Starwars

Nah, it's because the design documents revealed that there was a lot of good stuff and great design ideas in the game. There are quite a few things in it that I'm not so crazy about but on paper (which obviously doesn't mean in practice) I'd say it looked a lot better than both Fallout 2 and Fallout 3. Again, on paper. But still, there are many great ideas in there. And yep, if there's one thing I'm really hoping for them to carry over in New Vegas, it's the idea of rewarding the different character focuses (combat, science, stealth and speech). The science stuff in particular looked really cool.

Frank Vignola Quartet & Tommy Emmanuel - Django's Castle Their 'Just between the frets' album is awesome.

I really enjoyed what I played in terms of atmosphere and story. The gameplay was alright. But I had so many technical problems with it on my ATI card that I just gave up after a while. I checked for a while if they released a patch that would improve things but then I just stopped looking. Not sure if they ever got around to it. I ended up watching this nicely done Let's Play instead: http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Cryostasis/

I played it.

I also seem to recall that the devs said in some interview that they only hired actual Russian voiceactors to ensure that the accents wouldn't be fake. I certainly heard no problem with the clips in the trailer. Not the best voiceacting ever but pretty good. Can't help but comparing this to STALKER and thus being slightly disappointed given the nice outside levels in STALKER. But, this looks amazing for what it is. The atmosphere is absolutely awesome.

I go to NMA because I'm (having followed the series since I first heard about Fallout 1 a short while prior to its release) because I want to get all news related to the series, and they're good about finding that news. The actual news reports are pretty neutral, just factual. The forums themselves tend to be negative to Fallout 3 of course and have a somewhat strict view of the Fallout series, which I agree with personally. There are people who automatically spew crap everytime Fallout 3 is mentioned, and it is annoying, I agree. But I mean, there are many over there who are excited about New Vegas and look forward to hearing more stuff about it, even with the knowledge that it won't be a complete re-write of everything Fallout 3.

Pyramid Head is actually interesting. Silent Hill 2 is an interesting game overall because while you can tie everything together to a point, there is a huge amount of stuff which can be analyzed to hell and back. Who knows if the devs meant it for it to be like that, but it sure is cool when you can find several layers to a game like that. Even if it's only in your mind, the game and its developers should be congratulated for it.

As far as villains go, I think I'd also go with Shodan overall. I replayed SS2 last year for the first time since around the time it was first released. I was extremely surprised in how well it held up overall and how well done Shodan really is. The hypnotic effects on the voice and the writing is really terrifying at times, and yet you actually kinda grow to... I don't know, almost like it after a while. In some ways, I feel it is *still* ahead of its time.

It would've been awesome if the entire Blight stuff had been done away with and they had focused the entire game on political machinations. It's that more "human" stuff in DA which really shines, the blight and darkspawn is the boring stuff.

If anyone is mainly interested in good D&D combat, then I'd like to recommend the fairly recent indie release Knights of the Chalice: http://www.heroicfantasygames.com/ Not pretty to look at, but probably my game of the year for 2009. Lots of fun.

I lost all respect or fear for Saren after that cutscene fairly early in the game where he goes into an emo-rage fit. That was almost embarrassing to watch. How could I take him seriously after that?

Gameplay mechanics: Will we see an altered SPECIAL, a'la how they changed it in Van Buren, or will it be completely the same as in Fallout? Here's a link to the skills and all that stuff as it was to be in Van Buren: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Van_Buren_SPECIAL Personally, I at least hope they A) make the SPECIAL stats matter a *lot* more and B) make it so that you can't max out everything in one go. I wouldn't mind seeing something more similar to how tagging skills worked in the previous games where those skills generally determined what you were gonna focus your character on and the other stuff became more expensive.

I'd personally say less "in-the-middle" mutants because they were always boring as hell to fight anyways. Pigrats, molerats regular rats, radroaches, geckos, the crabguys from F3, dogs etc. All boring. Lots more fun to keep most of the encounters human (or humanoid if we count Ghouls, though not the feral ones), with Super Mutants occasionally further into the game. A Deathclaw or two to seriously beat you up and put the fear in you. Of course, the chance of that happening is NIL.

No earlier than April, but I'm betting June or so.

Two cool projects were released today. Trinity, which I mentioned before as I was testing it: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2M...tail&id=405 A great little adventure, good interactivity, polished and with some great choices to make. The SoZ "Holiday" Expansion Project: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2M...tail&id=406 Originally planned for a Christmas release, this is a project started up on the Bioware forums to create new areas to explore in SoZ. I have no idea on how good it is but the screenshots look promising. Apparantly new areas will be added as they're finished.

Not sure, haven't tried any ranged stuff yet. They're tweaking the shield breaking stuff.

You're right about the callers. Todd usually annoys me in interviews and such but I thought he was fine here.

I've also been listening to a podcast featuring Todd Howard where people could ask questions to him. There was some brief talk about New Vegas but Todd just said he couldn't talk about it yet. The guy making the call was interestingly enough worried about New Vegas being in OEIs hands as he felt they'd been making a "media boo boo" with Alpha Protocol last year. Todd was very nice about it, said he felt AP looked good from what he'd seen and that he had a lot of respect for OEI and emphasized the fact that many OEI guys have worked on the previous Fallout games.

Er, I don't think you're reading that right. I didn't counterattack in any of those moves showcased, and he never hit me for 0 damage. After he hit me with the big damage, it was my turn in which I re-equipped a shield plus hit him once. The total amount of damage he hits for are both values together. So, for those final blows, he's hitting me for 12 points of damage, but DR rating on my armor subtracts 6 damage from that. So the net HP lost for me is 6. His previous strike actually damaged me for 18 points of HP. If I hadn't had any armor, it would've been 24 points of HP. His armor absorbs 8 HP, which is fairly nasty since he's a real hardhitting guy and the ideal thing is to kill him fast.

Mikael Wiehe - Flickan och Kr

When I was on summer holiday this last summer, I went up at 6AM two days a week to go jogging a bit. I live by the ocean and man was that nice and peaceful. The temperature was nice, not much people out and about. And then got home a bit after 7AM, took a shower and ate a nice, light breakfast. That really made me feel good, had a lot of energy for the remainder of the day. Tried keeping it up through the autumn but it didn't seem as appealing when the temperatures dropped. It's the first time in my adult life that I started excercising somewhat regularly. My weight is almost dead-on for what it should be in reference to my height (whatever that value is), but my belly has grown and I really needed to air out the muscles. Doing it outside, especially since the environment around this place where I live is so nice, felt completely right. I also can't muster the willpower to head over to the gym or whatever. Hopefully I can start somewhat early in the spring this time around. It was so weird the way it happened when I started last summer. I literally just woke up early one morning and thought to myself "I'm gonna go jogging", and then did it.

I think I liked the urban areas the most in Fallout 3 probably, though I definitely agree that having to navigate the city through the subway tunnels was extremely boring. I loved how much of the wasteland outside looked, I think they did very well visually on the environments. But encountering the goddamn radscorpions, giant radscorpions and later on the deathclaws (once the level scaling seemed to drop them in) it got so incredibly annoying. On my first playthrough, I was still enjoying exploring the wasteland and finding locations, but eventually I quit because it seemed like I couldn't walk 100 metres before encountering some annoying critter that wanted to kill me.

Playing the Age of Decadence combat demo. Argharghargh, goddamn you The Butcher! I wonder how many times I've seen this screen now:

It should also be noted that, if I remember correctly (I think this was info I read on the Iron Tower forums), the "special ability" of a weapon will increase every 25 levels. So the knockdown effect on hammer kicks in more at 125, 150, 175 etc. Worth thinking about.

I want this mystical game called Alpha Protocol to be released.