J.E. Sawyer

You know, I think Cube D Cube and MC Comb recently contributed to a new Torment fan patch (really). http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/...Gets-A-Facelift

Hmm mentally ill old man? Surely the things he says regarding his beliefs should be regarded as part of a formal religious indoctrination! When people say they worship the Satan/Lucifer/the devil, they're typically being facetious, puffing themselves up to appear "edgy", or are crazy as heck. As with declared Christianity, declared Satanism has little to do with the reality of whether a person lives a selfless or selfish life. The few people I've met over the age of 14 who declare themselves to be Satanists with a straight face are obnoxiously overt about being relatively even-handed or pleasant while still observing a doctrine of enlightened self-interest. A sociopath who says, "I'm a sociopath," receives no sympathy and no support. Any person who says, "I'm selfish as heck and don't care about you," also receives no sympathy and no support. The people who are really like this don't declare it. It's the moral equivalent of this wisdom from Life Aquatic: "You never say, 'I'm gonna fight you, Steve.' You just smile and act natural... and then you sucker punch him."

In happier news (happier than Alex Brandon leaving, I mean), George Ziets has returned to the hood to pimp walk the halls of Obsidian once again.

Generally speaking, I only ask people at work for troubleshooting help (e.g. figuring out why the overland map wasn't working for me), not to do "real" work.

I'll try to coordinate with Nathaniel and Jeff on this, but there's a bit of a disconnect between the reality of the SoZ campaign, the overland map tutorial, and creating your own overland map. Some of the scripts Nathaniel refers to in the tutorial .pdf have nx2_ prefixes. Jeff created some generic scripts that are in the global SoZ data that can (and should be) referred to instead. For example, an nx2_tr_terrain trigger should use for its On Enter, On Exit, and On Heartbeat scripts gtr_terrain_en, gtr_terrain_ex and gtr_terrain_hb instead of the nx2_ prefixed variants.

The design is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_Keyboard Mine is color-coded for WordPerfect. http://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/f...tid/0/id/181992

Skill checks, for Intimidate and Diplomacy.

Yeah, I saw it a few years ago at Gen Con. It's pretty cool. I didn't mess around with it much, but it seemed like a good tool.

Oh, I see. This may sound pretty dumb, but I haven't overclocked anything in a long time. I've been out of PC building for so long that I was sort of lost when I was putting this new system together. I tried to pay attention to all of the important data, but I guess I missed overclocking flexibility. [quote name='H

Ooh, I smell wasted money (only half kidding, price/performance ratio on the fastet dual core isn't great at all, here that is, don't know about the US) It seems to be a reasonable price::performance ratio to me. The i7 motherboards and CPUs weren't really necessary for how I'm using my home machine. Here's the whole desktop layout for doing mod work at home: I'm trying to set things up so I run modules on the XPS laptop and do all of my toolset work on the desktop. I'm hoping I can cut down on iteration time this way, but it may not pan out.

It may simply check to see that you have the appropriate expansion packs installed and pop up something in the game if you don't have them. That's the best guess I can come up with.

I just played Oblivion as a guy who would stalk and kill anyone who said anything racist to him about being a Breton. Also I just murdered random people. That helped, too.

I honestly don't know. The best way to find out would probably be to load MotB and SoZ modules in the toolset and check their values.

New RIG (not that great) Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3LR motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 CPU 4 gigs of Patriot Viper DDR2 RAM (one stick is probably bad because I keep getting BSoD IRQL crashes) EVGA GeForce 8800GT WD Velociraptor main drive WD Raptor secondary drive Dell 24" LCD monitors Samsung Super Writemaster DVD burner Antec TruePower 2.0 550w power supply Windows XP SP3 onboard audio, LAN, etc.

Finished Fallout 3 a week and half ago. Entertaining overall, though melee, VATS, and stim use really disappointed me. I restarted Mass Effect but am having trouble getting into it. I'm languishing in the citadel right now. Saints Row 2 has the craziest character customization I've seen. The game ultimately feels like a less polished, more fun version of GTA4 that takes itself far less seriously. Tomorrow I'm getting my NEW RIG components and I can start a proper SoZ campaign mixed with some more L4D campaigning. I also just picked up a Wii Classic Controller for Super Metroid.

One of the enemies is a Karnovski. It looks like a fat dude that breathes fire. Awesome.

The DaVinci's Pendulum of Foucault: The Code: The Game.

Sure, it's fair game. I used VATS head constantly, all through F3. It was not challenging at all and I certainly wouldn't take offense to anyone telling me that it was the easy way through the game. Because it was. There was no problem I could not solve through the application of VATS head and the use of a bunch of stimpaks. If you don't think there's a design flaw in having two combat mechanics (VATS head + unlimited stim use in inventory) that allows you to bulldoze everything in the game, fair enough. I don't agree.

If you beat Throne of Bhaal with the Ascension mod, that requires some planning. Building a character to make consistent VATS head shots in F3 doesn't really compare. Fallout 3 is an entertaining game, but the mechanics bothered me on a lot of levels. When I scored a head shot outside of VATS, that required some effort on my part. Scoring a head shot in VATS required virtually nothing. People who can't manually score a head shot against a still target in F3 or who can't build a character that can consistently score head shots in VATS have one thing in common: they are huge n00bs who should probably not play video games or operate a motor vehicle. I'm sorry if that attitude is disheartening to you.

There is no strategy or tactics involved in using VATS, not even character building. You can have virtually no points in a weapon skill, rush a target, and spam called head shots in VATS with a 95% chance of success.

A player with a Sneak-oriented build, Commando, Finesse, and Sniper is typically going to rock a target whether he or she is using VATS or manually aiming. The AP cost of using sniper rifles (specifically) with VATS encourages players to use manual aim with the scope. But if you're not going to use the scope, you can use the Hunting Rifle and other non-scoped weapons in VATS with much greater success. The terrible bolt-action reload of the Hunting Rifle sort of discourages its use in standard combat (at least it did for me). Use of VATS for headshots isn't fraudulent, but it's a no-brainer, high-success action in Fallout 3. If you have a reasonable number of points (like, more than 30) in the weapon type you're using and the target is anywhere near you, it's rare to not pull off 95% success head shots over and over again. But I'd never use the sniper rifles in normal combat in Fallout 3 on the 360. I can't track a target's head well enough with the 360 controller unless the target's totally unaware of me. So in that sense, I don't even really think the headshots I pulled off were very twitch-oriented. I really just waited for targets to hold still. My character build was oriented towards Sneak, Melee, Small Guns, and shooting people in the head (inside or outside of VATS). I don't think I would have been as successful without the character build to back it up. On the rare occasions when I couldn't kill something with one surprise headshot, I'd pull out the Combat Shotgun, run straight at the target, and spam VATS headshots until the target was gone.

They don't, but a .308 round at two hundred yards sure will. I really enjoyed setting up elaborate booby traps involving frag mines, bottlecap mines, and funny triggering mechanisms.

It is worth noting that I believe there's some special critical modifier that goes on with scoped weapons fired "naturally" (i.e. no VATS). So if you do legit head snipes with the Sniper, Reservist's, or Victory Rifle, you tend to score crits a hell of a lot. With VATS... not so much.

Sneak + Reservist's Rifle/Victory Rifle = own zone on super mutants.

If you can, there is no benefit. Attacks increase in damage as your skill increases and you get more moves in the chain. To answer Pop's question, stick input can override the default targeting (based on heading) between moves. So you could hit one guy with two attacks and then smack another guy with your third (fourth, fifth). And you can always stop a combo simply by letting off the attack button. For combos, one button in the input window = one attack. Also, depending on the relative skill of your target, he or she may block some of your attacks, so a longer chain increases your chance of actually landing hits. When you are able to do five-hit combos, the final hit will always break a block/cause a stumble, so it's pretty worthwhile if dudes are blocking you left and right.