Humanoid

I assumed it was just a weird-looking cat.

Ultima 8 is the Dragon Age 2 of the series. Except I kinda liked Ultima 8. It was fun to just goof around in Tenebrae.

You should play Might and Magic 4 and 7. And Ultima 4 and 7. Huh, funny how that works. Detail: Ultima 4 is the oldest recommended title here, and I have to admit the reasons are as much academic curiosity rather than gameplay. As far as I know, it's the first RPG to go beyond the kill everything, loot everything design that had been the sum total of the genre up to that point. Ultima 7 is plainly the best CRPG ever. Ultima 7 Part 2: Serpent Isle is a worthy follow-up if you want more, it's a more directed, less open-world experience, relatively speaking, though it's still pretty dang open compared to anything else. Might and Magic 4 and 5 are two sides of the same coin, and that's meant to be taken literally as well as metaphorically: they happen on the two sides of the titular world, XEEN. Gameplay doesn't really differ, so play four first so you can logically continue to five if you find yourself wanting more. That said, it's largely a moot point: you can install both games into one super-installation that is both games combined. Might and Magic 6 was the return of the series after a fairly lengthy hiatus, during which the developers focused on the first two instalments of the strategy spinoff. Heroes of Might and Magic was so successful that it overshadowed the core series to the extent that it became the core series (and the same happened again when Ubisoft acquired the property, until the recent MM10 reveal, the purchase was solely to continue making the Heroes games). Anyway, unlike its predecessors, it's fundamentally real-time, although it has a pseudo turn-based mode. Might and Magic 7 is essentially the same game, but with some of its more annoying rules streamlined, and is a bit of a tighter experience than the huge, sprawling MM6, hence the recommendation.

And yet people still want to believe modern professional sports are clean. A-yup.

Flexibility in naming your character is the best feature of the game! It's ridiculous that in this day and age, other games still refuse to acknowledge a simple space in your name. What is this, are the characters being stored as DOS 8+3 character filenames? *glares at WoW and TOR*

They should ship PC games on SSDs, and you'd insert them into a 2.5" removable drive rack mounted in a 5.25" external bay. They could call them 'cartridges', and you'd not need to install anything, and your save games and settings would be saved on the game cartridge itself! Totally novel idea, I know.

As long as it doesn't have dice poker. God, I'd trade for ALL the QTE if it meant I didn't have to sit there rolling and rolling until I got a favourable outcome. Even the horribly laggy armwrestling is an improvement.

Probably was unwise in hindsight, but I had 1.5 litres of sugar-free jelly/jello (delete as applicable).

This idea would work great if the player character was a cat. Unfortunately cats are extinct in Fallout.

Well, if you want a tiny scrap of hope to cling onto, the THQ bundle last year had games added to it twice instead of once.

Threw in $10, half to Humble half to charity. I haven't used Origin in over a year (since ME3, the only previous purchased game I have on the platform, which I quit two days in), so I was a little worried about any potential issues - but it worked clean enough. Registered the games (well, only Burnout and Mirror's Edge) easily, but The Sims 3 requires using the clunky Sims 3 website instead of Origin. And Origin got a little confused because I have the disc version of TS3 installed. It made me uninstall that (but not the existing disc-based expansions) before allowing installation of the Stuff pack from the bundle, which meant I had to download ~7GB worth of data that minutes ago was already on my PC. Then when I tried to test launching the game, it still asked for the CD of my newest expansion, so I had to uninstall that too and download it via Origin, after registering its key on the website, to remove the disc check. Fortunately I didn't have to reinstall the two middle expansions that I had. Blah, at least it works now, and happy to confirm that the non-Origin disc-based content works fine with the digital copy of the base game.

I had nothing. And usually have nothing, at least on weekdays. I tend to fall back on junk food for lunch at work, and nibble a fair bit during the day as well, so by nighttime I'm pretty much done for the day (both in terms of calories and satiety). So yeah, I had fish and chips for lunch and also finished a whole pack of Tim Tams over the course of the working day. Nothing since. EDIT: It's 1am now and while I am kinda peckish, I'm going to go to sleep instead shortly.

Finished Monaco multiplayer (combination of two-player and four-player play depending on availability), although we have to go back and 100% the final mission. Meanwhile, started knocking over the game single-player, getting through the first campaign today. Was worried initially that it'd be pretty dull doing so after the madcap multiplayer, but it's still very fun and challenging in a different way. At this stage it's my game of the year.

As a kid my reading material was more along the lines of astronomy and dinosaurs! That said, if there really is a DL book named The Legend of Humanoid, then yay.

Heh, I've seen the name and am aware of the Dragonlance connection, meant to say I'm not familiar with his work: I haven't read a word of either his writing, or of any Dragonlance material. But yeah, it means that I did have the impression for a couple of decades that Dragonlance as a setting was the work of two women, which I thought was pretty cool for the genre.

Because all I had to trade was a 4-pack of the base game. (And I've still never played it)

All the dual-platform titles are the ones available for a buck anyway.

Hickman is writing for Shroud of the Avatar, for what it's worth. Not familiar with him personally (up until this year I thought he was a she....).

It was technically in the initial launch version, but was locked away unless the game was modded (and supposedly designed to unlock only you beat the game on impossible anyway). A later patch just enabled it for everyone (and fixed the bugs, a lot of the options were downright unusable in their initial state, hence them being disabled).

It's the range of options that modify gameplay settings in various ways, usually making things more difficult. They're not necessarily meant to be balanced, and certain combinations can make the game literally impossible to win.

The new resource gathering bit of XCOM is the only real negative I'm drawing from it now. Unless it's a tactically useful thing, it sounds like simple busywork. Looked a bit at the Sims 4 coverage, and it does look quite a bit more intuitive than the mess that was controlling its predecessor, but I guess hoping for pure autonomy, which would have really sold the game to me, was probably wishful thinking.

Worst moment was probably when he launched the whip/chain thing at nothing. Some intelligence at guessing what the player is attempting to do would go far.

-RPS That's TWO good news stories about EA in a week. Now as bad good news comes in threes, what'll be the third? EDIT: Don't see any reference to it, so I assume it's not the case, but it'd be nice if the policy applied to retail keys registered with Origin - i.e. being able to reclaim the key within the timeframe.

I get that, and fully admit my unfamiliarity and consequent indifference to the setting influences my position. But in a tug-of-war between a better game and a more faithful game, I choose the former every time. Ultimately I think a question those with similarly indifferent opinions of the gameworld have to mine would be along the lines of "why does the act of hacking a couple of turrets have to be such a big deal that it needs its own game level(s) and mechanics to do?" So while I understand some purists may be horrified, I see no problem turning what would have been Matrix sections in the (future) design documents into simple decking skill checks - of which we already have implemented in a number of places anyway. For if that's the cost of getting more game with your full party and full complement of skills rather than the abbreviated ones, then I think it's the sensible trade. The issue of the Decker class is a comparatively minor sidenote. We already have D&D skills heavily modified in pretty much any iteration of the CRPGs, rebalancing Deckers to give them more 'real world' utility is an easy enough change. EDIT: And a genuine question from an SR newbie: What is it about the Matrix that makes it less acceptable to cut than the Astral Plane (which totally not familiar with)? And surely PnP players play not-irregularly with modules and parties which include no explicit use of the Matrix?

We know Microsoft are closing down their GFWL Marketplace and the associated points system in a few days. But some information that was put on then taken down from the Age of Empires Online page indicates that Games for Windows Live in its entirety is getting the kybosh in the middle of next year. While in a sense it's good riddance to bad rubbish, it's unclear what the fate of those with GFWL-encumbered games is if the developers/publishers don't choose to act. Grain of salt and all that, rumour and images blatantly stolen from this thread. Another unsourced image sort of backs the above.