Aristes
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Posts posted by Aristes
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Try buying a house in Manhattan or San Jose or any of the other expensive markets.
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First of all, keep plugging away TheSlug! I don't have any grand insight, other than to agree with GD. Just because she's awkward or won't open up to you is probably more a sign of how she feels about herself than you. Dunno, but good luck my friend.
As for you, Hurlshot, OUCH! Dude, get better.
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Are there tunnels in this expansion?
Nope, the expansions uses the special 'air duct' variant.
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Hey Sawyer, I was wondering if you could tell us a bit insofar as Damage Threshold is concerned. I've tried explaining it to people and they tend to get confused. In the first 2 Fallouts it comes in before resistance, right? So if I'm being hit with a 10 HP spear attack and my armor has DR/DT 25/02, then the DT reduces damage to 8 and the DR reduces it further to 6. Is that how it works?
I believe it's good to know how the numbers crunch in the background, or at least to have that information available. However, I don't believe that it's a big deal to most players. I don't have a crystal ball to know what 'the average gamer' wants, but that degree of specificity isn't really necessary to beat any games I've played. Sure, if you pump up the settings to the hardest settings and maybe include mods that make it even more difficult, you might need to rely on the tiniest bit of information. I seriously doubt, crystal ball or not, that most gamers ramp up to the hardest setting and then saddle their characters with additional mod created difficulties. ...And if the difficulty comes from a mod changing the difficulty, the information about the underlying mechanics is moot anyhow.
Don't get me wrong. I think the question is legit and the fine tuned number crunching discussions are great fun. For an essential discussion, though, we really need to have basic information that's easy to understand in a nutshell.
Let me incite riots amongst the faithful by citing World of Warcraft. In WoW, you have armor, defense, dodge, parry, and block. Armor basically stops some damage. Defense makes it harder to hit and crit the character and then adds to dodge, parry, and block. Dodge allows the player to flat out avoid the attack by character movement. parry allows a player to use a weapon to deflect the attack. Block allows the player to use a shield to absorb some of the damage from an attack. Now, the specifics are more complex, but a player can get through the vast majority of the game with that essential understanding. Resilience reduces the chance of crits against the character and the damage of the crits that hit, but resilience is basically a player versus player defense. If the design team can't provide mechanics that players can distill into the same brief understanding, then it's a failing on its part.
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I've taken a break from the game. First of all, my video card bit the dust. Second of all, the holidays got in the way. Third of all, and related to the video card, I don't buy anything for myself during Christmastime until after the first of the year. I didn't figure that anyone would buy me a new video card, but you never know. Anyhow, I don't like to put my games on the wife's computer and the laptop would melt if I tried to play DA on it.
Video card will be here this week and then I can make fun of Walsh's puny character. Bwahahaha
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I'd say that this all sounds great. The point isn't that I would want to play a stinking, ugly, and commie ghoul. The point is that this is a wonderfully imaginative bit of story that shows attention to detail and love for the setting. I'm not cautious at all. If they can pull it off, and offer something as lovingly crafted that I'll actually play, then I'll go gonzo over the damned thing. No ghould for me, though, so get to crackin' on something human, rat bastards.
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I think alternate history is tons of fun. Really interesting conversations come out of the sheer speculation.
I don't agree with Guard Dog and Lord of Flies in that it was completely and utterly inevitable. I do think it was virtually impossible to avoid World War One, but that's because it's hard to imagine a world in which it did not occur. If it hadn't occured, it would have been difficult to imagine a world in which something so horrible had actually happened. Think of it this way, if we had endured a nulcear war in the 1980s, then it would have been hard to believe war wasn't inevitable. Hell, a lot of folks were convinced that we would end up in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Counterfactual history is wonderful for discussion, but anything beyond immediate proximity is probably worthless as an academic endeavor. It's not even possible to come to any real consensus about soomething as immediate as the bombing of a Nagasaki and Hiroshima in relation to the ending of World War Two, let alone something as complex as a world in which World War One never took place. I completely agree with both GD and LoF in regards to the immediate cause of Franz Ferdinand's assassination. With so much tinder and so many sparks, taking out just one would not have been enough. There were certainly enough immediate causes waiting in the wings to set off the event that the absence of any one would not have been sufficient to guarantee peace.
How the world would look had any one particular event not taken place is anyone's guess, but it is almost certainly not exactly what anyone would imagine.
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I've been bumped to first class before. I'm a cheap ass, so I don't fly anything better than coach if I pay for the ticket myself, but I have had benefactors who have paid for first class or business class tickets. Well... I'm cheap and I don't have a lot of money.
We often don't do much for New Years, and this year we actually did nothing. At midnight, we had a rum and coke.
Right now, I'm thinking about the crazy assed three months I've had, what with my week in the hospital and all. I was supposed to take a big exam and now I've put it off until the next cycle. Could have taken it in December, but the wife was griefing me so I didn't.
BTW: congrats, Guard Dog. And sorry to see you leave our fair land, Walsh, but at least you didn't get molested by Sluggie.
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Good Lord, kid, lay off the ganja. I agree, though, Leliana is certainly much more marrying material than Crazy assed Morrigan.
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I'll probably pick it up tonight or tomorrow. Artsy like The Path? I mean, the Path was weird and substandard in a lot of ways, but I enjoyed it for what it was worth and the wife played it with me on the big screen. Gotta do the same thing here.
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Spent the entire day sick in bed, it's weird because I haven't gotten ill in years. Forgot how much of a bitch it is swallowing with a soar throat. I'm passing the time watching the first three dvd seasons of House I got for christmas.
Funny. I've had all the seasons on DVD for a while. I'm watching the first season again. It starts to go down hill in season 4 and then hits the skids in season five. Season six has some good things going, but a lot of crap also. We'll see. I'm not making the mistake of buying it when it hits the shelves this year.
Currently watching House Season One. After this, we'll watch the entire series of the Twilight Zone that I just received this Xmas.
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And speaking of Carnivale, I'd have to say the episode where Jonesy gets
tarred and feathered
was one of my favorites.
Dude, there is a Carnivale thread in my head somewhere, but I haven't gone to the wiki entry. I'm just reluctant to read behind the scenes stuff sometimes because I don't want to ruin what I got out of the movie/show/song. Sometimes I do, though.
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I want to see the Road. I think it looks cool and I didn't even realize it's a book. I know it's made by the same folks who did No Country for Old Men, though, so I'm looking for a mortality rate something along the lines of an Alistair MacLean novel.
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Well, keep telling us what you think as you progress. I've not wanted to update here because there wasn't any participation and I hate being the only person posting in a thread.
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Haven't been in this thread in a while. Happy Christmas to one and all. Hey, GD, maybe you can run for congress this upcoming year. You might have a chance.
Some good gifts in my stash, but more to open at the outlaws. Peace.
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No no no, Gorthie! Those apprentices are part of the mage's consortium quests. They're a super secret group of mages that are extremely rare in Ferelden. I mean, SUPER SECRET and totally RARE! That's why you have to go to two places in the capitol city to find them, hidden right there in a magic shop in the Market District. Did I mention how rare magic is? It's really rare.
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Dark Corners had a lot of good things going for it, but it also had a lot of bad things too. The graphics were dated. The controls were clunky. The PC version had a number of glitches, some of which were game stoppers for a lot of folks. Fallout three, by comparison was merely fairly unstable. I don't remember losing anything huge because of crashes, but I know I tended not to alt+tab out, which was a result of a tendency to crash at that point. NWN2x seemed to do the same thing. NWN had a bunch of weird little bugs, such as giving me unlimited melf's acid arrows. Dragon's Age has crashed on me at least two or three times. Mostly I just get that bug saying it can't access my online profile, like I care.
I'm with you, though. Like every other rational gamer, I want a stabler game.
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Not a movie, but I did finish both seasons of Carnivale. KQD, you bastard! I've been putting off going to wikipedia to read more about it, but I resent the series getting cancelled. Swine hearted wretches!
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I seem to recall some problems with the game if I alt+tabbed out to look at other stuff. It wasn't remarkably unstable for me. I don't trust error reporting on message boards, but I do know that some folks can have a harder time than others. It's simply impossible to muddle through all of the reports on Fallout 3 because the crazies have muddied the waters. I had a lot of fun playing the original title. Great exploration, but I know it had it's irritating bug moments.
Now, two titles that have driven me crazy are ToEE and Dark Corners. Of course, the fans (and even the developers) would have us believe that half the bugs in ToEE were actually 'design decisions.'
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Good Jul, good meat, good God, let's eat! hehe
Happy Jul everyone!
This can also serve to take the place of my traditional holiday thread.
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I smell a ****storm of Beth fanboys brewing in the distance.new turn-based mechanics we thought might be cool for the title...Isn't that in reference to Van Buren?
Nope. New Vegas will be both isometric and turn based. I have a crystal ball and this is did shew.
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Branka couldn't get past the traps herself. She intentionally turned her clan into darkspawn so that there would be a steady stream of genlocks that would test the traps for her. She kept looking from the sides and, once the area was open, she intended to recover the anvil of DOOOOOOOM.
That story line was fun and creepy, but overall I was happy to get out of dwarf town. I don't know if it were the lighting or I just didn't like the dwarfs, but I was happy to be done and gone. I also thought that the dwarven area had the largest number of side bosses compared to other areas. The deep roads are a real grind. The way Grom and ~Di describe the end game is pretty much how I felt about Deep Roads.
I really enjoyed the fade also. I think I would have ended up with fade fatigue in the same way if I had been there as long as I was in the deep roads. As it was, playing some there in the mage origin and then seeing it again later was a lot of fun for me.
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I didn't expect the game to win a pullitzer in the first place. I just wanted the gameplay to be fun. I think that Bioware writes games to be accessible to the largest number of people, and they probably take into account that a large number of the players aren't even native English speakers. Gromnir made a good point about young adult literature, though, so who knows. I also think it's funny that Kaftan, a Swede if I remember it right, had a more complex reading of the Dragon Age dialogue than Bioware intended. Who knows? My main point, which I still believe, is that Bioware isn't inept so much as they are intentionally as explicit as possible so as to broadcast their intentions to the player. Even that fails sometimes.
Anyhow, I mean no animosity when I say that I'm done defending the dialogue, especially since I griped about at length some two pages back myself.
edit: I leave my mispelling of the Pulitzer prize as even more indication that I'm not the best person to judge Bioware's writing. Plus folks might see it as sweet irony. hehe
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I guess that's a good point. I'm quite fond of A Wrinkle In Time myself. One of my favorite body of works is the Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper.
I don't look down on RPG fans. Hell, I am one, which means I either look down on myself or I consider myself a different caliber of RPG fan, neither of which I believe. Still, whether it's because of the quality of the fans or what the designers believe to be the quality of the fans, ideas are flogged mercilessly in all of these games. Even my favorites have have bludgeoned ideas back and forth. Honest to goodness, maybe I'm too jaded, but it just seems that way to me.
I think I'll go and read The Dark is Rising series again. It's been a while.
Let's do the maths
in Way Off-Topic
Posted
Yeah, I was the same way, only it was more than a week. I was probably in the hospital longer, though, and I was in surgery for hours, so it might just be my body was healing more. Either that or I'm just an old bastard and don't recoup like whipper snappers like you.