Tigranes

Alright, started as an assassin with 39 dagger and 10 DEX, died in the very first fight, though I nearly killed him. Got through on the fifth try, not that bad, then several characters followed who didn't last very long in general. I've now fiddled around for a few hours and tried a few characters, though never 'finishing' the demo. Generally, a very fun, quite polished game that has its own style and delivers on the kind of experience it promised. Still clearly needs some touching up, though. Writing and Quest Design The writing in general seems fine. Nothing silly, nothing stupid. Occasional grammar errors or awkwardness but not enough to break the mood. I haven't seen anything that's really impressed me or made me laugh, but it does its job well, and there is plenty of flavour text that is really important for the gameworld. The quest design is generally interesting, makes sense in the world, has multiple choices that are not obvious, and at least at the start, seems to have a design where different characters and different factions often show different sides of the same event or mission, which is great. I don't know if it's *more* reactive than RPGs we know and love, but it certainly seems to do a good job of all this in the confines of the demo. Several people, in the beta and now, have raised the question of whether it's a good thing to cut out the 'fluff' of walking around and fade in/out straight to action. It's pretty surprising, and jarring, when you start; I tried assassin, mercenary and praetor, and in every case it's a lot of read, click continue, fade, teleport. Sure, it cuts down on the 'pointless' exercise of walking to the next building or opening a door and going in to talk to someone, but actually, that 'filler' can be a positive thing when used in moderation. I don't see why the game has to zip me through from an audience with my boss to the next quest dude instead of letting me walk there and take detours. If I wanted to do it quick I'd use fast travel and it would hardly take any more time than now, and if I wanted to I'd do it the slower way, still not waste that much time due to the compact town design, and feel like it's actually a world and not a flow-chart. Now, I expect this is related to the idea that there is no filler combat, the typical thing inserted in such walkways. I don't think the 'teleporting' should be eliminated, but right now it is too much, at least at the start - it does feel like there's a little less of it later on. But the set piece combat design, which is good in itself, means that you're never really experiencing that sense of approaching a new/hostile area, scouting things out. Character, Combat and Gameplay Doesn't seem overly difficult, but then I toiled through the combat demo so know what is what. I think the opening fight could be a tad easier, as in the long run making that hard is not really doing anything for the hardcore players, and it can just frustrate newcomers who haven't had a chance to learn the system yet. It's not a question of stupidity, it's a question of not yet knowing what each weapon does, etc. In general, though, I thought the battles weren't that difficult, and work well. Hard to say too much about the character development system in the demo, and I haven't finished yet.But every skill seems to have a reason to be there. The one downside perhaps is that often you end up hoarding a few skill points to use to solve the next text adventure quest - e.g. in the one I don't know how many multiple solutions there are, but it all seems to come down to do you have enough points in this or that skill. Not a 'problem' per se, but we'll see how it all pans out. Graphics, Sound, Interface Looks somewhat like a mix of early 2000s first person 3D RPGs (say, in interiors) and late 2000s advanced lighting, grass, textures, etc. elsewhere - fine, works for me. The portraits are excellent, but we knew that already. Music is forgettable but doesn't seem to get in your way so much. The interface is generally pretty good. I'm not a fan of the fluorescent solid colours used in battle grids and such, especially in combination with the stone and brick feel of the rest, but the opacity on the grid can be turned down. What interface is there works well; would be better if there was a bit more of it, e.g. a button to highlight interactibles or in-world tooltips. Small Suggestions and Fixes As others have said, an alt/tab button to highlight everything you can interact, short tooltips on characters when you hover would help. Also, something to replace that terrible, terrible neon green blob when you click to move. The Take All button in looting should automatically close the window, too. Or have an option for it. The minimap really needs a here-i-am. Bugs Playing on 1200x600 Windowed, 32bit Windows 7, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570. The weird tooltips / buttons in char screen bug happens on 1280x720 windowed. Switched to 1333x768 (i think, the next up 16:9 ratio) and all was well. Not to mention the fonts actually got bigger and better! The known bug that after several deaths to the first enemy, you just keep dying immediately after the first convo. This actually seems to happen later in the game too. In the opening fight, if I knock the opponent down on the far corner with the vase, even though I have 95% chance I missed 5 times in a row. Either bad luck, or some kind of bug. The AOD cursor seems to change into normal cursor in some places like death screens, main menu and character menu. One crash with Visual C++ runtime error, after lots of playing and reloads.

Bought the first novel in a long while, The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh. Sold me when page 3 named a character's indigestion-driven habits Tridib's Gastric. Indian writers tend to be a bit of hit and miss for me, sometimes the books really work well in turning all the Indian-British minutiae into a powerful illustration of ambiguities, other times I just feel like I'm reading more Indian we-are-postcolonial blargh. I felt the latter about The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, while I still really want to try A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, which had a very good first 50 pages. In university, one of the more interesting things I recently read was a chapter on French folktales in 17/18th centuries - how earlier versions of well known tales like Little Red Riding Hood often involved things like the wolf tricking the girl to eat the grandmother's flesh, then jump in bed with the wolf dressed as grandma, take off all her clothes, then get eaten by the wolf.

It is entirely too hot in Philadelphia. 25 degrees in March, what is that about? And why is everyone happyabout this travesty? I want my wind, rain and snow! Been in the office 11-10, will be glad to go home and try the AOD demo soon.

Another link: https://rapidshare.com/files/2722160238/AoD_Public_Beta.exe

Best way to go is torrent, go to http://www.file-uplo...xe.torrent.html and click the little download link at center of screen. Or watch the http://www.irontower...9.60.html for new download links edit: God I hate the new forum automatic detect link things

Most exciting game news this year, GOGOGO

Thought SC2 wasn't worth it, ambivalent about this one but I won't have my desktop around much May-August, so I guess I'll have time to see how the feedback pans out.

FO1 was 3 million, and that's 1997 rates.

Already pledged in hopes the combat will be fun, the rest is probably going to be OKish. I love their environments but the characters are booboo.

The Komnenoi rumble on as rulers of Constantinople. Empress Antonina, the daughter of Alexios, ended up ruling an astounding 42 years from 1102 to 1146. With 29 diplomacy she defused many would-be civil wars with bribes, titles, soothing words and the occasional imprisonment. I decided that having taken back Anatolia and Armenia Minor, going further East in the Heraklean tradition would be pointless; the Muslims were fractured into many squabbling nations and posed no real threat, while the Crusades had not really begun proper. I focused my attention on conquering Southern Italy and Sicily as a jump-off point back into Europe, even as my over-eager vassals decided to venture far north of the Danube. She was succeeded by Ioannes III 'the Great', who ironically earned the moniker by pretty much fighting twenty years of civil war. The Danubian Dukes rallied behind a certain Leon who declared himself King of Bulgaria, while many others took up the flag of rebellion. Actually, I wanted to white peace against the Bulgars and let them have an independent kingdom, as my vassals were expanding far too readily northward - but due to the crazy inter-duke warring in decades beforehand, Bulgaria also ended up with several random provinces all over my empire. The map-painter in me urged me to go to war to take those back, but the limited CK2 goals system meant a victory simply absorbed all of Bulgaria back. Unfortunately, the Bogomilist heresy spread to Byzantion around this time, and Ioannes decided to convert to a heresy that probably is followed by less than 10% of the population and nobility. That made the Empire a pretty unstable place, but thankfully, Ioannes kicked the bucket soon after. So in the 1160s Manuel Komnenos (I'm naming them as close to history as possible) took over. He was a promising lad, if not a genius, but decided to get maimed in his first ever hunting trip at the age of 18. Miraculously, he survived, and healed back to perfect health, and governed for another twenty years, mostly upgrading a lot of provinces, sorting out some pesky dukes and watching Hungary blob into a fiersome neighbour. Now age of 39, he's again incapacitated and his son is only 5 years old. He will probably die soon, and when he does, the empire could well break apart - there's no holding back the dukes with bribes this time.

Just pledged for Wasteland 2 and the Banner Saga too, so with Double Fine that's three preordered games for $40. I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy at least one of them enough to be worth that. I'll dump $100+ for an Obsidian one if it eventuates. Not sure about Dead State, I never thought it looked very fun a concept, and I detest zombies and sci-fi in most forms. Still, you never know.

Uhhh, this has nothing to do with the Codex, unless you mean that Dead State is made by DoubleBear, which is affiliated with Iron Tower, which is run by Vince, who used to be a Codex dude about eight years ago... yeah. With Banner Saga and Dead State these are existing games, so will be interesting to see how that works. Personally not that excited about Dead State but we'll see where my money goes. (Ironically, Double Fine is the only one to get my money so far but I'm least interested in that game.)

They're clearly not at a stage where they can announce something I think. You want to come out and say "we are going to propose X game", and build up momentum to a kickstarter date. Right now I expect they're still working out whether they want to do this, what they want to make, etc., so they aren't able to give a Yes/No.

Kotaku is being stupid, as usual.

So I've read its based off tob engine, makes me a bit more hopeful. Wonder if they can kill indoor loads, or something radical. But maybe that's crazy talk.

Mod compatibility is likely low. So will they make enough improvements to make up for the loss of litrrally hundreds of mods? Meh. Wait and see the specifics, but not excited. G make something original.

They died when bio moved away, interplay bearhugged black isle to jump off a cliff together, and the industry itself became even more big budget, etc. RTS had pretty rough few years, too.

24 Stewardship* is excellent even for a player tutored mid game ruler. That's 9 holdings with no penalty- I was beating the Seljuks without even raising realm levies and still in the black cash wise. It isn't even just the high stewardship as his traits are perfect for stopping civil wars and rebellions, I had ambitious heretic Armenians who still loved him. *That's Basileus Alex, I guess Doux Alex could have lower stats or BGA could differ stats wise from CK2+. I don't think my alex had over 15 anything at doux, though he lost bravery and had a couple other trait mutations. Also, being maimed at age 31 really crimps your style. But it may be a mod diffrtence. In Toronto = no ck2. planning to just take back asia minor, leave the armenian region as buffer then go for italy. Apulia is locked in a stalemate with the muslims.

Undergrad and grad applications are different beasts. Which makes sense, because most people are idiots when they're applying for undergrad. (Including me.) Yeah, so that really is a question where they want you to talk about what your philosophy/principles/vision is in terms of computer science as a field, the specific contributions you want to make, where you see yourself in relation to such things, how you strategize and plan your life and study. Because the worst thing in the world is a grad school student who doesn't love the actual act of studying that field and knows why he/she is there

Hey? Alex doesn't really have very good stats. I've had better in children I've grown, and I've seen a lot better in random courtiers. (I've been picking Geniuses with Humble or Trusting as my dukes.) I suppose he fares well compared to other 'pre-generated' characters at game start, though.

Yes, that's another reason for me to plop down the $15 here. Even if the game sucks, I want it to succeed. I'll probably splurge irrationally for an Obsidian fund, but I am trying to live like the poor student I am in reality.

Drowsy Emperor: Theodor Adorno, just with less German. I still don't regret not buying any of the ME games, but I've enjoyed seeing all the "Narrative Evolution" claims that are increasingly being made about the series. I mean, I skimmed some LPs and read some spoilers now about the ME3 ending, and it just seems standard sci-fi, and it's not like the game has a special amount of reactivity. So it is curious how such powerful emotional engagements are apparently happening across the board.

I put down $15 for Double Fine, I'll probably put in that again for Wasteland 2. I don't really have enough money for more, and none of their rewards excite me at all. Now, if Obsidian did something, that would be a very very different story. But I wouldn't really cry if the DB / W2 games never eventuated. Although, I should really play Wasteland properly. I remember dying a dozen times and that was about it.

I wrote 11 separate personal statements for my PhD program applications. Personal statements are the stupidest thing since Daikatana, and they should all go to hell, because everybody, including administrators and faculty who read them, know they're formulaic, contrived, performative, and a lot of it doesn't necessarily translate to actual competence. In my experience, at least for US grad programs (and much more for UK grad programs), they care about how well you can formulate your research questions, what kinds of clear principles you have about research and what you are doing, etc., than sappy personal stories or whatever. That's at least a relief to know that you don't have to make up some life-changing experience to get in. Mainly, my statements were rather transparently about telling them how smart I want them to think I am.

Return to Crusader Kings 2, with 1.04 patch and CK2Plus mod. One flaw of the mod is that if anybody in your realm rebels you get Civil War -20 to everyone's opinion, which more often means one count rebelling => half your empire. But in general a lot of things seem improved. Started in 1076 December by giving Alexios Komnenos the Duchy of Adrianopolis then playing as him. Historically, of course, the last of the Doukas emperors is deposed the next month, then Alexios takes the crown after some infighting couple of years later - with the Turks occupying most of Asia Minor. So I let loose the dogs of war and took the crown in 1077. After that was about ten years of killing rebellions and stabilising the empire, though. Then Alexios decided it's really time to make his mark and take back Turkish Anatolia, but in his first battle got himself maimed. Somehow, he walked around a cripple for another ten years conquering Paphlagonia and Thracesia, before he finally succumbed to bodily pains at the age of 43 - just before I had accrued enough prestige for him to become the Great. Next up was Ioannes Komnenos at age of 16, who had grown into a fine, attractive, diligent, smart young man... just homosexual, to boot. I married him off anyway, but maybe that was too strenuous for him; within 3 years he had fallen ill, then pneumatic, then dead. That meant the only heir was Anna Komnenos, his younger sister, at the age of 12. Now she has to keep all the vassals in check, wait and get a nice matrilineal marriage before we go and do anything crazy. Of course, two problems: before Alexios managed to pass Medium Crown Authority a few of my dukes waged some wars to become pretty powerful, one of them the heir of Doukas Emperors, and the Turks have decided to invade us right at this moment. Should be interesting.