Humanoid

Even back when I liked the IE games, probably just after I played IWD2, I tried to go back to BG1 and found it unplayable. :|

To me that's not really a mistake. The mistake is tying you to a kid that the game tells you you're supposed to care about. Similar to Dad in FO3 or the Waterchip in FO, forcing that kind of immediacy on the narrative kind of hurts where the fun in the game really lies (IMO) which is exploring the world with the character you've built. Mind you the game has a lot of problems similar to Bethesda's other games, mostly that the factions are mindless and to be honest I'm usually not one to give a flying flip about dialogue choices in a grand sense - most of it has been serviceable IMO - but I have to be honest and state for the record the incredible lack of ability to challenge some of Father's statements at the institute is unforgivable given that this is the moment the game has been trying to invest you in, with respect to the starting narrative. The kid thing was never going to work, but I'd say even good writers would have fallen flat trying to do it. Pre-war survivor, eh, it's doable, just not by Bethesda. I mean in the tutorial you're all shocked seeing all the dead bodies and radroaches, and not an hour later you're mowing down ghouls, androids, accepting assassination jobs, and your character has no comment to make whatsoever on these events. Aside from a few dialogue option where you can repeatedly ask different people what synths are despite already potentially having gunned hundreds of them down, the player character is basically indistinguishable from someone who has lived their entire life in this wasteland. It just becomes an unnecessary detail that sticks out like a sore thumb on the occasions it gets raised.

So Origin have a sale right now, and the Outlander Pack, which consists of 60 days subscription, 1050 bonus cartel coins, and some useless pet I don't care about is 33% off, comes to about $20USD (and ironically regional pricing makes it about a dollar cheaper in Australia). In itself not a bad deal, but Origin Mexico is where the deals are at, and it's $13.32 there. So I bought it, it's just a product key to redeem on the SWTOR website, and it works fine. I can confirm that the 1050 coins are in addition to the normal monthly subscriber grant, since that aspect was a little ambiguous. Given 60 days + 1050 coins purchased manually through the SWTOR site would normally come to $40, it's literally one-third of the normal price. Can only be used once per account, of course. EDIT: Needed to use a VPN of course. I used Hola which is a free VPN, and in terms of any security concerns, you can turn the VPN off once you get to the checkout stage where it asks you for your password and it will still go through.

Eh, I dunno, back in the day they also had Star Wars: Rebel Assault. If I didn't dislike Star Wars already at that point, that game would have sealed it.

Skyrim's was easily ignored though. What's that Balgruuf? Go see the dragon attack? Yeah no thanks, I'm going to go do my own thing for the next 100 hours. Fallout 4's overly personal story just doesn't work with the style of game Bethesda makes. And the mistake can be traced to the very first step: the decision to have the player character be a pre-war survivor. It's superficially an interesting idea to explore, but in no way does Bethesda have the chops to pull it off successfully. I haven't played it for a couple weeks at least now, and have no urge at all to give it another shot. Skyrim remains the only Bethesda game I can say I genuinely had fun playing. Comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4 is trickier. Fallout 3 was flimsy but I think its central conceit bothered me less (I think they reserved the worst of their writing for the DLC). On the other hand, Fallout 4 has colours other than green and grey. In the end, I played them for about the same amount of time, 10-15 hours, before giving up.

I have to admit I've never finished it either, or indeed ever gotten more than a third of the way through. Frankly what I'd look for is just an extract of all the game's text repurposed into a text adventure, the rest of the game seems rather extraneous. Or, more seriously, just a mod to literally remove all enemies from the maps. With a corresponding increase to conversational XP I guess, but I can't even remember if having higher levels does anything for speech checks or whether such a game could just be played as a level one TNO.

To be honest, "old school" is largely the opposite of what I want in an RPG. The likes of Fallout and Ultima before it were notable because of how they departed from the old school orthodoxy of their time: the status quo being represented by the likes of Wizardry, Might and Magic, the Gold Box games, and innumerable other series that I had no interest in, both then and now. Though it is interesting how crafting in general is making a comeback in a big, big way, with all sorts of game genres rushing in to embrace it. Personally I can't stand crafting systems in general, I have no patience for it and its cousin that it's never seen without, Inventory Management.

When the blurb says "focuses on exploration and combat", does it mean to say that the game is pretty much a pure dungeon crawler? Comparable maybe to say, ToEE or IWD? Legend of Grimrock?

Well shot-down UFOs aren't actually a problem, there's no penalty as such for leaving them alone besides not getting the loot from it. But landed UFOs if left alone will increase the research and/or resource level of the aliens.

So I'm playing XCOM Long War again for the first time in about a year. It's up to the final pre-release build now, and it's pretty much feature complete. I've just about run into the problem that I've had with any flavour of XCOM ever since its release though: I absolutely hate the large UFO missions. The ones that spawn early are in a way a blessing because I can skip them without guilt, but now it's late May and I've got one I know I *should* handle, but I'm seriously tempted to just leave it alone because this type of mission is just a tedious multi-hour slog with a heavily back-loaded outcome (i.e. the 4-6 Outsiders at the end). With that in mind, I massively look forward to XCOM 2's reduced emphasis on this kind of mission, since "alien" facilities will largely be architecturally the same as human ones and should have a lot more variation than the endless identical UFOs the aliens send now.

Well this is just unfair. Yes, that's every single alien pod on this escort mission. If only my rocketeer could hit the broad side of an observatory...

No, but it says a lot about the fragmented nature of the industry such that every studio seems to end up having to reinvent the wheel every time they do a new title. CDPR seem to be particularly good at wheel invention, but I doubt that tech will filter through much, if at all, to other companies. Is it because some companies hold on very tightly to their trade secrets? Or is it that others are stuck in their ways and are too reluctant to look outside and learn from what others are doing? Of course, on the other extreme you have the case of mega-publishers gobbling up all the small fry and forcing them onto one engine and one design philosophy, but hopefully there's a happier, more collaborative medium between the two extremes.

I picked up a multipack Red Heat/Raw Deal/Total Recall on Blu-ray for $10 or so. Not sure why because it was a few years ago and I haven't watched the discs yet. Aside (since it came up in the FO4 thread), it seems there are way more movies I recognise set in Chicago than in Boston. Still couldn't name a single landmark there though, I'd have them at similar status in a "name a random US city" contest.

It's a good single player game, but it's a great co-op game, so if you can line-up a friend to play with it's an essential purchase. I haven't played the EE so I can't comment on the revamped balancing, but the original release had a sort of inverse difficulty where most of the challenging fights will be in the first chapter. After that, XP gain snowballing usually means you can stay ahead of the curve. I played the game in "Lone Wolf" mode though, i.e. each player controlling a single character instead of two, which probably made things harder because we frequently were both stunned or frozen or whatever. It also means I don't know how playing with the companion NPCs works out.

Licence Arcanum and Interstate '76 from Activision as a package deal, then create a mashup of them. :D

It occurs to me as a non-American that the setting of Fallout 4 isn't exactly familiar, and that may contribute to the difficulty of getting into the game. Things I know about Boston: It's somewhere in the top right corner of the US, and has a harbour that may or may not taste somewhat tea-like. I couldn't name a single landmark, be able to recognise the general architecture, or know anything about the weather (though I'd guess it gets pretty snowy). This is in sharp contrast to Vegas and DC (sort of, I know it has, uh, the White House, and that obelisk) in the immediately preceding Fallout games, and would be the case with cities like New York, Miami, New Orleans and San Francisco for example. If I wanted to see what Boston was like from a movie portrayal, I wouldn't even know what to watch, whereas say Philadelphia, a city I'd consider equally unremarkable, I can at least get a feel for by watching Rocky.

On some less-good news, the "Project Phoenix" JRPG Kickstarter has descended into farce with the latest project update published today. TL;DR timeline: - Initial estimate (September 2013) of about 15 months for completion. - In March, claim a target date in June for Alpha and December for Beta. - In November, admit they have no programmer yet. - In December, claim they have a programmer joining in February, who will take approximately 30 months to complete the project, which would be followed up by 6 months of testing. So a 2H 2018 release. It's pretty spectacular how it went from a planned 15 months end-to-end project cycle to 30 months just for one step of the process. Makes the likes of Tim Schafer and Chris Roberts look like Flash Gordon.

I already dislike how the display of how much damage you did/took is delayed, so yeah.

Beaglerush (probably the most famous XCOM player around) has put up some XCOM 2 gameplay up as well, so it's a coordinated release of all this material today I guess.

I mean I don't think there's any collision detection with the rain? So if you're in a gazebo or under an awning, say, the game still considers you to be out in the open. You can script NPCs to move to certain locations during a weather event, but I don't think you can correctly do things like taking radiation damage from the rain.

I don't think the engine can simulate sheltering from rain and that kind of thing? Otherwise it'd be awesome with a Frostfall type mod where you have to scramble to take shelter from dangerous environmental effects - or even just from the cold at night. (Someone should mod in proper seasons)

It may become mandatory eventually, but I got bored and quit the game before even building a single settlement, and I get the impression that I could have gone on a lot longer without doing it if I had the desire to. I suppose that counts as both a bit of praise and a bit of damnation, but the point I guess is that for the ones who like to just explore places without being nailed down by the settlement minigame, I believe the game is fully playable that way.

^ Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed had a bunch of PC-exclusive characters, such as a General from Company of Heroes, a Shogun from Shogun 2: Total War, and Football Manager, from Football Manager 2012. Who says Sega doesn't have a rich and engaging stable of characters?

And it could all be addressed by some relatively minor changes to dialogue. Sure, you can have the desperate and slightly irrational option of "my baby's out there, I need to find him now", but you can just as easily have a weary, resigned protagonist who knows that odds are their baby may well have died of old age by now. Both would be valid approaches and the player could go either way. Y'know, roleplaying.

Had a PE teacher back in secondary school called Mr Dans. Has the same sort of build, square jaw, and massive chin (bigger, actually) of this Danse character that it's a bit disconcerting. Mind you my memory would be playing at least a few tricks on me since this was all of 15-20 years ago.