Drowsy Emperor

Yes it took a lot of work to position the rogue and then they missed more often than not and ended up as a stain on the carpet.

How about mages wear armor? No silly dresses, no cowl and no silly hats. Just plate mail and chain mail. There is no reason a mage shouldn't be able to wear armor all they do is babble and wave their arms around and chain mail isn't exactly a straitjacket. Clerics wear what they please and they're another type of mage. Everything is a contrivance for the sake of "balance". I think, since the game isn't really about specialized class roles all that much they could have just made the system classless with skill trees so you could just pick and choose. Want a mage that can wear armor and cast spells? Buy it. Want a rogue that can fight like a champ? Buy it. Problem solved. It always made more sense anyway.

Besides, if we track the rogue to the beginning of the stereotype in swords and sorcery, Conan, the character is basically a cunning warrior. What separates him from knights is his self serving attitude, not a particular skill set.

One of their problems is their approach to rogues isn't what most people associate with rogues. The classes are Warrior, Also Warrior, and Mage. I think they have to compensate somehow for the traditional weaknesses of the class. In BGII it didn't matter that the thief was so specialized since you had 5 other characters to make up for it. If you want to make the PC feel powerful as a thief you basically have to make him into a warrior, to lessen his dependence on other classes in direct confrontation. I wouldn't mind getting owned by the mobs as a thief but I imagine the imaginary average gamer would. After the third botched backstab attempt they'd bury their controller in the telly and frothing rage would erupt on the forums.

I don't know. Entropy in the first game had the ability to summon zombies, and it certaintly wasn't part of the blood magic. But who knows. Forgot about that. But weren't the blood mages in DA2 summing undead on mass? Also this is mage gear in DA:I? I think its silly in a good way. No one needs more cowled wizards with mystic runes all over, looking like they couldn't find better garments than someone's curtains. Really walking around with a cowl and a long robe there'd be more dead wizards due to tripping and hitting their heads on the pavement or being blindsided by donkey carts than due to enemy action.

I like the game, but I had some of the same problems as you did, and I completely agree regarding the frankly insane fanbase. A good portion of the game's difficulty is just understanding what the heck you're doing - both in terms of gameplay mechanics, as well as actual controls, neither of which the game really helps you out at all with. Once you "master" the controls - master them as well as they can be mastered, anyways: really, sometimes it seems as though they're bad just for the sake of being bad - then it's just a matter of fighting each unique enemy either randomly succeeding the first time or not and learning to understand them in subsequent attempts. There is some measure of skill required, which I guess is something...but... For that reason, I actually liked the PVP more at times. Except a lot of people are just terrible at PVP (or the game in general, perhaps), which is not so fun when you can wait upwards of 15 minutes in between fights...or longer, depending on the time of day. It's a lot more fun when you actually fight someone close to your skill level...even if you lose. It's not that the game is necessarily bad...it just could've been a whole lot better if it was polished a bit and some sort of very basic encyclopedia explaining game mechanics or something was present in game...never mind all the PVP problems. In other news, XFX is going to RMA my video card. I'm on a $10 backup card that is...actually performing way beyond my expectations. Video card tiers are so bogus, in my opinion. For $10, I should be barely able to play anything with a decent FPS, even on low settings. Instead, my gaming habits are almost completely unchanged. Sure, I have to turn down some settings, but none of the *important* ones, like draw distance or anything. Quite frankly, I think the way video cards are priced is a bunch of baloney...this just further cements my opinion I'll never pay more than $150 *at absolute most* for a video card, and I'll probably stay close to the $80-$100 range in the future. Bah. I understand that a lot of players today feel the need to move away from what I would call "fictional gameplay", meaning you mash the buttons, cool things happen and you win. You get the illusion that you're beating a challenge whereas in fact its not so much that you're winning but that you can't actually lose. I presume that game companies, over time, discovered that the majority of the newer, more casual players who are a very large, if not the largest source of money now dislikes the way old games were built. Basically many older games were a case of trial and error. You're supplied limited information and failure is practically guaranteed at first until you eventually find out what you actually have to do at which point you more or less breeze through it. Naturally this is frustrating for people who aren't habitual gamers and are simply likely to give up. So they dropped the various requirements, like having to learn weapon timings, bosses telegraph attacks more or deal less damage etc. to make sure the player doesn't stop and get stuck because stopping = failure = frustration. But Dark Souls just does it the old way through and through. Which is somewhat unnecessary and extreme since the game would have been still quite challenging even with a good tutorial and a bit more forgiving combat.

What makes Severance worth playing?

What he used to have were some chemical weapons that were given to him or that he bought from the US and used during the war with Iran. Apart from the obvious hypocrisy of accusing him of having something they sold him in the first place, the fact that he had them at some point doesn't lead to conclusion that he would actually use them against the US. By the time the US attacked Iraq he had nothing. The lie was twofold: 1) He had and was producing WMD's in significant quantities 2) Those WMD's are a threat to the US and the "free world".

In my 10 minutes of trying out DSII, I'd say its about as bad a port. The graphics look better though.

I was talking about the first one. I just have DAII in reserve.

First impression of Dark Souls after beating the beginning boss. This may be the most over-hyped game (by players) that I've played. On the audio visual side, the graphics are horribly muddy. Can't see what I'm doing half the time because the camera is hugging an ugly wall texture. What I do see looks bad. The underlying design is good but the textures and such are crap. The controls are slow and unresponsive, the UI and inventory is typical console mess of various screens. So between wrestling with the camera (I fought the camera more than the boss) and the controls the game becomes thrice as hard as it should be, even though its already hard enough. The way its hard though, is not particularly clever. Its just makes enemies respawn and doesn't checkpoint often. Combined with low health and high enemy damage output the game forces you to learn its fighting system or die endlessly. Even so the fight with the boss ended up being a game of getting behind him to stab at his testicles. Nothing clever or interesting. On top of all of that the game adds confusion to difficulty by not explaining its core concepts which I had to look up on the wiki. Stuff like humanity, kindling etc. I believe the success of this game, which is nothing more than a return to old mechanics seen in previous third person action games is due to a quasi "revolt" on the part of the players. Its "hardcore" (which is another word for stupidly difficult) therefore is so much more cool than today's "noob" games. In reality, its a typical japanese game, a flimsy story with gameplay stuck mechanically firmly in the past. I'll play it more before making up my mind

The media that simply reports what the government presents them is called state media in the service of state propaganda. When the media decides to do something independent that doesn't sit well with the government they simply tell them to destroy what they have "or else". http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-released-guardian-editors-snowden-hard-drives-gchq

How is this different from US conduct in Iraq, Afghanistan etc.? At least Putin has an excuse given these countries NATO ambitions and the fact that they share a border with Russia. I don't see Russia's military bases all over the world or them intervening halfway across the planet on account of "national security". The west dismisses anything Russian on account of simple racism. They're the enemy so anything they say is automatically misguided at best, flat out lies at worst. Please, you're capable of better arguments surely.

This Totalbiscuit video mentions something about disabling stuff at device manager to get controller to work, you might want to give it a try. It's around 9 minutes in the video. I got it working. My PS2 converter had 2 slots for Dualshock gamepad's and the game was defaulting to one which apparently doesn't work.

Top game review of DSII on Steam:

This Totalbiscuit video mentions something about disabling stuff at device manager to get controller to work, you might want to give it a try. It's around 9 minutes in the video. That's one of the first things I tried. Didn't work. >

I tried Dark Souls again but even after much fiddling the game doesn't recognize my gamepad (PS2 gamepad over USB converter) which works with everything else. It doesn't work with Dark Souls II either which is a port as ****ty as the first one. That they couldn't build a respectable PC interface is a disgrace.

You conveniently side-stepped the fact that the western media flat out lied, or supported the state enforced propaganda lie that Saddam Hussein had WMD as they have many times before and since. I've been following the Ukraine crisis closely and there is no significant difference between the two media sides. Western media has their propaganda, the Russians have theirs, but the west is supporting an illegitimate side and breaking international law so their media is recruited to provide support for the whole charade and is therefore less reliable. The Russians could afford to tell more of the truth seeing as how it wins them points in the international community.

To be fair, some of the classics had lots of repetitive, filler combat too. I'm on an IWD2 playthrough, and it's starting to wear me down. IWD1 had much better variety; things were changing frequently enough to keep it interesting. It's really too bad they didn't have the time and budget to do that, and had to build length by throwing mob after mob of goblins/orcs/Aurilites/ice trolls etc. at you. If there was a mod that removed 80% of the combat I'd apply it. I never could finish IWD2 for the same reasons. The original IWD was far more playable but, being used to characters that speak and better stories I played it late and with great reluctance. I'm not sorry I did, although I would say that the best thing IWD had was art design. BG gets a free pass because its the first one in the series and I was weaned on it. The thing is, in IE games you could storm through much of the filler combat with a good application of haste and fireball spells. Even without those, it was generally quick. While playing DAO I had this feeling that the combat dragged on forever and that encounters tended to go one right after the other with pauses that were too short.

Bioware is good at necromancy, they've been bringing back Carth Onasi in one form or another for more than a decade.

Yes, Stalker and Solaris changed me as well. Stalker in particular. Mirror as well. I've seen a lot of films before and since but I've yet to find anything as powerful. El Dia de la Bestia is totally wacky, in a good way. It reminded me of the Jodorowsky type absurdity which I enjoy a lot. El Comunidad is as good, if not better.

I guess the Russian troops are hard to see cos' Saddam's WMD's are in the way.

Riddick games are indeed excellent.

Alas, PoE already has two design decisions which I consider pitfalls at this point in my gaming "career": using tolkinesque races and having generic fantasy art design (although better than some other generic fantasy games). I suppose those two could be summed up as having a generic fantasy setting. I'm so tired of these things when I see them in a game I just sigh with resignation. And no, throwing a few new ideas on a stale base doesn't help. An elf is still an elf, a dwarf is still a dwarf and its all been done to death. Fantasy has become a contradiction, a word so wide in meaning but you could practically build an ISO standard around the end product. Why do I say this? Because we knew nothing of PoE even as it was funded other than the promise of a familiar gameplay model. Apart from that it could have been anything and I guess I expected something new and familiar at the same time.

Tarkovsky is my favorite director, anything by him is good and his best work can only be described as transcendent. That said, he's hardly underrated or lesser known.. For a less known director I recommend the spaniard Alexis De La Iglesia. His black comedies, "La Comunidad", "El Crimen Ferpecto" and "El Dia de la Bestia" are ingenious.