Drowsy Emperor

Yup. The Bestiary says it weighs over 4000 tons, so I suppose anything helps. Maybe they're enchanted. I guess it's a special kind of anti-gravity lead

Kim is playing this whole thing like a boss, I never thought him this politically savvy.

POE rippoff. POE is not really a novel concept... otherwise they're all ripoffs of Baldur's Gate. I find the name more grating than the game itself. Anyhow, they seem to be a bit amateurish, and will soon find out just how hard it is to make a good game of this type.

You can squeeze in a lot of time wasting activities when you have no social life.

Fire Emblem is a tactics/strategy game. It's pretty good for what it is.

I'm kind of with him there, I played Suikoden 3 for some 5-10 hours and then never again. But it really boils down to whether you like the extremely combat and grind heavy JRPG gameplay or not - at the end of the day, the games are all quite similar. I liked FFX because it had a good story, despite how incredibly tiresome combat became 40+ hours in.

3DS JRPG's are trashy grinds reminiscent of the worst of the PS2 JRPG selection, except with weaker graphics. There's not a single good one in the modern sense of the word.

I always play an alter-ego of myself, so never any outlandish characters. On the other hand, my best friend always plays a hot, underdressed chick with the rationale: "If I'm going to stare at an ass for 30 hours, it should be a nice one". Which, admittedly, also makes a lot of sense. I do think he spent more time in Skyrim picking the thong on his nordic fantasy babe than actually playing the game, but hey, whatever floats your boat. I do like the old fantasy art (Frazzetta etc.), even some of the bikinimail nonsense - but I never roleplay it. It's also hard to do because armor progression tends to go from rude peasant, to normal knight, to spiky warlord of doom - so there is little space to actually express yourself unless you're totally willing to flaunt the stats. One of the things I loved about the Witcher was how you flat out wore a shirt or a very modest looking leather armor for the most of the game. They ruined that with the sequel though, when they made Geralt into an obnoxious action hero.

Coming fresh from Baldur's Gate 2 I really disliked Arcanum, an opinion which never really changed. None of it's combat systems worked, the graphics were ugly, the cities unfinished and empty, the game broke and turned into Diablo in the latter segments and none of the characters or stories were particularly engaging. The only thing it had going for it was a novel setting, which it successfully realized (most of the time). And you could shag a sheep, if that was your thing.* If this sounds harsh, take is as a reaction to Codexian worship of Tim Cain, who has never made a 'complete' game after Fallout 2. Yes, Bloodlines had a wonderful first act, but after that it goes downhill and never recovers. I admire potential, but I appreciate complete works more. *It also had one of the best quests ever written, where you're recruited by a dwarf to return a valuable family heirloom from a mine. Being the typical loot monkey, you expect it to be some jewel or weapon, but it turns out to be a toy train. This was both brilliant and humbling.

I was in high school and at the beginning of university, but progressively I gamed less and less, until I practically stopped playing. With me it's a familiar pattern - when there are things going on: job, socializing, travelling and the like, I do not game. When I fall into a rut: there's no work, nobody to go out with, or I'm generally not feeling 100%, I start gaming, or watching films, or binge reading. I do game from time to time for nostalgia reasons, and even then the novelty wears thin rather quickly. If I have the good sense to drop it then and there, it's all good - if I don't (like with PoE), I start feeling bad because I'm playing compulsively to finish, while not actually enjoying the experience, which leaves a lot of 'feel bad' all around. It's stems from a bad habit of binge playing instead of parceling it out over time and letting the game die away (if it isn't interesting) or just enjoying it in short bursts to the end. All in all, I rarely get into a game nowadays - often it takes longer to download and install them than it does to get bored and stop playing.

I played much of that list and the only game I truly loved was Final Fantasy X. Everything else disappointed somewhere along the way, and the majority I never finished.

CDs, lol. Back in the day I thought I was making a collection of games, but while I wasn't looking it turned into a collection of coasters.

My pet peeves in RPGs after 19 years of playing them: 1. Trash mobs and filler combat - if the designers didn't think an area should be a challenge what is it doing in the game in the first place? Do they want me to play their game or not? Because if I'm playing on autopilot then I'm not really playing. 2. Excessive focus on combat mechanics as opposed to exploration and interaction - 'mass murder simulator' 3. Abundance of loot, particularly magical loot - makes magical loot completely mundane and nothing more than an optimization game 4. Percentile loot and progression systems - 'sword of 5% damage increase replaced by sword of 7% damage increase' - completely meaningless gamey mechanic 5. Persistent level scaling (across the whole game) - lazy replacement for actual encounter design 6. Full turn based combat - never seen it done in a way that does not eventually become so slow as to be a chore or deep enough to justify the time spent. 90% of the time you settle into a groove well before the end of the game where you win 9/10 encounters by doing a repetitive formula. At least in the Infinity engine games you could slam Haste, Fireball, Autoattack and barge through the easy fights in less than 10 seconds. 8. Level grinding - if you make me into a sweatshop worker to progress in your game, out the window it goes 9. Broken lategame - where the player is rolling over everything to the finale (PoE, Arcanum and many others) 10. Fake dialogue trees leading to the same outcome - save your energy and write 3 options instead of '7' that are actually 2-3 11. Excessive verbosity in dialogues - know when to reign it in (Pillars of Eternity I'm looking at you) 12. Rote storytelling - 'ancient evil returns', 'only you can stop it' - this is more a matter of execution than content, all of this can be good, but it's usually a cop out A game that avoids this will do pretty well with me.

I say the word 'true' lightly....but to me personality, it means a lot of things. To narrow it down, let's say the biggest 'rpg' that i don't consider it being a real rpg is the Witcher series...why? Mostly because you can't even make your own character. You can't CHOSE who you play. The Witcher is just kinda pre made for ya...I'm not saying the Witcher series is bad as far as video games go (far from it), i'm just saying that it's lacking in freedom that RPGs need imo. Like I started above. An RPG should be about freedom. Freedom to explore, to create your own character, to play however you want, solve quests in different ways and all that great stuff.... Pillars of Eternty for example, the characters I make there, I love the best. Because they're truly mine. With the personality system and the stats that I can modify for RP only (combat aside, I play on story mod now lol), with such an immersive, personal story...it was great. And what i'd call a 'true' RPG. Despite some minor flaws... So yeah, I guess a real rpg means to me it has to allow you to play who you want, and how you want. ) Personal story is just a huge plus though. Not needed, but I couldn't get into games lil WoW because I heard there are many great stories in, but none are about your character. The Witcher is literally role playing - you're playing a very well defined role and choosing a number of things within it. Now you may not like that role, like so many people don't like the Nameless One from Torment, but it is a role nevertheless. There's no implicit superiority of being able to choose from a bunch of stats, and predefined facial features. God knows, you could make just about anything in Oblivion but the game was utter junk. There was little real freedom in either The Witcher or Torment (or Final Fantasy games for that matter), yet they stand head and shoulders above many 'freeform' RPG games. ...There's no hard and fast rules about RPG's, the end product just either works - or doesn't. For example: I had fun playing Pillars of Eternity, but no matter which character I made or how I played the game, (plenty of options there) at the end of the day, the story and a majority of the characters were still quite 'meh' and undermined the value of the entire experience and time invested. There's no use making a pretty fish for a dirty, stagnant, fishtank - if you get my meaning.

It was a combination of no-challenge combat (on hard), obligatory decking (still not fun) and a story that failed to hook me in - neither the foster father, crime bosses or brother are endearing or very interesting, and the big bad is just spat out 15 minutes before the finale because there has to be one. The Russian and Japanese companions were the best thing about the game. I was also expecting them to keep pumping out more modules.

Dunno, I think I got the default happy ending. All companion quests were completed. I didn't play the follow up campaign, I had to force myself to play to the end in the first place.

I finished Shadowrun Hong Kong. It was okay, but not much else. Both the story and characters are weaker than Dragonfall. I'm pondering playing through NuTorment but the opening didn't inspire much confidence,

New territories are falling under government control near Homs so I guess after the brief WWIII interlude, it's back to the usual. I just wonder what happens when Idlib, the Kurdish/US area and the vicinity of the eastern US base that is under rebel control are the only territories left to liberate.

Lol I was staring at the buildings for 2 minutes trying to figure out what the deal was

The second slider looks exactly the same?

That's also true. The thing is, the presidency is a trophy for him - he is immensely rich and powerful even without it. His political attitudes are very amorphous and inconsistent, but the few things that he did advocate for strongly he has to now swallow and backtrack on. I think that on a personal level this is something he never wanted to happen. Not because he's so committed to these ideas, (Russia, Syria, Islam etc. - it's all neither here nor there for him) but because it's humiliating. I don't see him doing this as a culmination of a 'master plan', I see it as being ground down from the fight with the political class which has successfully nuked all of his people (in which he assisted by not supporting them) and just giving in to their demands. Also, the whole affair has a noticeable toll on his relationship with Melania - even a very driven (idealistic) man (which he is not) would find it challenging to keep pushing for something that seemingly everyone is against.

If anything, Trump has demonstrated the irrelevance of the office of the president in directing policy. He won on a non-interventionist, Russia friendly platform and was browbeaten into conflict with Russia and interventionism. Cuomo, Oprah, a horse or a bale of hay - what fills the chair at the White House literally makes no difference at all.

Shadow Storm is supposed to be relatively new tech, if it got blasted by the old S systems that doesn't sound like much of an endorsement. Also, at 2.5 million euro a pop, it probably costs more to manufacture than whatever it hit.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong While Shadowrun Returns was more of a proof of concept, Dragonfall was a pretty good game. Hong Kong is somewhere in between. So far, I'm not feeling it nearly as much as Dragonfall, but it is definitely not as bland as the first game one. The principal problems (of all SR games) are a lack of interactivity, dearth of side quests, transparency of mechanics (the structure of the game is too obvious and rigid) and linearity. They just don't seem to have the budget to make a 'great' game. Also, I'm playing on hard, I don't really fully understand the system, but I'm still easily winning most encounters. Not gud form.

So stupid and pointless. Assad has already won the war, they can't attack him directly without attacking the Russians, so all the destruction is basically for show. 'We said this can't pass, but it did pass, so we will attack just to prove you can't say no to us without consequences' - Summary. Said consequences will only hurt people on the ground and the alleged target, not in the slightest, helping an already devastated country take one more step down to total ruination.