Tigranes

Technically I meet all the minimum rquirements except CPU speed (2ghz, they want 2.2), but I just know I'll be lucky to get 5-10fps at low settings. (which... counts as playable for me, since I played TW1 like that ) Sounds pretty good for a physical CE, Humanoid. Would have done it too, but they never seem to make a CE worth buying, for me. In the end the junk is junk.

Yeah, I'm just hoping that the inevitable won't happen, the demo comes out after 3 months, 50 hardcore fans give back 50 pages of feedback, Vince and Co actually be awesome dev guys and consider that feedback... for another year Just waiting until I can preorder, really.

God, now I know my computer can't handle this. At all.

What about people who already preordered? I'm in NZ so chances are I'm affected too. Though a GOG store credit would be fine with me...

The problematisation of sexuality in children, accompanied by attempts at a discursive erasure of infantile and childhood sexuality, runs parallel to the 18th/19th century and the medicalisation of society, yes. I don't have a lot of time now, but my point, as it pertains to games and TW2, is this - perhaps it would have been better in various ways for our society to have developed a more open and frank understanding of sex and sexuality, especially in relation to children. But in the current climate, the current context in which sex is commercialised, I don't think video games that feature 'mature' content really do anything positive to society and representations of sex/sexuality. That's why I'm not averse to some censorship, keeping the current context in mind, not an idealistic view of what sex/sexuality should have been / could be in the future. TW1's sex bits made me feel like I was sitting through a 13 year old's uncomfortably indulgent fantasies, and I expect TW2 will be a bit better, but not fundamentally. It would be nice if, by not being afraid to show sex and nudity as it might happen in the setting, TW2 can help the gaming media get over the big titties and thong armour crap - but I don't know if it will. edit: true enough, this is going pretty OT.

Spectre: Come back, Manny! Come back! I... I love you! Manny: And I loved you too, Mister Spectre. But the world needs me now. The world needs the Mannster. The endgame returns us to the Dragon Form. The MacGuffin Alternative works like some sort of suicide super-explosive. It is loaded onto the zeppelin, which we must escort... the whole way to the castle. Yes. You can't just fly straight to the castle from that screenshot - the zeppelin goes along a predefined path off to the right, looping round, through all those islets you see in the background. That means literally over a hundred towers. This part is actually fairly difficult (especially since I'm useless with the Dragon) and I died several times. The chick that tricked us into reviving her in the original campaign. I think this calls for a Ygerna somehow survives the nuclear blast, and we must fight her one last time. The final battle is a mere formality, as we do over 1,000 damage per hit. Ygerna is dead, Damian too, and through some deus ex machina (I forget), the Divine is also freed. Citizen A: Hooray, it's the Divine, Manny and Gandalf! We have been saved! Citizen B: But our city is in ruins, the quarantine has depleted our food supplies, the over-recruitment of militia now risks unrest, and more besides! Citizen A: Yes, but we now have heroes to save us! Three cheers for the DMG! Citizen B: But don't you think that a long-confined warrior, a suspiciously unintelligent, sexually confused, absurdly rich and powerful adventurer and an enigmatic, mysterious wizard is a bad foundation to build a functioning city around? Citizen A: That's... that's true. They'll probably either disappear, go off to some stupid adventure to fill the void in their souls, or struggle to make the transition into peacetime, anxiously watch their influence and capability diminish in the new world order, and meet a tragic end much like a celebrity beyond her time. Citizen B: Hooray for our city! Citizen A: Hooray! And so ends the story of Manny, and with it, our poor play. We hope it pleased you... friend. Thus ends our third Obsidianite LP (though we couldn't use a Obs Party in Div2). I'd like to do one more at some point before I start my PhD - though it all depends on whether my computer can run TW2. Perhaps an Obsidianite party BG1+2? Alpha Protocol? (Though I doubt I can screenshot well enough) We shall see.

Oh. Right. Carry on. Listen, buddy, if you're inflicted with a magical curse to make you fatter than [insert forumer name]'s Momma, don't make it worse with a pig portrait. We help him out by returning a troll artifact of some sort. Aaaaaand we are finally ready to begin The End. I've skipped several sidequests and such, but they're nothing special. Manny is now fully equipped and ready to enter MacGuffin Land! True to RPG tradition, the MacGuffin Land features art assets, animations and creatures never seen before in the game. Blame the market for constantly demanding creative and mindblowing end levels, while disregarding the utter inefficiency of the practice. Why, this would have been such a better game if there were zombies sprouting out of the ground from the first hour! The Macguffin land contains its share of puzzles. First, we wear the Helm That Makes The Screen Really Wobbly to see the Stairs That You Need The Helm That Makes The Screen Really Wobbly To See. Then we alternatively take off the Helm That Makes etc. to see certain platforms, then put it back on to see certain platforms, to reach the top. Have a cookie. After some requisite battles, we finally reach the Big Decision Point (BDP). Bellegar, the crazy wizard that popped up from time to time to try and stop us free the Ancient Evil, now wants to persuade us to not do this. Spectre: Wait, hang on. So after guiding the idiot here for the last gazillion hours, he, uh, she has the option NOT to free me? Manny: Sounds good, Mister Spectre. Isn't this the choice and consequences you always used to talk about? Spectre: Look, you monkey, the real world isn't the Codex. Without me you would never have got here - you have to free me! Bellegar summons every ounce of eloquence he has. MacGuffin Alternative is offered to you in exchange for giving up MacGuffin Original, and keeping Ancient Evil under control. Manny: Well, I was always a Diet Coke person. Spectre: How is THAT relevant? Manny: I always prefer the alternative. It's how I assert my individuality in this post-capitalist consumer society. Spectre: Wait, but-

They die in approximately four seconds. On the upside, they provide enough loot and cash for us to make one final upgrade to our weapons and armour. Spectre: Impressive. You've decked out in a red sword, a purple sword, orange plate, blue skirt and silver greaves, but a geriatric gnome with a sharp mango could still decapitate your legs. Manny: Legs don't have a separate armour rating, Mister Spectre. Spectre: Tell that to the mango. We also come across a house on fire and a maiden in distress. Woman: Please, please help me! There's my baby in there! Trapped! Manny: I'll help you! Woman: Oh, also, if you can get my love letters and wedding ring it'll be great. Manny: I'll... try. Woman: And a venti chai latte. You're such a doll! The house is suffering from a peculiar disaster, wherein the danger is not so much flames as some kind of improbably intense heatwave that makes everything look like jelly. A nice touch is how in our dallying to retrieve the letters and ring, the baby was already dead when we got to it on the second floor. We still receive half the reward. A chai latte goes a long way towards soothing the pain of family casualties. We also save some random guard's wife from some hooligans. Don't be too hard on him, ma'am. He don't have orange armour like I do. Servus the Guard, here's the thing: you don't let women anything these days. The women let you. Think on that. We are also charged with a covert op to rescue Random Man's sweetheart, Random Woman, who has been... procured by the city's general. But why, here he is himself. How positively Roman of you in your decadence! We also track down some missing villagers, who have been variously subject to organised cannibalism for commercial purposes in the centre city district. The insanity demographic theory continues to pick up evidence by the barrel. The business claims that it was forced into this practice by a particularly demanding customer, who single-handedly demolished their normal stock. Seriously? One person? This is clearly a case of thoughtless, illogical storytelling, even in a fantasy setting-

Next up: the talking vegetables. Remember the tomato we nearly ate? Well here's a carrot. Tracking down the three fruitified scholars, we track down the culprit - The evil witch, who has fallen into a dark, evil mix of feminism and goth fashion. True Dragon Ball Z style, she transports you into some lava-ish platform to duke it out. I remember dying several times just by falling off, but if you look here we deal +350 damage per hit with dual wield, and the result is inevitable. Manny: I died?! When? Spectre: Once every 4.3 screenshots, at current tally. Don't worry, you're outperforming your IQ range with that rate. Seems like all she wanted to do was help her secret, beleaguered women-only society. I guess there is no saving them from the evil of ogling now. We also pick up some hints about our main quest - if you remember, to free a deeply buried MacGuffin, at the risk of also freeing the Ancient Evil, who two-times currently as our Spectre. Thankfully, the Miniguffins we need to reach the Macguffin are quite naturally found in our sidequesting. From memory, this mostly involves finding random Evil-worshippers with telltale blood symbols then chopping them into bits. We mindread a tree and extort some armour out of it. While running around, we also find this guy talking to an agent of Damian - remember, the original badass who is still besieging this city trying to conquer the world? Of course, this is the same agent that we chose to believe and rescue from the city militia some time before. Sucks to be us. Manny: You know, this part would be so much more interesting if anybody could still remember the earlier episode. Spectre: Oh, I remember. I remember telling you to kill him. I also remember, distinctly, that you farted something about innocents and burden of proof. Manny: Well, now we do have proof... We chase the other contact, the Black Ring lieutenant, to a city portal. Cleverly, he has led us into an ambush! I'm shaking in terror.

Spectre: What...what the hell happened here? Manny: We're back on, Mr. Spectre. You should probably put on some clothes. Spectre: I'm an ethereal spirit, Manny. Manny: Yes, but an ethereal dong is just as offensive to the children as a dong in flesh. Spectre: Why are we back on anyway? I thought we already saved the world. Manny: No, we sort of... stopped in the middle. I heard that the writer started on another game. Gothic 2, I think. Spectre: Oh, that's a much better game. Why couldn't we do that one? Manny: Remember? They said you weren't German enough. Too much American sitcom-inspired jibber jabber. Spectre: Alright, fine. But don't expect me to enjoy this. Where were we? Manny: They made me turn into a girl. Spectre: I'm going to enjoy this. Last we left, Manny had followed a certain Willy to his home. He apparently has some trouble with Assassins, uh, creditors, wanting to seize his assets. Spectre: We could let them kill him, then kill them, then take everything for ourselves. Manny: FEEL THE FURY OF MY HAMSTER! Spectre: Wonderful. You can see the insane XP we get just from the assassin goons. Halfway through the expansion pack, this is when the game's balance begins to break down and we enter the familiar RPG late-game God territory. With the ability to send goons out to get herbs to make potions, way too much money and ihhg-level items available in shops, quest-related powerful items, and of course the ability to respec or extend the skill limits by paying money, we are pretty much unkillable. At least the game tries its best by throwing very, very powerful enemies at you. I forget what we did here, but I don't think we really bothered. The only time we ever liked the idea of having your own house was in Morrowind, because you could really get a cool looking pad (if you spent 6 hours dropping objects at just the right angle so they wouldn't roll around and knock everything else into outer space). Manny: I'm sort of a high-rise person anyway. We also finally solve the mystery of the triple murders at the Busty Babes Motel. Spectre: Nobody bothered to do this while we were gone? For two months? Manny: It's probably a leftist government in power. Using the pixie dust thing acquired from the perfume-maker (where Manny was reborn as Manny Bootylicious), we uncover the terrible secret behind the murders... A secret door. Beneath the bed. Yeah, seriously. It sort of pops into view. I've lost most of the screenies from this segment, but below there are some form of catacombs, and after solving some basic puzzles you encounter some kind of super-zombie. To defeat him you must bring down the incarnations of his three victims, including the poor, misunderstood Folo. Spectre: There's no misunderstanding here, the man liked to stick his gun up the pig's arse and fire multiple rounds into the apple. Manny: Why is there an apple inside the pig? Spectre: I'm sure the pig was thinking the same thing. Next is the Haunted Playhouse. The familiar concept is played out rather well here - after some searching across messy and deserted rooms you see the ghosts endlessly playing out a play on the stage...poorly. The way to help them, of course, is to wear the disguise of a woman, play the leading lady, and get all the lines right, releasing these ghosts from their unfulfilled dream. Manny: Oh, so that's why I had to turn into a woman! Spectre: No. Manny: Well, can I turn back now? Spectre: No.

Perhaps, but the task of a censorship committee is not to challenge the social norms, but to protect them and respond to them. It is essentially a tool of the norm itself to regulate the media industry so that its commercial logic does not violate the said norms excessively. In that respect it makes perfect sense to smack down on prostitution as quest reward and not so much, say, Assassin's Creed or even Hitman. If we're talking about it more generally, of course we have this huge mess with sexuality. But at the same time, I'm deeply suspicious of gamers that use that as an argument to say we should get boobs and sex and brothels in our games. Even less than other stories or issues that games deal with or reflect, their depiction of sex and sexuality has been generally terrible. As it stands this is the last place that we are going to see a healthier and more open representation of sex and sexuality - the truth is that most of the 'maturity' in TW1 or elsewhere is decadent, carnally indulgent and shameless marketing tricks. Sex sells, but it seems silly for the customer to defend it by arguing that the society's prudishness is flawed. (That is sort of a strawman because I don't think anyone's arguing that in this thread - it's more of a general thing, e.g. on people that want to kill children in the FO3/NV. At least the earlier ones had a child killer reputation thing.)

There's a difference between getting sex as a quest reward and killing people to fulfill your goals, because most of the killing in, say, most FPSes are given specific circumstances, such as war, covert ops, global conspiracy, etc. Certainly the Aussie board would have a second look if the killing was overtly gratuitous, or killing as an act rather than a means was glorified or incentivised in extreme ways - which is of course why Postal 2 was banned outright in NZ. You can't argue that there's a difference between playing a marine who shoots people in a war setting and a man who gets to sleep with a prostitute for finding her family heirloom, in our current cultural norms.

Yeah, I agree that having an R would solve a lot of problems. Does anyone know how the preloading works for TW2 GOG? It seems strange to me that you can download it on May 10 but... you can't unlock until a full week later?

It was something to do with sex/drugs as incentives - though I don't remember that in the game, really. Maybe it was smokeweed as a reward? Again, banning the whole game for that is stupid. I think the sex bit might be Risen's prostitutes - again, it's not like they were interesting in any way, wouldn't shed a tear if they were removed. Censorship is only a problem when it removes worthy content - which it obviously is if the whole game is banned. I doubt any of the breasts and sex in TW2 will be worth the time.

*shrug* I don't see a huge problem with it. Of course censorship should ideally be more consistent across violence/sex, etc, acknowledge a R category instead of just cutting crap out, etc., but on the flipside it's kind of silly to complain about this because as much as I'm excited about getting TW2 I find all the sex stuff meh. If it's not as in your face as the marketing was, great. I couldn't care one iota less if you couldn't see any nekkid action, the 'mature' argument is a strawman because you don't need boobs to be mature. Now, trying to ban Risen in Australia because of, I don't even remember what? That was retarded.

I've started a new BG1 playthrough. Most of the wear-and-tear it's suffered over the years is neatly mitigated with Widescreen Mod and Tutu (+ BG1 GUI / loading screens / music and some tweaks). I'm also trying a new mod called Spell Revisions that rebalances many spells - I don't know if it's kosher D&D but it should shake up the magic use a lot more - and of course SCS, which makes the game a huge challenge. I've rolled a Fighter/Druid modded to use an Avenger kit (with Shapeshifting rebalancing mod), then plan to go semi-ironman - reload if whole party dies, but if a party member gets chunked go out and find another one. This will help me resist just taking my favourites again and again.

New BGTutu+BG2 run after I had to abort the last one due to BG Trilogy introducing huge lag. Made a Fighter/Druid shadowkeep'd to the Avenger kit, the usual assortment of mods centred around SCS AI/encounter upgrades, also modded NPCs' kits & proficiencies to mix it up a bit.

There doesn't appear to be a pseudo-persistent online MP in the sense of Diablo or MMOs where you have one character you play with over and over again - co-op does appear to be the big focus. I don't think DS3's character development system is built for grinding to level 99, in any case, so I'm excited about the coop, but it might disappoint some.

We had Segas in my youth for some reason, I was happy enough with Sonic until age 9 though. The SNES Mario Kart was glorious, though...

Of course, but isn't the idea that we want to avoid this and restore a semblance of proper democratic voting? I think one of the huge barriers to more / better informed / positive political involvement and participation from voters is the lack of a reliable standard or framework. I paid almost zero attention to politics growing up for some reason, and as I approached voting age I decided to try and do some research - but it was so difficult to 'define' the parties and politicians using existing information because you expend a lot mroe energy trying to judge how biased and in what way the information is (as it nearly always seems to be) rather than compiling that into a fair evaluation. So you either end up going by 'feel' putting your own personal morals into it, which is where negative smearing works well, or giving up. For example, after all that drama, it's really hard for me to tell what the Republicans' real problem is about Obama healthcare, whether it's been 'successful' so far, etc.

Hrm, perhaps the patch changed the way the console works... sorry, it used to work for me. My own game's on hold - after ~5 playthroughs I think I'm done with FNV, in the end the VATS combat just isn't fun enough to hold up the game once the exploration and story is exhausted. Will probably buy & play the DLCs, though.

As I understand it, the whole Parliament Siege crap is there because of the various legal requirements for legislation to be passed. Perhaps the party in power contacts their members in secret, convenes at super-short notice, then make sure they have just enough people to allow a vote, and a speaker of the house or equivalent to authorise the vote - then go through the motion, seconding, etc superfast. At the same time the opposition members hear what's going on and know that if they can break down the door, get in and disrupt the proceedings they can delay things long enough to neutralise the surprise. The climax is when the opposition inevitably breaks in and there's a fistfight melee inside parliament, with one guy trying to bang the gavel and authorise the vote with others clinging to his every limb. (I'm an idiot in law/politics so all the terminology is wrong.) edit: Oh yes. On topic - Wals, isn't it very dangerous to start letting people vote negatively, though? It will make the kind of negative smearing campaigns( that are already proven as more effective (when successful) than positive campaigns) the order of the day, and the focus will be on what kind of disgusting or otherwise offputting personal quality, scandal or somesuch to pin on the opposing candidate.

Make sure that you use your mouse to select your target - you hit ~, then you left-click on the zombie. You know the right one is selected because its name comes up near the top of the screen (e.g. "Glowing Ghoul"). And *then* you use the 'kill' command.

I think I was on the fence so long my arse slid naturally into "won't-bother" mode. Reading an LP of it and nothing I see makes me wish I played it, really.

never tried, but disabling the attack with GECK might well be possible. You can also cheat and kill the glowing ghouls temporarily, though this is not ideal - just use ~ then after you select the target with your mouse, I think.