Tigranes

And so, gentlemen, we have survived Icewind Dale 2 Ironman, and the legendary Obsidianites II will all live to see another day. It is a grand, grand moment. A single tear rolls down Feargus' cheek. It was a bit easier than we had anticipated in the last few sessions, but I think it's because IWD2 gives you so many magic items and so much XP that, near the end, you quickly accumulate some crazy +4 +5 weapons and highest level spells - without Mordekainen's Sword, Horrid Wilting and Mass Invisibility I'm not sure if we'd have survived the last two battles. To end, let us tally up the murders. Monte Carlo Junior managed a respectable 622, though it couldn't match the father's 689 in IWD1. I wonder if IWD2 actually has less enemies? It sure doesn't feel that way. Indeed, Grommy stops at a disappointing 350, as opposed to Magical Volo's 467. I think he ended up not as effective as I'd have liked all throughout, a little bit too death-prone... but of course, he did singlehandedly save us from a premature party wipe in the Underdark. Surprisingly, Chris Avellone is third, at 244 - better than Numbers' 233 in IWD1. I think this proves the effectiveness of AOE spells and such in this particular party. Feargus is just two behind Purkake's 226. Mkreku II died a lot less and did a lot more for the party this time round - but at 222, his kill count is in fact half of Mkreku Senior, who clocked 455. To be fair, though, Mkreku II's real contribution was in his several dozen hastes and stoneskins. And finally, you just can't cheat blood - as Walsingham Senior came last at 115, so does Walsingham Junior, though at a much more respectable 212. I attribute this to Call Lightning and Static Charge. And there you have it folks - the Ironman LP for IWD and IWD2 has come to end, after approx. 660 screenshots' worth of fun. Let it never be said that I have not done my part for the community. Actually, it's been pretty fun, and I might come back and do more later - a while later. I hope some of the other LPs can continue, though, I think we got some great ones in us.

This is a very difficult fight because they have too many spellcasters to disrupt at once, and dragonkin pack a punch. Fortunately, if you've noticed, we entered with Mass Invisiblity pre-cast and we are able to relocate the party to a better position, then open with Horrid Wiltings. After that it's a quick rest, re-stoneskin, re-mass invisibility and off to see Isair and Madae. This is not an easy battle. In the first couple of times I played IWD2 it was literally impossible to beat them with my party because I could hardly hit them or damage them - you need a halfway decent party and some good tactical use of your resources. Now, IWD2 always talks to your invisible party members, so don't mind me if I will take advantage of it for once... our stoned, invisible party discusses Isair's facial complexion. We recommend mud-packs, twice a day. Once again we can reposition our party so we're not surrounded by our enemies, and most importantly, Ormis Dohor's monks will be able to distract some of them. Isair ends up coming over, but Madae's out of it for now. We summon monsters and begin (the beetles are the enemy, though). Feargus is sent on a sneak mission to kill the enemy summoner before he makes too much fondue for the cauldron, but ends up needing half the party to assist. Meanwhile we keep summoning and pushing them towards Isair, trying to keep the party members out of harm's way. This works pretty well: Madae comes over eventually, but by that point we've dispelled Isair and get his HP down. ....aaaand it only takes one of them on low HP to end the first phase of the battle, as they retreat. Doing pretty well so far. We can't rest between phases, but we heal up, use up nearly every buff potion we have left, and go for it. We again form a tight pack on the bridge. Our aim is to dispel Isair/Madae then get summons to keep them away while the other goons go down, and hopefully get in some Lower Resistance & Malison to soften them up as well. Unfortunately, Madae punches through our front and starts doing some nasty things to Chris Avellone. We concentrate on getting the goons down, and stick Wals on Heal Duty next to MCA. It works pretty well - after all we have 3 heals memorised and about 4 heal scrolls saved up. So I send the rest of the party to pound on Isair. Eventually Madae attacks Wals instead, who has to scramble away to try and stay alive, but Isair can't keep up with Monty, Grommy, Mkreku and Feargus pounding away. I didn't realise, but apparently you only need to take one down here too - and so... We are victorious. No casualties? I'm a little disappointed, villains.

I forgot I still had one more to go - the very final update! I am now playing BG trilogy packed with about 70 mods, but I won't be LP'ing that one. Pity - after you LP for a while you get that ingrained into your brain and you get excited about sharing, say, a level 2 party's struggle against 50 gibberlings (literally). And I'm doing this on dialup internet, grah. Last we left it we were halfway through the various convoluted questlines of the Severed Hand,wreaking havoc before Isair and Madae return. The war and officer towers are filled with rooms of blissfully unaware enemies, waiting to be AOE spam'd. Now that both mkreku and Chris Avellone can cast Horrid Wilting it truly is devastating - read those damage numbers, esp. on Fort Save fails. I don't know why the IWD Horrid Wilting graphic shows a skeletal fish swimming across the middle, but it sure does make a statement. Don't eat fish. At any rate, it gives us an excuse to enjoy all our big spells ere the end. The only room that gave any trouble was this one, where Feargus (not me, oh no) mistook the robed fellows for unbuffed mages, but they all turned out to be monks with reflex saves from hell and the big boss with Quivering Palm strikes. As you can see we only bothered with a blizzard... ...and we pay dearly for our error. Raising dead is no real trouble now as we swim in money, but it is annoying re-equipping bloody everyone, I can't believe with about 3000 mods out there nobody's made an automation script for this. After much Macguffin fetching we begin the rite. Basically Xvim, son of Bane and a God himself, is worshipped round here and the Severed Hand, an Elven stronghold centuries ago, has been defiled - purification should weaken the enemy. Iyachtu Xvim, presumably some earthly avatar of his, comes to stop us, but we're well prepared with summons and pre-set skull traps (although the one on the bottom left failed to fire). Mordekainen's Sword is awesome for damaging enemies that have good DR... ..and our preparation pays off in the end, though Wals had to use all 3 Heals. (We're level 18 or 19 by now, I forget which.) Ain't that fancy, fellas. On another tower, the diminutive Captain Pudu does the shorties world round proud with his sleek womanising. Pity we won't let him live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his loins... uh, the loin-fruits of his labours? And finally we are ready. Stocking up on hundreds of +5 bolts & arrows, we stoneskin everyone and interrupt the diplomatic party from the dragonkin, whom the Legion hope to ally with.

Will be super interested in thoughts, though I've already blown my bandwidth on the football game demos.

The complaints in question almost certainly have to do with Sega, not Obsidian. You could argue that Obsidian has something of a reputation for bugginess, which I would agree with, but in this case it's really about Sega abandoning a franchise ruthlessly (whether that is justified given its sales - is up to you.)

I was going to update but I'm on dialup for now and I just can't upload. I'll do it in a couple of days - one big update to finisht he series off!

Was quite interesting Walsh, but I can't make heads or tails of it and tbh this genre of 'mindf---' they got going in literature doesn't tend to impress me... at least this one wasn't full of phallic symbols. Still, not bad. I enjoy Gunnerkrigg but I think you have to say it firmly belongs to the Harry Potter school of light reading.

I agree in general about the weirdity of small scale tactical logic being played out in big spaces, but I don't think that's a good compromise gameplay-wise. The whole point of getting rid of stacks was to (a) reduce the number of units you have to deal with, (b) make terrain/space matter, © differentiate units instead of having one stack doing all jobs... and a 3-limit wouldn't really do as much. I think it's just the question of scale in Civilization as a whole - a problem that you can't really solve without turning everything upside down, and thus will enver be solved. Civ's combat is Civ's combat, a world of its own, and if you find it fun go for it. I don't think they could bring properly scaled combat with good gameplay without reworking it a lot (crude example would be dividing 1 hex into ~6 or whatever for units).

Because we're all mad, maaaaaaaad and Purkake is our Lonk the Sane. What was so bad about Daikatana anyway, from anyone that's actually played it? I sort of missed the initial furore around it, at the time I didn't really give a rat's butt about shooters (and still don't...)

fanboi. I'm still thinking about it - I don't know. With both Civ 3 and Civ 4 I found that I liked it, and they were well made games, but I kept getting put off by a few weird things - that (a) it's really designed for random maps where Romans fight Brazilians and Napoleon, not any sort of historical games on world maps, (b) the make-work involved in stuff like railroads and pollution even though I think I like the endgame more, © the weird suspension of disbelief required in combat. I love how they killed stacking and I think combat will be more fun now, but I think it'll get even weirder as you're doing tactical combat on a strategic level, e.g. artillery firing over a river and a mountain or something.

82-84% is a pretty good voting rate these days, doesn't Switzerland have 40 or so?

Fair enough, I won't be obnoxious about it. But yes those two vids look great, it's good to see the franchise continue.

Metacritic is worthless, though, as it depends on *shudder* vg reviewers. I'm going to buy Arcania & PES 2011 next month, and quite possibly F:NV... so I was going to give this one a miss, especially with Steam, but man it does look quite delicious. They've done a very good job at making it look very inviting with the combat animations, UI and so forth. In the end, though, I've never been the biggest fan of Civ, it doesn't have the longevity appeal for me - I'll wait and hear from you guys how much it's been changed & refreshed?

What? At max pistol skill your reticule zooms in as soon as you aim at an enemy. It only takes half a second for it to become a tiny dot - in other words, half a second to headshot an enemy from max range. it's just blatant exaggeration, if you aim properly you can get headshots most of the time even in the Greybox.

Remember everyone, discussion of piracy as an issue is fine (though it is OT here), admission of / endorsement of / providing information for piracy is not. Because, last time we checked, it's still illegal. Anyway, I won't even get into the kind of things that have to be presumed in order to mount the type of advocacy of piracy that khelgar does - you have to presume that you are above the law and can, vigilante-like, judge what is a 'fair price' or not, you are presuming that this vigilante-like judgment of the consumer is going to be accurate and selfless, that pirating games will send the right signals and make specific changes in game companies (instead of just bankrupting them and encouraging generic GOW clones), that supporting a system whereby everyone gets stuff for free and video game companies go bankrupt will help us get better video games that we will then start to pay for instead of continuing to get it for free... Certainly piracy is an inescapable fact of the industry now and in combination with other things, the hope is that it can lead to a few positive developments, such as more sensible game budgets, but to encourage everyone to pirate a game because one person in his divine wisdom has decreed it 'unworthy' is madness.

Just wait till grad school. ...or jobs, really. I think training in bureaucracy should be compulsory in high school, really.

Good news, GOG is awesome and I thought they were too popular to go away just like that, but that's a moronic stunt and I'll give them an earful when their forums come back up. Bloody trolls.

Ironically, when I was running my blog project, everyone thought it was Alley of Infinite Angels. Clearly nobody had played Torment. (Also, what is that? An easter egg where devas keep spawning and get chunked?)

I think it's not really sensible to continue to see the Fallout world or Fallout reception in this binary way that was only really close to accurate during roughly 2005-2007. What you're doing is conjuring an imaginary demographic of 'NMA' (which in fact reflects, yeah, only about 12 of the craziest people in NMA, thus making it tautological), pitting that against an equally imaginary silent majority, drawing a big fat line and saying 'where you at'. Trying not to fall into that same trap, for instance, we can see that there is a sizable group of people who can see FO3's writing was pretty mediocre, but didn't really mind it and still liked the game as a whole. We know that a large portion of that group would probably consider buying F:NV, and once they do, a certain portion will recognise the better writing (well, probably) - and come out with a newfound hunger for better quality writing in games (or, of course, treat it as the icing on the cake). I do think your perdiction is spot on, though, esp. that F:NV reviews will display another example of the hilariously distorted cultural memory in videogame journalism and say things like how F:NV is buggy and FO3 wasn't, F:NV is graphically inferior and FO3 wasn't, etc. But I think the really funny thing is, according to the kind of critique you've just given, you're essentially telling people that to frame their own opinions and standards of games in terms of how the companies have cultivated the market at this present time... is the right way to go. Surely the thinking is not "millions love FO3, that means Bethesda writing is 'good' by their standards, etc", but it should be, "millions love FO3 despite the writing - what does that mean about the place of writing in games, what games can get away with, and what people have been conditioned to expect". Personally, what I expect from F:NV is like a K2 from K1: same game, same combat, same gameplay experience, but vastly superior writing/characters and a few cool improvements / fun stuff added on.... but hopefully without the bugs.

After accepting several small quests (which are quite welcome after this dungeoneering) - we speak to Riki. As a Paladin Mkreku must refuse the option of poisoning his enemies - everyone knows that the only honourable way to fight is to walk in, announce your name and swing your assorted phallic symbols around. Funnily enough, the alternative 'sleeping potion' is suspiciously lethal. I guess Mkreku will need a Confessional after this. Mkreku just got done by an NPC. We clean up some quests, finding that drawing stars open up wizards' towers.... Return a natural elementalist to sanity... ...and catch a food-thieving semi-ethereal monster. It's good to know that our party is so skilled at stealth, they can hide to catch the thief by standing in the middle of the corridor. And now it's time for the four Towers and Endgame. We speak to Ormis Dohor, the real leader of the Black Raven Monastery from before. He's been inflicted with the side effects of a rather drastic botox operation and needs our help. Climbing up, we take the shiny teleport to Tyrannis Brute Mar's sanctum... next time. It's going to be pretty confusing, but essentially all we have to do is hop around the 4 towers picking up various McGuffins, killing lieutenants, rescuing the slaves, foiling the Legion's alliance with the dragonkin and finally tackling the big villains. All that in the final update!

The lich has memorised 2 power word kills. We somehow disrupt this one with a wand of flamestrike, and in another one let summons take the flack. He nearly gets mkreku with a Horrid Wilting (88 freaking damage!), but we take him down eventually. It's sort of battle after battle in this area, and we finally fight whatshisname the Thayvian wizard. Saablic Tan? We tried to get the mages down first but our own spells were disrupted, and Chris Avellone falls almost instantly under concentrated fire. Wals transforms into the shambling mound to try and take out the mages, but in that form he can't heal, and he goes down just before taking out Saablic Tan. Feargus joins the dead even as we finally defeat the wizard. At this point it's not a question of running out of spells, but staying alive long enough to use them all. It turns out that we do get to stop in Kuldahar before the end anyway, so we restock - by this point you have so much money from all the redundant magic items, you can just stock up on everything you need and more. We squeeze out the last bit of XP by completing this quest - you speak to the ghost of Mother Egenia, the one who raised Isair and Madae. She fulfills the Poetry Quota. Be true, Mkreku. Be brave, Mkreku! And now we are in the final dungeon of this long journey, the Severed Hand. It's been a bit spiced up from the IWD1 days... isn't it funny how nobody's ever ready for us in RPGs? They're always talking about stopping us the exact moment we enter. Yxbudur'zmutkimdu is quite justified in his anger, I feel. Pfinik'millillin and Tutup'limbobo really have no business arguing while Yxbudur'zmutkimdu is around, do they? He dies quicker than it takes to say his name.

Yes, there you go. Now we have a new short page for easier reading. We forgot about the Holy Avenger battle last time, and proceeded through Dragon's Eye - so we teleported back to Kuldahar to deal with this big battle first. We're pretty nervous about this, so Mkreku sits and stoneskins the entire party, we buff up, and summon some monsters before beginning. We open by sticking the summons on the more troublesome guys, and quickly backstabbing Atalaclys, the spellcaster. He goes down in a couple of turns and our plan is to prevent them from getting stronger through spells/summons... It works fairly well, especially with Chris Avellone wielding the special IWD-version Mordekainen's Sword (or is it how it works in 3E?), and another Man-With-Terrible-Name goes down. Now it's time to reinforce the summons, who are taking a beating. Gromnir goes down to help but gets beaten up pretty bad himself. But having killed the spellcaster and the summoner there's not a lot extra the enemy party can offer... And we emerge victorious without too much trouble. Remember Mkreku is a long sword specialist - and has 1 level in paladin. Never has the Holy Avenger been in better hands. Now it's back to the Fields of Slaughter and there are quite a few tricky battles here. The big Thayvian is out to get us and you can see the best of the Legion of the Chimera here - half-dragons, arcane and divine spellcasters, the lot. But of course, they can't deal with our pretty colours. This encounter is a little more tricky - a lich and his corrupted elven cohorts. The elves in and of themselves have good saves and pack a punch, and even with Malison they resist the easy Disintegrate.

There are two more updates to go and I'll get on those shortly, over the next 2-3 days. Maybe get this up to p7.

Instaling about 70 BG mods using Big World Project, which automates most of it but still takes hours and hours. Hope it works..

It is the future but why is it 'necessary' now? Something I don't know? The cost of the computer (processor), not the Windows. Although, checking now, even mine is 64-bit capable - heh, I didn't know that.