Sannom

To each his own I guess, I have no problem with that image, and the cartoon looks good. Plus, as far as I know, it's the first TMNT adaptation to give each turtle its own build to differentiate them from each other aside from the differently-colored masks.

They do not look like that in the cartoon! They went for the really cartoony in that one, this looks like they're aiming for 'realism'! You sure those aren't for the new movie?

Spiders weren't the ones responsible for the Game of Thrones RPG, that was entirely Cyanide.

I don't think so, it would be a great trick to have one or multiple enemies tangled up and immobilized, but I don't think you need to use the Engagement mechanic to make it work.

Josh may have already answered this, but I will ask anyway : what happens to a fighter who tries to go help another fighter locked in an engagement with an enemy fighter? Does the enemy fighter gets a 'disengagement' attack as the other fighter gets close enough, or did I completely miss something here? I want to say 'Duh'. That's how firing breath-like spells work too, like in NWN2 or Dragon Age, you have to move the characters to be in a very precise position to maximize the effectiveness of the spell. Depending on the size of the map or the room the fight is taking place in, going around the big guys beating each other with clubs shouldn't take more than three successive movements.

Sometimes I wonder how Troika would have turned out if they had had someone like Feargus to take care of the publishers, contracts and other administrative work. The way Tim has described it from time to time, that was one thing they absolutely didn't want to do.

Maybe it's because you use it all the time, I know that Steam has the habit of asking for me to check my account online before playing offline if I hasn't used the service in a long time.

Is there a link to directly launch Steam and then the game for a DRM-free Steam game? If not, then the game shouldn't be DRM-free on Steam, since because the GOG version exists, all Steam clients should be people who likes the service it proposes, and they shouldn't have to go through the hassle of going through an interface to launch their game. One click is better than two or three.

Diablo is point & click, Dungeon Siege 3 isn't. You control the character directly, have to manually select the direction he faces before attacking, etc. That's not a control scheme, that's gameplay. Having the dodge/block functions separated would make no sense in that game. Also, they did take advantage of the PC's greater number of keys by having the abilities of the Defensive Stance bound to different keys instead of the console's scheme (Block + button for ability). Also, when the game uses the mouse as the direction controller and that you can't point on things (like in a point & click), an interact key sort of becomes necessary.

You do realize that Devil May Cry is a game that came out often in discussion from one of the devs to talk about DS3, right? It wasn't a hack & slash anymore, it was an action game, comparable to the Dark Alliance games. So it used an direct-control scheme instead of a point & click system. DS3 wasn't a point & click aRPG, that's what you're not getting. Actually, very accurate, that's how Feargus described it recently in an interview : they had a release date set for December, early versions of the games made their interlocutors at Lucas Arts very enthusiastic so they told Obsidian to expand and gave them six more months, but 'last minute' Lucas Arts changed plans and came back to the original date and Obsidian had to cut short on the additional content. No, our point is that DS3 wasn't a Diablo clone, so why are you saying that they should have gone with the Diablo control scheme? It couldn't have worked!

Standard over-simplification. By the same token, Avellone hates D&D because he created Planescape : Torment. He was just bugged by some aspects of the setting and tried to deconstruct them. I doubt he would be so heavy-handed on the 'this is stupid' in another game. You're a sissy. And the patch made it better.

I don't know about that, the stories you hear about Eve Online makes it sound like role-playing heaven for example. Of course you really need to invest yourself into it.

I'm partial for dragons who are inspired by bats as far as walking on the ground goes, like the Terrible Nightmare from How to Train Your Dragon.

This is old news and your hopes have probably already been crushed, but the redactors of a game magazine in my country were so surprised at how awful the preview was, they decided to cancel the Alien-themed cover of their next issue, as well as an exclusive on the game which would have meant at least a 20% increase in sale. Just so that they could avoid the embarrassment.

In the same vein, why do all fantasy games need priests and healing spells when they already have healing potions? Besides, Obsidian didn't really come up with all of those by themselves. A lot of it existed in previous material from the E.U, including a few table-top RPG.

The death animations I remember are those from C&C : Red Alert and The Heart of Darkness. The last one had some very 'squick' ones, too.

For me, romance is just another form of deep relationship you can have with your companions in an RPG, and saying 'no' to romance is basically saying 'no' to the relationships which started to appear in Baldur's Gate 2 as opposed to Baldur's Gate. Yes, I am aware that Baldur's Gate 2 isn't exactly the best example, but for me it's the same template, they just hadn't worked out some of the kinks yet. For all we know, they planned for more men to romance (Valygar and Haerd'Alis are prime candidates), but were cut short because of time constraints. Also, "insanely large number of characters" ? Baldur's Gate had easily twice as much companions to choose from, but Baldur's Gate 2 is when the Bioware designers realized that quality should be preferred to quantity.

And it isn't mine. For me, 'too many love interests' is a discrete thing, not a percentile thing. Four love interests match the numbers of Baldur's Gate 2, the planned number for Neverwinter Nights 2 before they dropped to two, the number in Alpha Protocol, the number in Dragon Age, etc. In fact, I would argue that if you include 'role-playing' romance in your RPG, four love interests is the bare minimum, so that even if you go the 'all heterosexual' route, there is at least a choice... and we don't end up with the KOTOR or NWN2 situation. Brr. Do Kelly even count as a love interest in Mass Effect 2? And Jack and Miranda weren't companions in Mass Effect 3, their romances were just the continuation of the ones from the previous game, and from what I understand, they were rather light in content.

... and was responsible for Dragon Age 2, I can't take anything you say seriously. Only four of the companions were romance options in that game, right? That leaves three companions who weren't, and four really is the average for those games which include the option. I never played the game, but I thought there were only three romanceable companions in ME : a man and woman who were heterosexual, and an alien who was omni-sexual in almost every way, so two romance options by gender of the main character. And if anything, Obsidian is guiltier than Bioware on that topic if only for the inclusion of Scarlett as a romance option in Alpha Protocol : she panders to a lot of wish-fulfillment fantasy with her fiery red-head who's also an intrepid reporter status, and the main mechanic of her romance is gift-giving, a mechanic which was disqualified when Dragon Age went too far with it! I sometimes feel like Bioware's love of romance is really, really overblown by everyone.

Nothing wrong with it, but for PE they decided to not limit the player in the amount of loot they can hoard, while still limiting their equipment options while their party is in the wild. Hence the creation of that third layer, the 'stash', on top of what seems to be the classical inventory as used in the IE games.

An unnaturally powerful swordman filling his enemies with dread whenever he shows up, unbeatable almost to the end and the antagonist who leads most of the villains' operations. This one being inspired by Wrath from the manga Fullmetal Alchemist. A racist with a burning, irrational hatred of another race or culture because of past events, a dangerous sociopath specialized in the hunt of those from the culture he hates. Inspired by Eggskull from the franco-belgian comic book Blueberry.

They said there would be a two-weeks pause, so I would say 'no'.

(1) Although those don't generally change the gameplay that much. I don't like it when the option is merely esthetic. (2) That would require a very specific background for the game, though. Too binding, I think.

Non-lethal could also mean using stealth, include a 'tie them up' option for fallen enemies (looking at you, Commandos 2) and outright refusing quests that requires you to kill someone. The main path would need to have ways to avoid or skip some of the important confrontations too.

Wasn't that called a Sequencer in Baldur's Gate 2?