Tale

Why not? I found the story stupidly shallow, but its still really fun game. Because I haven't upgraded from XP yet. I'm saving that for my next build.

Far Cry 3 is the one I'm voting for. I hope Blood Dragon is part of the sale. I can't play Dishonored and already have Borderlands 2.

Did you like 2? Well, it's kind of like that but less compelling. Ridiculously slow start, no new mechanics of interest, and a storyline that just isn't worth the effort of insulting.

Mars: War Logs was listed as a daily, then replaced with Antichamber. It didn't have a daily counter, so that might have been a mistake, Antichamber does have a daily counter. I want to get it though. Hopefully it gets a deeper discount later. I wonder if there's a chance of Brave New World getting even a 5% discount on Civilization's turn. How is Defiance? I'm falling in love with the show.

Yeah and it makes me laugh But I would say we are all in agreement that GTA is the superior game ????? Than SR? Hell to the no. I share this opinion Saint's Row 3 had a nice variety of interesting vehicles, including VTOL jets that fired lasers. And the missions provided variety too. Every GTA I've played was just lots of the same from beginning to end.

Amazon usually price matches. Or has for the past two at least.

I see what you mean. That the devs are chaps with families. I'd really like to know what 'our' devs think about this. On some level it makes sense. (in the way that ideas look good on paper) I think we need, and can expect, to see more of this. The average age of gamers is supposedly somewhere around 30. This puts them at late teens/early twenties to play Baldur's Gate II, the game that really kicked off RPG romance. But also at the right age to play games like Lunar and Final Fantasy VIIat the peak. And now they're the same people raising children. I expect in about another decade we're going to see the mid-life crisis as a topic in videogames. I'm sure there are. I'm not trying to paint the now as if it's a revolution. But I suspect there's a bigger audience for it than ever before.

Two of the three games I mentioned have it as adopted daughters, with the majority of the development being on establishing that relationship.

Father/daughter dynamic seems to be popular recently. Nier/Walking Dead/Last of Us, okay that's all that comes to mind off the top of my head. It's probably some combination of the developers getting older and coming into their own families, but also the audience doing the same.

Midweek Madness ends 6 hours earlier than usual this week. A good indicator that the summer sale will start on Thursday.

I got bored with GTA IV before completing it. I'm kind of with Drowsy on the repackaging. I played III, played some of Vice City, and felt it was too much of the same thing. Got IV on sale and more of the same. In Rockstar's defense, the heist thing they're doing here looks drastically different. But we'll have to see if those make up the core of the story missions or if that's just something you do occasionally, with 90% being the same things we did since III.

I have a whole other week of house sitting. *shakes*

I haven't played anything since Monday. I'm going through withdrawals, man.

I still can't get over those thigh pauldrons.

Pacing is the tempo of highs and lows. Combat segments to puzzles, that sort of thing. The opening of gates that yield rewards to open yet other gates is progression. Whether or not it fits the definition of character progression (and whether you define that as character skill or character sheet) seems beside the point of whether or not it is part of progression systems. There is a progression. You won't be able to deck yourself out in +5 equipment at level 1. You have to earn that by getting the recipes and associated materials. And it does provide additional benefits to the player that aren't handled by straight equipment drops. Which is far more important than what word you want to call it.

Most crafting systems use multiple progressions, so taking out only one progression system from them doesn't eliminate all progression. You still hide the materials and recipes behind gates, they're just not gated to the skill system. I think the big benefit to players in crafting is the ability to customize your own rewards.

That seems fair. So the main reasons they were doing durability is to give the crafting skills a party-wide use so you don't dump it on only one character and as a sink in the economy. I'd like to think they can still handle the economy without it. Which leaves it existing to do little more than justify a skill. Removing the skill, but not associated functionality of crafting, seems to be the more elegant solution to that little problem. That's probably how I'd prefer it. I haven't played too many RPGs where having crafting be a skill sink actually improved things. Does anyone actually prefer for crafting to be attached to the skill system?

That seems a chicken/egg situation. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that older games are cheapened by sales, and not that the sales reflect how they cheapened naturally. Especially when consoles have similar issues of games losing their value in the tail. Really, the only decent way to grow audiences is by encouraging impulse buys. With larger franchises, people need a way to catch up without breaking the bank. And with smaller franchises, there's not enough word of mouth going around for the people on the fence to spend the full price. How else can they get people to take a chance? Especially in an atmosphere of growing consumer distrust.

I also learned yesterday that I am absolutely awful at swimming. Was good when young, but I haven't been in so long that I was just flopping around in water. But it was good exercise for me, so I'll do it again today.

Old thread Additionally, I appear to be closing threads for being too long.

Getting upset. My boss is having me check on the tax status of one of his business for like the past two months. Now everything's in order... except our tax preparer forget to file the right affiliate list. So I'm going to have to file that myself. And then who knows what it's going to take for the good standing to come into effect. New thread.

I like the idea of an economy. Of the player's gold going towards something. I am not remotely used to that. In every game I've played that wasn't an MMO, it always went to hoarding. I think other people, like me, may simply be used to that. We're used to stockpiling 99 megalixers and 4 billion megabux for the final confrontation, then not using it for anything. Then pondering later about how our character can decimate any in-game economy and how strange it all seems. But being used to that, we come to like it. That said, I think we can come to like tighter economics. Ones where our hero ends up with only a bottlecap and a nickle wafer that he swore was 30 pence when he stuck his hand in his pocket, but really shiny armor. Some people will never get used to that. I'm willing to try.

Is Viola even confirmed?

Of the higher funded ones? Shadowrun Returns is about to come out, so I'm fairly optimistic about them. I haven't seen any red flags on P:E yet to make me worried.

Scamstarter at its best. How can it be a scam if they're producing more than we paid for?