Humanoid

It's not regret as such, but I do feel that at $250 I kind of overshot my valuation for the game. The drop down to the next tier was too great, so in a way I could say their product gap between $95 and $250 "swindled" me. But nah, in reality it just means no T-shirt addon for me, something I almost try to get from the high profile drives. Still, once W2 is out and is well received, I'd be happy to reconsider that latter point. Adjust for inflation so it'll look slightly better!

Looks like they gave no thought whatsoever to UI usability at that kind of resolution. Yeah I know good players use hotkeys, but still, seems lazy.

If it comes to be that Obsidian need to do another Kickstarter project once the bulk of the income from Eternity comes through, I'd rather it tackle something new than just funding a straight sequel. From a pragmatic point of view, a series that can't sustain itself from its own sales (in a situation where the bulk of revenue from sales goes directly to the first party) is harder to justify crowdfunding for than a fresh new concept, which jives with the idea of crowdfunding new ideas which might seem riskier. That's false altruism though because the real reason is that while I enjoyed most of the IE games, it's generally in spite of the engine and not because of it, so continuing to evolve that gameplay path instead of exploring alternatives is somewhat less desirable for my own selfish ends.

Because Ubisoft.

There's a spectrum on which the various properties can be graded depending on how much they've been maintained, or inversely, have fallen into disuse. The superhero examples are very much towards the former end of the spectrum, where the other end would be something like, say, the Flintstones - I don't imagine a Flintstones game would have any more cachet embracing their roots than trying something new. Mickey Mouse would be somewhere in between, but probably far enough along that it would not guarantee a loser.

It could be argued it's because the generation that had the most affinity for the property in the first place is now older, with the idea of, right or wrong, attempting to adapt to that reality. No one's making games with the classic Hanna-Barbera or WB cartoons so it's hard to say whether the traditional sell would have been any more successful. I guess this problem really only applies to properties which cross media types because Mario obviously doesn't have that problem, where inversely Sonic in trying to adapt has just kept on digging deeper. I have to admit that on a personal preference is for Obsidian to develop just about any other Disney IP other than Star Wars - a property I have absolutely no affection for.

I was banging the drum for the notion of a "combatless RPG" as far back as on the BIS forums way back when, and I guess something like what's proposed here - not the Walking Dead but something of a future evolution of it - would be right up my alley. The term is not meant to be literal, but is meant to reflect the notion of de-emphasising combat to such a degree that it'd probably be only encountered if you went looking for, or indeed instigated it. I'd be looking for something with much greater scope and range of consequences than the Walking Dead of course, which will necessarily (and not undesirably) take away from the cinematic angle that that game had. I can't quite decide how much voiced dialogue would be essential for this type of game though. God, decent voice synthesis would be gold for this type of game.

Yeah, regrettably my primary character was a scoundrel, and the positioning felt so clunky for reasons I can't fully explain. Playing a WoW rogue with 400ms latency felt smoother than a scoundrel with 40ms latency. I guess only being able to sneak attack only 1/3 or so of enemies because of the grouped nature of spawns also detracted from the sneaky bastard gameplay experience. Was in the low 40s when I quit, the story ran completely out of steam and the gameplay had died a fair way earlier. I got as far as patching and getting to the character select screen once the game went F2P, but haven't been able to muster any real desire to finish that playthrough.

Heard the same about IA, but have mechanical issues with the class (and its mirror), either shoehorning the notion of backstabbing as a ranged class, or the concept of cover-based shooting in a genre where it doesn't really fit. I haven't played since my trial month ended almost a year ago, mind.

Current special if you have all the non-terrible D&D games on GOG, NWN2 comes down under $5 right now. 76% off! Retiring my CDs for that price.

TOR just took the Revan and Exile stuff directly from the novels instead of establishing anything new, as far as I'm aware.

One of the main reasons I can't really go back to those old first-person games is how there's nothing visually distinct from standing on one tile or another one in the same locale. New graphics solve that problem, but can't say I'm particularly enthused about the extremely discrete notion of movement and position those games had and which the video seems to hint at.

It is about on par with Gamebryo's camera-ganking facial animations, yes.

RIP LucasArts 1982-1998

I'd just try to suppress the natural OCD tendency to clear them out and leave them well enough alone. While one might assume the various entries to be cross- and backwards compatible, there's a risk that certain programs might expect a specific version of the libraries and throw a fit if it isn't present. Not disastrous, but it'd likely lead to reinstallation of the program that bundled it in the first place.

It uses an in-house checkout system instead of Amazon payments for what it's worth. As there's no option to switch currency, your credit card provider will be the one doing the conversion and they might charge a small conversion fee.

Dammit. Oh well, I might have, er, half of a lazy single-layer transfer then.

I made the mistake of loading up on 2TB drives before and am sort of capped on space on my HTPC without disposing of some of the drives - but upgrading them to 3TB drives is too little gain for the effort. Impatiently waiting for either vendor to release 4TB 'slow' spin drives, or indeed 5TB if the price is within reason - they're due near the end of the year last I heard. I've filled barely half of the 800GB on my desktop spindle drive, yet have filled the full 12GB available to my HTPC, with about 50+ Blu-rays in the queue to be ripped as soon as I acquire more space.

Yeah, in my last game I ended up deliberately leaving a gap in my satellite coverage to ensure abduction missions continued to happen. Alternatively, I think a mod can create that behaviour without needing to game the system.

The alpha build of Moebius, from Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road Kickstarter, has been released to backers. Torn on whether to try it.

Up until the second expansion, I believe WoW officially supported dial-up connections as part of the minimum system requirements. So yeah, not a whole lot to it.

My feeling is that the support is based more on what they're specifically promising for this instalment - the turn based combat, higher degree of roleplaying, the co-op play, the return to an isometric view, etc - rather than what was in the prior games. Not that I speak for everyone, of course.

Did a bit of paid overtime yesterday which neatly covers the $65(+shipping) boxed tier. Done. Shame there's really not much in the way of swag to make the $100 tiers appealing. Ah well, must remember to email the Shadowrun guys this week to up my pledge to them anyway.

As long as they're not 5/5 panicked, it's a stable situation: panic will not go up until you either, a) ignore an abduction occuring on the same continent, or b) fail a terror mission. Remember also that a country at 5/5 does not actually leave until the end of the calendar month, except if a terror failure occurs to take them to 5/5 (in which case they leave immediately), so it's still a recoverable position. Aside, refusing council missions is actually not all that bad - often the first month's council mission is skipped if it's a bomb disposal one. Actually lowering panic is done via launching a satellite, successfully completing an abduction mission in that country only, succeeding at a terror mission on the same continent (actual reduction depends on number of civilians saved), or successfully assaulting the alien base (worldwide reduction), which I guess you could say ends act 1 of the game.

Meh, I just started construction of my second lab directly under the first lab. Why is it couterproductive to build labs adjacent to other labs? Heh, I meant that most experienced players will build no labs at all. There's a relatively shallow tech tree in this game, which I imagine will remain so until an expansion at the very least, and so every single dollar (or simoleon) you have is always better spent on other things. That said, it's on normal difficulty, so it's really not that big of a deal either way. At classic and impossible difficulties, you flat out can't afford to build any without hobbling your game: you can't afford to "waste" a single cent. The strategic base-building aspect is one of the weaker parts of the game, and there really is a definitive "optimal" way to go about it once you're used to the game. Again, not a worry now, but once you've played through once or twice, future new games will play out exactly the same way in terms of initial builds.