Tigranes

That's happened so many times with various games for me over the years - works fine the first time, dies after. Might be something to do with how many games set various preferences and configurations when they first run (e.g. in older games, setting a problematic resolution). No idea what did it here, though.

1. Download the .oaf extractor - http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=6743 2. All the dialogue/music files are in there, but oddly, while they're named .oggs, they don't seem to actually be .oggs. 3. Wait for LadyCrimson to post here, because apparently she got these to work.

Heh. Its amusing how half of the questions go "No, it'll be more like Oblivion than Morrowind." Just like Dragon Age 2, the initial hype wave got to me but I'm glad they're spilling all these unpromising details, it makes it really easy not to expect anything.

Ooh, a reboot. Good stuff. I have a tempered enthusiasm for indie games - I love the growth of indies and think esp. gamers like ones in this community should spend as much attention on them as AAA titles, but I also think many of them are overly praised because they are indie - i.e. not that good. Recently I've bought: Fate of the World - Macro-level turn-based policy game where you control economic, scientific, etc direction to avert (or cause) global warming and related disasters. It's very not-dumbed-down. Your Earth asplodes. A lot. You won't spend 50 hours on it but it kept me up at night for a couple of weeks, and it IS quite educational. Gamebiz 3 - Lone Swedish programmer makes pretty much a bloody ugly spreadsheet simulation about running a video game company from 1980. There's competition, GOTY awards, employees (including Sid Meier, etc), you can release your own consoles, become a publisher. It's not particularly complicated but pretty fun and there's really no mainstream competition. World of Goo and Machinarium above are also highly recommended. On the other hand, I'd say don't waste your money on Torchlight and Penny Arcade Adventures. Torchlight is polished and well made, but is pretty much exactly like Diablo 1 without the atmosphere or multiplayer - i.e. pointless after a few hours. (Crafting was also broken - unless they fixed that, loot balance is way out the window.) Torchlight 2, on the other hand, might be awesome. PA Adventures has a completely irredeemably bad gameplay of a boring grindy JRPG - its saving grace is meant to be the lulzy story/writing, but I found it crap even though I enjoyed reading the PA comic at the time. It's sort of like a Simpsons novella or something - the gags just aren't funny in this particular medium.

AFAIK you can't release an official patch without the publisher's approval, either. Separately, while I love AP and wish it would get a patch too, but if we look at it from a PR perspective, it would be a waste of resources - it won't matter to those who never bought the game, and for those who did, 90% of them will already be done with it. It would be nice, but it wouldn't be bang for buck.

He's right. If Matt-C thinks DS3 is 3/10, then 3/10's the score he should give. Why inflate it? Of course, that's Matt-C's opinion. No more, no less. *shrug*

Generally I tend to agree that the MP camera sucks and can understand people that enjoyed DS1/2 and feel hard done by. It's worth noting that (a) your character IS saved, just to that game, so if you keep playing with your friend you'll have that sense of progress - but you can't export the character, no. (b) game was never marketed as hardcore MP title, it was marketed as a couch co-op title. (And a bloody good one it would be, too, with a zoomed out camera.)

They can't. Sega won't fund a patch.

Clearly, a proper discussion of DS3's commercial success/failure will have to wait for another day. Now both of you go to your room and think about what you've done.

Volourn touches us all in mysterious ways.

I don't know the Rumblepad personally, but it may have a Analog/Digital swap button on the controller itself, otherwise you could try using the emulator to remap it to get the same result (though that may not work so well given the nature of the analog joystick). Make sure you're using the latest toca's (which is Vibmod), and fool around in the settings, I guess.

Depends, what are you doing / having trouble with? I generally ignore automatons and go straight for the pods. If there's too many I roll around a bit using the circular platform to lead them away. Lots of rolling when they first cmoe out and fire a lot of rounds. Dapper's attacks are easier to avoid.

Menu -> Abilities, each ability there's a bar showing how close you are to Mastery.

Save points never save automatically when you walk through - that would be incredibly annoying if saving took a long time, for instance. Anyway, when you stand on a save spot your portrait lights up and shows you the key you need to press. When you DO save, it should restore your health.

We really don't get the hint the first time, huh? Let's keep it to DS3 and reviews, DA2 rants can... go in a DA2 thread/forum.

What only one? Jesus christ, Monty.

That was a bug for you, the game autosaves at those points.

You should use the emulator to rebind the controls. The left analog should move, the right analog control camera; the D-pad is shortcuts to menus; the XYABs are abilities and attack, etc.

DS sold more than FO, it just didn't have a lasting fanbase in the same way. That said, FO3's commercial success probably had as much to do with Bethesda picking it up and porting their TES brand of gaming in there. Of course. Who said?

I think what is at dispute is whether there are any 'real numbers' available. I suspect the numbers will be mildly disappointing for Obsidian/Square, but we will see when we have some 'real numbers'. It was never going to be a multi-million seller - for Obsidian it's a smaller title in terms of budget and scope, and out of all their licensed games this has the weakest franchise of all (completely separate from whether DS1/2 were good or not, it's not a particularly valuable franchise in this respect). It'll be interesting how Obsidian takes this, compared to Alpha Protocol, and whether after the latest round of releases, they re-evaluate their strategy of "taking the Obsidian style story heavy RPGs to a wider PC/console audience". (At least FNV sold about 50 billion...)

My girls shoot exactly where I want 'em to, hard and fast.

I think generally bosses were a good balance - not too long because of super gigantic HP bars, and not too simple where you just figure out 1 thing and you could toy with them. A little more variation would have made things very interesting though - i.e. bosses that shake things up a bit more in HC mode, say, Rajani summoning hounds, Yaru-Yatum chasing you around, etc. And certainly they pulled out all the stops with the final battles, they were awesome.

Funny thing is, if Obsidian listened to you, queue a thousand people going "OMG I CANT BELIEVE IT SO SOMETIMES BOSS DROPS THIS UNIQUE WEAPON AND SOMETIMES HE DOESN'T? OMG OBSIDIAN U SUCK WHY DONT I GET THIS DROP OMG OMG" Doesn't mean you're wrong, but generally speaking, just means "this game doesn't do what I want" is not "this game is half done".

I find Arcanum a more entertaining game than Fallout, to be honest, even if Fallout's own setting and delivery of that setting was incomparable. And it is clearly a spiritual successor in many ways. Sure, it's best defined as a 'flawed gem' more than pretty much anything out there, and for some the flaws are bigger than the gem, but especially these days there are so few games that have character and try to show me exciting things that that's what I count the value of a game by, not how bloody 'polished' it is. Polish is good. It's not that good. The 'entertainment' that polish, as a quality, brings you is like the quality of a TV show that is just good enough for you to not bother changing the channel - a flawed gem can be infuriating but at least it's worth the infuriation. Anyway, if there's one thing I vote we import from the Codex, its the emoticons. Including the Avellone drawings.

You can always grind respawning enemies anywhere to get your level up if you want to. Obviously the final area is the best place to do it - everything is very close, lots of cyclopses.