Starwars

Age of Decadence is out! Buy it and get owned!

Yeah, it's a pain. I just powered through as much as I could (ignoring monster contracts and such for stuff in there). It's not a very fun area at all unfortunately. Chapter 1 is also a pretty weak start to the game I think (not nearly as bad as the swamp). Vizima is still my favorite city in a 3d RPG. I'm amazed at how they could accomplish it with the aurora engine. So many games get cities wrong.

Replaying the Witcher 1. It's actually a lot more enjoyable than I remembered it to be. The atmosphere is unsurpassed in the series and the characters are great even though the writing (localization perhaps?) are pretty wonky. Combat is wonky also but I love that alchemy plays a big part as well as reading books to gather herbs and all that. The areas are wonderfully realized and I think this game still looks really beautiful. It really holds up well in my opinion. That said, there is a lot of filler as well and the game feels pretty drawn out. But yeah, I'm enjoying it. I'm in the Murky Waters area at the moment (which again, looks *incredible* given its age).

Our cat gets those weird moods sometimes. He'll just be absolutely mega-focused on... nothing that the human eye can see. And during this time, if you make a sudden move or something, he'll jump like his entire body was made of springs. Very weird and most amusing. Anyways, our white shepard puppy is almost 3 months old (we've had him for almost a month). Puppy life is hard but fun and occasionally rewarding as well. My biggest problem personally is probably that he'll pick up, and often eat, *everything* he finds. This makes taking walks rather... frustrating at times. It's also left me with a newly ignited hatred for people who don't pick up their dog's poo.

I like the Grieving Mother's backstory a lot. Very dark and fit in perfectly with the lore of the game. But I had a really hard time with her manner of speaking. I think they tried a bit hard with making her "mysterious" and otherwordly, just comes off as silly. It's probably the companion I use the least because of that. Once I complete her quest, she never goes into the party again.

Goddamnit, ran into a gamestopper bug in SOMA, close to the end. A lot of people are experiencing it... Hope they can fix it quickly, I really want to see what happens. Damnit. EDIT: Whoop, managed to fix it by opting into the beta. Aaaaand finished the game. Really enjoyed it overall. Just in terms of story and the pacing of it it's almost hard to see that it's the same company who made the previous games. Huuuge step up in storytelling. And one of the most enjoyable sci-fi stories I've seen in a game, no doubt. Not as scary as their previous games though and I think they seemed to have struggled a bit to have the monsters in this game and make it feel natural. They still serve a really important purpose in providing the risk of death and danger in the game but the sections where you encounter them feel a bit... constructed. If they continue making these types of games, I hope that's one area where they can improve. Nevertheless, great game overall.

Well, I'm kinda the same. That first scary bit in SOMA had me as well. I've found all Frictional games to be extremely nervewracking, in a way that I never found Isolation. But, I'll stop to try and convince you that Isolation isn't scary. I will say that it can be quite stressful but for me it quickly turned into "damnit I don't want to play through this agaaaaaaaaain", lol.

Alien: Isolation completely failed for me in the scary department. It had beautiful environments though but I mostly found the gameplay to fly in the face of the horror aspect of it. I suppose that's one thing the Frictional people are trying to find a right balance on. I dig SOMA a lot but I think it's a bit too gameplay-lite overall, whereas Alien: Isolation was on the other side of the spectrum. Obviously feels weird to criticize a game for having gameplay but yeah, in Isolation I think the various trappings of it being a game really crashed with it trying to be scary.

Playing SOMA. 3 hours in according to STEAM. So far, it's not as downright scary as Frictional's previous games (that doesn't mean that the game didn't just scare the hell out of me in one particular section though) but in some ways, it doesn't really try to be either. It's more interesting though story-wise and I think it's paced a bit better. It's a lot more ambitious and it's doing a pretty good job of delivering so far though there are beats here and there where I think it can fall flat (mostly due to voiceacting direction, the actual actors do a commendable job I think).

There is a mod for NWN1 called 'Almraiven' which I think was great. It had you playing a mage that was almost more like a private investigator. That really got me into the spirit of things. It felt more "low-magic" in some ways which is kinda ironic I suppose.

Both those games suck. KOTOR2 just happens to suck a little less.

Edér is awesome. Him playing with the pig was the greatest thing ever. And him reacting to you getting baby Laguafeth (or whatever they're called) was hilarious too.

I think the crux of the matter is that people tend to get confused about Watchers, Awakening and awakened Watchers and why it's a supremely bad thing. That and the insanity angle just kinda wears off after a while. No more ghosts (until almost the very end), no more anything (except a skill which is very useful in solving quests). I quite like the story overall but there are certain plot points that I think needed to be hit harder than they are. It's kinda noticeable since people tend to bring it up time and time again, so there's obviously something that's not quite being communicated quite right. And I don't think this is a particular case of "well duh, the guy playing is just stupid and doesn't understand" so to speak,

Finished up STASIS which was pretty awesome. Not quite the smash that I was hoping for but great nonetheless. And the story appears fairly simplistic at first but once you think about it, you realize that there is a lot of "mystery" and unanswered questions about, and it doesn't feel like the developer just gave up on it, it feels thought through. I might replay the game soon actually even though it's very linear. Now I'm replaying the Banner Saga. Enjoy it a lot still, one of those games that just feel unique. The soundtrack is *amazing*. Looking forward to playing SOMA next week.

For me it's more of a case of... it looks boring. Really boring for being the battle of Hoth. I never played the previous Battlefront but this just looks extremely generic and... again, boring. Battlefield to me looks way more exciting than what was shown in that video above.

Not of particular help to PoE but they said in one of the recent panels that they'd like to develop a system for PoE2 where all interiors within a particular exterior (say Copperlane district) wouldn't need a loading screen. That would've helped immensely in this game even if it wouldn't be a "seamless" world so to speak.

That Battlefront video manages to make one of my childhood dreams look completely uninspired, boring and uninteresting. That's quite the feat I must say.

So, me and my girlfriend got a puppy. Picked him up last saturday so it's about 9 weeks now (8 weeks when we picked him up). Day after he got home with us, he starts shooting off diarrhea and puking like mad. Whelp... decide to hold off for a day at least and see if he recovers. Feels better the day after during the morning, but in the afternoon it starts again. Poor guy can't even hold down the water he drinks, it comes up a couple of minutes later. Off to the animal hospital and he stays the night. He's better now thankfully but that little excursion cost us nearly as much as the puppy itself. Damn. And it stressed us out really badly. A week later and we're kinda getting into the swing of things of having a puppy. The constant running back and forth when he needs to pee and crap is pretty old already though, and him wanting to eat every single thing on the ground is also maddening. On the plus side, we've already managed to train him to almost ignore our cat (who's also getting used to the dog already, very surprised by that). So whenever kitty comes by, puppy can actually just stand still, and not run up to the cat, with some vocal guiding from us. Very pleased with that. He appears to be a really quick learner. Still, I can't wait until we can sleep an entire night without having to do the "go out in the middle of the cold and rainy night for a pee" routine.

I'm pretty interested in that, might have to get it soon. I'm playing through STASIS at the moment. It didn't amaze me quite in the way I wanted to (so far at least) but then again I was pretty hyped up about it. But it's good. Sound is fantastic. The jump-scares so far takes away more from the atmosphere than anything though unfortunately.

Probably. It will require Part 1 to play so that implies there will be ties. And I believe Josh said something about Part 2 being a result of our actions in Part 1 also or something (don't remember the quote exactly, might be wrong). Of course, there may be some optional areas like Cragholdt which are stand alone.

I agree that the motivation is a bit iffy for the player unfortunately. There are also some other things I can dislike in some ways (being funneled through the whole Lady Webb deal in Act II for example). I thought the whole thing about you being able to develop your past personality in the flashbacks was pretty cool though. I wish there had been more of those flashbacks though, as that side of the story is pretty thin. If there had been more of it (with more twists and turns), I think more players would've resonated with the whole "past self" thing. A really interesting experiment though.

And you get one if you're with House Doemonel too. Again, you still have to fight. I didn't like this area at all. Don't get me wrong, having a few of these encounters here and there in the game would be fantastic. I loved the increase in difficulty and that the enemies seem to really use abilities actively. But it really feels like a high level area thrown together for the sake of it. It just doesn't fit in very well.

This is a pretty good point actually. I ended up actually choosing the place to have certain conversations to try and keep the atmosphere intact. Mostly ended up being the Endless Paths. But yes, in the future, it'd be great to have music to fit some of those conversations. It can get pretty weird as is.

I really agree with whoever said that there's a serious lack of nuance in the political debate about this, at least here in Sweden, and it's very frustrating. One the one hand, you have the Swedish Democrats which are, in my opinion nutjobs, angry men with an axe to grind, who are all about good ol' swedish values (lulz) and who can't seem to shake their previous attachments to nazism. They're not fond of immigration at all. They're gathering a lot of support because... ... the rest of the big parties tend to be of the "WELCOME EVERYONE!!! WE'RE HUMANITARIAN UNLIKE THOSE SWEDISH DEMOCRATS!" side of things. And there's... very little middle-ground to be found. I think I'm one of the soft-hearted teddybears I know of but even I see that just dumping a lot of people into another culture without good plans for integration is not a good idea. I'm all for immigration, I think of it as a valuable resource in the end. But for god's sake, the society must treat it as such. There must be a good plan for turning it into something productive, both for the immigrant obviously and also for the society which we live in. But in Sweden right now, there's just the war between the two extremes. Either immigrants are BAD, or they're AWESOME LET'S GET EVERYONE! It sucks.

I believe all signs point to part 2 being added onto the main campaign just like part 1, and not be after the final battle.