Humanoid

No, it's the guy you always blast away because you took the "Four Eyes" trait, and he's wearing the first damned pair of glasses you've seen on a character who you can get away with murdering. There's a pair of glasses on a table in Doc Mitchell's house.

Made one final attempt to extract some value out of my SR3 sale purchase, unsuccessfully. Steam counting playtime at 13 hours but it drags so much it felt a lot longer - but that's where the clock's going to stop for good. Secondly, while not categorised as 'playing' per se, I've also gone cold turkey on the Project Eternity discussion, since every thread in the first few pages is either about a topic I've already dropped my two bob on, or is utterly irrelevant to my interests (mostly the latter now). Will see if anything changes after the funding drive is over. Another game I've fallen out of love with is King of Dragon Pass. On initial acquisition I was thinking it might have enough gameplay to cover me until X-COM's release, but that turned out to be wildly overoptimistic. Just got too frustrated with the all-too-narrow scope of it all, and ended up only playing one victory.

Glasses make displays generally smaller though - should have been obvious really but it never occurred to me until I did some relatively recent research into buying a new TV, in terms of considering distance-to-size optimisation. Aside, I always end up magnifying my Firefox text size unintentionally, because of the Ctrl-mousewheel shortcut. This will happen without fail at least a few times a week... P.S. A typical modern 27" monitor will have a greater pixels-per-inch count than any other mainstream screen size either smaller or bigger.

Despite being here on an RP-oriented games forum, I don't really have much of a history with 'classic' RPGs. Indeed I'd say the story begins and ends with Ultima 7/Serpent Isle, with a brief detour into Ultima 8. It's all down to the maligned combat system, which makes it perfect for my tastes. The closer the design of an RPG approaches that of an adventure game, the happier I am. I had no interest whatsoever in the combat-oriented RPGs of the era - your Might and Magics, your Wizardrys, your Gold Box games - I watched my older cousin sink hours into the latter, but never was interested in trying it out for myself. My PC gaming fare as a kid was more along the lines of the god game: even a game like Civilization which was one of my first loves I generally played as a god game instead of a strategy game, peaceful perfectionist expansion on easy difficulty. But I digress. Sometime in the latter part of that decade, I had an Electronics Boutique voucher that I needed to use within a month, and there being no titles at the time that I was interested in specifically, I ended up using it on what happened the most critically acclaimed title of that particular time, being Baldur's Gate 2. From that gateway I suspect my story mostly lines up with a majority here, getting attached to the BIS ecosystem and all that. Ahem, so to answer - it's not a very long list: Ultima 7: The Black Gate Ultima 7 Part 2: Serpent Isle Ultima 8: Pagan (somewhat incongruous inclusion, but a big part of my transition to full term PC gaming) Baldur's Gate 2; into Fallout 1/2/NV, Torment Bloodlines The Witcher 2 There aren't really any "almost" titles that I could include in the list: the gap to the next tier of RPGs for me personally is a fairly big one.

Same, if only because it's one of those 'minor' games for me, in that I pledged a token amount for it not because I particularly wanted it, but because like Dead State, I just wanted to support the devs. If I end up wanting to play it once released, bonus, and if not, at least it'll indirectly help that little bit towards a future project I may be interested in. That said, don't mind how this is shaping up now, but will skip the multiplayer for sure.

Oblivion holds a special place in my heart - as the worst game I've ever had the misfortune to buy. Skyrim on the other hand is competent in that ever-forgettable way and have no strong feelings about. Don't particularly want to recall the specifics about it that raised my ire, but aside from the obvious facegen issues (which I assume is the thing that doesn't matter), there's a selection of minigames that all comprehensively fail, the notorious and ludicrous level scaling, and the repetitive nature of the gates. That said, one thing in its favour is that the player character is, as far as I can tell, not a Chosen One in any shape or form.

I always ran out of momentum after reaching Vegas too, but that was true of my very first run as well. I'm a sucker for a simple revenge story. Up to that point it was a personal quest, the game thereafter was doing a job. Yes yes, I'm a heathen who wouldn't mind a little more linearity and gets a little overwhelmed with too many options. Not that it wasn't still my game of the year though...

If I had to pick one thing FO3 did better than Skyrim, it's that my character was marginally less of a doormat for NPC questgivers. Yeah, a lot of the alternate options (like, y'know, blowing up the starter town) were idiotically written, but Skyrim had their one and only option frequently turn out just as idiotic, so eh. That said, I only managed to log single digit hours into FO3 before giving up, while Skyrim nearly clocked up triple figures.

Spent about half an hour arranging, rearranging, then re-rearranging my virtual shelf on GoG - mostly by genre but all grouped up so that series would all be on one row and so forth. Count stands at 125 games, including the free ones. I estimate the ones I've ever downloaded at about 20.... Pickups this weekend are Deus Ex, Anachronox and the Thief games, none of which I needed to buy, and none of which I plan to play in the foreseeable future.

I thought one of the chief complaints the stereotypical Bio-fan supposedly had was that *no-one* in the game was bisexual. Then I heard that they would supposedly be patching in the same-sex relationships later, but no idea what became of that.

I never got past the first round.

Could argue you're better off this way.

I remember the feature too - it was irritating. Not saying it inherently is, but fleeing isn't the same as running around like a decapitated chicken. I also vaguely remember Fallout having fleeing enemies making a break for the edge of the map, then staying there (recollection may be faulty). Now I don't mind foes running away out of reach for good - which is only reasonable unless you drop everything and give chase immediately - but I expect a lot of completionist types might get irritated at the lost loot and whatnot (fortunately it seems XP won't be an issue). Alternatively, combat can end up breaking down into trying to position your group into a ring to try to keep foes from fleeing as you whittle them down one by one. It's one of those things that's superficially simple but implemented incorrectly can be a big drag on enjoyment.

The 'harm' as it were would be in the resources for balancing and testing the feature. In principle, I'm fine with the idea though it's one I find pointless, but only as far as an undocumented feature in terms of support: you know, the usual disclaimer of "provided as-is with no warranty."

Due to the new assets required, I imagine that minute for minute, TOR's new content is orders of magnitude more expensive than equivalent content from previous MMOs. I remember reading something along the lines of an expansion features summary, listing *one* new planet. Of course, that figure of one is then multiplied by the number of classes, and the light and dark side of each: that's up to 16 times (I know most of the time it'll be shared and be more like two to eight times as much) as much effort in some areas than single-track competitors...

Take the reverse of this thinking and think big! Engineer the Eternity engine to be the Infinity engine, or indeed the SCUMM engine, of the 10s and TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Ensure it's easily extensible and adapted to a variety of scenarios and then you could have comparatively tiny teams consisting of writers and scripters producing high-quality content in parallel. Steampunk, sure. Sci-fi, of course. If rights permit, maybe even licence it out to third parties.

It's no bad thing to occasionally stroke the player's ego, but subtlety is important here. Presuming Twitter and phone cameras haven't been invented yet in the game setting, news travels both slowly and inaccurately, and is interpreted differently in different places. Catching a whiff of a conversation in a bar is a long way from fanfare on the streets and it should definitely be kept towards the more discreet side of the scale. Done incorrectly, this kind of thing can end up instead making the world feel like a very very small place where everything revolves around you.

As long as they omit the mundane elements: both products and components, I won't complain overmuch. Found a shard of a legendary weapon that you want to turn into a sword? Great, but don't make me have to collect leather to make the grip. Broadly speaking it'd be a matter of handwaving all the stuff a stereotypical town smith would have, you just provide the one, or few, special parts to get it made. Nothing groundbreaking, it's really just BG2's system really, e.g. assembling that elemental flail. The key here is that there's no balancing of "dropped" loot vs crafted gear: they are one and the same.

That's for a very rigid and literal interpretation of a 'quest' - there's sort of a disconnect going on here between that reading and a broader one of "the accomplishing of objectives".

What did you consume in the preceding ~750 years though?

If protection isn't a concern then naturally they'd wear the most comfortable garb around: T-shirt and trackie pants. Smart casual if invited to a party.

Not to dispute the point, but it's an annual poll they do where previous winners are automatically excluded, so most of the usual suspects were ineligible for this year's edition. Okay interesting I didn't realize that. But for the record who were the previous winners (or losers in this case ) Not something I've followed (since I'm not American) but apparently from 2006-2011 respectively: Halliburton, the RIAA, Countrywide Financial, AIG, Comcast and BP.

The thing about DXHR's dialogue battles was not related to either its fun factor or balance, but the notion of roleplaying. It's at home in the DX (or AP) setting, but in a genuine roleplaying game, it shifts the gameplay from choosing the option which best fits your character and instead makes it a case of choosing the *right* option. I certainly hope that in a game like Eternity, that I can choose the interesting option instead of some defined "correct" one, aside from a few exceptions like riddles and whatnot. There should be no *right* answer. Lockpicking on the other hand is about doing it right or doing it wrong, so I can understand where Josh is coming from in that regard. Not that I support making it a minigame; the hacking in DXHR is a large part of why I quit it about 2/3rds through.

Not to dispute the point, but it's an annual poll they do where previous winners are automatically excluded, so most of the usual suspects were ineligible for this year's edition.

I miss having HKD around to 'shop some box covers up. Rubber Soul with the Obsidian Fab Four?