Tigranes

I think it's been on hiatus long enough that we can safely go with Tale's campaign if he wants to run one, then see when/if Blank returns. I'm still up for this, more so since now I'm in the right timezone.

I think it's been on hiatus long enough that we can safely go with Tale's campaign if he wants to run one, then see when/if Blank returns. I'm still up for this, more so since now I'm in the right timezone.

Bethesda animations are never, ever, ever, ever good. I don't know what you guys were expecting. I've pretty much forgotten all the hype points about Skyrim though, because what's the point? Half the things they said about Oblivion wasn't true. The thing that makes Skyrim possibly worth buying is what Oblivion did well despite its flaws. If you're relying on Skyrim to substantially improve or change direction from, I doubt you'll be a happy customer. I'm in a weird place - I know that it's pretty much guaranteed we'll see more silly dialogue, more terrible animations, more terrible level scaling (though maybe not quite as bad), more terrible plot, etc. But I also think we're pretty much guaranteed to get some fun exploration and wandering-lootin'-dungeoneering. That's good to hear, though.

From what I've read, he only really ran into trouble right in front of at the end - otherwise the minor altercation with the sounds pretty unchallenging as well. I mean, you've played for two hours and you're knocking down a ? It really doesn't sound very well scaled at all, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong next week. Leveling pace won't be too hard to mod, but level scaling might be impossible to.

http://www.ripten.com/2011/10/29/three-hou...-lying-khajiit/ Three hours with Skyrim, not particularly spoilerish. Generally doesn't tell us much about game mechanics, its just "hey this is what I did guys". One particularly stupid detail is, of course, that he played for 3 hours and he was already Level 7, and in fact, he got all the way to one of the remotest areas at the edge of the map before he found enemies that were too strong for him. Remember, Fallout 3 style level scaling is only workable if the developers set sensible ranges - e.g. set a given area's creature levels between 12 and 14. There's no point if the range is something like 8 and 16, then the effect is more like Oblivion's. We don't know yet but it's not promisng that (a) you level up so fast, and (b) he was able to get that far. Still getting it, but expect to try and mod it Day 1...

I thought Oblivion controls were fine, it was just the interface. And it looks like Skyrim's interface will be even WORSE. No item value comparison, no paper doll to see what the hell you're wearing, everything is tree-tiered with one-column scroll downs, etc. I mean, what, console players can only press X and up/down? They would be just fine with multiple columns at least. People could handle older Final Fantasies just fine.

Oh, so you were talking about the same battle. You could have a unique bug, but it's more likely that you're getting hit by her spear attacks but with all the enemies and projectiles around you're not noticing. There's also the pillar of fire attack that is hard to see when you're surrounded that does a ton of damage, and from memory, two different types of spear throwing. They could one-shot you depending on your current HP/defenses - and in most cases in that battle, you're getting hit by someone every half a second, so that adds up. Are you genuinely not getting hit by anything, i.e. far away from mobs and with no projectiles at all?

Nothing to play, so checking out The Book of Unwritten Tales demo. RPS is talking about it at the mo and there was a half-done Codex LP before... doesn't seem great, but I'll check it out I guess. What I really want to play is a grand strategy game but Victoria II and Shogun TW2 are really not very replayable, and older TWs make the horrible problems with the strategic gameplay even more apparent. Maybe EU3.... again.

What do you mean by 'arena battle'? As for the first Jayne Kassynder fight, there's nothing that insta-kills you, though her attacks do a lot of damage and it's hard to keep track of all the projectiles in the chaos. Edit: well, maybe it's a DLC thing... I haven't got mine yet.

I'm waiting for exploration, dungeon crawling, leveling up and doing cool things. A wife? What?

In a totally WTF kind of positioning, I actually am curious - why do so many people say "hey, you're wound up / stressed / in a rut / whatnot, go and get yourself a nice one-night stand." I mean, OK, people like sex. But what is the reasoning/wisdom here about it helping you snap out of it?

Is it? Absolutely, the relationship between professor and student includes that of a customer and service provider / employee. But your formulation implies that the latter is the true, essential component that defines the relationship - i.e. harp on all you like about academia, professors, tradition, education, but in the end all of that is fluff and the real truth of our relationship lies in this reductionist core of I pay, you deliver. (Note that I'm talking about your formulation, which might be different from what you actually believe, GD.) I find that obscures the reality just as much as some high-flying rhetoric about The Professor might do. Hell, in the end, there is no relationship which can be reduced only to the economic transaction of give money, get X - unless, perhaps, we're dealing with nonsentient clerks such as self-checkouts or whatnot. Even if you are a simple shopkeeper at a local dairy a range of relationships develop through the process of your business. You could argue that in the end the economic transaction is the most important, without which the rest may not exist, but this doesn't mean the shopkeeper is reducible to a service provider. By the same token, I would argue that while it is sometimes necessary to bring self-important professors from their pedestal and remind them that they're not rock stars, it is equally absurd to tell them they are just service providers. Ironically, with your situation GD, one could argue that it is precisely when a professor thinks of himself as purely an employee that he might just 'present it and move on' - i.e. argue that he is being paid to deliver the material, not hold individual sessions over it. (Then of course, you would argue about exactly how much he is being paid to do.) Rather, it is when professors too internalize a sense that they are participating in something called academia and they have a moral obligation, that they might be prepared to say "I'll make sure you learn this stuff". I won't go on about it, but essentially, I think it's dangerous to say "this is a customer/employee relationship and that is what it is" because in many cases, this leads on to an implicit discrediting of other moral, symbolic, traditional, etc. forms of relationships embedded in that as less relevant, disposable, or less essential in some way. i.e. "Don't pretend you care, psychiatrist, I know you're just doing this to earn a living." Writ large, I think that leads to a dangerous and frankly rather unpalatable vision of a particular service or institution. I'm not up to date on what the UK gov is doing, but I think in general, yes, if your institution/service is being run according to the laws of capitalist economics, at some point you need to find ways of integrating that reality into the way you talk about and practice what you do. Some good can come out of that. But not in a way that sets down such a binary and says "all we are is a consumer/employee". (Again, I'm taking what you say GD as more of a starting-point; as a direct inquisition of your post it would be rather straw-mannish.)

Huh. I thought I was done with DS3 but I might check this out. Maybe go for 2 player co-op ( I think 2 players is OK, more than that is a crowd).

Found them both pretty boring, really. I like a simple well made shooter but not sure why they don't stick.

For one thing, it's economical - if you're not going to put a lot of emphasis on it writing/gameplay wise, it helps to have just one powerful religion that can be placed in all of your locations, providing plot hooks, etc and also helping immersion through continuity. If you wanted multiple theologies or religions competing with each other you'd want to give it a more central role, or your setting would be more of a 'roam the big world we have and meet all the wacky cultures" (e.g. some Final Fantasies). But as Enoch says, one of the problems (and the reasons for this) is that religion is treated as part of the power structure, along with magic, etc. Just as you don't see a lot of games where magic is treated problematically or in depth, but just assumed as a nonproblematic part of the world that just 'does cool things', so you have religion as just another power institution with some specific capacities of its own.

Oh, i know. But I won't believe until I see for myself (and FO3's solution wasn't that great, either). There's other things like I expect to slow down levelling in some way, but maybe I can do that myself a la NV.

Skyrim's coming at the right time for me - have had nothing open world or nothing fantasy for a long time now. But I'm gonna need to try and hold myself off Day 1 purchase, so that I don't have to deal with typical 'features' I expect it'll come packaged with (level scaling, for one).

General consensus seems to be that the DLC is great, but ~5 hours for $15... hrm. The full game only took me 20 hours, of course. Wonder when DLCs get price cuts, usually.

Is Heroes 6 worth trying for someone who liked King's Bounty? I want fun battles and progression and levelling, not too much castles and strategizing. (When you combine the two I always end up cheesing everything.)

There's a massive difference in the way you play between map markers & HUD markers, as Deranged says. Oblivion improves considerably without the latter because you then feel like you're walking around the world as opposed to cutting through it like some sort of laser beam. (Or there's the DX:HR way, where the hud marker is so terrible you need to use the map anyway.)

Finished bastion. Not bad. I'll dabble with New Game+ at some point. The ending was good I thought, a nice twist to what had been a fairly bland plot in the first half and I liked the choices that were given, although

Nearly completed Bastion. A simple game with nothing particularly great about it but it was fun enough to be worth the money. Doing a second DX3 playthrough which is fun, but I think that will be the end of that, too.

There was an interesting French documentary last year where a researcher/teacher went in and taught philosophy to a group of kindergarten children - I think from age 3 to 5, or 5 to 7, or something like that. Obviously they didn't emerge with some kind of systematic framework out of it, or even an understanding of the widely accepted definition of philosophy, but more importantly it was amazing how going from year to year they developed certain ways of looking at things and thinking in the abstract (they were able to handle the abstractness of, say, a concept like death), even if they couldn't articulate what they were doing. The necessary margin for sensationalisation as a documentary aside, I absolutely think that the growing momentum for an educational overhaul (esp. in the US but elsewhere) needs to be harnessed for a revival of ethics/philosophy/etc from primary right through to tertiary education. The problem is that the social sciences still has not been able to reassert itself and really declare its legitimacy in the world at large - they took some big uppercuts and have been reeling for decades since, if we look at how they fare against the natural sciences in those kind of decisions (hence the major cuts to humanities in universities post 2008 - they weren't able to articulate why what they study is useful to the world / university as well). There's possibilities here but there needs to be a concerted effort from political science, philosophy, psychology et al to show that it really is important to know these things as a society and from a young age, and not just for the vague result of "better human beings". Of course, this would work best if coupled together, as I say, with an overhaul of education whose principal mal du siecle is apathy and disengagement of its students - there is no longer a sense of everything being in its right place anymore in the classroom. Numbers' critique works in the sense that if you just threw in a random philosophy class that made no effort to properly mediate the contemporary field of philosophy, well, you'll see most clearly that a lot of humanities has its arses up in the clouds (and I say that as someone inside). Ethics and philosophy isn't about learning a corpus of facts, building up a knowledge bank - that is arguably the worst possible way to try and introduce it as an institutionalised subject. A properly taught philosophy has to be, through and through, about the way you see things and make your decisions, and has to be connected at every possible juncture to real tasks of organisation, mediation, deliberation, PR, politics, and activism. I don't think it's a lost cause - but it might require too much of our current systems to do it right.

Kotick would be happy to give away the Arcanum license for free, except the moment someone asks him for it, he'll realize he can charge for it.

Will it ever come on PC?