Tigranes

Hrm. Ive checked out some Nightmare gameplay just for combat. The tutorial combat & Exiled Prince DLC combat mainly. Definitely seems to resemble DAO a lot more on nightmare if you use pause and abilities, which is nice, but pretty silly how your party instantly gets full HP after each battle, and the camera id efinitely terrible. Looks like it could be fun if encounter / enemy design was up to scratch, but not if you're having crap spawning on top of you and not if most enemies end up being darkspawn mobs? Also, it does seem easier, in that a city battle with +10 mobs on DAO could slice through your party fast if you let it, here the guy fireballs his own party but is never in danger. But certainly, nightmare seems much more like DAO than press A for awesome. This game is doing a really good job of mixing good and bad.

Yeah, I'm hearing that it's very difficult but I also want to use it to get myself more familiar with how all these climate/env issues work together as a whole - I think fi you just read the news every once in a while you get a very fragmented knowledge about it. How expansive is the game? What I found with another indie game, Democracy was, for instance, that while it was interesting, the variables were limited and once you figured it out it was just like playing a card trick to yourself.

We ignore the glorious flowering of indie games at our peril, gentlemen. Recently released is Fate of the World, a rather prettylooking climate/environmental simulator for Earth in the near future. As I understand it, you take control of a fictional global body that uses funds from all nations to make macro-level interventions in an attempt to avert disaster. 10USD, or 10euro/pound inc. VAT. I think I'll pick it up, but has anyone tried it? <iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5Pk3QDC84Go" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> ...if only we had HTML

As expected, Bio/EA rescind the guy's game ban and argue it was all a mistake So, does that mean their earlier policy quote, which says EA account bans do kick you out of the game altogether, is wrong? I doubt it. Good news for the guy though.

The point remains that every character is limited to a specific weapon type, including your own (since if your Hawke is a warrior, he can't into bows, cuz warriors SMASH THINGS). DAO was mainly a powergame looathon dungeon crawl for me and a lot of that goes away if half their gear, including their most important gear, is limited. (btw, just reminds me... we shouldn't bash DA2 for "press A to win", it's going back to the great tradition of WRPGs... Ultima 7 )

People who actually played the game. Keep in mind that they might tell me it's fun, but from the details they give me it might seem unfun to me, but I certainly don't think criticism is so neatly limited to people who haven't played the game.

Unknown as of yet, really, isn't it?

Interesting comments. In my case, personally, yes I liked DAO a lot and I was disappointed by the direction here, but that's not why - it's just that from everything I've seen and heard, DA2 simply appears to be a bad, rushed, not-fun game. (And then the bonus of the combination of stupid marketing / PR that lies to you, blackmails your enthusiasm then bans you from playing if you're not nice). I like Action RPGs, I think they're fun. I just don't know why you'd insist on making this weird halfway between a real RPG and Exploding Tomato Sauce Action Game, where you swerve wildly between taking a quest from someone then having people pop out of thin air to fight you in waves so they can explode into 37 pieces. edit: ... and having said all that, part of me still wants to try it. Bloody consumerism

That said, metacritic IS a good way for people with real concerns to get themselves heard, because investors do pay attention to it (though mostly to the 'real' / professional score aggregate).

Another benevolent touch from Bio (or, most likely, EA): it seems that DA2 contains securom despite Bio/EA saying securom is out - and it leaves files behind on your computer. Not the worst DRM out there but it's certainly nice they mislead you about it. They're making it really easy to not buy their products, which I will do now - no way I'm giving a cent to these idiots. And to think I scoffed at people talking about the EA monster...

Yeah, combined with the "pre-order before the demo or any reviews or miss out on stuff" and all the other stupid crap, I think they've just helped me forget about their products. Often when a product is enticing enough you ignore your dislike of a company or policy, and I did with FNV and Steam, but pfft.

Shryke doesn't know her office, just her bedroom.

Yep, the Kirkwall bits are just typical DAO stuff so far, will be interesting to see. Also, Vince likes it. So conflicted edit: actually, just read about banning random guy for saying 'bio sells soul to EA' and stopping him from playing the game he bought. Are they asking people to pirate or something? O_o

Exactly. For me DAO had pretty boring writing, it was all about the party combat, loot, level up, etc. I enjoyed 'powergaming' on Nightmare. If loot / customisation is so restricted that most companions have their own gear and weapon types are restricted except for amulets/rings, that takes down that kind of gameplay a notch. I have no idea what was wrong with being able to make Leliana different kind of thieves - why restrict that? On the 'good bits' you've got a point, though Azure's example sounds interesting. I guess I'm pretty sure now I won't waste my money on DA2, not while it's at full price anyway... but I think I still want to convince myself it'll be fun.

I thought warriors can't equip ranged weapons now. edit: also, anybody up for giving any examples of decent/good writing or quests? So far I've only seen okish or silly.

OK, so clearly in my early 20s technology has already raced beyond me - I know pretty much nothing about smartphones. I want to know whether I can buy one when I'm in the US next week (or import later on), then get a plan in NZ and use it there. From what I've read this is possible and commonly done if (a) the phone is 'unlocked' and (b) the phone is compatible with NZ's networks. Obviously most of you won't really know/care about the NZ situation, but anyone willing to give me a quick lowdown for the ignorant on; (1) Things to avoid when picking a smartphone, generally I've heard good things about Android phones (2) How 'unlocked' works / what that means (3) If you know, what could be bought in US then used in NZ

I'd imagine it'd get terribly.... empty without the waves, since it sounds like a big portion of encounters involve them. Azure you make it sound pretty interesting, can you still do spell combos and combo abilities between characters like in DAO? Do you tend to pause at all or just have one guy and run around?

Friendly kidnapping. Do you not watch sitcoms or something? (Seriously, I guess the mission is to contrive some situation that can convince him he's got issues.... )

I play the hardest option on every new RPG now, yeah, but when a game is harder, it's also a lot more frustrating if the combat is badly designed. e.g. if Nightmare = 200% enemy HP, do you really want waves and waves of peekaboo enemies to take 2x longer to kill? That's why I want to hear how tactical people's experiences are so far.

Morons. Wish I could pay for the game and not use Steam, without the help of pirates. Oh wait, that used to be possible until they became even more money-grubby >.<

Yep, I updated NVSE and got things started now, which is lucky. If it was a more 'major' patch that did break existing mods then I'd have been really pissed. At least Steam isn't as crap as it used to be, when it wasted 10 minutes of my life every time it started. 5th playthrough time!

I'm interested by this, because when I watched videos of people fighting the first ogre, they could win on Normal by sitting there and smashing A A A A A A A then hitting whatever ability is avialable when the cooldown is over. After about 20 seconds of hack hack hack hack hack their health would go down and they'd shove in one healing potion, which would put them up to full. But now I'm hearing DA2 does feature enemies that are both faster to kill and do more damage. I would like that if that were true. Which is it? I'm also interested to know how DA2 combat can be more fun and tactical if you have waves of enemies that just drop on the screen. I mean, sometimes being ambushed is fine, but if you can't ever plan your approach, or plan how many enemies are remaining, but constantly just have to smash through enemies that drop on top of you, what's fun/tactical about it? Enlighten me.

Barcelona definitely showed once again how incredibly good they are, no question about that. Curious thing is, though, in the first half, they dominated possession, but only had 1 real chance (Adriano's shot) before extra time when Fabregas committed ritual suicide. As good as they were they couldn't penetrate the Arsenal defense - and given how useless Arsenal have been at defending at other points in the season, that's amazing. It was only after the red card they ran rampant. Barca were great and deserve to go through - at the same time, without the ref's idiocy Arsenal could easily have gone through, helped by their first leg display.

Barcelona are an unbelievably awesome team. I'm an Arsenal fan but you have to take your hats off and marvel at just how good they are. At the same time, the extent to which they roll around clutching their arses is equally remarkable. It's sad how blatantly incompetent refereeing has become so common, though, that we've all become desensitised - refs to truly stupid things every bloody week but now they do it so often you can't help but shrug and move on. That said, I'm not so sure that they chickened out. I think the plan wasn't to sit and defend for 0-0, the plan was to defend well and then play some counter-attacking football. The problem was that the Arsenal midfield was injured/unfit and the Barca midfield were just too good - they couldn't get something going, and then the ref made it worse by sending off the striker for having a bloody shot. It's pretty amazing how close it was, though. If Bendtner didn'th ave the touch of a mule in that last minute chance Arsenal could still have gone through.

If a reviewer reviews purely based on persnoal experience and opinion, why should he be a reviewer at all, i.e. his opinion privileged above others? What qualifies him to a position of such influence? I mean it's been a problem with the vg journo industry for a long time - how to build up a standard for who should be reviewers and how they should review - and unfortunately the solution so far has been for everyone to just peek at each other's answers. the argument that reviews are still useful because you can cherrypick for info you want (i.e. what bugs are out there) is a good one, but I think the greatest failing of reviews are therefore not in what rubbish they sometimes write, but what they don't write. See: Oblivion. Unless you're very well informed with a game's progress, the genre, and what you personally prefer exactly in that genre, it woudl have been impossible to read the reviews and infer certain things that would later bloom into giant annoyances.