Humanoid

I've been sick and housebound since Wednesday, but sadly haven't had any desire to play a game of any sort despite the downtime. Neither did I play anything during the easter long weekend, so the lack of motivation can hardly be attributed to illness At least today, thanks to the GOG sale, I got around to firing up NWN2 and launching the MoTB campaign. As soon as I hit character creation, I realised I'd forgotten just about everything I knew about D&D character creation - there were classes I didn't recognise, and I had only perfunctory recollection of what the actual effects of the various stats, feats, and skills had. I think I'm going to go with a severely combat-unoptimised pure rogue to roleplay fairly strictly with, and hope I don't die too much at normal difficulty. If I do I'll just tune it down to easy I guess. And gah, getting 18 levels of experienced dumped on your head in one go sounds rewarding, but having to take them one at a time and allocate my skills manually was a chore. Quit the game after I was done with that, will see how much desire I have to go on with it tomorrow. The first and only real time I attempted MoTB, I only got out of the starter dungeon and maybe half-an-hour to an hour beyond that. The second, and until now, last time I tried, I didn't even get that far - my character was so ineffectual at combat that I got sick of dying to every single pack and quit. Aside from that, just saw the post about TOR2.0, will investigate to see if there's anything at all in that update for single-player campaigners. The AoE2 talk has also got me sort of interested in the subject, but I think my CDs are about 700km away from me at the moment. I think when I can be bothered going out, I'd rather pick up a $10 budget rerelease of the game rather than this new HD edition. Also patched XCOM (I'm usually in offline mode, so much so that I'd call online mode "patching mode") with the view to playing a new Second Wave Classic campaign in the short-to-mid term future. Looks like I'll have to wait for the Toolboks mod to be fully updated for the current patch before I can play though. No-delay overwatch command is essential for gameplay!

Could have picked up the MM1-6 pack instead for the same price and been able to try MM6 which has nigh-identical graphics to MM8, and be able to play World of Xeen (MM4+5) to boot!

Yeah, I was vaguely interested in the idea of it when it was announced, but it doesn't really pass muster if you look at what you get. I suppose it might be a good option for people who rely on Steam for multiplayer support (note that the new version is *not* compatible in any way with the original release for multiplayer), since that's apparently the biggest change. Other than that there's fairly standard updates for modern machines, but fairly minimal ones that have already been accomplished by the mod community. Check out the feature list of the UserPatch for the original release - there's a *lot* of overlap between it and the "official" HD version. Indeed you could say it's better - such as the aforementioned UI stretching, plus smart unit build queue splitting. I'm disappointed at the missed opportunity to do a real update to the game. AoE2 is, to this day, the last RTS game I've played for any meaningful length of time, and indeed is, alongside Total Annihilation, one of the two games of that genre I can say I genuinely like and have good memories of. Given I could probably fairly say that RTS is my least favourite genre of game (FPSes running a close second), I'd consider that fairly high praise. It was the multiplayer game of choice (besides, er, Mario Kart) in my household growing up, so I would note also that there's no offline LAN support in the new release - I'd have to buy three copies of it just to replicate those experiences, as opposed to just firing up the game on multiple machines with the one CD. (Tangential rant: what happened to those old fashioned "multiplayer spawn" installations of yesteryear? Moneygrubbing bastards.) At any rate, I had a quick look at the Steam forum for AoE2HD and it doesn't seem pretty. Sure, overreactions are standard for this type of thing, but there seem to be some legitimately serious issues such as frame rate drops and multiplayer connectivity drops/lag. Plus they changed the food icon from a steak to an ear of corn. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

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.