Tigranes

The inner web of contradictions will slowly tear you apart, until you explode in a shower of LittleBigPlanet plushies. Sorry, it's a terminal condition.

In keeping with the spirit of the thread, I suggest that Purkake is a personification of gamer cynicism as a whole. Actually, same kind of 'should be' exists in every other cultural sphere, so it's no surprise. It's probably a "should-be-snobbier" kind of thing that drove me to try older and more 'classic' games, but ironically, I haven't regretted it, most of them have been great. Sometimes posturing can be productive.

OK, thanks Monty, I'll read up on the two (somehow I thought there were multiple sequels already out) and see how they are. Just not a fan of Starcraft and I haven't got my RTS fix in a long while. Haven't seen a grand one since AOK, really.

Monty, for some reason I always thought CoH was like CoD. How wrong I was when I was told that it was the only properly done WW-based RTS. Must pick it up somewhere sometime. But which one?

I suffered through G3 at launch, then returned about a year ago the Gothic 3 Community Patch was at 1.7 something. Freezes every 60 seconds due to CD-check were gone, game was significantly faster, quest dead-ends mostly fixed, crashes minimal, combat rebalanced, no stunlocks, no "random instakills", etc. Certainly the game was literally unplayable for at least 18 months after launch, which by itself is a horrible indictment, but there always was a pretty good game underneath it all and the great thing is that the community work has actually brought it to light by now. If it's on sale and someone likes that style of games (esp. G1/2), it's a no-brainer.

AP's aiming error has been greatly exaggerated. I am by any stretch of imagination a substandard aimer in shooter games, but after a few hours' experience I had no trouble headshotting people relatively consistently at Level 1. Even with zero skill in pistol it doesn't take more than 5-7 seconds to line up an aimed shot at the head, which - if in range - will still get the headshot more often than not. At least, as GDM says, in AP no matter how crap you are if you take the time to line up a shot you still have a good chance - DX's mechanism didn't even account for that. Reports of perfect headshots missing completely all the time are complete bogus - they come from (a) the unlucky few times when it does happen (you know, like critically missing that rat in FO1...), and (b) when people just line up a shot moving without realising there's an aimed shot, like they do in a FPS, then say "screw this". You can argue that stat-based aiming is a bad idea, or that you felt AP combat was crap, but you can't argue that you couldn't hit anything in AP - that was simply not the case if you took 10 minutes to see how the mechanics worked.

As I said, the extensive community work over the years has fixed most of the major problems with G3 combat - which absolutely does not depend on mindless button mashing. You would only think that if you played/watched early/vanilla G3.

Gothic 3 combat is fine with the community pack, once stunlocks are fixed. The world is good for exploration (except for the desert, I guess), there's faction C&C where you see the world change, and it's a pretty decent game if you're into that stuff.

Wait, what?!

It's better than KOTOR, to be fair, but if the angle/zoom shown in the vid is as far as it goes then you can't aim AOE with any precision on the far ends of your LOS. Hell, it's hard for me to tell what's down there.

I assume the one in Manners Mall - almost posh I suppose, but never fashionable. They know me by name and last time there was a big Indian birthday party with some respectable old gentleman in traditional clothes (inc. headgear), and they had me stay and watch some amateur magic show.

I'm finally done with the September-December period where I finished my MA, went on conference trips, submitted manuscripts, applied for PhD, wrote research proposals, moved back home, blah blah. Now there's not too much to do but wait to see if I get in anywhere awsum. Meanwhile I think for the first time in my life I need to start exercising for the sake of it - life, youth & football got me by in my teens but now in front of the computer all day I can feel I've become unfit and slightly bloated. Weight-wise I was 110 pounds at age 17, now I'm 135 at 22. Theoretically that's going from underweight to normal but nevertheless. I'll just start running round the block in mornings... yes, there's some eery echoes of dear old Hades here but there's quite a few differences biologically. And no, I detest you filthy bourgeoisie with your hard-core running with iPods and tight fitting running clothes and hup hup hup hup. You exercise so you don't die, not to channel Federer through your toenails. Pfah.

Snow just doesn't happen in Wellington, damnit. We get super rain/wind combination instead, Gorth it was a one-day summary of the bloody city. Called for a good curry.

Steam still suck trying to update itself for 3 days. Pirates $2.50 sounds nice but damn I can't bring myself to give money to this 'service'.

Wait, wait, iso-ish camera is out? OK, scratch my earlier post, it's back off the list. The KOTOR camera was so annoying I could never have got through it if it wasn't so incredibly easy you never needed to control your party properly.

Let's not run around with giant labelling guns... although, that would probably be fun to larp. But yeah, timed dialogue, AP or not, is quite different from your typical QTE's, since the two key components of a QTE mechanism is (a) abstraction/simplification, which is often used to depict scenes or player actions that are not easily achievable with that game's normal controls, and (b) success/failure on timing, which is then linked to reward/punishment. I think a more relevant example of how the QTE logic is utilised for variuos purposes might be Witcher 2's cutscene QTEs, where failure leads to a different outcome of the cutscene - that is a fairly interesting take on it, though execution is pending.

QTE's are often abstracted. Adding a timer to a game mechanic without changing the rest doesn't make it a QTE, I think. You don't call RT combat a QTE version of TB.

To be honest I think DA2 in the end will have a lot in common with DAO. It will still have Tunnel Fighting , it looks to still have RTwP squad combat, it will probably still have a relatively 'traditional' talk/quest/fight/loot hub-based progression, and so forth. It's just that the painting on the walls will be a different style, everyone's wardrobes got outsourced from Japan, and all the fighting lessons outsourced to ballet dancers. I might be able to live with that if the well balanced loot&quest romp remains beneath, actually... we'll see.

The faction C&C doesn't disappear with the Mark of Caesar - I don't think it was the best solution by any means but its detractors always go over the top and claim it's some sort of gamebreaking nonsense. The Mark makes perfect sense from a story/plot/setting POV, esp. since you are in NCR territory for much of the game & given your importance (importance which you largely earn by your in-game deeds, not prewritten factors). Gameplay wise you do need some way for players to earn back favour in a limited way - otherwise it's too easy to have people shoot you on sight for half the game, and that's why the Fame/Infamy balances (Good Natured Rascal, Wildchild, etc) are there. The only real problem with the Mark of Caesar is that; (a) you don't do anything to earn it, it's given to you - understandable to ensure that you don't get locked into a particular ending with 20 hours still to go, but would be nice if depending on your rep you had to earn your way back. (b) it's a straight off Infamy reset to zero - it should have been more contextualised. i.e. If you had high Fame & high Infamy it could have been reset to low Fame & low Infamy, or reducing Infamy just enough so that you are not Hated. Other than this, and perhaps thanks to the clear & simple reset it provided, the 2nd half of the game does an excellent job at showing you the different paths available, allowing double-crossing & double-jobs, giving you good warning about what's going to alienate whom in what way, and having different factions look like they are working to persuade you. edit: more on topic, I can't remember a single FO3 quest clearly, though I do recall the one in that big ship city was fairly well done. I actually think Bethesda's quests are decent, its the quality of writing behind it that lets them down more.

Please don't do voiceovers unless they will be really good quality recording & decent quality acting. Nothing is more annoying than fanmade VAs. I'll try it for my next playthrough.

From memory, we asked that question a while ago and couldn't find out. Given what they've done with everything else in the game I wouldn't be surprised if it meant something, but...

FNV Dead Money is the first DLC I'm considering buying. We'll see about price, length & quality.

Wow, I loaded up Realms of Arkania 1 and just couldn't do it. I've played older games, up to the late 80's, but there's just something about this particular Wizardry/Ultima Underworld look & GUI that is going to be a mission to get into. It took me ten minutes to work out how everything in character generation works, and having 6 or 7 different types of magic doesn't help, either. For now I've retreated to Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. Playing the campaign at Normal it's quite fun, but hardly a challenge - I think that's because I'm taking a long time (+100 turns per mission) and the game gives you no incentive to hurry up. It can't compare with King's Bounty at the moment but we'll see.

Exactly.

Again, I can't see anything here that supports the argument that BG wasn't "big". Obviously it can't contend against, say, the combined influence of the Ultima series, but it certainly was extremely successful and is one of the landmark franchises - one that could easily attract huge hype with a rebirth (please, no).