Humanoid

Is friendly fire implemented? I've been avoiding shooting at all when a companion decides to run up to a random insect instead of shooting it. If I ever played a melee character I guess the reverse concern would apply too. With the aforementioned mods I guess the party members shooting each other up might occur too. As for FO1/2 companions - Ian was just a tribute to Iolo clearly. Name is close enough, the only difference is whether you get shot in the back with a triple crossbow or an SMG.

I for one would be pleased if they leaned back on western animation and bedecked the player character in lycra.

Yeah, over the past year I took both fighter and rogue PCs for a spin, didn't like either experiences - partly due to the stamina mechanic and partly due to the poor selection of ranged-capable NPCs - so I had resolved to go back to a mage if and when I finally got around to it. I told myself I'd start up a new game (importing a cheap complete edition) if New Vegas turned out to be a bust. So now I guess I'll do it if DA2/TW2 turn out to be busts. Oh, and just aside, the ridiculous mage hat graphics look even more ridiculous on an AW wearing non-robes.

I used to be insanely jealous of my friend who had some device to play Sega Master System and/of Mega Drive games off floppy disks (of which he had several boxes), all the while I had to beg my parents to buy single NES games.

Either way if it's something you don't squeeze onto bratwurst it fails the first G in GRPG.

I got Arcane Warrior early too and regretted it - mostly due to my own bad planning though. Turned my balanced 2 melee 2 ranged group into a more fragile 3+1. Couldn't afford to lose my tank (Al) and I had specced thief-girl into full melee as well. Too many point blank aoes tended to devastate my party even on easy/normal difficulty. Now in hindsight I could have reversed the decision with a mod but I didn't know about it. So yeah, impulse decision ruined my game (I abandoned that game a couple of quest hubs after) but it should be fun if pre-planned properly. And I still haven't gotten any further than 2 quest hubs complete on any subsequent character either.... I can't say much about my ME choices - skill cooldowns looked too long to bother with so I just set it on easy and killed everything with pistols.

I bought ME2 under the impression that I couldn't even alter the default PC appearance let alone change gender. I mean the guy's on the box art! So a pleasant surprise when I hit the new game button I guess.

Mm, Ubisoft games from back when they weren't so evil. Maybe it's still lining their pockets but I'll just tell myself that I'm showing them the right way to do things - and because my copy of HoMM3 is a few hundred km away from me.

Thrustmaster Warthog A-10 Thunderbolt replica stick.

Yeah, I'd view it as a fun/silly option - since I'm not sure how an evil dude would get to that point in the first place instead of just shooting them all as soon as you enter the facility. Then again such a character wouldn't likely bother visiting the facility in the first place. I suppose there's the insane character roleplay option but that's probably a bridge too far for me (hello chaotic neutral). When I play the usual 'evil' runthrough the problem generally is skipping most of the content since the inclination would be to tell any questgivers to sod off (or shoot them in the head).

I'm awful at planning and contrived to miss whole lot of cultural centres. Knowing I only had a month to spend I don't regret the decision to chop the entirety of southern Spain (sucks missing Moorish centres like Cordoba and Sevilla but wasn't practical), but somehow contrived to also run out of time to visit important northern cities like Bilbao, Santiago de Compostela and yes, Barcelona. From memory, I only managed to hit a rough triangle - started from Madrid (obligatory day-trip to old capital Toledo) and struck off towards Salamanca via Segovia (particularly liked this). Turned north to what was originally planned to be Bilbao via Burgos but days lost already meant chopping out Bilbao and going straight to San Sebastian. Time spent there in turn ruled out Barcelona so I headed back down south via the sleepy small cities of Logrono and Soria to Zaragosa and finished in Valencia. This isn't meant to be travel advice by any means since it's a very small subset of what there is to see. I guess I was backpacking though I don't like to admit it. All travel domestically was by bus, I think about 10EUR per trip (bit vague on that), and stayed at small family run ..."pensions" I think the term was - small establishments of a half-dozen rooms or so for 10-15EUR a night. Mainly avoiding youth hostels and the usual stereotypical "ugly Aussie tourist" hangouts. I think I only met one or two other Aussies on the whole trip, and I liked it that way. I guess in the end I rationalised that I could always go back and fill in the gaps, but in the end I don't think I've got the stomach to be a regular tourist - time, money, travel - and in the 5 yearsish since then I haven't been out of the country. My sister on the other hand spent almost a year there (a large part of which in breach of the 90 day stay limitation which apparently wasn't enforced at all) and still wants to go back.

The roots of the universe/setting whose game they are building a sequel to: Deus Ex 1. I wanted to say Daikatana.

I didn't particularly like any of the Indy movies, but Fate of Atlantis is a good chance of getting my nod as best adventure game ever.

Didn't know about the carry-over half skill points, that'd good to know - the typical rpg game mechanics have conditioned me into thinking even-points=good, odd-points=bad so I end up with a character with either 4, 6 or 8 points in each stat. With skills I also tend to compulsively raise them in multiples of 5, which result in the counterproductive practice of tossing a spare point or two in a less useful skill. I'm not familiar with most of the voice talent in NV and I think I like it that way, very few character preconceptions that way. Not so say instantly recognising Malcolm McDowell in FO3 wasn't cool, but in my mind's eye I end up just seeing Admiral Tolwyn deliver all those lines. Vaguely recalled the name Felicia Day in some gaming news recently (no idea about the actor bit) and checked - random factoid: she's Codex Dragon from UDIC (the Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter) from way back in the early 90s.

Excluding the second one, which is a screencap of the Careless Whisper video.

I'm going for a Cybermage sequel purely on the basis that it's an EA property and therefore possible.

Getting losing paths back in the game could be fun. And by that I mean more than picking the wrong dialogue option at the end of a game and meeting a horrible fate. I'm thinking Wing Commander 3 where instead of reprising Star Wars, you instead get gradually pushed back into (and lose) a battle for Earth. Now that's impending doom. You don't play half the missions of Wing Commander 1 if all you do is win every mission - all that happens is that you miss out on some better missions. (That said, the Save the Ralari mission would have resulted in close to universal failure - rewarded by 3 extra missions)

Only if Fireballs can only be detonated on the ground. Being able to detonate fireballs outside the 2D plane of the floor would be kind of cool. Not to the extreme extent to grenade physics but it would add tactical options. Then again, Virtual Pool level physics with fireballs might also be fun.

Newcastle is.

It only has to beat Tabula Rasa to do so.

So who's in for the replica Geralt head?

I'd call it a race between a IBM Deathstar hard disk and a car with no air-conditioning. Highly probable fatal failures vs no native AA support.

Outside of characters, it'd be a fair bit easier to draw the sharp lines and flat, clean surfaces in ME. Even then it still involved a lot of pre-fabs and clone brushes. ME1 reminded me of NWN1 stylistically, though that may be a flaw of memory rather than a side-by-side comparison. Wing Commander has aged much better than say, Falcon 3.0.

Sounds like the various "multimedia experiences" typical as of around the birth of the CD-ROM (with the caddies!).

I always thought a map that automatically was drawn by the player character on graph paper as they walked around would be a cool compromise - mimicking what older gamers had to do manually. Minimaps in the old Fallouts were like documentation for FORTRAN programs. You could use it, but it was easier to just look at the actual world/code. On the radar markers, I think the most internally consistent use would be to ask the question "can I find it with a GPS?" If an NPC tells you about such and such building knowing where it's located then the ability for the player's compass to point the way isn't nearly immersion-breaking as getting compass direction hunting down a notorious outlaw who as far as your character knows could be anywhere.