PrimeJunta

The list above was pretty comprehensive. In this case, only buffs (spells and abilities like Divine Radiance) will apply. However, you can do something else: debuff whatever defense your Invocation is attacking. All the caster classes have spells/powers/chants etc. which can do this. That's in general pretty much required for effective use of magic.

Mmm... I have high hopes for T:ToN. Although it's going to be so different that 'better' or 'not as good' will be a difficult comparison to make. And there's P:E2...

Hallo, Seebaer -- Spielst du auf einem Mac? Der voller Zoom war näher als auf Windows. Ich glaube das war ein Bug. Ich hoffe Obsidian und Paradox werden den Handbuch auch übersetzen. Der Spiel ist doch ganz spielbar ohne Handbuch; die Tooltips usw sind meine Meinung nach ziemlich gute.

Even better, you can do that without Skyrim. Make-believe FTW!

Because fighters are good at fighting and wizards are good at magic. If you're offering all talents to all classes, you might as well not have classes in the first place. (Which is not a bad idea by any means, but would have made the character system rather different.)

Good review. I disagree entirely on all of your "different approach needed" points though, I think Obsidian did those exactly right.

The entire economic structure of the Western world since 1950 or so begs to differ.

^ Niiiiice.

On the bright side, he'll be playing 1.04. Which is a good deal less wonky than the version that was released.

Apart from the overly-shiny spell effects, the problem is that the camera angle is too low, so characters and objects occlude each other more. Also some map designs which put your party in awkward places. The IE games had some of these too, e.g. attacking from north to south on a constrained map with doors was annoying. It's still less annoying than NWN2 though.

Capitalists will never be this manly.

Starting at 17:03, specially for (some of) you.

I believe your phone's auto-correct has a learning algorithm. I.e. it'll recommend words you've used before, you potty-mouth you.

Stalinism was quite fascinating in many ways. I had a couple of long talks with a guy named Yuri—a true-believer die-hard Bolshevik—who lived through the whole damn thing. Really old guy, history professor emeritus who still stopped by to give courses to foreign exchange students, but sharp as nails. He was building railroads in Siberia as a teenage Komsomolets in the 1930's, fought at Stalingrad, worked at an armaments factory, then went back to school and eventually ended up teaching history. He said the period of Communist construction—Stalinism until the Great Patriotic War—was the best time of his life: amazing sense of purpose, camaraderie, and fun, with great progress and accomplishments daily, never mind that they were often sleeping in the rough, were cold, tired, and sometimes hungry. When I asked him about the purges and the Gulag, he shrugged it off as insignificant side events; stuff that had to be done to stop things from breaking down that barely affected anyone anyway. I also knew someone who had lost both of her parents and much of her extended family in Stalin's purges and the holodomor in Ukraine. Her take on the period was... rather different. The things is, I think both stories were true. Stalinism was at the same time a glorious march of progress and purpose, and an inhuman meatgrinder. It all depended on where you happened to be. The mass purges were chain reactions that started out—or not—essentially at random. When someone got arrested, they'd denounce a couple of other people, who'd get arrested, and so it went. One collective got decimated, while another was untouched—only because when the chekist said "I see in your eyes that you are a saboteur," the guy replied "And I see in your eyes that you're a cuckold," followed by much laughter. (True story that too.) Poor USSR. Such an epic tale of good intentions going horribly wrong. Like Viktor Chernomyrdin put it in another context, "We tried our best, but it went like always."

Whoo, I'll reiterate too. From where I'm at the awesomeness of BG2 comes from the richness of its systems and variety of its encounters. The fact that the systems were heavily based on hard counters and on/off effects is incidental. You could have equally rich systems and varied encounters based on mechanics involving scalars rather than binaries.

It is going to flip. It's unlikely to kill anyone much though, at least directly. It's flipped lots of times before, but there's no correlation with that happening and major disasters (mass extinctions or similar). The signs of it being about to flip are there. Whether it happens tomorrow afternoon or some time in the next 1000 years or so is anybody's guess. For kiddies explanation: http://www.physics.org/facts/frog-magnetic-field.asp

Climate in Finland's been getting rather nicer lately though. Until the Gulf Stream stops anyway. Brrr...

Lots of practice.

Or it could be plain ol' resistance to accepting unpleasant facts.

Embrace it. You bought the game. What law says you're compelled to finish it now, this week, this month, or this decade? If it gives you the enjoyment you expect for your money, awesome. (I've never finished FO:NV yet it's one of my favorite games f.ex.)

There you are, several ways to reliably murder poor Baron Firkraag. QED

I could swear that I've seen Interrupts break Engagement, just that it's not nearly enough to matter. It disappears for a split second, so I've never been able to actually even try to take advantage of it. I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually do it even if it appears so by the visuals. You'd see "Foozle engages Hero in melee" in the combat log pretty much after every interrupt, since they would re-engage almost immediately.

Not really. For example: