Tigranes

Random rumours of a real expansion, but may be bogus, or just a DLC bundle. I certainly wouldn't mind a real expansion pack with actual gameplay improvements as opposed to this pointless 'play for 15 minutes and get a nice sword' crap.

Actually, wouldn't it be great if it just cost $4AUD (or $4 NZD)?

Well put. A lot love for Bioware has turned into apathy or hate because they have a habit of telling the same story over and over again. I don't know. Americans don't mind it in movies, books and music, do they.

Exactly. Little bit of common sense thinking will go far here. What exactly is being argued over now, anyway? Does anyone actually believe Jesus wanted to persecute, accuse or damn the rich?

If you find that you are having difficulty beating the arena, yes, simply ignore the crit skill for now. The most efficient build is a 'dodger' build; e.g. you'd put roughly equal points in crossbows and dodge until both reach 175, after which you would concentrate exclusively on dodge, eventually maxing it out. You'd go for 10 DEX and 10 PER to maximise your chances of hitting people and moving around. You don't really need criticals: you are hitting things 3 or 4 times a round with great accuracy (so you can afford to do aimed shots), while, if you're keeping dodge along at a good pace, they'd need to try 10 times to hit you once. My extreme dagger/dodge build eventually got 300 dodge and a special dagger from one of the opponents that costs only 1 AP to do fast attacks. So I could fight naked, attack 12 times a turn, and get hit about once every 50 attacks. The downside is, of course, (a) armour penetration - you do less damage per hit so sometimes its very hard to damage heavily armoured opponents; (b) if you're unlucky and you can't dodge a couple of hits it might be the end of you. Still, I found 'dodgers' by far the easier and better of the various builds. And never try to invest in more than 2 skills for one character, you won't get anywhere. Just beat the Arena with that hammertime man, but the group fights were especially tricky because he kept getting crit'd and hit in the legs. The trick with the Ordu is you rush the bowman as fast as you can, as soon as the arena opens, and close down that distance before the combat turns start. Then close him down and smash, he doesn't have a lot of HP.

In the demo, where no general skills are used, the most balanced character is one that shares points between a single offensive skill and either dodge or block. That said, I'm trying to do a Sulik-like hammertime where you have no block or dodge, just very high health, very good armour and one big sledgehammer.

I used to weigh half you gargantuans a couple years back. Plenty people are depressed when young. The difference between them and old people is that the depression is marked by frequent but brief moments of wild euphoria* *usually substances-induced.

Got through it now with xbow/dodge, axe/block, dagger/dodge, bow/dodge, spear/dodge. It's a very solid system, but it's characterised by (a) low hit points, and therefore risky, on-your toes battles; (b) a very firm rock-paper-scissors specialisation route; © I am not certain, but probably the use of absolute thresholds for certain things like critical chance. And of course, in the demo, extraordinary elements like alchemy is absent. So yeah, it does depend quite a bit on luck. Critical skill has to do with your own critical hits, I'm not sure if it helps you defend. The vsCS (defending vs. crits) value is heavily modified by shields, armour and helmets though, and you can check individual vsCS for each part of the body in the inventory screen. Generally if you have the best armour you can grab at that point, you won't do too bad against crits except a certain crit-specialist later on.

I'm spending it playing the AoD demo. 21 minutes now, gentlemen. The aztec zombie machines will rise and destroy us all... wait, no, two more years.

It's cute you're trying to be clever, but they drummed this out over several hundred years and several thousand dead bodies. Although, if you're short-sighted enough to say that about 'Africans' (that's nice of you to discard an entire continent into the waste-pile with that definition), I'm rather glad we have religion around so that it can hopefully be used for good. It's a secondary question. If Religion du Grom has sufficient cause for belief in the first place, before his death, then the actions of his followers are simply a problem in and of themselves. This cause for belief can obviously be different for people, as it is for Christianity or other religions. For some it is a 'miracle', others a 'vision' or 'dream' (despite the inherent impossibility of defining a miracle or vision that would satisfy all), for others it is a certain text or words or place designated as sacred (though that, as I'm sure you can identify, is a reverse logic), etc. The most interesting part is, of course, what if Religion du Grom has provided sufficient cause for belief for many people (Or at least sufficient cause for the possibility of belief), and has also, through its teachings, advocated the actions of his followers? Then it is simply a matter of the faith battling it out over existing common sense. Sometimes, in limited areas, the former manages to win and change the latter. Sunkist may become an unviable business model.

I've tried a variety so far, and crossbow/dodge is the easiest I think. You just make sure nobody can hit you and run around firing. But that's because I made use of the arrow price bug (costs 1 gold to buy arrows in multiples of 5, not 10) without realising - with a blocker you need to invest a lot more, and the butcher really gets you with the shield splitting. I'm experimenting with a 2-handed hammer dude with zero dodge or block, just lots of HP and armour.

Been playing it for a few hours, great stuff. Where they wanted to go with the art is pretty good, as evidenced by concept art, but engine limitations and such mean the game looks pretty ugly in reality. I hope they can put in some decent lighting at least. Writing, atmosphere, combat, balance, etc. are all excellent though, it really feels like I'm playing Fallout the Improved. If you enjoyed FO1/2, trust me, you're going to like this. My bow guy only got as far as Sarpedon, but only because I forgot to loot half the bodies. The crossbow guy is doing better, but stuck now at Mack the Knife, who's able to use his excellent dodge and dagger attacking speed.

Dragon Age and Risen are the two I really enjoyed. Empire: Total War could have been great, but once again CA put more work into flashy crap and inconveniencing their fans instead of actual work.

If you are trying to argue that the Christian faith in general and in practice has obliged the submission to government authority in any significant way, you're not really going about proving it.

While lof has horribly misunderstood this particular quote, the former still tends to be true in many cases. Of course, it's not actually true as a general rule, because it doesn't come from that quote or biblical story. At some point, I wonder which is better, to be left without ideology or to carry with you some hypocrisy.

It's on my list to play at some point. Maybe when it's on sale somewhere othere than Steam.

You're on a similar line of thought with me, actually. I'd like it if TW2 incorporated 'showy' but actually fun things that add to the combat gameplay, like jumping, climbing, throwing, different weapons, aimed hits. Heck, even button-combos would be better than this QTE business. As for the Scoia'tael, unfortunately I never sided them because of one key factor: I didn't see how their victory would do any good. They had no single figure or guiding principle that had enough authority to actually establish some sort of proper order and see it through. Instead they had various medium-level squad leaders, some of which were downright violent in their hatred of humans. I had no hope that they'd actually have the capacity to work out something sensible. The likes of Zoltan and Vivaldi are certainly more likeable than most human characters, though.

It was an entertaining and well made game that certainly did deliver atmosphere and story better than most contemporary RPGs, and I'll be happy if Witcher 2 keeps that up. The stupid quick-time events and the bigger focus on cutscenes bother me, though.

Except Di should only need to remove that mod long enough to get the specific quest(s) done? Only needs to go through the reinstall hoops if there are more problesm.

No bandwidth to get it at the moment, but excited.

Uh... untick it in the in-game DLC page?

With an integrated graphics card it is highly unlikely.

Girlfriend went up to Auckland to join family, and my own tend to do their own things, so I spent the day taking a good rest and reformatting. Much too hot to do much, anyway, and all the shops are closed. Still, Christmas is nice.

Nobody likes repetitive sequels that beat a dead horse, so I wouldn't like to have Basic Manners IV. Less clobbering each other with clubs, please.

Well so far it's amazing. It reformatted a 320gb drive virtually instantly, installation itself took about half an hour. It automatically set up my internet, sound, everything, and after 5 minutes of tweaking it's totally useable (i.e. after turning off stupid notifications and alerts). Installing all my programs and restoring backup and will see how everything works, but so far it's miles ahead of previous OS's on painless installation. edit: after a few hours with it, looks a keeper, though with its glitches. In general the OS itself looks really good: good performance, a few nice tweaks I'm fond of, a few nice tweaks I'm not so fond of but can hide / not use, purty, picks up everything quite well. Games reports: Sanitarium works with Win98, 256 Colours, Disable Visual Themes / Desktop composition / display scaling options in compatibility mode. Fallout 2 needed manual installing (see NMA), high-res patch (see NMA) then a little bit of ini editing described here. Torment worked right off the bat. Thief 2 needed enabling safe textures and using imagecfg to make sure it only uses one CPU (see here); better than my XP setup, which couldn't get it to work. Still need to try dosbox, bg2, the longest journey.