Humanoid

I'm still using the Repeater at 16. I don't even meet the STR requirement to use it properly.... And yeah. the initial people to talk to suggest that the area between Goodsprings and Vegas is very much "here be dragons" territory and funnel you counterclockwise.

That's why I put "killed" in quotation marks. But I assume that's just an 'out' to prevent an unfinishable state so not particularly relevant in terms of the denouement.

I know I'm miles (or ~2.5 weeks) behind everyone else, but anyway - finally got into The Strip about 25 hours and 15 levels in. Sort of regret it now, out of momentum after executing Benny - I'd been playing it all Charles Bronson so now my character doesn't really have a purpose. "Killed" Yes Man for being complicit (being 100% unforgiving is an everpresent trait of almost all my characters), went up to see House and ended up killing him too for trying to rush my decision (I thought I'd be able to do the usual "I'll think about your offer" response). So yeah, now feeling kind of aimless and tempted to start afresh with a different concept, probably a more self-serving one.

Must... resist.... urge to have a pop at DNF. Oh hell - Breaking news: Duke Nukem Forever to switch to Gamebryo engine!

Unfortunately it was just a turn of phrase. Our raids were text only. Feel free to substitute "yell at" with "have a pleasant private text discussion with." Probably one of the reasons WoW has now passed me by. Everyone else wants voice comms nowadays, and I don't - I prefer to game while listening to the Thin White Duke and there are some efficiency gains that indeed go too far for me to still classify as having fun. The experience probably peaked around 2007, natch.

(Italicising the WoW specific mechanics so people unfamiliar with WoW can ignore them - the rest although WoW in context makes sense generically. Or just ignore the big block of text and skip to the bold.) Not to argue against the point, but back when I played WoW (I haven't since 4.0) I had two primary characters for raiding - coincidentally a holy paladin and a moonkin which I used depending on which role was required. I'll genericise as necessary. I had to yell at my co-paladins to not nearly having the raw output necessary for the more difficult stuff. Now granted this wasn't at the bleeding edge of raiding - ended up with 7-8 hard mode bosses done by the time we called it a day - but the point is that when we first entered ICC I was outperforming the others by 100-200%. Digging deeper I found it was a combination of: The examples won't mean anything to non-WoW players but the general fault highlighted does. a) using the wrong skills - Flash of Light instead of Holy Light (yes, a choice of two spells and a lot still get it wrong) b) using the wrong equipment - Intelligence stacking combined with Flash of Light (Flash of Light is only viable with the spell power gearing sub-spec), or Spell Power combined with Holy Light c) not using skills often enough - a lot of downtime often due to a combination of mana conservation (often due to incorrect gear) or fear of overhealing (an outdated mechanic) d) poor use of support/supplementary skills - incorrect target selection for Beacon of Light, poor timing of mana recovery spell use TL;DR: I guess the point here is that while the mechanics were simple and the spells few in number, a lot of players still managed to grossly misuse them. I had to drill them back down to basics and force them to forget their preconceptions to get them working effectively again. Gear full Int, cast Beacon on the tank every 90sec, spam Holy Light, use Divine Plea aggressively Simple instructions but it got them to the point where the tank stopped whinging if I wasn't playing my paladin. _______________ I was a sole moonkin in the raid so I don't really have anything much to impart about common player mistakes. However it's actually a neat illustration of ignored and ineffectual complexity. Yes, the moonkin had a lot of tools - however half of them were not effective and therefore suboptimal to use. The result was that in practice it was actually quite simple to play .....provided one had an efficient user interface set up. Install the Squawk and Awe mod. Keep moonfire up, cast Starfall every minute, and pick Wrath or Starfire - whichever one the mod tells you to cast. (Insect Swarm for a few specific bosses only) I could play effectively like this while asleep, something I wouldn't be able to do with the theoretically simpler Holy Paladin. _______________ If you skipped everything above This is meant to be a simplified tale of two implementations. A dumbed down system which can still be completely misunderstood and butchered, and a complex system rendered moot because the extra complexity could be easily discarded with no ill-effect. I suppose I should try to find a point to my rambling, and I guess it's to say it's not a scale with dumbed-down on one end and complex on the other. It's a 2D plane - with one axis for complexity and the other for implementation. The four corners would be something like: dumb, streamlined, intricate and dog's breakfast.

I'd be concerned that it might cause the sun to crash to desktop and go supernova, or at the very least, start to splutter.

If US prices drop from $60 to $40, Aussie retailers will probably drop it from $120 to .....$110.

For the same reason the inventory/stores are huge lists too. 1. Put huge lists everywhere 2. ?????????? 3. Profit! While we are at it, I wanna know who got the idea that mouse acceleration is a good thing? I love lists. But with a catch. XTree could show more lines of text in 200 vertical pixel CGA than most game save/load interfaces can show in over 1000 vertical pixels. 95% of the screen space on the interface is blank. Hell, I'd be happy if game save/load interfaces just behaved like the Windows shell default ones. Resizable, tile view, list view, detail view, etc. Wouldn't mind if inventories worked the same way either - and add searchable, sortable, filterable.

Could always go double sided dual layer. Games took dozens of floppies before CD-ROM came along. Games took a dozen CD-ROMs before DVD came along. Actually would be neat if gaming came full circle and went back to cartridges once flash prices crash. Ship games on fast SSDs, plug them in using eSATA. Play straight off the media! Hell, make it bootable and then we've arrived at PC + console convergence.

I've made my feelings about combat in CRPGs known often enough. I don't have a problem with it per se, but it's development effort put into something I tend to just skip past. I'd much rather the devs spend time with other aspects with the game than fine-tuning a detailed, balanced combat system. So yes, I'm advocating the hiding of substandard combat systems by making combat scarce. If an average playthrough only had say, a half-dozen to a dozen times where the violent option be taken, then the choice to engage in combat becomes more a character decision than a gaming one. The violent path does not even need to be tied into combat systems given the now fairly accepted stealth takedown mechanics (which is so simple it doesn't really need to be called a mechanic) and the occasional dialogue-based violent option (the "execute" option if you will). But yes, I'd wholeheartedly support either getting rid of all the filler combat, or at least awarding no experience for them. Either option would make experience systems much easier to balance without hiring a chartered accountant. Once you cut out those, you have quest XP and 'Important Fight' XP. Important Fights are basically quests, and so can be considered and balanced with the whole character growth system as a quest. Tabulate all the quests and 'quests' and it should be fairly straightforward to regulate the levelling process. More simplistically I suppose there'd be lazy option of just cutting out XP from combat after a certain threshold (upped per level).

Civ5 compares well to vanilla Civ4. Given it's got 4 years and 2 expansions to make up for, I think Civ5 is in a good enough spot for the future. There are plenty of good arguments for an Civ veteran to let Civ5 mature, but the question as it relates to new players favours it more by providing a more natural learning curve and the chance to learn in-step with the game and the large Civ community. That said, neither SoD or Religion were particularly good implementations of depth. SoD covers for the lack of any tactical nous by the AI and the notion of stacking an axeman and a spearman is certainly no more an involved tactical decision than unit positioning is in Civ5. Religion while not in itself a bad thing is simply too dominant a modifier and renders most other diplomatic factors irrelevant, and furthermore, the implementation of founding religions made it such that it was neither advisable (or for most, possible) to do so. Ultimately none of the items in the list are real causes of the game being derided as "dumbed down," I'd suggest it's entirely down to the AI being less able to hide its constraints behind favourable mechanics - the requirement therefore being simply a smarter AI, or at least one that believably cheats more. Maybe this is all just because they just used the Sitting Bull AI module from Civ4 instead of the Shaka one.

I booted up Fallout 3 for the first time in ages as well, but had to quit and lie down after 30-60min. First case of motion sickness (I assume it was that) I've had in years, odd.

Unfortunately EA holds the rights to it, and Brian Reynolds is busy working on ....Farmville. So that's three things that need to come together for it to happen. Most of the flavour of SMAC came from Reynolds' real interest in philosophy, so I imagine it'd be harder to just straight out switch designers. Some might have dismissed it as pretentious rubbish but hey, it worked.

Start with II and then move up. That would involve playing III! 1-2-SMAC-4-5 would be a better progression. Maybe slip in MoM before II. I can't exactly put my finger on it but I found Call to Power excruciating. This after the local games rag tricked me by saying it was superior to SMAC in the battle to be Civ2's successor. Its only redeeming feature was the African music track (I forget its name), which wouldn't be matched until Civ4's Baba Yetu.

Heh, I'm doing some googling of my own since I didn't know much about it than vague news here and there. But looking at a gameplay trailer - yep, it looks like Crusader with local co-op multiplayer. No networked multiplayer is odd, whole game exudes old-fashionedness to an extent does. I've never played any Tomb Raider games, but this would have tempted me if I actually had anyone to play with.

I had the impression Tomb Raider was restyled (successfully I hear) into an isometric Crusader-style action game, so it doesn't sound like it.

The degree of annoyance over a given inventory system can be ameliorated or amplified by the role and rarity of currency in the game. Just taking Bioware's games alone - you have Mass Effect where midway through the game you probably end up at the cap, and DA:O where there's literally not enough to get all that you want. This meant that after the early game I could sort of ignore the majority of random junk in ME (sucks that there wasn't an omni-gel all button) while in DA:O I'd lug around all sorts of worthless stuff because every little cent counted. And it isn't just the inventory management, it's being able to skip pixel-scanning for lootable barrels, being able to avoid tedious minigames, etc. To that end I lean towards designs where currency is marginalised, being used sparingly as a game mechanic. Don't correlate currency with the power of the player - no buying magic weapons, stat boosts, skills, etc. Limiting it to plot-related usages works well - chapter 2 of BG2 for example if you removed the silly magic items merchants. Or Flashback (ok, not an RPG but since I recently played it) where you earn credits doing odd jobs to pay the entry fee to Death Tower. Or even Ultima 8 where I could just about get enough cash by robbing one house (of a bad guy, so it's virtuous!) would be just about enough to last to the end - that and nothing other than gems were sellable anyway. Actually, I'd like to see that in general - junk like scavenged food and rusty swords shouldn't be sellable at all. I guess this is just a long way of saying the best way of eliminating the pack rat tendency is to remove the rewards of that behaviour. Some might do it anyway, but give the player no in-character motivation to ferry crap to the local tat bazaar.

Or Alpha Centauri! But yeah, start where you plan to finish - so most probably V. Learning IV with expansions would be a pretty exhausting job given the extra complexity over the base game - and I imagine trying to learn the base game first before adding expansions would be a bit over the top. With V I guess you could say you can learn it in step with the rest of the Civ community. The only caveats I guess would be assuming a system that runs it well, and not wanting to say, play multiplayer with a friend who absolutely refuses so move forward or something like that. Or a religious aversion to Steam.

Old platform games are great for killing an odd hour or two. Flashback: The Quest for Identity - remembered for its fluid rotoscoped animations, but it's more than just Prince of Persia with guns.

I've never used FRAPS but I suspect it's for legacy reasons. FAT32 file systems have a 4GB file size limit for instance, and many video editing programs might still be designed around that. Better video editing programs may allow you to join them a bit more cleanly but no idea about any alternatives/workarounds/updates to FRAPS itself. Then again, videos on YouTube tend not to be measured in the gigabytes, nor are they in 1080p format. Bear in mind that 1080p has well over double the number of pixel over 720p for example so the size blows out very fast.

While not nearly as close in hindsight, it made me think of

I exhausted my supply of Slowie is old jokes in 2003.

And that there is such a thing as anti-aliasing. Just occured to me that 3D accelerators are 15 years old now. Scary.

Here I thought manly men preferred their steaks burnt to a crisp over an open bonfire. That said, given that there's a The Sims Medieval in development, I don't see why a The Sims Post-Apocalypse wouldn't work. I'd play it.