Humanoid

Sure, but with the RTS aspect looking pretty flat, it'd need something special in its other qualities to really stand up. Again, early call, but splitting time between the builder aspects and being a dragon is something I'm not feeling is working. I wonder if the in-battle economy aspect is something that could be simplified or dropped. A more autonomous army, perhaps produced offscreen instead of at ingame bases, backing you as a full-time actor might have worked better than the current compromise.

For extra comedy, it's been mooted that Kutcher will front up for a series of Lenovo ads. St Jobs promoting Wintel machines? Perish the thought.

First turn of Dragon Commander, which I got as a backer reward. I'll flat out say I probably wouldn't really have looked at it if it wasn't a reward, based purely on the genre, and as a result I'd probably have to admit I might give it less than a fair chance. So far there's really nothing there that's grabbed me and made me want to keep playing. I will - one turn is one turn and all that - but the RTS aspect is a downright turn-off. If it turns out the game is viable while completely opting out of the RTS element, there might be a bit more in there worth seeing, but even then there's not really much opportunity for RP - no option to burn your insubordinate generals to a crisp for example - but such is expected for a game that markets itself on its other aspects.

Been too tired to play games today so instead sat down to watch Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Now I'm in even more of a dreamlike state. Too tired to even try to deconstruct it, just enjoyed it as the surrealist comedy that it is.

The Paypal cut is probably smaller, true, which may be advantageous if the scenario is taken in isolation. Momentum's a funny thing though, and it may be that the snowball effect of having a larger main campaign more than cancels that out. I'd say the scenario may be particularly true of stretch goals for example, for backers there's probably that visceral feeling of knocking over goal after goal in quick time, which encourages more spending than they might otherwise do in a post-campaign downtime.

I think I started IWD2 with a party of two, which went okay until somewhere between halfway and two-thirds through the game before it became too finicky to get through encounters. Added a couple more characters from that point to finish up, as far as I remember.

Especially given that Microsoft are abolishing their equivalent system. When a behemoth like Microsoft - a company with the turning circle of the Titanic - is showing itself to be more agile than yours, it's probably time to ditch the concrete boots.

And their sales tend to be highly regional anyway. Not like Steam where you have percentage discounts on varying list prices, but rather a tendency to not bother with sales at all in "non-core" regions (of which Australia is one).

If it means death to the stereotypical dwarven accent, I'm all for shared voices between races. Or a generic pool you can select from. At any rate, something like Saints Row does just fine with multiple PC voices.

The female human looks like an elf and the female dwarf looks like a human, I'd say.

Be sure to remember to buy the horse armour DLC before you do that though.

I thought I would be playing Dragon Commander, but it turns out the installer I downloaded from Larian directly is corrupted, and is yet unfixed. Ah well, I'll download via Steam for now, fortunately my Steam downloads are unmetered. More truck driving in the meantime.

I hate the fact that "you can kill anyone!" is the gold standard for reactivity. Yes, I recognize that it's a symptom of having combat as your primary gameplay mechanic. But real reactivity, it seems to me, would involve interactions more sophisticated than just kill/don't any character. Like talking? Going into business with? Sharing an apartment? Playing tic-tac-toe? The problem of course is that a lot of these require specific scripting to be done well, unless you go the Fable/Sims route of fake speech. It's the opposite I think, the claim isn't that it's the gold standard, but that it's the first hurdle. Beyond the base state of existing, which most games treat as an immutable condition, killing an NPC is logically the next step: that is, getting the game to react to the simple binary possibilities of a given NPC being alive or dead. We celebrate the possibility, because like QWOP, barely anyone gets over that first hurdle. If a game can take that step, then as you say, the next frontier is the more 'sophisticated' nuanced stuff.

Lothering is the third intro. Or indeed fourth, if you count the wilds and the tower as separate intros. Yeah, it's a long slog, of which only one part varies.

Heh, I get frustrated with that too ... I mean, I could upload giant uncompressed photos but I'm still old fashioned enough to worry about annoying people with loading them, and most people still don't like clicking links vs. embedding. That "visitor" (cricket?) has an adorable face! ...the robber fly...ick. Makes me think of the Alien using its inner mouth to punch a hole in people's faces. Nice capture, tho. What I used to do, before auto-resizing and before big download allowances, was to upload two images, and use the smaller one as the embed that would link to the larger one when clicked. e.g. [url=http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/jj404/Michael_Ab/robberfly_zps5e4e4b83.jpg][/url]Like so: Probably totally unnecessary these days.

I've felt for a long time that the Origins in, er, Origins, were a nice idea that ultimately harmed the game. Instead of a smooth curve in which the writers could ease you into the game and provide better justification for what followed, they instead let you play a few independent ideas for a while before abruptly grabbing you by the collar and throwing you into the plot, communicating beyond doubt that "yep, you're on the rails now." I've complained a lot about being forced to become a warden in DAO, but ultimately it's not so much the fact itself as opposed to how it was handled - and that itself is down to the hamhanded compromises they had to make in reconciling six different stories into a common one-size-fits-all set of circumstances. So yes, I am in effect arguing for more linearity in the game. Or at least, making an argument that while divergent non-linearity is good, convergent non-linearity is a far more finicky affair.

... the way they handle their DRM-free version annoys me deeply... trying to sell people to the oh-so-hasslefree DRM that is Steam. To avoid swearing: in the olden days, developers were actually able to package bugfixes into small executables, and in most cases these even worked with any previous version of the game. This ability to serve their customers has been lost apparently. To be fair, they're not alone in that Expeditions: Conquistador had the same issue to an extent: their first patch was able to be released as a small executable, but their second required a redownload of the whole game. Applying Occam's Razor, I'd say the stated explanation that Unity makes it hard to patch games is a valid one, as opposed to deliberately wasting bandwidth to push a static number of users towards a different platform. We'll see for sure either way once a few more titles are released.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwpHVBjPr28[/media]

You're never going to make it as a AAA developer with that attitude!

It was hard to tell what station had what kind of content though.

Patch 1.0.2 notes, there's a fair bit of rebalancing going on there alongside the bug fixes. EDIT: DRM-free version is updated on the account website too, have to redownload the whole game though.

It's not even the full series. The only instalment I played, and then only because it was on the driver floppy for my Gravis Gamepad, was Goodbye Galaxy (I think).

RoboCop? Privateer

It's $20, so yes.

Had a couple hours to play some sort of two-player multiplayer game. Thought, why not finally try Company of Heroes? Neither of us had ever touched it, let alone knew the slightest bit about it mechanically, but with limited time, decided to dive right in. 2vs1 against an AI on Easy, should be plenty of opportunity to mess around learning the mechanics as we go, right? Wrong. Ah well, I'll go play the tutorial sometime soon I guess.