Raithe

Unfortunately , it's a BBC thing, each episode is about 90 minutes, and there were only three episodes for the first season.

A brief look at some of the shifts in ME3 combat ..

MMOMFG - A ToR preview based on several weeks on the Beta..

I find it quirky that there's that whole "show skin/flash flesh" and people get considered to have lower intelligence, lower self-control etc.. And I'm thinking of the various girls I knew at university who were studying to be doctors, nurses, etc... who paid their bills by working at some of the.. a.. gentleman's clubs in the area.

It was a quite nifty series. The second episode is generally considered the weakest, but the third when Moriarty comes into play was rather brilliant. And there is going to be a second season. And for the random trivia, the guy who played Mycroft? Is also one of the writers of the show..

Having another doodle-around on Saints Row the Third causing chaos and mayhem. I've got all of the Fallout New Vegas dlc now added, so at some point when I'm in the right mood I should start that up again.. but like Hurl, I find I'm waiting for TOR to release so I can jump back into that after my weekend run...

And for the quirky science.. The Psychology of Nakedness...

It's always fun to struggle with those moments of creative genius. Most especially when you can pull the draft of a brief together in a very short time.. and then when you sit down to rework a few sections, make the summary snappy, and then produce a companion document ... you end up shuffling a few words around over hours and not having any of it actually sound right...

Urg, got about 4 hours sleep and trying to kick myself into some format of wakefullness. Hm, between winter weather and the puppy, the garden's turning into a paddock looking place of mud.. and the kitchen floor and hall carpet inside is just.. looking fairly awful, muddy paws and the bones dad keeps giving him to chew on is leaving its mark even with multiple daily vacuuming. I'm going to have to try breaking out the carpet steam cleaner at some point .. probably before I start getting the christmas decorations out soon...

Crafting is a bit..different I think. The key trouble being, you have to select up to three "crew skills". One of which can be a crafting, but (and correct me if I'm wrong) I seem to remember hearing that you can only select one crafting skill. It works out at around six different "Crafting" skills in total, and a slew of non-crafting skills: Four "Gathering" skills, and Four "Mission" skills. Basically as you wander around, you can send your companions off to do those things. So you don't directly craft stuff yourself, just have your minions do it for you. Crafting skills are: ?Armormech

Hm, from what I've seen, I wouldn't say that meet one and you've met them all. It is literally impossible to select all the possible advanced class tweaks. Okay, let's see if I can explain this in a manner that's actually comprehensible.. There are Abilities that your class picks up that you actually "buy" from a trainer. So that every Trooper, every Smuggler, Every Jedi /Sith etc will have as they go up levels. Each Advanced Class also has some talents that you "buy" from a trainer as well, but only those of that advanced class has access. As you level up, better versions of those skills are available as well. DarthHater - Abilities - There's a handy dandy list, showing all the assorted Abilities, the classes they go with, and the levels they become available at. The bit where ability customisation really comes into it are the talent trees. Darth Hater - Talent Calculator Each class shares a single Talent Tree, and you get access to another two Talent Tree's depending on your Advanced Class. - All Jedi Knights have Focus Talent tree, but Sentinel has Combat and Watchman Trees, while the Guardian has Defense and Vigilance Trees. By 50th level you will have 49 points to spend, and that really shapes exactly your character in a lot of ways. It refines/improves skills and opens up new Abilities as well. If you want the really advanced options, you're going to have to be quite focused on a specific Talent tree. If you spread your talents around, you're not going to get that far up the tree. You have to spend 5 points on each level of the tree before you get access to the level above.. It can make a big deal on whether you're Trooper can effectively heal, or tank or just do mass aoe damage or what.. So two commando's could be very different in what they can do. Visually, there is a lot of variety to the armour that you could pick up, and that could change how you look. They have it pretty much locked in that you won't get rewards/items for quests that aren't actually usable by your class. So as a Trooper, I pretty much only got credits, guns, armour, or commendations as rewards. - Each world gives out "world commendations" for various things, and you can use them as a special form of currency to pick up items as well. Throw in the various crafting skills, I'm sure you can end up with something quite different visually. I do remember hearing something about being able to make sure colors matched, but I didn't actually find anything to do that... not that I actually looked that hard. Physical alteration of your character , well pretty much the body is on a thin-fat (big boned) physique, and then the face has the type of slider setup of DragonAge. Note - each race has different setup for exactly what you can alter. Also, races that can be both Imperial and Republic have differences. So there are variations you can have as a Human or Twilek if you're Republic that you don't get access to if you were Human/Twilek for the Empire. And vice versa. Edit: Nearly forgot something...

You do get to overhear a few fun conversations as you wander around, and I have to say this.. the background music is really damn good. You've got the familiar star wars tunes, the tunes reminiscent of star wars scores and it pretty much always works with the atmosphere of what you're doing and where you are. I can't say anything about PvP. I got lost in the PvE content. Seriously, solo'ing most of it just felt like a massive Kotor game. While the world didn't seem to change per se to what I'd done, character interaction did to some extent or another.

Wait, you can replay dialogue? How? I think Holocrons might have been disabled, there were some issues with them in a previous build. There is a really easy to find one on Korriban, that was the only one I ever found. If you hit escape, it takes you out of the conversation before it finishes. Space will skip the dialogue to the "choose response" part. And I can agree, sometimes the short words choices don't always react in the way you expected them to. Flirting also seemed to bounce wildly from entertaining/smart moments of teasing flirtatious play with words, to some really braindead jock style "me like you, lets go play doctor" type. It would be nice if they actually balanced those sorts of things out. Hm, I found one holocron, but that seemed to be part of the whole "introduction to the game" type of situation, rather then one that you actually find on your own. I'd bet every class has that on their starting world.

The key expense at the moment, is boosting out of the gravity well. If/when we get a station in orbit and potentially a moonbase, once some minding/manufacturing in place it becomes a lot simpler to establish further solar system exploration and travels.

An old one - A Matter of Life and Death (although I think it was called "Stairway to Heaven" in the US). A classic fantasy-romance set against the backdrop of WW2. David Niven as a pilot who cheats death by accident. The bomber he was flying was damaged, his parachute ripped to shreds and he ordered his crew to bail out. He talks to an american radio operator (played by Kim Hunter) and both spark up a connection. He decides to jump out of the plane rather then burn in it.. and the angel supposed to pick him up misses him in the fog. Through the general mixup in Heaven, it takes about 20 hours before the mistake is realised.. By which time, the couple have met up and fallen in love. Niven's character ends up having to take the argument that Heaven owes him a second chance, since if they'd done things right he'd never have fallen in love. So has to take on a Celestial Court to decide exactly what his fate will be...

I managed to do Esseles and Hammer. Esseles seemed quite smooth, and the conversation points slid in quite nicely - and I did it from the Republic side, you can do an Imperial version as well can't you?. At the time I seemed to be in a good group of four folks, and that certainly helped. It made a nice storyline, although the guy who had to take charge of the ship seemed a waay bit suspicious so half of us were waiting for him to be exposed as a traitor or something throughout most of it. Hammer didn't seem to have as much in the way of dialogue to partake in, much more of a run around and kills things as you progressed the map. Certainly hard without the full team and a dedicated healer. What was a nice touch was that depending on crew-skills you had, there was potential to open up short-cuts or side-routes that would take you past encounters - scavening, kicked off some mining machines that bored through a wall, slicing hacking an elevator into activation. Small things you had to notice. On an unrelated note, I have to say even while I was exploring worlds, I didn't see any holocrons around. Although I heard a few people mention them. Also, codex entries that could be in the environment for clicking on - pretty damn hard to notice. I do kind of think they should make them perhaps a wee bit more obvious rather then totally blend into the environment...

Well, I started playing friday afternoon, a bit after 4pm. It's now hm, 0330 tuesday morning and it's just done a crash out on me, so I'm thinking of calling it done for the beta weekend rather then get back to it. After fairly intensively (in a probably unhealthy manner) playing the game over the last 4 days with minimal breaks - well, apart from about 6 hours saturday for a birthday party - I managed to get a Trooper up to 28th level. Started on Ord Mantell, then onto Coruscant where I picked up my ship, and that was the prologue done. Went on to Taris, Nar Shadaa, and was just getting into exploring Tattooine and the mix of world & class quests. I had no idea how much longer it would take to finish off Act 1 of my class-story. Did know I was going to be headed Alderaan way after Tattooine. Technically there were a few other worlds I could have looked at, but then I'd end up way over-levelled when I went to the worlds with my class-stories. And you need to advance the class-story to get the different companions and possibly a few other things. I can say I'm looking forward to when the game is released and I can take my time exploring, and poking around with some of the other classes to see what they're like - both in gameplay and story-wise. Ah well. Urf. And now the family knows the beta test is over manana, so my break from various carer duties will be over.. It was fun to be able to geek out intensively for a few days with no real worries.

Okay, I decided to focus on one class (the one I'm least likely to play early on) and see how it all opened up, and the spaceships and companions, and what a class-story-line looked like. So far, I've ran a Trooper up to 26th level, I've picked up two companions (one a growly male trooper type, and the other a female field medic type) and gone around a couple of worlds. Apparently different classes will shift how many companions you get at any stage. There were Jedi knights running around who've picked up two companiosn by the time they were 16th. But as a trooper, I didn't get my 2nd until I'd finished the class-storyline at Taris (and I was around 24th then). I have to say, the ex-imperial who defected to the republic because all the Imps broke their own laws and fostered corruption actually comes across as quite interesting. And it's kind of funny that she's got a hot british accent and they keep making reference to how that's the Imperial accent. Once you get your ship, the whole universe opens up. Technically you can go to any of the planets.. but all the planets do have level ranges, so there's limits to what you can actually do at them. There seem to be a couple of planets for each level range, and they seem split on what class-stories are run. Starting world introduces that class-story, then you head off to Coruscant. You end the prologue by getting your ship. Then it's Act 1 and the universe is at your feet - but the trooper storyline will focus you on two planets (Taris & Nar Shadaa). If you go to other worlds, you get access to the various world storylines and assorted sub-quests, but you'll be missing out on the class-related story. So swings and roundabouts to exactly what you prefer. It really does feel like Kotor writ large. The same style of maps..just..way, way bigger. Taris is frikken huge. You can wander wherever you want.. but you might not be able to deal with what you find.

There also seem to be a few dialogues and choices where its not a light or dark side.. You can actually pick options that throw in a light side choice in with a bunch of neutral ones. (or dark side with a bunch of neutral). I actually ended up playing till about 4am last night not realising they've apparently extended the test by a day? Not sure if it's the way I've been playing it, but my Trooper hit 23rd, has a ship and just picked up his second Havoc Squad member. I will say the starship combat is actually kind of fun. But, that's possibly because I have fond memories of the old Afterburner arcade game...

Well I've managed to hit level 17 as a Trooper. Still haven't actually finished the first act or picked up a ship yet.. Hm, the dark/light side choices of the Trooper tend to involve things like the question on whether stolen medicine should be returned to the troopers who it was meant for, or provided to the sick refugees who originally stole it.. Or political chicanery in the Senate, how close you are willing to break the spirit of the republics laws to reveal that a senator is trying to form a group to ally with the Sith and expel the jedi from the Republic. If you still the information to reveal it, you're not trusting the Republics laws or the will of the people... So you get a few dark side points if you go through with it. Then there's the Esseles flashpoint, where you can do a quick and easy solution to a problem, that has the side-effect of killing some people (but it stops the Empire) or you can attempt a longer, winding route that might not work (which is of course the light side).

Why do you think I've been using the US servers? Sword of Ajunta Pell to be a wee bit more exact.

I have to say, the conversations are certainly smooth. Especially when you're in a group, even the heavy story ones slide nicely into everyone getting a chance and the way it flows along.

Hm, I just checked for patches before my "time slot" tomorrow.. and found I can hit play. .. Since the majority of the european servers are non-english.. I've ended up just starting up a Trooper on one of the US east coast servers...

Heh, and bastard sons of bastards. I saw the Fallout NV dlc on sale this week at half price, so I picked them up. Then today.. I see they've reduced them even more. They're now 75% off.