Tigranes

You can have all of those, or Mina, or nobody on the boat. But Mina is the go-to choice, so you have to alienate her sufficiently or make it impossible for her to be there physically (wink wink), then ensure Sie has the best relations with you and helps you out in Greybox... there are a couple other conditions as well, but it's been a while. The triggers for the endgame stuff are ridiculously complicated.

Games the size of GK1, eh? Good point, I should learn2read. I'll see how my budget's looking and go for $16 or $50.

I liked Gabriel Knight and I'm considering donating, but the lower tier rewards aren't as compelling really. You get *one* game for $16 and their business model seems to be create a lot of episodic low budget adventure games, at least several a year. Whereas you get a full copy of Wasteland 2 for $15.

I'm in to play.

Don't they realise the more they make Windows PCs Macs, I'll just go and buy a Mac? Or Linux, finally.

Yet another stupid and annoying spyware, uh, sorry, Game Downloader and Player Service.

Machinarium is the first new point-and-click adventure I've enjoyed in some time, so I'm keeping an eye out for Botanicula. Not quite as cute, though.

They own Kickstarter.

Today I yanked the cable from my guitar at an angle by mistake, making the... connecting-bit that holds the input jack fly out. So then the input jack, obviously still inside the guitar, slips away from the hole made for it and is lost somewhere within the guitar body, a solid block of hollow-bodied wood with no points of access. Cue an hour of lying on the floor rattling the guitar upside down trying to make the input jack come back out the hole, pulling it out with my nails only for it to pop back in, then trying with two hands to hold up the guitar still, pull the input jack out of the tiny hole, and fix the connecting-thing back in the jack without pushing it in the hole. I've succeeded, but only at the price of a rather poor job where the whole thing rattles loose all the time. I'm afraid to try again lest I lose it inside the body again. So yeah, a nice day!

Awesome, should be good to have a GOG version around.

Finally getting round to trying my first game of Jagged Alliance 2. Am playing it without the 1.13 fanpatch for the moment, and trying to work out the ropes. (1) Why can't I scroll the screen with my mouse at the edges? Do I have to click on the minimap all the time? (2) Why can't I select a merc by clicking on the portrait? It seems to instead 'flare' the merc. (3) Any way to speed up walking animations?

Fair enough, I should be careful not to lump everyone in the same box. I can accept that for some people, nudity mods play a role in making the gameworld more coherent, while for most gamers, they probably bracket that part of 'unrealism' out to begin with. Then of course it's rather different with mods with sexual content or, I don't know, Thong Armour. And then, of course, there will always be people in denial, but that's something you wouldn't want to accuse anyone of, since it's impossible to tell. I always thought the child-killing stuff in the Fallout franchise was actually similar. I never had any problem because I never saw a child I wanted to kill, or, more importantly, a child it would make sense for me to kill or to die in the crossfire in the context of a quest or story arc. That is, until Little Lamplight or whatever the name was in FO3, where the survival of children itself becomes a key story mechanic, and some children actively try to annoy you and do bad things. I do think it's all related to the history/culture/ritual business. Most gamers don't require a fantasy game that borrows from an Aztec ritual to be 'historically accurate', but fit into the laws of the gameworld and the range of plausibility in our own world. If something fits well enough into both, then it can be a powerful storytelling device because we recognise the tropes from 'real life', but also fits seamlessly into the gameworld.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-non-steam-bargain-sale-mega-thread-of-savings.58950/page-7#post-2035212 Amazon DD, for US-addressed people, will have various sales; from 5th to 8th, Crusader Kings 2 is only $17.99. Get it.

I can see how it's different if you're already 'set in your ways' culturally - though as you admit, LC, I'd wager your affections for Boone is an interesting window into how we can latch on to the most unlikely things. I think that's the greatest strength of games providing a coherent world with rules that you can play in (and break). Just the fact that, although it's not 'historically accurate' or anything like that, you have a world that obeys its own rules, and the sum of its parts is more powerful (and thus fun). Sometimes I wonder, the people that download nude mods which invariably top the popularity list for Elder Scrolls games and the like - is it for titillation? I mean, you can get a lot better pornography than that just using Google, right? And it's not like they add any adult functionality in the gameworld. An idle speculation I have is that it becomes more exciting just because it's a coherent gameworld - not that it's mistaken for the real world, but just that aliveness. Or, people are weird, I guess.

Depending on your decisions, you can make SIE your handler for the later Moscow missions, and for her to help you out in the final mission - even for you to run off with her in the boat. It's still not as much as Mina or something, but yeah. She does have an 'interesting' scene when she's the one that helps you out of your binds in the last area.

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,2584.0.html AOD preorders are up for $25, other info on link. Looks like this is the season for paying up front.

The devs don't post much, but they definitely read the forums, so you can be sure at least one of them will see this. If you tell us more about what you like / dislike about AP we can probably help you figure out which Obsidian (or non-Obsidian) game you'll most want to go for next.

Yep, CD Key / DRM / etc business will be handled by the publisher, and especially if you bought it directly from Atari, they're the ones that are most likely to have an answer for you. Hopefully they have someone who's a bit more helpful there, though...

You're right, of course. What I'd like to do is get away from the simple real or fake, accurate or made-up, educational or entertainment binaries - I don't think games are meaningless fodder, but it's not like they're some sort of spiritual reincarnation of myths, and it's definitely not like they need to 'educate' us about 17th century Christianity for it to be significant. I'm still rolling various ideas around, but I'm trying to figure out a little of how this process of cultural flow is working in its own disjointed way. And of course, where some gamers are concerned, they really feel that stuff doesn't matter at all. (See above, Exhibition A.) That shouldn't be ignored - which is why I wanted to know how you guys thought about your own gaming experiences. I'm intrigued to see that most people talk about it in terms of learning new information, as opposed to moral/ethical or 'emotional' sides. Maybe that's because of how I worded the original post, or maybe it's just me; ironically, I tend to be really cynical about big ceremonies and rituals in real life, like the Diamond Jubilee, but am more impressed by, say, the fate of the Nameless One or the Vault Dweller just because they are 'true' in the gameworld.

The moral/choices stuff is interesting. I remember when I realised that I tended to play more or less the same character in RPGs, and even the same style in strategy games. I would sometimes start out a new game thinking I'll see the consequences to choices I hadn't picked before, but it wouldn't 'feel right'. I'm still not sure why that is. Some of it was definitely that the character would then not feel like me, or the kind of person I imagine I'd like to be in such circumstances - but I think it's also what kinds of characters or events I would feel are 'plausible' given the kinds of settings they draw on. For instance, that I read rather one-sided accounts of longbow power at Crecy probably accounted for my love of the English in Age of Empires II, since my imagination of a victorious army in medieval wars would shoot their opponents down before they got close. The Frankish knights were actually heavily overpowered after one patch, but it just didn't feel right to me. I also struggle to remember when I've actually had the option of, or taken the option of, helping benevolent large-scale religions. Unless it's a persecuted minority religion or a primitive one, they all seem to be conspiratorial con men or well-meaning but sadly backward and rigid institutions. I wonder whether it's because several widespread conventions are built into most games - that you are special, that you will experience a dramatic and instantaneous transformation in your life, it is the individual that can save the world and not institutions, etc.

I beat the demo several times trying to sell myself on it, but I was really turned off by the fact that (1) it seemed to be more story-driven than Elder Scrolls, but had just as terrible writing - which was exactly like Two Worlds 2; (2) the combat was just horribly, horribly broken in that I could butcher the entire town by mashing Awesome buttons; (3) Skyrim at least had the joy of exploration going for it, but even though the demo was surprisingly large and let you run around a lot of places, I just didn't feel like I wanted to. I'm hankering for an RPG right now but I don't think I'll go back to it until it's $5 or something.

Thanks all. It definitely does vary depending on what age you entered into games, what kind of gamer you are, and what kind of games you play. One of the things I'm currently mulling over is whether it's significant that some rituals, group experiences and social bonds no longer exist in the same way in our society, and we only get to experience them through the proxy of games (and other media). So if it's a question of knowledge, well, you learn that Greek phalanxes used sarissa spears, then you move on, nothing special there. But if it's a question of experience - you know, we don't know what it's really like to be participating in sacrifices, shamanic rituals or potlatch, or even hangings, coronations and such that only some people really get close to. I'm wondering whether it's significant at all that we get to experience and live through the drama and emotion of such things only through games and other media now. I remember really liking NWN2's trial because it actually tried to make me feel like I was being assaulted by unseen forces, that I was perpetually in a state of uncertainty about my own freedom and righteousness, and that I had to go through this process of vindicating myself. It didn't always work very well in practice (because I can reload, etc), but I really ended up liking it more than the design itself probably deserved just because that was a feeling of 'being there' very different from, well, feeling like you're an awesome goblin-chunker. It's probably indicative that my favourite genre is RPGs, but I also find myself getting stuck on things like really wanting my King in Crusader Kings to get the 'Crusader' trait for participating - maybe there's a small bug that doesn't make him get it, and it doesn't really make any difference in the wider scheme of my empire, but it pisses me off because the story I'm knitting in my head as I play has already made him a Crusader. Growing up I've always been really skeptical of 'real life' public ceremonies and such. Olympics / World Cup opening/closing ceremonies bore me to tears, I thought the Superbowl half time show was awful, I used to sneak out of high school assemblies, and I've only been to three weddings but I'm bored to tears of them already. So it's interesting to me that I've probably never been in a real life ceremony that I really found moving or profound, but I've seen a lot of game/film/etc descriptions that do sound really amazing.

Folks, Something I've been curious about for a while, and now will tangentially bear on a small paper of mine. Do games play any role in your exposure to or thoughts about different cultures, history, myth, religion and ritual? I don' t necessarily mean that in a typical 'are games educational' sense, since I think that's rather silly and limiting. I'm asking more generally about being able to access and play around with history/culture through games, or games shaping your impression about those bygone times / faraway places. I'd love to hear about some examples, whether it's any different from movies or books, etc. E.g. for my part, I've always preferred games to other visual media like film, and when I moved to New Zealand at age 10, I suddenly discovered Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy (I'd been mainly playing Sonic, before). I remember that in the process of looking up walkthroughs online, no less, I found out FF7/8's summons were a mishmash of Hindu, Arabic, Aztec and other spirits; and later, of course, I'd find obvious similarities between Western high fantasy architecture / art style in games like BG and medieval styles. I also remember Age of Empires and Civilization actually helping me synthesize the stuff in History classes (and find them more interesting). Looking back, probably because I wasn't a big fan of TV or films, I found that a lot of my impressions about things like the inquisition, Crusades, shamanism, monks, etc. came from a combination of 'serious' books on history and their derivative portrayals in games. I don't think it was ever about games giving me the 'wrong' idea about those things, but the fact that even if the games weren't focused on delivering an accurate portrayal of those things, they were still a big factor in me enjoying the games and imagining different cultures and historical periods. (Hrmm... here or WOT? Oh well )

Pokemon already has a movie, anime, manga, not-for-children versions, and everything else besides.

None. Much better to make original stories.