Tigranes

I don't know a gun from a cannon, but it just looks like your any old scoped rifle, doesn't it? I'm much more intrigued/amused by the mix of gritty grit and, well, Tunnel Snakes hair.

Very Hard/Hardcore is pretty hard when you go off the beaten path - and I'm finding areas that I completely missed the first time round. At level 6 with only a Guns skill of 25 I went down and found a canyon full of golden geckos and radiation, used up a dozen stims and all my explosives getting through it. Was gaining XP too fast still, though, so I pushed all the iXP values I could find down by third to a half. I"d like to only get to level 30 near the end.

Funnily enough, the most satisfying such effect magic had in a game for me, so far, is Disintegrate in BG2. Just the fact that you would actually see the enemy sprite immediately vanish, then a pile of dust accumulate at the spot. Other than that, I guess force powers in Jedi Knight. It'd have been nice to see other APRGs take up Dark Messiah's initiative in that manner though.

*shrug* different ways to look at it, fair enough if you see it as nitpicking. I don't have a problem with Dragon Age or even Thedas, though. I didn't take your previous post as directed at me, but more general, and my response was general as well. Note I didn't say certain people, I'm more inclined to think most of us move in and out. But hey, if you're determined on seeing it as a black and white battle of the titans, well, Castillon certainly is a tiny thing to fight you over. edit: can't find much info on what castillon will be like, so in the end it'll depend on that. If they get art style / etc from actual Castille, well, I'd think the name becomes even sillier, but I'd probably enjoy the locale.

True enough, though I find it equally amusing that in response we seem to have grown a vigilante mindset where any negative comment in a bio thread is scanned to check for foaming at the mouth. Anyway, the value of Castillon as a location depends on how it's done, not it's name - just thought it was a pretty bad name. Now I'mw aiting for the one voice actor who will invariably say Castiyon...

I just want to know if Castille is now obscure enough to be a good fantasy name by changing the suffix. Now I'm also wondering if Castillon is going to be Castille-like, or it was just random name-grafting. It strikes me as amateurish, like calling your desert lands "Arabicana", but maybe it's not so bad for less history-oriented people.

DLC sounds fun, we'll see if it uses the medium to the fullest or is just a random quest add-on. It's almost certain it'll see multiplatform release later.

Exactly, I get lost in real life but I rarely have a problem navigating FNV. Especially with the compass - which I'd disable, but it's convenient for (a) deeply hidden caves that you can only reach by going round and round impassable mountain rocks in a specific pattern, and (b) fetch quests.

Gritty Cinematic Shooter? Concept is bleh, but maybe there will be fun in the details.

Quite a while, given their number and depending on the method used? I'd imagine at least a full day. I mean, that's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but they probably felt it was good enough as is.

FO3/FNV looks fine, if you hold it up against other games, IMO. No worse than Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Arcania...Oblivion was pretty nice to look at and walk around in except when any living things got involved. I think the last time an RPG wowed with its visuals was... hrm.... mm.... some bits of MOTB, and... yeah, 2D era. :/

Maps were pretty useless in every FO game, and it's no exception here. The upside though, is that you stop staring at the map all the time and treat the wasteland ilke a real place you explore. I think that's good, as long as there aren't too many super-convoluted areas (and there aren't, really). I always assumed FO3/FNV maps were automatically generated...

No, I found out all that. I think mainly, the first thing you find - the idea of electing other people - put me off a bit because it seemed like too obvious a reversal of the election process to parody the political institutions today (you can see this in the language they use). After that, I got into it again as I kept finding out more and searching the Vault, but at the end when you find out from the cheerful computer message the truth - I just thought "well that's way too pointlessly ludicrous to be serious". I'm sure it will have worked differently for others. I did get that "Oh God" feeling of hopelessness when it all wrapped up, but it stood right besides that WTF feeling.

It's up those steel railing-style stairs, yes.

Isn't it the one If the latter, I never really found out the full story, just a cryptic message about how "we will never find out exactly why"

I think a couple of times FNV tried to do the whole Fallout ironic black humour but either overshot it or made it too obvious - V11 is one of those, that's the one with the elections right? The premise felt pretty stupid at the end... but then, the way the story unfolds through terminals, etc as you go in was so effective that it was still quite enjoyable. I'm a real sucker for getting lost in 3d spaces in games, but I felt when you do a couple of sweeps around the vaults or Hoover Dam, it's fine. Much more annoying is the walking you need to do in McCarran, Golf, AFB, Dam. I already installed a mod to put a fast-travel at Lucky 38, maybe if I can figure out how to do it for myself...

Yeah, I loved how in most early game FNV towns, they would all be obsessed with the question of supplies and business and population flow, etc. Still didn't really see a lot of working the land going on, though, but I think again that relates back to the devs wanting to risk shaking the Fallouty feel too much.

I actually abandoned Psychonauts after a few hours - I liked how funny and wacky it was, but platforming was never my forte and it just doesn't interest me unless it's done very simply and very well, a la 2D Mario. Couldn't wade through it.

I'm pretty much spending November and December on conferences, submitting publications and PhD applications. The latter two is pretty much a lot of work for probably somewhere between zero and miniscule return, so FNV is especially tempting..

There's nothing wrong with the look for your daddy hook, per se - I mean in FNV you spend a lot of time chasing down people who shot you. The problem is that both story-wise, and gameplay-wise, it was just a series of uninteresting mehs. Your dad wasn't exciting or interesting at all - neither when you didn't know, nor when you met him and got the explanation afterwards, did you feel that all this was particularly intriguing or significant. This ties into what Enoch says, in that at the end of the game, you don't really end up with any vested interest (unless you have a low tolerance for bad stories). Hell, I don't even mind my character dying. But the sheer nonsense behind why he had to die, and the obviousness of the deus ex machina (here we'll just make this room super radioactive just so you can die a heroic death) makes you vomit. Sadly, now that's really the only part of the game I remember clearly, even though while I was playign I thought some areas were quite interesting.

I believe FNV is superior just for the fact that it doesn't have Three Dawg or M-something-lady-that's-writing-wasteland-journal, and doesn't want you to kill yourself for NO REASON at the end.

Started my 2nd playthrough on Very Hard/Hardcore with nerfed XP rewards. This time I'm going 9 PER / 9 AGL / 3 LCK, explosive/repair/speech tagged, Legion and generally being a thieving greedy bastard. Now that I've gone and finished it once I can also take the time to look around nooks and crannies.

I was idolised by NCR for much of the game and actually, they treated me very appropriately. I tried very hard not to kill any Legion folks and was neutral or somesuch when I was approached by them, but with the NCR it was more of everywhere I turn up, they're fawning over such a hero / excellent servant to the republic coming to help them out.

I love how House had been painstakingly updating his own eulogy, he is really the king of nerds. The Khan quest is excellent in that there are a huge variety of ways you can solve it, and you don't need to go to the Fort. If only its excellent variety didn't lead to an equal variety of bugs.

Just beat it siding with Yes-Man as well, clocked in at exactly 40 hours. Went with NCR all the way until the end though, protecting Kimball and letting General Lee go. The ending slides with different voices are a bit jarring, and it felt like the wasteland didn't change much, but that could have been my goodie good quest decisions. All in all awesome and goign to start again with explosive-happy Legion man as soon as I work up an XP nerf. A couple of faction quests bugged out in the end where I accidentally had Hardin take over BOS and then all the dialogues went a bit odd, and similarly got the Khans to live but they 'suicide bombed' the Dam instead. Walked through the final battle encounter in full power armour and modded sniper rifle, one-shotting everyone except Lanius, who looks damn stupid in his helmet and Final Fantasy sword.