Pop

If it worked in Rise of the Triad, it can work here.

ditto.

The Bar has problems even in the vanilla game. If you end up siding with Freedom against Duty, there's a Duty soldier in the Bar who will shoot you dead if you enter it (while in the bar, you are not allowed to brandish weapons). The first trader in the bunker should be fine as he's not accessible by any means. If a mutant managed to kill the guard in the Bar the main questline could very well break.

I didn't get very far before I hit a snag from which I could not recover, so I don't know. Like I said, most of the frustration came from the design. A couple more things, actually. You start off with a sleeping bag that allows you to rest and regain health (which is apparently a mod you can get by itself) but doing so anywhere not underground leaves you susceptible to the "pulse". Also, the normal restrictions on AI that allow places like the city in which the Bar is located to be free from mutants are taken out in Oblivion Lost, so there is always a chance that any area can be wiped clean of human life before you even get there.

The driving is really an afterthought. Cars have no mass whatsoever. If you get attacked by the aforementioned pack of dogs and hide out in a car, they will swarm and knock the car around like an empty crate. There are some cool additions gun-wise, like a hunting shotgun you can get at the beginning that pisses all over the sawed-off, but all in all the changes make the game a lot harder. The anomaly detector is removed, bandages only stop bleeding and don't recover health, and nights are considerably darker, which in addition to the anomaly blindness, the random chernobyl pulses and the increased mutant numbers (have I mentioned how turning on your flashlight at night alerts all mutants in the location to your presence?) make the early game damn near impossible to play.

If you're going to get an Apple player, don't get the higher range ipods. The 80 gig I got lasted all of 11 days before it permanently died.

Oblivion Lost is not for anyone who hasn't played the game all the way through. The mutant numbers are increased significantly from the start and they are made more aggressive to boot. Get the attention of a pack of dogs and you will not survive unless you have an attic handy to hide out in. Plus there are random "pulses" from chernobyl which paralyze you and increase your rad count.

There are a couple of nifty gameplay mods that will change the game. As with most games, I'd advise holding off on implementing mods till you've finished it vanilla, but if there's something that frustrates you it can be changed. There are weight mods, repair mods, gun mods, etc. Whatever you should need.

As it stands it's nearly a megabyte in size. If you put the entire sequence in, most people would change pages before the image finished loading.

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You've never actually seen a Michael Bay movie, have you? Bay uses a lot of quick cuts in his movies. Other than maybe the fight cutscenes on Virmire, the camerawork is rather smooth throughout Mass Effect, owing more to, say, Star Trek than Bay. As for CSI, I have no idea at all where you get that comparison, except for maybe the blue tint to most of the visuals. But that's honestly just the way sci-fi always looks.

I always preferred a fire-centric druid, with maybe a point or two in Oak Spirit and Molten Boulder neglected save for that required first point. Total reliance on Firestorm and Fissure. They may have reduced the power of firestorm in a patch, though. Otherwise, a Tiger Strike assassin with points in that speed-up spell and eventually the Fire Wave trap and the Shadow Warrior. Inferno Trap seems to be mostly useless.

Painkiller is this in game form.

Yeah, it's sort of funny, I played through as a thief and got to the Fortress with all the greater shadows, and actually ran into the dilemma that so many tru gamers found so appalling about Bioshock. In both games you can't really die, and in Bioshock you can exploit this by going after the Big Daddies with a wrench and just patiently wear the thing down as you keep getting smashed to bits by it. Thieves obviously don't have that great of combat abilities, so the greater shadows kept killing me and I kept coming back to life, killing one or two and trying to figure out where the next objective was with a dozen shadows in pursuit. And then of course the final boss came around and I was 1 or 2 wisdom points below the threshold for the diplomatic resolution, so I had to fight him. Luckily for me P:ST suffered from the Unavoidable RPG Problem of Too Much Cash and I had made sure to stock up on oodles and oodles of clot charms. And goddamn, it was like that first time you fought a wolf in BG1, but you've got 75 HP and the wolf has 500 HP. A minute would pass and I had hit him once or twice and he had hit me three or four times. That battle lasted 45 minutes and I must have burned through at least 40 clot charms.

I'm pretty sure they implemented some different animations for h2h combat in MotB, high level stuff. I might be thinking of some other game, though.

Wait, what does the accumulated worth of a jewel case 10 years from now have to do with anything?

Tactics had humor? That's how I distinguish it from the other Fallouts. It was a much more dour game. If they had changed its name to "Mad Max Tactics" I wouldn't have noticed.

So your complaint is that he hasn't defined what "just right" is? How would that even work? He takes a game that works, like Psychonauts for example, and uses it as a control variable to be tested against? That's not a very smart way to go about giving criticism. At the end of the day all you can really say is "This game is not as good as Psychonauts" or "this game is as good or better than Psychonauts" which doesn't really mean anything. Especially if it's a review of something like Tetris or Gothic. I'd love to get into the whole criticism spiel again, but this is a gaming forum just like any other. I could argue with a brick wall and provoke more thought. Still though, as always He gave the most honest reviews of Mass Effect and the Witcher I've seen in their respective categories. Whether he's funny or not is beside the point. I remember when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and called that show out on cheapening political discourse. They called him "a comedian" as though it had some bearing on what he was saying. There are a lot of Tucker Carlsons out there.

Yes, he uses words to point out flaws and strengths. What a rote formula.

Their livelihood is owed to their shareholders. Shareholders want more profit. PC owners are apparently less ready to give them the profits that console owners are, opting instead to give them AARP-ready entitlement speeches.

Talking to a woman, eh... I wonder if they've got the dialogue recorded yet or if it's just placeholders. I'm interested to hear what B actors they'll get for AP, if they get any. They might just stick with the talent they've used. Don't know how well that will go down. Some of the previous games' VA could get a little stilted.

Yah, this is a ****storm in a teacup.

You don't really need to compare them, just your reactions to them.

Why do you hate freedom?

The problem with the post-BG2 Bioware CNPCs was that their plot arcs were welded onto the PC's level progression. BG2 was big and long enough that if you took your time you could exhaust all your party's banter, but a few of them, particularly Jaheira, are actually very difficult to get through before the game ends. She only became a true Harper once in my 15+ playthroughs. I suppose the level progression thing was a way to fix stuff like that, especially with the generally shorter playtimes. I like this sentiment coming from the person who didn't see a problem with the Witcher's female NPCs being walking, talking vaginas.