Darth InSidious

Particularly in the obligatory gratuitous HAWT SECKS scene.

You make that sound like a bad thing.

For such a "great" game, Mass Effect has some examples of ****ing ****e design, and even then, seemingly deliberate attempts to flaunt how ****ing ****e the design is. I've reached Ilos, if you couldn't guess.

He's already a reincarnated former hero and the son of a lich (possibly after aforesaid lich shacked up with Bimbo - divine parentage being A Good Thing after all) - I'm not sure how much more CHOSEN a CHOSEN ONE can get... Maybe they have the magic amulet the lich needs, and... erm, a scrap of paper written in an ancient and forgotten tongue that describes his parentage favourably (which everyone will believe, naturally). He is, after all, the son of a very stupid goddess and a lich with a serious need for coffee.

Nah, they'll be busy with an original IP and outsource that to Obsidian.

Has someone been reading our thread in WOT?

Hopefully this will ensure that TOR will be an epic flop.

It's sand. Luxury. [/fakeyorkshireaccent]

Yes. One more beta-build until public release.

The Lich is also preparing to extend his powers to infinity via a dark ritual hidden in the Black Codex of Mng-Klushvush, The Sneezing Abhorrence With A Thousand Tendrils From Beyond The Abyss, one of the eight Dark Gods . The Black Codex is naturally written entirely in an ancient and very obscure dialect Grkkvfgg... inscribed in the blood of the first Dwarf-King, Gkrrrlggsg Th'frst. Who was killed in the battle to defeat the Dark Priests of Mng-Klushvush in the First War of Darkness in QX 5586. QX doesn't stand for anything, it's just the counting system imployed. To do this, he will stand on the top of Mount Incontinence, the only volcano on the world, in the land of Xo'jd where the... um, shades abide. He intends to stand in stone circle of Ungthummerungel at the moment of total eclipse, activating the Talisman of Heksekek The Foul at the precise moment of eclipse. Naturally, in a STUNNING PLOT TWIST (international copyrights obtained), the heros will arrive too late, and after a brief battle, he will activate the talisman, only to be consumed by the power of Heksekek, who will then turn out to be the true big bad. This is, of course, after having fought through legions of enemies whose only real job is to block the way. Which brings us onto the subject of gods. There are nine gods, and eight dark gods (there were originally nine, but one got sucked up by the hoover and chucked in the bin by mistake by Mum, the mysterious Overgoddess). The gods live on Mt. Paphnutius, and some of them are Yam Greatest And Best, The Father of gods and King of men (with the portfolio for thunder and lightning), his wife, Yulie The Frowning One, goddess of bossy wives and makeup, their daughter (and Yam's only legitimate child) Bimbo Shining-Hair, goddess of negotiably priced love, hunting, blondes and total stupidity (also known in the dark hinterlands of the Distant North as Lurial The Worthy), and her daughter Lusilu, goddess of elves and long, stupid names. The dark gods were banished at the dawn of time by Yam to the pits of Tartasaus, the darkest pit in Haidou, Abode of the Dead (governed by Ossides, god of bones and chartered accountancy). Not that I'm sending up the classical epics at all... Oh, and in the first area, there's a bookstand, which you can read. It says "Well done! You can read! Aren't you the special one? Have some XP." It instantly gives the PC enough XP to level up to lvl 3. Did I mention that there are fifty classes, each with two prestige classes? There are. And hundreds of useless spells and bizarre abilities that you can use X number of times per day (such as "conduct ontological debate with aubergine"). Each of the majority of the classes are capable of using a single weapon - ranging from "sharp stick" through to magic users, all but one of which have mainly spells that are no use at all in combat, and need to go on a three week correspondence course before using any of their spells. After which they have to do a further week-long retraining-by-correspondence before they can use it again. Aside from the Faustlord, who can cast endless attacks of precisely 1 damage at enemies... mostly.

Is that the sequel to Peggle?

Well, it seems my comments caused a bit of discussion. Sorry for the delay in responding and massive post, but anyway. I should probably explain that when I made those comments, I'd just finished the Citadel and literally just landed on Noveria, and should be interpreted in that light. I've finished with Lianna T'Soni, since, as well as finishing Noveria, and IIRC I've gone somewhere else, but I don't remember where. Generic Prime, possibly. To be honest, I still have yet to be impressed; combat is awkward a lot of the time as a Sentinel (is this a particularly unbalanced class, or do I just suck?), your party members appear to have been designed around a soldier-PC, and the pacing of this game feels horrible. Some of the design for key areas sucks, too - Therum's design is awful in particular, with the black road indistinguishable from the black void falling into which kills you - which brings us on to the Mako, which doesn't handle well, and is more of an irritance than anything, IMO. The black bits on Therum are also separated from arbitrarily visible sections - usually around pipes - by a paper-straight and equally sharp line. That's just poor design. After Noveria, the planet feels bizarrely short, barring the numerous reloads trying to kill the last major task-force before . Noveria, OTOH, is much too dragged out, and does have some really sucky moments (whoever came up with Generic East-European Scientist could have come up with less clich

The Dwarf-Kings of Sppkklstrrm should speak Grkkvfgg, a language notable for having absolutely no vowels. Pr'fcct!

Oh, the Lelilulilileluli tribes are also dying out due to an inherited and uncontrollable desire to swim the Unending Ocean.

I don't drive, partly due to having reaction-times in the "glacial" ratio, but if I did, and had more money than braincells (which would, frankly, be quite an achievement), I would get this:

That... could actually be a nice twist on the amnesiac/dark past clich

"MEANWHILE the gates of Paphnutius all-powerful Ope; And the father of gods and king of men calls a council unto his sidereal seat, whence high aloft he looks on all the world, On X'kkkkrul camp and Lelilulilileluli tribe. They partake of their seats in yond hall with ye portales twain, and he begins:" (cont. p. 94)

Interesting stuff. When was that? I'm intrigued by the mentions of still working on things within the D&D license...

His project, his priorities. *Shrug* In any case, spending more time focussing on something doesn't necessarily produce anything better; sometimes the opposite, particularly in things like writing. But you also proceed from two false assumptions; first, that what you want equates to either what is best or the views of the majority, and second that time is an issue. This project is a personal one and a mod; even assuming there is a time-table in JES' mind, I'm sure it's fairly flexible.

I can see why! Beyond some moderately shiny graphics and... erm, OK real-time combat, this game has "mediocre" stamped all over it. All right, so the first part was unnecessary, but I was trying to find something distinctly positive about the game. I suppose the areas are reasonably built, although again, nothing special, and the size and habit of including superfluous changes in level and random, purely decorative walls makes them a little labyrinthine. I'm really not seeing what the fuss is about, and as I suspected, the similarities between the Alpha Protocol dialogue stance system and the "dialogue wheel" that ME uses are purely cosmetic. Also, this game is about as well-optimised as NWN2, if not slightly worse. My laptop is supposedly well above the minimum specs, but the game still runs laggily even on mid-low settings. I'd turn the texture detail down further, but everything already looks fugly. The story is bland even by BioWare standards, and the voice acting, for the most part, is diabolically bad. Especially for Shepard. To top it all, the majority of the party members have even less personality or interest than usual. And the (bland-to-dreadful) dialogue is unskippable. Oh, paroxysms of joy. Seriously, why do people praise this game? Of BioWare's recent output, both JE and KotOR easily trump it, from what I've seen so far.

Finally updated my drivers, and installing Mass Effect. A lot of people have said it's "t3h aw3sum", but I don't really trust their opinions. Expecting diabolical dialogue, fun-ish gameplay, horrid quest design and no replayability. At least, given what JE was like...

To be fair, EF2 had the whole tricorder thing, which was cool and rather different. And probably a load of other stuff I can't remember. Mu PC at the time only just met the minimum requirements, IIRC. And lag in an FPS is no fun.

I hate to sound repetitive, but...

Yes. The first one is rambling (incidentally, "determination" takes "in" as its negation), not terribly coherent and over-the-top. The second is just banal, and the occasionally unusual constructions are badly employed. The effect is clunking. Both indeterminable and undeterminable are acceptable according to dictionary.com All your other points are wrong also, but it's a matter of taste, thus probably useless to argue about. What a fantastic non-rebuttal. Thank you for proving you are simply a fanboy, uninterested in debate and only willing to read and write blind praise of VD as the saviour of mankind.

And will there be crates or barrels?