Humanoid

You're all making it sound as if people never buy new TVs during the lifetime of a console. OLED is just about entering the mainstream now that Panasonic and Sony have both relented and are competing on that front, so after a quiet few years there's finally some life in the TV market again.

I skipped buying Dawnguard a few years ago when it was $2.50 and am now locked out of an essential mod in Live Another Life and doubtless a number of other important ones. Now it hasn't even been under $10 for three years, making it not viable to purchase over just rebuying the entire game. Am sad. Can't exactly blame Bethesda for it I suppose (other than the actual Dawnguard content being so crappy that me of three years ago decided it wasn't worth $2.50), but I probably should have guessed from the nature of their games that modders would always assume you own the whole package.

Usually I go Humble direct download over GOG over Steam. I don't actually buy anything direct from Steam - for Steamworks games I'll buy a Steam key from the cheapest store listed on IsThereAnyDeal.com. Humble is there because they take a smaller cut of the sales, so it's better for the developers (and charities). I'm not sure what the exact cut is these days though, and how IGN's buyout will affect it. Sadly they're selling precious few DRM-free titles these days anyway, even for titles which are available DRM-free on other platforms. GOG is there because of its relative simplicity. Galaxy is not a plus though. The only issue I tend to encounter is slower patching, some of it due to GOG's manual vetting procedure, other times due to developer complacency. (Death Road to Canada took 2-3 months to catch their GOG build up) Steam is last because its advantages are generally those that I don't value, and because I dislike the way they try to push their brand with the insidious always-on model. I make zero use out of the social functionality. Achievements actually have negative value for me, I would rather they not exist at all because they promote unfun gameplay. The other knick-knacks like in home streaming might have value, but I haven't found a practical use for them yet. The one title I want to use family sharing for doesn't work despite extensive troubleshooting.

All cars have thrusters built into both sides for convenient sideways ramming, what's not to like?

Having a fixed character like Link and Gordon be silent seems to be a matter of tradition for tradition's sake. They were protagonists of good games who happened to be silent, and for some reason that became an association to defend, no matter how much people claim to understand correlation is not causation. It's basically just dogma at this point. Fortunately Arkane were good enough to acknowledge their missteps and Dishonored 2 reversed the decision on the silent protagonist and is a better game because of it.

Unlockables are totally fine as long as you can edit an easily accessible ini file to unlock everything immediately.

Adding the multiplayer functionality would imply some sort of attempt at balancing I would hope. But even without any changes, I reckon I'd have fun just fooling around anyway, perhaps with some self-imposed challenge (or intentional sabotage). That said, given how some multiplayer sessions go, the addition of teammates might already have made it harder (looking at you, Magicka).

Every single player shooter could do with a buddy just jumping around you helping you out, in the style of Saints Row's multiplayer. I mean Mass Effect has two virtual buddies tagging along with you at all times anyway, I never saw why multiplayer turned out to be some weird standalone arena thing instead of having friends in their stead. All the Mass Effect games would be a blast with drop-in Saints Row-style multiplayer. So would Bethesda games and just about every single-player shooter campaign out there. And RTwP is no limitation, any such game worth its salt has enough difficulty customisation so that it could viably be played without pause, and there's plenty of prior art in this regard. If you can do Baldur's Gate or Crusader Kings multiplayer, there's no reason something like FTL wouldn't work.

I reckon Cities Skylines would make for a fun multiplayer experience. Whether co-op using the same resource pool, or as competing mayors in the same gamespace, it'd be a hoot. I mean, Theme Hospital had some entertaining (and trollish) multiplayer and that was 20 years ago.

Like this reenactment? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce2jEDfPwG8

This thread made me check up on the Skywind (the equivalent project for Morrowind) and their website hasn't even been updated this year. Wonder when the last time a fan project like this ever made it to release. There was, um, U5: Lazarus? (Ultima 5 on the Dungeon Siege engine)

I praised the game earlier for allowing you to kill a seemingly important NPC early in the game. Well I withdraw that praise because apparently the game just Deus Ex Machinaed him back to life in a very literal sense so his role in Act 3 is unchanged. Bleh. The magic has wearing off pretty quickly in the last few play sessions, and not just because of things like the above. Bloodmoon Isle was a frustrating mess of obtuse quests with a couple of Guide Dang It moments, and it prompted me to just end the act without tying off all the loose ends because it was seriously turning into a mess of unresolved issues. But the first few hours of Act 3 have been pretty aimless too.

Just had a stickybeak and I see I can get the PS4P for $469AUD ($366USD) and the XB1X for $549AUD ($429USD). Seems fair enough for both, though I'm in the market for neither. (And granted the Xbone price is a MS store exclusive offer for Amex holders).

I'm a software developer who likes video games, and I would not even slightly consider working in the games industry. It's the wild west out there. Cushy government job where I can count the number of times I've ever done overtime on my fingers - now that's my speed. It's hardly a localised problem either, I remember reading about the development hell that was LA Noire, and that was made in Australia, where we have much stronger labour laws than the US or Eastern Europe. It's safe to assume it happens everywhere. I'm not sure there's a palatable solution to all this. In real terms, games have never been cheaper to buy, and they've never been more expensive to make.The sticker price on games are still the same as they were near the dawn of the industry, absorbing decades worth of inflation. Meanwhile team sizes would be the biggest they've ever been, and that's before taking into account the auxiliary stuff like licencing, voice recording and marketing - the cost of which would also be at record highs. Sure, the greater volume of sales these days (compared to when gaming was a comparatively niche hobby) compensates to an extent, but in an increasingly saturated market, something's got to give.

's where I bought NWN from, the collector's edition with the cloth map. Boy what a fine disappointment that ended up being, at least until the expansions came out and some really good user created content was available. The shop's been kaputt for a while now though. I think the cloth map was also included in the standard edition, unless the CE came with a different one. And the cloth map was indeed a disappointment if I remember right, it was fairly small and flimsy. Still infinitely better than the travesty that was the DOS1 map, of course. I have a recurring dream of walking into a second hand shop and finding a pristine copy of Fallout 1. Then I wake up and am sad. I do have a battered copy somewhere that I bought on eBay yonks ago, and my FO2 box isn't the original release and has an ugly yellow banner along the side of it. My Arcanum copy is fine, though I don't really remember the contents of it.

It's weird, everyone reckons the writing is better this time and I can't objectively disagree. But I can't say I'm enjoying the writing as such, maybe it's because of how wildly it swings between their off-the-wall humour schtick and the newfound Darker and Grittier additions. I'm suffering some sort of mood whiplash as a result.

So they changed direct connections to no longer allow joining using IP address. You have to use the special code which you need to generate every time you play, because it always changes every time you launch the game, unlike your IP address. Dumb, dumb change.

Diversification relies on identifying which abilities scale with what attributes/skills and how. It's not always in an intuitive way. In a physical party you need to identify which spells can be useful with baseline intelligence, and vice versa. There are some traps like how summoning doesn't scale with anything but itself - a pure summoner can stack strength just as effectively as intelligence. Even summon spells that are not linked to the summoning skill use it for scaling: things like the Fire Slug and Bone Widow still require you to stack summoning to be effective, not Pyro/Necro as you might expect.

I always thought based on how the title was styled that Kathy Rain was a spinoff of Alan Wake. Apparently this is false.

DHL continue to be an easy counterpoint to the stereotypical notion of German efficiency, but my CE box finally arrived today. Heard some horror stories about poor packaging, but I guess I'm fortunate in that because I bought some extra apparel as add-ons, they were packed in a larger box alongside the box containing the CE. As a result, though the outer box was banged up a fair bit, the merchandise is in pristine condition. Gotta say it's the best Kickstarter CE I've seen thus far, and it's up there with the Witcher 3 CE as the most premium game package I own. The Fane statuette is very well constructed and is the kind of thing that retailers would sell for $100+ alone and the two hardcover books are lovely too with embossed covers, better than your typical D&D sourcebook or whatnot.

It's fully reasonable to put enemies in intelligent places, particularly when they're expecting to ambush you. However it's still somewhat unfair because often the enemies won't actually spawn until you trigger the ambush so there's nothing you can reasonably do to counter them - other than cheesing it by pre-placing explosive barrels and such. Why not instead have the enemies stealthed but let you detect and counter-ambush them? In the grand scheme of things, it's just a minor annoyance to me on medium difficulty, but it does take away from immersion a bit. Most of the time there's no problem initiating an encounter on your terms, and I do appreciate being able to initiate separately instead of the whole party being forced into combat simultaneously. It doesn't tend to resort to the tired trope where the bosses go invincible and force you to fight mooks, or where they unilaterally declare a fight over and just escape unchallenged (though I've heard of a couple edge cases where it happens). Nonetheless, there are a few annoying gaps though where scripting overrides your actions, such as the execution and the purging demonstration near the start of the game, where it would have been interesting to see alternative outcomes. EDIT: Top of my wishlist for any further sequel is proper Z-axis handling so that you can do things like throw enemies off cliffs and climb on stacked crates to get over walls (Ultima 7, after all, is cited as a leading inspiration for the game).

And the counter is that the player is effectively made to take single points in Warfare and Huntsman regardless of actual role, just so they can abuse the mobility options. This is made even more obvious because by and large, these utility spells do not meaningfully scale with actual skill level. This is often true of civil skills too, Telekinesis can lift infinite weight with a single point investment. Loremaster gives complete information on enemies with just one point. (Incidentally, enemy units design abuses this because even generic level 1 mooks always come with a point in Loremaster, so for pretty much every single encounter in the game, they will automatically be able to exploit your weaknesses and avoid your resistances. There's a mod - No Psychic Enemies - that restricts Loremaster to enemies who would reasonably have it.) This weird behaviour is incentivised by the weird design where learning new spells is tied to very low skill requirements, such that with a mere three points in a spell school you can learn pretty much everything. You'd think there'd be more benefit in specialisation, but often this is not the case. When the correct advice when trying to build an archer, for example, is to take three points in Huntsman and ten in Warfare, it's plainly obvious that there's a fundamental flaw in the way skill points work.

Yeah I admit I don't know how stealth interacts with the turn order. e.g. if I open an engagement by sneak attacking with a rogue, does that count as the rogue's first turn? Likewise if another character initiates combat, then you move the rogue in real time and then join combat using backstab, where do you join in the initiative order? Unfortunately since you only get one character in the tutorial unless playing multiplayer, you have to go a fair ways into the game before being able to test the mechanics.

Doesn't make sense that loot is randomly generated when the levels aren't, but that's how it is, which is a shame.

This is why you get the DRM-free version instead, both GOG and Humble carry it. Steam version is boobs only. I believe GOG is too. Humble version is the full monty including, um, fluids. I believe it should be fairly trivial to convert one version of the game into the other. what is point in porn game without, uhh, fluids xD You can choose to be male or female in the settings. You never see the player character ever, but the fluids are only drawn if you select male. You can change this setting at any time, however. It's also fairly obvious that the censored version was created later and the panties in that version are simply painted over the top of the existing images, such that it the images sometimes no longer make sense in context. EDIT: For those who just want to play the game for the articles and avoid the above sort of thing, the most expedient way is to simply avoid dating at night. You'll still receive sexts, but will never end up going all the way and thus be able to focus on the pure match-three goodness. It's genuinely unfortunate that there's no standalone "skirmish" mode where you can play the core game without the story elements.