Humanoid

Wow, someone here really likes video games... So is there a no pants mod for DA:I yet?

The first Mario Kart 8 DLC pack is now active, so tried each of the new tracks (eight of them) in easy mode. I'd not played the game for some months now, so I don't have a good gauge of relative difficulty, but in terms of production value, they're by every measure as good as the original tracks. There are a few extra characters and vehicles but I don't really concern myself with them.

Well, the fact that they sent out review copies at all, unlike The Sims 4, is a good sign, right? Right?

Shouldn't you be, er, requesting this on the forums of whoever developed DS1+2 then?

Couple of things come to mind: 1) I feel I need a definitive player character. There may or may not be party members, but I have difficulty RPing if there's more than one character of my own creation in the game. I struggle to get into the spirit of Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin for example, even though mechanically I'm quite happy with them. Also most 'old school' RPGs from the 80s and 90s suffer this problem - your Gold Box games, Might and Magics, etc. 2) I don't really care all that much about the absolute quality of the story/writing, but I do absolutely care that it respects player agency. Even in a completely linear game, this manifests in being able to disguise the rails well - that is, if you're only going to have one path through, better bloody well make it the most obvious choice that a reasonable player character would take. For example, I feel both Dragon Age and Baldur's Gate 2 are mechanically quite boring, and yet I believe the latter is a very good game overall, and the former rather substandard - a position I'd never be able to justify on gameplay alone.

Little Big Adventure, a.k.a Twinsen's Adventure is free for 24 hours.

My biggest beef with Skyrim was the fact that there were dragons. These days I advise people to not activate the dragons until done fooling around with side content.

I actually typed up basically the same car analogy (with different brands, mind), but decided to not post it because car analogies.

Retailer-come-competitor though. So uh, probably betraying my lack of knowledge of the American retail sector, but it's like no longer selling Best Buy branded stuff at Wal-mart. Tortured analogy, I know, and I think largely unimportant. Pulling a game from Wal-mart will probably result in a number of lost sales, sure, but theoretically it may yet be better for the bottom line once the margins are taken into account. The same logic applies for digital sales, only that the gap is probably even easier to make up for. EDIT: Filter didn't like my spelling of come.

Obviously the best solution to avoid such disagreements is to have 10 charisma in real life.

Probably did their numbers and found that for any sufficiently high-profile title, not being on Steam has zero meaningful impact on sales and thus having it there does absolutely nothing except to enrich a competitor. Anything that reverses the modern gaming trend of Steam being an always-on piece of software, as pervasive as one's operating system or anti-virus (probably moreso than the latter even), on is fine by me.

This is the Witcherverse, so instead of Horse Armour they'll have Whore Armour. :D

There needs to be a Monty Hall gameshow type of setup where you open portals and there's either a dragon of a lounge suite behind the portal you choose.

It's true, those crotchety old atheists are sad because they shun the faith of Comic Sans.

As someone who enjoyed Skyrim but absolutely loathed Oblivion, that'd put me in a bit of a pickle.

Sportsmanship! More fighting games need to have cordial handshakes at the conclusion of gruelling fights like that.

What do you get when you mix Unrest with Alpha Protocol? The new project by the developers of Unrest, of course. It's a liiittle bit more traditional RPG than its predecessor, mainly in that you only play a single character this time around, and you have a few of your own character traits. Fundamentally though, it's built on the same engine and you interact with the denizens of the world in the same way.

Yep, I won't even build a PC without an SSD these days no matter how low-end. A little unfortunate thing though is that the V300 is the subject of a notorious bait and switch - Kingston changed the NAND chips on it to a slower model without telling anyone in the middle of the product's lifecycle. It still works fine, but the new V300 is a strictly inferior product to the V300 when it first launched. On the other hand, I'd take size over speed anyday if it came down to that.

To be fair, with nVidia's current tech advantage all it likely means is that Mantle levels the playing field performance-wise for Frostbite engine games, rather than giving AMD an advantage.

I think you can ignore everything in those screenshots except the squirrel and have a thorough understanding of why Keyrock is unreservedly positive about the game.

This is Bethesda we're talking about, they could take notes from literally anyone and it'd be an improvement.

Played a handful of missions of F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0, but ultimately my enjoyment is being hampered by the lack of responsiveness in the controls, which makes precision stuff like landing and manual bombing much more of a chore than it needs to be (though the latter issue can be avoided by taking missiles instead of bombs). God, I wish there was a modern stealth 'fighter' game - and I don't mean F-22 sims because they miss the point about what the old game is about - a Thief-like experience where you avoid contact at all costs. Anyway, relented and bought myself The Sims 4. I know, I know. But if I don't like it, I can just pass the game (i.e. the whole Origin account) to my sister who didn't like Sims 3's scope and might prefer the back-to-basics style of the new game.

Contractual obligation to take even longer than Prey 1 to develop.

I'll give it a go, and as it'll technically mean that DAK is my first run through DA2, I get to experience all its good points and none of the bad.

Personally I'd have preferred the sequel to not be set in the same licenced setting, to avoid some of the issues I had with the original game being straitjacketed by canon. Stuff like the various non-tribal cultures surrounding the game map being literally a "you lose" encounter, that kind of thing. Still, pleased to see it go ahead.