Nepenthe

Ahem...it seems that due to unforeseen tactical circumstances I will have to revise my class selection to the Soldier. Note, my decision is in no way related to the rumored side-effects of gratuitous b00bies, no matter how voluptuous they may appear. I'll point out that Vanguards can work in that role quite well, too. They could in 1, and going from the non-trailer trailer, they will still in 2. Unless there's some soldier-boob thing I am completely unaware of I don't think it was confusing, more like overly succinct to the point that it might have lead to the problems I described in my later post. But yeah, I think we're on the same page, here

They've been pretty tight-lipped about the changes, apart from the fact that some major ones have taken place. The only thing I can think off the top of my head is that some of the upgrades will be researched by the scientist on your team, using resources and materials you've gathered. I'm guessing these will be the more unique ones...

Not when the game creates a different kind of save called 'autosave' which is the subject of the original question? If the poor chap were to bin all his other files and just keep the 'autosave', he'd probably be in for a rude surprise, y'know...

This is correct. The very last autosave of each playthrough is what ME imports. No, it's not. It's a separate save, as autosaves are character specific and each character can have multiple end-game saves.

Apparently, it's something else. There's a thread on the Bio boards, probably a sticky one, that explains the whole thing. I'd look it up, but I feel dumber every time I go there. I swear the average age on the ME forums is 12-14. Of course, youthful eagerness by itself is not necessarily worse than a bunch of bitter old men, but...

Dante's Inferno demo. I needed a quick action fix and this seemed to fit the bill. I actually became mildly interested in the full product - not sure if it was the quick 'n dirty action or gratuitousness of it all.

As an owner of both consoles, let me tell you that each has its own merits. Mmh, true. I have both consoles as well, but for some reason I have a deep aversion towards the x360 (which I bought later, and really only to play Mass Effect), which I can't fully explain. I have one of the anti-RROD Jaspers, which apparently in addition to lower power consumption were also optimised for maximum fan power. That thing is a screamer, even with the games on the drive. The PS3 is hardly silent, but both the fan and drive noise are subjectively unnoticeable to me. Also the way the menus and everything else on the PS3 side work it somehow manages to seem more like a quality home theatre product than a gaudy games console on the appearance level. The x360 is the opposite, and I still get lost in the menus and the forced adverts getting rammed down my throat whenever I do something on that side. This puts me in the unfortunate position were I have to pick multiplatform games for the console on which they generally work worse (the ps3), just because relatively minor subjective things make me like using it more

I'm wondering about the latter as well. It's going to be very interesting how ambitious they get. Having meaningful, wide-reaching C&C go through a trilogy of games would definitely be a first in gaming. Yeah, this has been mentioned in some previews. We'll see what it is and how it works soon enough...

Im replaying ME right now and the time you spend in combat compared to traditonal RPGs is very short. There is no "not another damn cave of friggin' goblins!" combat fatigue. This is very true. Unfortunately, it has the 'not another damn planet of friggin' mountains' mako fatigue. BG1 suffers from the AD&D systems core problem. The differences 1-2 levels can make at the lower end are astounding - this results in practically all areas having a mix of good low level encounters and insanely lethal ones. So instead of just either following the story or exploring, I find myself making a list of safe lvl 1-3 encounters and trying to find those on the overland areas without getting my bottom handed to me... in another words, due to the slow dribbling experience gain and steep power curve of 2e AD&D I just wind up metagaming the hell out of it. This is not a problem in BG2, as your start up higher (and probably overall level a bit faster, too) or Icewind Dale (where you get the first few levels in pretty rapid succession). The engine/gameplay improvements in BG2 are pretty significant as well. OTOH, I really like Sarevok as a villain and his plot to take over the world is at least pretty innovative to me. I also vastly prefer the BG1 casting sounds over the latin in bg2...

Don't mind the guy. Somebody like, say, Steven Hartley could have made an interesting alternative, but to me Meer sounds vanilla in a completely inoffensive way. What he was hired to do, I assume.

Interesting, but color me sceptical. That would be 15 hours of game coming basically out of nowhere - either the best kept secret in gaming, or a 'seekret' team :/

I think it's potentially what the original Baldur's Gate was - a prequel and a prototype to a brilliant game. A good game in its own right, but hardly flawless. Based on what I've seen of ME2, it will be relegated to the same role BG1 had, having played it makes you appreciate the sequel more and fondly remembered, never booted. It cost me a lot more than 4 euros, and I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of it over the last 6+ months. It's funny because BG1 was better than BG2. Story-wise, yes. In technical and design execution, no.

I think it's potentially what the original Baldur's Gate was - a prequel and a prototype to a brilliant game. A good game in its own right, but hardly flawless. Based on what I've seen of ME2, it will be relegated to the same role BG1 had, having played it makes you appreciate the sequel more and fondly remembered, never booted. It cost me a lot more than 4 euros, and I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of it over the last 6+ months.

It did, and the Krogan and Turian variants weren't too shabby either. Human, almost as bad as Phoenix. Both my 'main' playthroughs, I wound up going with Predator L/M/H for everybody, just because I liked the idea of my Spectre squad having uniform camo armor, and Spectres using Armax Arsenal gear even made sense from a story point of view.

Huh? The crazy fan in the Citadel markets? Did anybody find his interruptions entertaining at all? I'm having bad memories of the "Noober 2" (Neeber?) who showed up in BG2-- it wasn't funny the first time, and it didn't get any funnier when they did it again. That's the point... I don't think he initiates conversations either, you have to talk to him. And I do agree that there are definitely some recycled character types, with the 'buddy' type Maria brought up being the clearest. However, I think that people are a) making a bigger deal of this than it is b) stretching these 'archetypes' to the point where, if you picked a handful of hollywood movies, you'd find all the same basic archetypes in there as well. Of course, I haven't read any movie thread on crpg boards of late, so I guess people could be whining about the same thing there...

Most of the armor I saw weren't ugly, just not as good looking as some others (turian phantom armor <3). ME armor? No, there was a lot of good-looking armor in the game too, most of the mid-tier stuff Hahne-Kedar etc. stuff was pretty sweet. But of the top-tier human armors, of which there were essentially just 2, Colossus and the Predator L/M/H range, I basically had to go with the Predator each time because of the 'red panties on top of black armor' look of the Colossus. And, well: http://www.halolz.com/wp-content/uploads/2...onthavetime.jpg

I basically started gaming again late last year after a work-induced break of a couple of years. Still, I think I only picked up ~5 games the whole year (Red Alert 3, Mass Effect, Civ Revolution, MW2 and DAO, iirc... Oh yeah, Hitman: Blood Money, too). Of these, ME and DAO were the most memorable, but the others all ranked at least on 'good fun'. I had some pretty high expectations of this year, but either I stopped caring about some games I'd anticipated when they came out (Ghostbusters, Wolfenstein) or they got postponed to next year (Alpha Protocol, Bioshock 2). Considering I was basically catching up for a couple of years, it wasn't much. I'm of course limited by the fact that I have just the PS3 (and from June onwards, the X360, which I hate, but suffer to be able to play mass effect), but still... Early next year looks good, with ME2 and the postponed games, and apparently Alan Wake coming out at some point too (I haven't followed it too closely, see what I said about my feelings on the x360), so we might not get a super-stacked holiday season that then blows up due to being overloaded, like this year. Might pick up Ghostbusters and/or Batman when they hit the bargain bin, too. p.s. Oh yeah, GTA IV too. Now there's a game I regret paying for. Unless there's a Vice City 2, that's going to be my last GTA game.

Some of the best stuff can be bought, and it's not cheap The most powerful ones are quick to empty one's pocket completely! It's not like Baldur's Gate 2 where three to four items that are sold are among the best in their category, and their price isn"t that high when compared to the amount of cash one cam make in that game! Ok, sure, maybe it's the inverse - the sale value of all the loot you pick up is so low that I can't see a point in not keeping everybody outfitted at least to a tolerable degree. Especially with the amount of sneaky forced NPCs you get. I love it that they nerfed the DAO Blood Dragon Armor to get its set bonus with just the helm (the original version had somewhat better stats and didn't require the helm). It actually looked pretty good without that glowing bucket. (Ok, so maybe pretty good is relative when it comes to DAO armor, and the fact that barring the Chevalier Armor, basically all the good-looking armor isn't gettable in the base game, including but not limited to Warden Commander's armor, King's Armor and the Red Steel variant of it Ser Perth sometimes wears. Grr. And don't even get me started on the helmets, this: http://social.bioware.com/wiki/dragonage/i...le:Massive1.jpg better be in return to ostagar... ) OTOH, armor looks wise, ME2 seems to be a vast improvement over the first installment (phoenix and colossus armors, 'nuff said), but that's not really for this thread...

Turns out that I'm apparently jaded enough to keep the second string armed and equipped to at least a decent standard, just because I suspected that at some point I'd have to use them. Not sure how somebody can actually be strapped of cash in this game, though.

Jan. 5. Unsurprisingly, PS3 is 'later' again. Yes, me too. The Intai'sei pad, half-assed as it is, made pinnacle station worth it. While the phat lewt in warden's keep carries it, I can't just help but wince at how totally it fails on the 'base' side.

I don't see how Tali is a 'lovable rogue', unless you mean she can open things. And I'm not sure how Samara is emotionally scarred emo. I'd place her under 'mentor.' It's wonderful that those 'archetypes' are so wonderfully vague, and they still don't work out. I mean hk-47, heart of gold? Wrex, lowbrow? Tali, rogue? Shale?! I mean, sure, there are similarities, but grossly exaggerating them seems to be the current trend...

+1 Also, playing Drakensang: River of Time demo & replaying Venetica/Divinity 2. I was in the correct mental state, so I gave my favourite, original character 2 run-throughs of Mass Effect to unlock the final two 'chievos I had left and get a character I actually like on some level prepped for part two. Plus, especially after grinding through all the uncharted worlds, I seriously doubt I'm going to go back to this game for a long while. I seriously hope they've learned from ME1... Dragon Age did show something along those lines, most of the side quests were pretty quick and sweet with a minimum of trudging around. OTOH, some of the main quests felt reaally stretched outi... :/ So, just finished basically 4 days of non-stop Mass Effect, currently recuperating a bit and then maybe some DAO or MW2 special ops...

Oh yeah - the ONE place where I might actually bother to use traps, , the traps apparently magically disappear between the day and night times (along with the area movement the engine does to make it night) Also managed to get the 'save everybody at ' reward this time around. I think it was Wynne's cleansing aura more than my leet skills, but this being the console version I don't have a clue what goes outside my field of vision, including whether the friendly mooks count as allies for the purpose of cleansing aura affecting them.

When it clears approvals. They apparently went back to the drawing board with it and either submitted it later than they had planned or resubmitted it. I have mixed feelings about Warden's Keep. It's short, it's more a question of buying the really good loot (including the armor with the best looks/stats ratio in the game and the best sword...) with the quest as an excuse to give out that stuff. After completing the mini-quest, the area completely fails to deliver, either in the way it's been set up in the story or even as the 'base', really... OTOH, the level design is gorgeous, and JNPCs and everything else is integrated to an impressive degree. I realise that they wanted to avoid The Pittesque artificial lengthening of the DLC by having lots of running in empty areas, but I think they went overboard with it - encounters are going off in quicked succession than ever in the main game... I guess I like it, but I'm gritting my teeth at how much more it could have been... Pinacle Station was Demiurge's DLC, though.