, in a sequel perhaps, is to go back and ask the question "why was it done this way?" to each and every classic design element, keep the good ones and throw out the bad anachronisms. Despite the negative tone of all the above, I do want to make it clear that I'm having a pretty good time with it.

It is somewhat interesting that the story can survive the player character being a fighter, thief or bard, as long as it's not a female fighter, thief or bard. I'm picturing in my head a game where you can play a dockworker, a chef, or an accountant, with a supposed story that would be perfectly fine with any of those roles, as long as you're a guy. It's just a bit weird to be flexible in one area but immutable in the other. Static protagonists are nothing new, but there's generally a *lot* more that's static about them other than their gender.

That said, buying Ubisoft games through Steam just adds another layer of complications since Uplay is required anyway, no? 30% off for the next day at GMG by the way, comes to $17.50 for the deluxe edition with the code 33M15F-1DGAOD-YLXBYR P.S. Don't bother using the GMG capsule installer they give you, just plug the Uplay key into the Uplay client.

Just wait until the Al Qaeda sysadmin upgrades their XP machines once support expires later this year. "Wait, so I have to create a Microsoft Account and download the app to launch the chemical weapon missiles? Jihad on Microsoft!"

I was never going to love MM10, I knew that from the start. I've never loved any of the mainline Might and Magic games, and their fundamental gameplay elements that were shared with its contemporaries. Hacking, slashing, and looting were never what made an RPG for me. But with that in mind, MM10 is a well made game, and I'm very much enjoying it. Likes: - The nice and easy inventory management, no more grid hell like in previous games in the series that I've played. - Character creation mostly seems about right. Enough room to feel ownership of the characters, while not being an opaque spreadsheet. The stats and skills are simple enough to understand immediately. - Straightforward combat mechanics, no messing around with initiative systems or anything like that. Minor quibble though, I get a bit disoriented about who's move it is on the first turn of every combat. Since all your characters get to move before the enemy anyway, may as well have hardcoded the leftmost character to be the initially selected one. Dislikes: - Poison. Oh god, poison. I'm happy with the concept of poison being a genuinely dangerous thing, instead of like in most games where all it does it turn your health bar green for a few seconds. But when a dose of poison means you can barely walk from the inn at full health to make it to the temple to get cured without dying again on the way, it feels way too harsh. (For those who haven't played, poison 'ticks' every single step you take, and can take around 10% of your health each time) - The grid based movement, while playing quite well in dungeons and in combat in general, feels unnecessarily restrictive in town. I wouldn't have minded a dual-mode movement system here that relaxed the rules out of combat zones. - Two portraits per race/gender combination is just sad, considering there were quite a few more options in prior games. - The Ubisoft rebooted MM universe. Admittedly though it's out of total unfamiliarity with it - I haven't played any other MM games post-Ubi acquisition.

As inevitably already posted, Privateer's intro is the one standout in my mind, the wonderfully insane machismo setting up the player character perfectly. I'll contrast it to Strike Commander intro, same devs, same cutscene tech, same production values. But instead of setting up the cynical Brownhair, it only serves to set up the much more typical heroic protagonist Redhair, and so has nowhere near the same impact. In general though, it's hard to differentiate between nominations for lists like these - whether an entry is there on its own merits, or because of the game that it backs up. That said: - It would be hard to argue against Privateer 2's ensemble cast being the finest ever assembled, and the finest that ever will be assembled. Shame about the game itself though. - Interstate 76's lo-fi 70s schtick, with the intro's pretensions of being that for a classic TV show. The awesome music gives it an unfair advantage however. - Civilization's iconic "In the beginning..." sequence still warms the heart like no other. But again, being *the* game that made me the gamer I am today, it's hard to be objective about it. - Wing Commander 4's excesses has brought about mixed reactions, but at the time I had never seen anything like it, not least in terms of length. Three distinct scenes segueing into the first gameplay sequence... I'm a critic of the excessively 'cinematic' gameplay of today, but I loved that sequence. - Before I forget: Wing Commander 2. Sound Blaster. Voice pack. Yeah.

The Ubisoft HoMM setting, yes. There are very frequent shoutouts to the old NWC setting though, mostly NPCs.

The grid movement is going to be OCD-hell. Must....step in every tile.

Canada unleashes bioweapon attack on the UK, in the form of a cruise ship with a payload of DISEASED CANNIBAL RATS.