Starwars

I think the atmosphere of the first chapter was well done though. Like it's been pointed out, Witcher 2 kinda lacked that... folklore-esque feel to it that was so prevailent in the first game (mostly in the second and fourth chapter) for a more straight-up "dark fantasy" feel. And yeah, I think the more supernatural parts of the Witcher 2 tended to be on the weak side as well... The whole Wild Hunt story is very weakly done if you ask me (though was like that in the first game also), and the whole business with the Mist and all the quests involving it in Act is the absolute worst part of the game. The more "common" struggles are way more interesting, dealing with people like Loredo, Roche Iorveth, Henselt and their politicking and scheming. But yeah, the whole bit in Witcher 1 where the Beast was born out of the evilness and the villagers and all that was kinda... eeeh.

The bit where they tore someone's arm off looked so silly I thought. I mean, I guess they had a sword handy in there but the way it was filmed it looked like the angry peasant literally pulled the arm off with their superhuman peasant-mob strength and then showed it off triumphantly.

Another good episode. Wasn't really feeling the first few episodes of the season though it's moving along really nicely now. Ygritte was well cast I thought. Which makes me wonder what they were thinking when they cast Asha. I may be misremembering, but while there are certainly girls in the books which are described as being not too beautiful, I seem to remember Asha not being one of them. And well... in the TV-series, she looks rather ghoul-ish I think.

I hear you, man. The more ****ed up work has got, the more I just want to lose myself in tunes and wine in the evening. And even though work has been beating me up a bit lately, I must say that the nicest thing is just to have that feeling of having a place where you can always go and be welcome. One of the greatest annoyances in my life is how much of a goddamn headache it can be at times just to get together with friends. If it's not work, it's scheduled gym-time, or blablablabla. Drives me batty at times since I'm not that great of a planner.

I was pretty disappointed when the game was first announced. But to be honest, I'm looking forward to it more and more, if just to get a RPG that will hopefully retain Obsidian's trademarks such as factions etc and also to get away from all the epic, large-scale type of stories. Now, I presume this will be "epic" in the South Park vein (saving the town in the end perhaps or whatever), but that alone means it will mostly be silly. Whether it be high-fantasy, or the more "realistic" epicness of games like the Witcher, the genre could do with something poking fun at it and deflating it. I hope this game will really poke fun at a lot of the tropes we typically see in games. Plus, just a RPG game with a huge focus on comedy alone will be interesting to see. Though I will also fully admit that I started watching South Park more as a result of the game being announced and I've really grown to like the series though it is quite uneven.

Having a sober day today, which has been a while now. For the last week, I've only gotten evening shifts at work which means that I typically get off at 9:30pm or thereabouts. Trouble is that I know a group of people who, for some reason or another haven't worked a lot lately (some also work late, some have gotten laid off at work, some have broken up with girlfriends, some are happy with the nice weather we've been having, some are typical bums). These people are the kind of people who are very generous and charitable, so you know that you'll always be treated well when you show up there (the home of one particular guy there) as long you bring some beer or wine of your own every now and then to treat the others to. And of course, the guy lives like 5 minutes away from where I work. So it's been plenty of late-night drinking and while it thankfully has been very nice atmosphere, with lots of playing music and singing and people getting happy-drunk but not to the point where they puke all over the place, I must say that I'm really feeling the after-effects now. Reeeeally tired. So it's gonna be good to go back to a regular schedule and all that. Still, must say it's been a very pleasant and fun week. It's always great fun to have a group like that where you can just end up without having to plan it for weeks before, and then just having a jolly ol' time despite some of the people facing some hardships in their life at the moment. Good camradarie in the group.

Good to see Butters on the cover, one of my fav characters in the series.

Some of those are prime examples of why I think CDProject simply does too much at times. I mean, it's admirable that you want to create an ambitious game. But we don't really need half-assed Metal Gear Solid sections, stupid QTE sections, some immensely crappy, minigames with crappy controls, all in the same game. The sneaking sections are the most terrible parts if you ask me, they are absolutely awkward to play through and I have no idea why they chose to include them. For Witcher 3, I really hope they cut away a lot of that annoying, unnecessary "fat" and focus on other things like providing more reactive content to prior saves for example (if they go with the same importing saves system as TW2 did). The political storylines already work very well so that is good but I think Geralt's personal story needs a lot more oomph if it's gonna work well and be wrapped up in a satisfactory manner.

I'm not even sure what the complaint means in this case. I mean... from the screenshots, it basically looks like a South Park episode to my eyes. Isn't that kind of... the point? What else should it look like? I guess they should convert Cartman and the others into characters that would fit into Crysis or something. Then I would get my goddamn GRAFIX!

Wasn't too enthused that it would simply be a remake of the first Larry game but I must say that Al Lowe pretty much won me over completely by his videos. How can you not want to support this kind, funny old man? Reminds me so much of my father and his friends who will absolutely laugh their ass off at the lamest of dirty jokes.

Maybe he likes them. I know that it's a far-fetched idea but it could be true.

I am not sure how legit this site is, and it makes me wonder since there are no other pre-orders up on other sites (including STEAM) as of yet. Plus, the price tag is hefty for a PC game. But... http://www.greenmangaming.com/s/se/en/pc/games/rpgs/south-park-game/

Really liked this episode, feels like this season is starting to get some momentum which I thought was a bit lacking in the first episodes.

I watched it and yeah... looks pretty amazing. But it is spoilery so don't watch it if you're careful about that. One more month...

I have a harder time with the more story-based long games nowadays as well. Though I think, for me at least, that it's not so much a problem with a game being long per say, it's just that most long games have a lot of filler in them. Or at least really boring sections. I find I'm getting increasingly non-tolerant towards that. DS3 was pretty good about that I think, most of the time the areas get switched up before you get really bored of them. I think Glitterdelve is the only location where I feel it goes on for just a bit too long but even then it's not that bad. Dragon Age was a game I really enjoyed on my first playthrough and I still like it, but yeah... Some parts of it are really hard to replay. Similarily, I'm replaying the Witcher 1 at the moment and some bits are very tedious to go through again. Same with the second game. A long game like New Vegas though is no problem to replay for me because so much of the playlength is up to the player. If you start to feel like things are starting to drag a bit, you can usually go to the ending bits in a rather quick fashion and finish it up.

I'm personally glad that we don't have to suffer through a bunch of sword-fighting scenes, it's rare that they are in the least bit interesting. That said, I'm also inclined to agree that parts of the series feel forced in how "mature" they want to portray it. I think Joffrey's character in particular is starting to feel boring to watch because of the whole "evil child" thing. Not that it was much different in the books from what I can remember, but... Also, the finale of this episode was largely one that gave me pause in the books as well, where it sorta went off in a direction that I felt was sort of... out of place. I never really liked the Melisandre character much as she really feels like a character directed at type of people who love to write and read fanfics. Of course the TV-series takes full advantage of this. But again, in the larger scheme of things, it is also nitpicking. I found the books to be excellent reads for the most parts and the TV-series is in my opinion pretty damn good. This episode was probably my favorite so far in this season.

There is a point where you won't be able to access it anymore, though I can't remember exactly where it is now (I believe you get a message warning you about it though). I guess it's before you head to the Spire or something. But it's definitely designed to be played as part of the main campaign. But yeah, there are two main "threads" from Stonebridge with the Stonebridge-centric quests or the Glitterdelve related stuff. I'd suggest doing the DLC in between those two, I think it feels pretty good there.

Project funcroc would be awesome. Obviously it would be a detective game. But there are other projects... projects that I might *welcome* being cancelled... *shudder*

Like forumites on the Obsidian board.

The violence didn't really phase me me one way or the other. While it was in your face (literally), it was also short and to the point. In a sense I like this better than, for example the Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition trailer (that serves as a new intro) where you have burts of blood exploding in slow motion through the air. Anyways, I was really looking forward to another steampunk game but the art direction in this trailer really didn't do anything for me. And those... guards on robotic... stilts... or whatever they are looked really silly I think.

Personally, I'd say it's like... I dunno, it's like a much, much better Oblivion but it still suffers from many of the same problems. The biggest improvement from Oblivion is the world-building. The world of Skyrim is really excellent to explore on your first time through. The world is intensely beautiful (both in the technical sense and the art direction) and also a lot more varied than Oblivion. Even though it's an obvious northern climate, you have glacier-like areas, you have a tundra, hot springs, big mountains, a forest area, a forest-ish area that feels like it's more in the autumn, a steppe-like area, a murky and gloomy swamp... They did an excellent job at varying the feel of the environment within the northern feel framework. Dungeons are generally better in terms of their story-telling and looks. You often have plenty of notes and journal-entries giving good context for the areas. On the other hand, most of them are *completely* linear. Literally like corridors with extremely dumb... puzzles. Actually not even puzzles, they're just things that you do to go further in the mine. It has the appearance of a puzzle often, but they require not brain power whatsoever. Lore overall is much better. Skyrim has a much better sense of culture and "place" than Oblivion did. The writing for the world itself is really quite good. Where the game really fails for me personally is that, like in Oblivion, there is little reaction to what you do in the world. You can still be head of all the guilds and nothing really changes. The game never really cuts you off from anything or "bites back". Some people think this is the epitome of sandbox gameplay but I think it feels very tepid. And because of this, I don't think I'll ever do a serious replay of the game, it'll just be sorta screwing around and testing out mods. And it's sort of a crime because the world deserves better. You have strife in Skyrim, you have factions opposed to one another, you have all this stuff in the lore and yet it feels like can only scratch the surface barely. You can't *really* sink your teeth and get creative roleplaying wise because either the game just doesn't react to what you're doing, or it flat out won't let you do some things (like the unkillable NPCs). You can go on a large number of usually very linear quests and watch as rather boring storylines unfold. I bought it at release and I still consider it to have been worth it though because I squeezed quite a lot of "juice" from that first playthrough where all the exploration was new to me. And that to me was really the fun part of Skyrim, the initial exploration of the world. Once that was mostly done, my interest plummeted. I don't think TES and Fallout are in the same subgenre of games but a game like Skyrim could've desperately needed a good injection of New Vegas into it. And I don't even mean that you could potentially solve all quests in a myriad of ways, but I'm talking about the sandbox style gameplay. Reputation checks, opposing factions where it actually means something where you join, removing plot-armor from the NPCs, a Hardcore mode (makes sense given the environment) etc etc.

There are people who say the modded highres texture packs are better so that may be worth looking into. But you do see a difference when you're playing, definitely. But yes, there is an impact on performance (though I feel it's off-set by the performance improvements in the patches). Loading times are a bit longer but nothing really extreme.

Been seeing a few Ridley Scott films in anticipation of Prometheus. Kingdom of Heaven earlier, The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner, Hannibal the last few days and then American Gangster yesterday. Body of Lies later today. Really hope The Duellists will get a blu-ray release. It is such a beautiful film. Ridley's work varies a lot but you can be sure it will always be visually good at least. American Gangster is really excellent, one of his best in my opinion. I typically like his earlier stuff more but American Gangster ranks up there with the best of them I think.

Thanks for answering question on formspring George. It's good to get insight into what you've worked on,

I don't think it's a huge problem now in the phase where kickstarter is really getting all the attention as far as games go. I think the huge support from gamers is needed now and I have gladly spent money on a few titles. However, for future kickstarter projects, the main thing I'd like to see is just more info, plans etc etc regarding the project when it's put up. So you know exactly what you are supporting. Like, I backed Shadowrun out of goodwill and the fact that I like the license, but I would've really liked some sort of vision doc or plan for how the game will play out. We know now that it will have similarities with X-com for example, but that we will do more of the "legwork". But what does this mean? Is it the typical RPG stuff where you run around town, getting quests? How close will they trying to remake the PnP feel? Will they say screw that and just go for the feel of the setting itself? Like I said, I have had zero problems to back promising projects right now because I think the industry really needs this kind of creative freedom. But in the future I would like to know more about the plans for the actual gameplay and stuff like that. EDIT: At least if I'm gonna be convincedto plunk down more cash than the standard 15 bucks pledge.