Tigranes

No restriction, except for a couple of quests involving the key players. The only thing you should look out for, though you've very probably done this already, is visit Theyleron's house and speak to him and Eveyln about stuff. Because the game has run marvellously since Day 1.

Two crap teams (that is, one team that was crap all tournament, and one team that became progressively boring) play a terrible game. Hope the Germans give us a good show.

New Zealand and China certainly are, and on the whole there's no taking away from Klose's remarkable record, even if I never rated him too much for the fact that he was rarely that lethal for club football.

2010: North Korea 2006: Australia, Japan 2002: China, Costa Rica 1998: Entire group made of Norway, Morocco, Scotland 1990: Costa Rica (again), Scotland (again) 1986: Northern Ireland 1982: Scotland (again), New Zealand Brazil only barely deserved to be in the semis in the first place, and are justifiably out. I'm more impressed by how good the Germans were, though - on most other days you would dominate a game like that but only be 1 or 2 goals up. They were able to kill the game in 6 minutes. I called them to win the Cup before the tournament and it looks like they'll now have a good bout of confidence for it.

I'm just bitter that here's a guy who finally makes his big move to a big European league aiming to play those few years that will be his career high, and some moron comes and nearly amputates his leg, with the end result that he never recovers and goes back to Dinamo Zagreb or whatnot. "Welcome to England, here, experience one of our lovely legbreakers". I've tipped Germany since the start of the tournament and they should still be favourites. They've been disappointing in their attacking verve, though. My favourite result would be a Dutch win where Robben has a horrible game and gets sent off for diving. Just so they can't pretend he won the entire Cup for them again, and so that their less high profile players like Vlaar or de Vrij get credit for the great job they've done this tournament.

Divine Divinity looks a lot like a Diablo clone and it still wears those trappings, but ended up being a lot more complex than it looked. This one almost fully sheds those beginnings with its turn-based, combination-centric combat and new engine.

D:OS, like Divine Divinity, has a pretty well built character development & loot system which work well together, even though they are far from the best. D:OS combines this with some of the best encounter design RPGs have seen in a while, a highly interactible environment, and a world which may not be very interesting but certainly has a lot of interesting things to do. It's a pure gameplay experience for me. Their 'humour' is mostly terrible and the serious bits of the plot are even worse, there is very little reactivity and their 'lore' is nonexistent. (However, what is important is that as a whole the gameworld does have a certain fairy-tale charm to it; if they were in your face with the story and writing with cutscenes and 'epic' pomp it would be insufferable, but here, it doesn't really bother you.) It doesn't matter - it's all about teleporting enemies on top of mines, crafting pumpkin helmets to wear, using Pet Pal to talk to rats to get hints about the area, winning a boss battle at the last turn before death because you had crafted a couple of spare voodoo dolls.

You can't punish people for the end result of a collision in a contact sport. Sometimes you just bump into somebodyh and they fall over the wrong way and they rupture their cruciate ligament. Is that your fault? I've long been an advocate of much harsher punishments for those who deliberately go in dangerously on people (see: some British dumbass both feet flying studs high in 2008, breaks the leg so bad you can nearly see the bone in open air, basically ruins the guy's career for life.) (Also see: the greatest British idiot of them all, Roy Keane, who does flying karate kick and really does ruin a guy's career for life.) But the Zuniga case is not something like that - it was reckless but it wasn't some kind of kung fu targeted hit on the spine.

Eat food or lie in any bed to rest. You can craft anything, I think even without reading the recipe. Just drag and drop stuff. The writing is pretty meh but you never play a Larian game for the writing or the setting.

Cool beans. BG2 is big enough for many LPs and mine's been on hold for a long time. Feel free to do whatever you find entertaining.

French wasteful before that, Griezmann with the slowest pass in the world in the box when a quick one would have given Benzema a tap-in. Going to be very hard for them to get back into this now, first goal was always going to matter here.

Some people experience crashes, but otherwise, there're very very few bugs. This one has been polished very well. I'm 20+ hours in with virtually zero bugs.

Without a doubt the best RPG released in the last... what, three or four years? And the most faithfully old school RPG since the end of the Infinity Engine. I cannot imagine anyone enjoying Obsidian games and regretting purchasing this one. Combat is fairly standard if you play it standardly. If you start using the interactible environment and skills creatively, there's no limits. Leave your mage near some mines that you've found, get the rogue to approach some orcs and initiate combat. Launch a fire arrow near an oil barrel to get a conflagration going. Use the pyramids (Pyramid A teleports wielder to Pyramid B) to get the rogue back to where the mage is. As the enemies approach on foot, the mage casts teleport, picks up an orc and drops him on top of a mine, creating a poisonous glob over the ground. As other orcs approach the glob, cast fireball to set fire to the glob... Same deal with quests. Pick pet pal and speak to the dog who is totally into the fragrance of smelly old boots to get hints about the murder mystery (and, in fact, bring him various underwear of the suspects you pilfer in order to get more hints). Dig up graves. Use telekinesis to move blinds inbetween you and the NPC sneakily so they can't see you steal their crap. And so on...

They are allegedly a rather mediocre team which is led by one very good player, whom some people also think is overly hyped. I'm not one of the people that thinks Messi is overhyped, I think he's legitimately the best footballer on the planet, but I agree with the rest of that statement. I get all that and agree. But the hatred of Argentina is akin to Lebron and the Heat. Personally, I like Lebron but hate the Heat because they are a dummy puppet organization who's evil mastermind is bent on global domination. I don't see Argentina ruling the world anytime soon, regardless as to who is running the Vatican. So why the Argentina hate beyond lousy hero-ball style futbol? I don't care that they're a one man team or that they're hyped or anything like that. Actually, they have many talented players beyond Messi. There's only one reason I want them to go out as soon as possible, and that's because the quality of their football is not only bad, it is incredibly boring. Just about all of their matches have been about as fun as the Russians, with a pr. good Messi goal time at the end thrown in.

And so every group winner wins the round of 16. Really really feel sorry for the Swiss and the USA. Argentina is the new antifootball team, they are absolutely rubbish and boring and the sooner they get kicked out of the tournament the better. Useless. The Swiss' final chance really should have gone in. Belgians have been good but not great in any game, and though that is also true of Americans they created enough chances to score a second in extra time.

Yeah, scrolls are single use only. But spells are not too difficult to learn, and there's hours of exploring and looting to do within Cyseal.

I don't like the art style either, but the environments, etc. is a lot less WOWy than the characters and the game can look pretty nice in places. The real core of the game is the fact that there is a combination of ridiculous levels of detailed world interaction / manipulation, sheer number of NPCs to talk to, unorthodox quest solutions using your skills and items, things to see and do and craft, that recalls Ultima 7 as well as other golden age RPGs in a way very few games do today.

GOG Version will be partly destupidified after GOG realises what colossal idiots they were:

Action points are like Fallout. Gifted, stick with it for more than 15 mins and you won't be confused. GOG have been dumb idiots and have delayed release to non-Kickstarters to August 31 so they can launch it with their new shiny Galaxy crap that is going to make it more like Steam. No thanks, if you're going to stop being no-frills cheap old games then I might as wel go to Steam. Anyway, most importantly: Freud, Talents: "Know It All decreases everyone's attitudes towards you by 20 points but give you 1 intelligence" Nietzsche, Talents: "Pet Pal allows you to talk to animals."

Worried for Germany because of France? Surely not. The French have been every bit as mediocre as the Germans since the first game. The Germans still have more players from which goals and individual moments can come; the French are well drilled but today's tactical experiment showed that they need Benzema down the middle, Griezmann penetrating the flanks and Valbuena spreading the ball for them to really find the goal. i.e. with Ribery injured and Pogba not yet quite firing, they only really have one plan. Germany may have one plan but they have a lot more depth and ability to execute it, and they can always Klose it up.

I'm using my beta key to play now, but I have 2 more keys I haven't touched yet (I think), so I hope it all works out...

Thanks Malcador. I'll give it a try at some point, maybe next sale.

Nigeria looking good (& a bit physical), a wonderful Pogba volley stopped by the keeper as well. Good stuff.

I love the Dutch and Sneijder's goal was awesome. Sadly football's biggest cheating piece of crap does it again and will now pretend he won them the entire thing and he is the greatest. Just like in the Champions League. If only one day he'd crick his back doing those goldfish dives. (There was a clip and the Mexicans' fault / Robben's credit for getting to that position but human beings don't clip the end of their foot and then arc into a water sports dive through the air.)

It's been on my list for months but cash has been short this summer. I feel like I'm holding out for sub-$10 which may not happen for quite some time. How does it compare to Caesar 3? It sounds very similar to that.