Leferd

Bolognese style ragout with pappardelle. Technically they're leftovers from last night. ...If I'm taking the time to do a proper ragout, damn straight I'm gonna make a lot of it.

Yeah, Dragon Age Legends was pretty good. It was designed by Soren Johnson - the lead designer for Civ IV, IMO the best of the series. You can still get it here: http://dragonagelegends.com/

Iceman and Goose.

If I recall, Dragon Age was announced in spring (May?) 2004 and Elevation bought BioWare in 2005. They were sold to EA right after ME was released in 2007. I wonder if the doctors have already squandered all their cash in booze yet?

Have to root for the Royals and Pirates to get in the playoffs. Oakland going for the jugular against Texas.

Flax seed is amazing! I started taking it in 2004 myself.

No XP for psychopathic murder counts? Good riddance. One of the best things Sawyer and Cain came up with.

I'm kind of concerned that their may be a balance exploit if using the adventurers hall. Could both idle party members and adventurers hall recruits be used to inflate the body/agent count for your stronghold?

I love that Keith Olbermann is back doing sports.

It was definitely a game with a smaller focus than the others, and the units were fairly homogeneous but it played like a dream. It's probably the only game in the series I feel like not having to mod. Plus the ninja videos were hilarious.

Valid points and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with them if they were true. Barry Bonds was taking flax seed oil as far as he/I was concerned and it was that villainous Stan Conte and presumably Greg Anderson who allegedly injected/rubbed on certain controlled substances that may have allegedly extended his career peak. Marvel the greatness that is Barry Bonds: http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/bondsba01.shtml 30 days home confinement for being the alleged victim of a conspiracy? Barry Bonds can do no wrong. PS his 2004 season was just absolutely amazing.

As far as I'm concerned, Barry Bonds can do no wrong. Was he a jerk? Yep. Was he the most hated superstar of his day by fans and media alike? Yep. Was he the most destructive force on earth within the battery's box since Babe Ruth? Undeniable. Was he a product of his age? Check. Gents, you have Ted Williams.

Nobunaga's Ambition is another game I'd like to see on GOG. Trading in my Sega Genesis version of Nobunaga's Ambition was my single biggest video game regret.

Another mea culpa from CA, this time from the man himself - Mike Simpson. http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/89314-Second-statement-from-CA-on-Rome-II-s-release-(11-Sep-2013) Second statement from CA on Rome II's release (11 Sep 2013) Hi everyone, We’ve just put up a hotfix that significantly improves campaign map frame-rate on a variety of hardware combinations that were getting frame rates less than 15 fps. It took us until Monday to get a case of this happening in the studio, but it was a very simple fix, so we’ve decided to put it out as a single issue patch. This bug was introduced very late in the process, but we absolutely should have found and fixed it before release. This release has obviously not gone as planned for some people, and I want to apologise to everyone out there who had issues with the game, whether they were hardware issues or disappointment in the performance of game features. We obviously don’t plan to release a game with any bugs, performance and AI issues. How this has happened is something we’re beginning to post mortem in detail now. Fortunately, the same tech that gave us the rope to work on the game right up to release lets us keep working on it after it’s out, and the flaws in the game are mostly just bugs, not structural defects. We can and will get the game to where we wanted it to be for everyone. The top priority is stability and performance – both frame rates in battle and campaign, and end of turn times and loading times. Then gameplay spoilers – AI flaws and exploits, balancing tweaks and the level of challenge on higher difficulties. Then minor bugs, lesser features that really didn’t pan out, UI improvements, and longer term adjustments to features and systems that could be better. Because there are a lot of us working in parallel there will be a mixture of different priority fixes in each patch. Much of this work would be part of the usual planned improvements we would make to our games post-launch anyway, but we are aware that they have now taken on extra significance and importance. We have a major improvement to end of turn times in the pipeline, along with around 100 fixes in the next patch. We have another 100 or so fixes already being tested for the patch after that. At this point the limiting factor on getting issues fixed in patches is not our ability to fix issues, it’s our ability to test them and guarantee that we don’t repeat past mistakes by putting a patch out that breaks something new. We’ll also be putting each patch up as a beta you can opt in to before releasing it. It’s our aim to continue patching more or less weekly until all the bugs are dealt with. Then we can start the kind of dialogue we always want to be having with the community – which new features you like, which you don’t like, which deleted features from previous games you really miss and so on. That’s a good conversation to be having, and since it’s our intention not to fall in to the trap of just re-skinning the previous game each time, it’s one that hopefully you’ll be having for years to come. Lastly, I’m hoping we can fundamentally treat our releases differently in the future. Long open betas are the way things are going, and while that model hasn’t been compatible with the way Total War has been built to date, that could be the way forward. Mike Simpson Creative Director Creative Assembly

"sorry I'm new here but this game will support mods?" From Update 16: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/323119 Mod Support From Neverwinter Nights 2 to Fallout: New Vegas, we've enjoyed supporting the mod community, and we are continuing that with Project Eternity. It is awesome to see how you extend the worlds we make. To make getting mods easy, we are excited to announce that our friends at the Nexus will be the official spot to download Project Eternity mods once the game is released. They have been a great host for mods for our past games, and we want to continue the trend with the Project Eternity Nexus. Check out the Nexus Network at www.nexusmods.com. Our plan is to release our file-format information and expose as much of the data in the game as possible for you to extend and edit. We traditionally do not "hard-code" numbers so that our designers, and you, have the power to easily change and iterate on RPG data. We also plan on releasing localization tools to let communities around the world create localized versions for languages we are not translating Project Eternity into. As we get more familiar with Unity during production, we will be extending Project Eternity even more for mod makers. Look forward to announcements in the months ahead as we make further progress and can provide you with more information about tools and mod support.

Did you play Napoleon TW? It actually fixed many of the problems with Empire, but downscaled it to much more manageable levels. I especially liked the Peninsular Campaign DLC. Of course, I was on my Richard Sharpe, Horatio Hornblower, Aubrey/Maturin, Rifleman Dodd fix at the time.

Pre-Alpha footage released by CA, narrated by Rome 2's lead designer. He essentially stated at the end of the video that the game is going to look and play better as this is early Pre- Alpha code. Bollocks. Did anyone's siege of Carthage look or play anything remotely like what was in this pre-release Alpha? Gross misrepresentation much?

Yep. He's been amazing.

I'm thinking I'm going to stop playing Rome 2 at this point and revisit in a few months. Shogun 2 was easily the most polished and best game of the series so far, though ironically enough, probably the one I've played the least. I think Steam says I've put in less than 30 hours into it. And it's not that I'm unfamiliar with the setting and history of the period - far from it - I studied it extensively in college. But I reached the point where my evangelizing Christian daimyo (who happens to be a jesuit lapdog) with a Portuguese supplied matchlock ashigaru army and captured Black Ship is just steamrolling through heathen samurai armies with too much ease. My personal favorite was Empire and up until Rome 2, it was the buggiest and most broken upon release. Still its scope and ambition was just so compelling and I really love just how..."epic" it was. I was hoping Rome 2 would have that same grandiose feel as Empire, but...

Those dastardly ikko ikki have no honor. http://youtu.be/_EQWcB1vXXg Definitely want GOG to release SotS.

That's because despite all it's flaws, bugs, instability, and horrendous ai - the underlying design is still very solid. This would have been a great game if it was allowed a few more months to bake.

Would you still have control of your garrison at least? Lols.

Or that Uehara's was the second of this season - after Shelby Miller.

I'm kinda amazed but there hasn't been much buzz about Koji Uehara throwing a "perfect game."

Tom Chick's take on Quarter to Three. Probably my favorite "professional" vidya game critic. http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/09/06/creative-assembly-fiddles-rome-ii-loads/