IndiraLightfoot

We're just all too eager, I suppose. I love that rule of yours. It's clever and I commend you for your self-restraint. I suspect that many of us already know it's gonna be buggy as hell, so our expectations are just that - and that makes it much easier. Like Melkathi wrote, the Steam forums are full of people steaming over bugs in newly released games or delays or almost anything. I recall when you had to wiggle a mini-screwdriver in a tiny hole of a cassette tape player for an hour, watching flickering rainbow colours that caused epileptic seizures to unsuspecting kids, just to get the game running...or not! EDIT: I have the exact same problem as Melkathi now. I create my character, watch the intro, then comes the load screen with the blood drops serving as a loading bar, and then *pop*, I crash to desktop. :/

Not to be rude or anything, but... A MMORPG of recent years is to a SP CRPG of good old IE-standards like a cool dude that surprise everyone with a shave after all those years:

Yeah! Tell me about it! My AV had all its bells and whistles go off as soon as I touched the play-button. I will try the game again later today, I reckon. It's been a few hotfixes now, it seems. I will not import my old save from TIAOVH1. This looks to be best treated as a new game altogether. And Katarina is adorable!

Melkathi: Skylander is a sweet game! And I pre-ordered the Incredible Adventures of van Helsing II, and I downloeaded it. However, then there has been some hickups with anti-virus programs catching their .exe-files as viruses and a few hotfixes, but I think I'll have it up and running today. This kind of setting is right up my alley. There are so many good games coming out now that I can't keep up or track.

I was lucky I was playing through it all at such a high pace, so I recalled that password, even if I did Skull Rock pretty late (for some reason, I always thought of that place as Keyrock). And I agree about your critique on where the sweet spot for old school ought to sit. I resorted to Google at the same kind of instances. I must say I love those classic riddles, where you get to type in the answer. I missed only one, I think it was in the Lost City.

You can say that again! It's one of the jewels in the crown of CRPGs.

Hi! Here are some more pictures from a game that I still find much better than expected: There is a Wolfenstein NO-mode for those with lower-end graphic cards too! A serene memorial altar for all of those who died in the fight against fascism. The resistance managed to save a few pieces of art from the Nazi bonfires of "degenerate" art. Somehow I feel acquainted with Tekla, the problem solver. Apparently, Crimea is not part of Russia. It's Nazi German. A saggy Heil on a wheezer statue with no package - no Nazi virility here... Even those 1960-turntable phones look sinister in this grim context. Early Nazi computers. This doesn't bode well... I've been on post-WWII trains just like this. This evil lady have you do mad picture shrink tests.

AGX-17: Indeed, and System Shock is a very tough act to follow (I loved that game way back when). I tried to get into Bioshock 1 & 2, but I had to uninstall them after a third of the game or so, and now poor Bio Infinite runs the risk of ending up on the same discarded-before-finished graveyard.

Melkathi: Aww, I love Monster Loves you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--_jBkVgwoA Scratching rodents for y'all to enjoy!

I don't expect any of yous played the old PnP RPG Boot Hill (Gary Gygax was one of its designers). I kinda liked it, since it was no fantasy. Just pure Wild West sweetness with showdowns and all. I would love to see some kind of How the West Was Won-CRPG, a big open world with awkward settlers and resisting Native Americans in beautiful landscapes. It could be turnbased, but I reckon Expedition: Conquistador, for instance, would have been better if it had been RTwP. Obsidian would whack that game out of the ball park!

Mkreku: Heh! It looks like some kind of Doom Minecraft mod!

I've started playing Wolfenstein: NO, and I was off to a rough start, since my graphic card needed an update before I could play the game at all. I've passed like four areas now, and I am five hours into the game (I've not played like a completionist, nor kept to one play-style, or should I say, kill-style?) I am a huge Dishonored-fan, and it really shows that Machine Games have picked up a lot from that game (also with Bethesda as publisher), and in my book, that's very nice. This game has much more cutscenes, though, and it has pretty cinematic setups and linksbetween chapters. The story is pretty cool, built on what would happen if the Nazis had won and then taken over the globe. The art and graphics are really well executed, and this goes for the sound fx as well. The difference is that you can't go unnoticed everywhere here by stealth - no ghost missions available - some stuff and some fights are forced on you, for good or bad. However, compared to Thief, your freedom of action all over the map, including some climbing through jumping and ladders, is actually better in W:NO. Overall, this is a very intense shooter, with heaps and heaps of gore (for once, the 18 yr old rating seems warranted. The Nazis are absolutely atrocious in this game, and their leader pure cruelty): The year is 1960, but some stuff still feels like 1945, like this checkpoint by the Oder. The basic premise of the game is this above (see subtitles), and you're an all American broad-chinned hero who's about to do the impossible, to save the entire world. The only kindness you ever saw after the war has been in this Polish asylum, but did the Nazis let you keep that tranquillity? This evil head is your antagonist: Deathshead. *Shiver* Deathshead is fond of portraits in oil, like any old leader, it seems. This game has borrowed heavily from old movies like "Where Eagles Dare" and "Cross of Iron". This is just from the tutorial. The slaughter and gore escalates from there. Whatever you can say about it, it's at least a very gripping game. So far, the game has exceeded my expectations. It's more than a shooter, it's a cinematic revenge shooter with (too much?) gore and pretty exciting combat that is varied enough. It's not a game for the faint-hearted.

I'm in the first maps of Wolfenstein: New Order. This is a pretty intense game with a lot of gore, see more of my comments in the Pictures of my games-thread.

BruceVC: Monte and Nonek argue strongly for something I also see as pivotal in social power relations: the importance of context. Context always trumps concepts and categories (especially ones being wielded from the comfort of armchair academics, from the communiqué harping of journalists, and from the staged delusions of audience-enthralling demagogues). Context is harsh; It's down and dirty; it's vital priorities made on the fly. Another thing that I'd like to steer clear of is letting categories almost get a life of their own: It's called reification, the fallacy of treating an abstract category like a real thing. I agree with Nonek that it is indeed sensible to see a safe, orderly and respected existence as the basic right of everybody, and may I add in whatever context?! This makes the isolation of certain categories a dangerous enterprise, which very rarely leads to good thing, neither short-term nor long-term. Other than that, I just hope you guys get along fine and don't let stuff get personal or other your skins. No need, even if a lot of fishing in that department is taking place in discussions like these.

SqueakyCat: Heh! For Thief, I know exactly what you mean! I even got lost in the hub area! The maps themselves were bigger obstacles than the game's sneaking and nicking stuff. As for Wolfenstein, I grabbed it after that trailer and some previews. It seems to be story heavy and action-packed. If we're lucky, we get a nice mix. When in doubt about not yet released Steam games, like I was before Thief was released, go cheap with vouchers and other deals and discounts on Greenman Gaming.

Sarex, we don't always see eye to eye on stuff, but this gaming tip certainly struck a chord in me. Who wouldn't want to be an All American hero saving the world from the cruel grip of Nazis in a retro-1960s setting? Thank, buddy. I bought it on Greenman Gaming via Melkathi's 25% code there. So, like 29 quid wasn't too bad. And those brown shirts certainly seem to be particularly nasty in this game. *Shiver* P.S. While I was at it, I got another WW2-inspired game, namely COH2 the Western Fronts on GMG as well. In that way, I used an impressive 1£ discount I apparently had accumulated on that site. It seems to be a summer of war ahead of some of us (Hmm, that didn't sound nice and right at all, but you get my drift.)

I wish, I w.i.s.h, I wish, I wish, I wish, I WISH!!! Perhaps, if I'll scream louder, it will all come true. *sigh*

Excerpt from War and Gender, Cambridge Press, 2001, by Joshua Goldstein: Strength Strength is clearly more influenced by culture than is height. Most US 18-year-old boys have spent far more time than girls in rough-and-tumble play, vigorous sports, and other activities which use and stimulate the development of strength. Their female counterparts have had much less strength-promoting activity, and this was more true of the sample of US 18-year-olds measured in 1982 (see below) than it is today, thanks to girls’ sports. Furthermore, different kinds of physical strength show different gender patterns. Women are constitutionally stronger than men – they live longer and are more resilient against fatigue, illness, famine, childbirth (!), and so forth. “Anyone who has observed women of Africa on lengthy treks carrying heavy loads of firewood and water cannot help seeing how arbitrary our indicators of strength are.”64 Data on strength are available from the US military – not an ideal sample, but similar to the general population in height. A 1982 report rates five areas of strength and gives male soldiers’ strength relative to females as follows: upper-body, 72 percent higher; leg extensor, 54 percent; trunk flexor, 47 percent; lean body mass, 33 percent; and aerobic capacity, 28 percent. Upper-body strength, the area of greatest gender difference, is emphasized in military training. Field exercises in which troops march sustained distances carrying heavy packs seem to be a key point at which men rate women as inferior. One West Point colonel said, “The women just drop.” On the other hand, sometimes women can use their bodies in different ways than men to achieve the same result.65 Lifting capacity shows the greatest gender disparity – probably in part because far more young men than women in US culture in 1982 engaged in weight training. The 1982 data indicate an average lifting capacity for women soldiers of 66 pounds, versus 119 for men (80 percent higher). The difference in lifting capacity is especially critical at around 100–120 pounds. An Air Force test for lifting 110 pounds was passed by 68 percent of men and 1 percent of women. I do not know how important lifting capacity is in the range of capabilities that enhance combat effectiveness, but it does resonate with the clincher line of the retired colonel’s argument quoted above (p. 159), that a weakling woman would be unable to save her wounded comrade’s life in battle by dragging him away. Thus, the 80 percent difference here seems far more likely than the 8 percent difference in height to explain why so few women participate in combat.66 Actually, however, the key question is not the difference in gender averages, but rather how much the bell-curves overlap. Figure 3.10 shows the data on lifting capability from the US military data. The curves indeed overlap less than for height, but not much less – still more than 10 percent of the military women have greater lifting capacity than the lowest 10 percent of men. Recall that these data are not biological givens but reflect the influence of a culture where men try to grow up big and strong, girls thin and pretty (back in 1982). Remember, too, that lifting capacity (part of upper-body strength) is the area of greatest gender difference among all the kinds of strength that go into combat (running, enduring fatigue, etc.). Thus, even the most pronounced gender differences regarding height and strength alike appear to show a nontrivial overlap of bell-curves, albeit nowhere near gender equality. Speed and endurance In addition to being large and strong, combat soldiers travel long distances on foot, sometimes at high speed. This requires running speed and endurance. It is an especially significant capability because of claims that it was important in our evolutionary past. (Some scholars see the human body as especially adapted to running over open terrain, in the context of long-distance hunting on the African plains. This capability would thus be quite primordial in the evolution of war. Evidence on this question is disputed, however.)67 In speed, as in size or strength, men score above women on average but men’s and women’s bell-curves overlap. I calculated the curves for the 1997 New York Marathon, which had posted on the Internet the rank and time of each of 30,427 people to finish the race (nearly three-quarters of them male). Figure 3.11 shows average speed over the 26.2 mile race. As the figure shows, although the median woman ran 11 percent slower than the median man, the great majority of men finish well behind the fastest women, and the great majority of women finish well ahead of the slowest men. The sample represented here is not typical of the general population. The bulk of the curve represents the most motivated and skilled long-distance runners from the New York area – less than 1 percent of the population. The right-hand end of the curve is even less representative since many of the fastest runners in the world compete in the New York Marathon. For example, none of the first 13 finishers were Americans. They came from Kenya, Italy, Mexico, and other countries. Presumably this elite sample would exaggerate gender difference, representing as it does the tails of the two bell-curves.68 Implications These data on overlapping curves imply that if armies included just the largest, strongest, fastest soldiers, then we should find many cases of women’s participation in combat, albeit in smaller numbers than for men. The actual gender composition of such an army would be determined by the extent to which a population was mobilized into the army. If being a warrior were an elite occupation practiced by a select few, say 5 or 10 percent of the population, then the best army might contain virtually all men. If, however, a society needed to induct half of the entire population into the army, it would score highest on size and strength by including something like 85 percent men and 15 percent women.69 Perhaps the virtually all-male armies found historically result from warfare’s being just an occupation of a small elite. This makes sense in that most people most of the time in the world are not at war, and in many wars only a minority of the population needs be mobilized as combat soldiers. In reality, however, the extent of mobilization of populations into warfare varies greatly from culture to culture and through time. These variations should be reflected, if Hypothesis 3C is correct (and given the data on overlapping bell-curves), in patterns of women’s participation in combat. We may frame this as a corollary to Hypothesis 3C – that is, a testable statement that should be true if the hypothesis is true: the participation of women in combat increases where mobilization for war is more extensive. This corollary, however, receives very weak empirical support at best. True, in those few cases where nontrivial numbers of women participated in combat historically, extreme warfare forced extreme mobilization of a population (see pp. 60–70). However, these particular cases are a small minority of the cases in which societies centered around war or faced dire war crises. In the great majority of such cases, even when most of the male population lived by war most of the time, virtually no women participated in combat (see pp. 10–21). These cases include preindustrial warrior societies such as the Sambia of New Guinea and the Yanomamö of Brazil, as well as industrialized societies engaged in “total war” such as the World Wars. So the corollary would lead us to expect far more women in combat and far more fluctuation over time in numbers of women in combat than we actually find.70 The problems are compounded by a second corollary: the introduction of firearms to warfare, both locally and in a global-historic sense, should increase the participation of women in combat (by making size-strength differences less decisive). The problem is that this hardly ever happened. Furthermore, this point can be extended to all kinds of forms of industrialized warfare in which machines rather than human bodies alone provide size and strength – tank warfare, air combat, and so forth. The point is not that strength does not matter at all in these occupations, but rather that the introduction of such forms of warfare shifts the importance of body strength in combat forces relative to other combat skills of various kinds. Yet the historical mechanization of war produced little change in the gender ratio of combat forces over the past century – a problem for Hypothesis 3C.71 To consider an even more basic corollary: most wars should be won by the side with the larger, stronger soldiers. If size and strength are so critical to military effectiveness, they must frequently determine battle outcomes. But in fact this is not true. Military historians emphasize the importance of such factors as strategy, discipline, fighting spirit, accurate intelligence, and (especially) the quality of weaponry, in determining the outcome of battles – more than the importance of one side’s physical strength. Indeed, the one war that America has lost, Vietnam, was to an army whose members were substantially shorter and less strong than Americans.72 The evolutionary implications of this corollary also run into trouble, since size and strength apparently have not been “selected for” in humans. Compared with species closely related to humans, notably the other great apes, humans have a relatively small gender difference in size. Gorilla and orangutan adult males, for example, are typically almost twice as large as females. Larger size exacts an evolutionary cost, mainly in higher food requirements, which would be worth it only if size and strength mattered greatly in fighting. Apparently for humans they did not. Men were probably about 35 percent heavier than women several million years ago, but only about 15 percent larger starting before Neanderthals several hundred thousand years ago, remaining around 15 percent heavier in modern humans. Furthermore, modern humans totally displaced the substantially stronger and larger Neanderthals about 30,000 years ago.73 Finally, if gender differences in size underlay gender differences in participation in war, then we should find among primates that species with large gender differences in body weight should also have low female participation in intergroup fighting. In fact, however, across 21 primate species, these two variables are uncorrelated.74 Overall, then, the data on size and strength give limited support at best to Hypothesis 3C. The major problem is that in the context of overlapping bell-curves, the considerable variations across time and space – in mobilization of a population for war, in size and strength, and in the importance of size and strength to war – do not produce the variations predicted by Hypothesis 3C in terms of gender composition of war-fighting forces. -------------------- Important points: Goldstein emphasizes how much overlap there are in strength and stamina bell-curves like these. Add to that cultural differences and various human genetic groupings, and you get heaps and heaps of women that are stronger than lots of lots of men. @Sarex: There are literally millions of women out there that would wear that plate and great axe better and longer than you (using you as a random sample of a male), just based on statistics. So, drop this "it's a myth!". Xena, the Warrior Princess, is out there, and she is mighty angry with you right now.

Hmm, someone on Youtube removed my "the family cat saves the day"-clip. Here's a new one:

On the scope of the huge 15-level dungeon: "There is a storyline associated with the Endless Paths of Od Nua, but it is separate from the main plot. During the first third of the game, the player will come across the Endless Paths on the critical path. The crit path only takes them down into the first level. The rest of the dungeon is entirely optional. It should be a fun (but very difficult) dungeon crawl that players return to as they gain power and experience over the course of the game." Josh Sawyer Source: http://www.rpgnuke.ru/articles/site/del_vey/interview_rpgnuke_with_josh_sawyer_eng.html

Indeed. I've been following that research a bit, and earlier this year, we got yet another piece of the puzzle that seems to prove that Native Americans all derive from ancestors that passed over that land bridge many thousands of years ago. Even Wikipedia has an entry about this new discovery: "In 2014, the autosomal DNA of a 12,500+-year-old infant from Montana was sequenced.[63] The DNA was taken from a skeleton referred to as Anzick-1, found in close association with several Clovis artifacts. Comparisons showed strong affinities with DNA from Siberian sites, and virtually ruled out any close affinity with European sources (the so-called "Solutrean hypothesis"). The DNA also showed strong affinities with all existing Native American populations, which indicated that all of them derive from an ancient population that lived in or near Siberia, the Upper Palaeolithic Mal'ta population.[64]"

I have played a few more theatre of war and campaign missions on harder difficulties as of late, just to try out the Elbe Update changes, and the game has indeed improved quite a bit from where I'm standing. Relic have slowed down the openings of the game, making the infantry, the clown cars and the half-tracks, etc, a much longer tactical affair. Also, they have improved the importance of taking cover and they've taken into account the distance from which you're units are firing - all of this makes unit placement much more rewarding, albeit micro-management-heavy. I always did like that first phase more, and it turns out that it really works. Thank you, Relic! As for other news on COH2 Western Fronts, well, let's just say Monte is helping Relic out in that department as I type this. I'll let him fill you in on that laterz.

Heh, my DH got a new pair of legendary pants and a legendary plan. And I was showered with rift keystone fragments. Ican't say I rock T2, but it's slowly becoming what T1 was for me a month ago.

PrimeJunta: You certainly prevail in this discussion by logic! It's just that bad habits die hard, and I sorta got used to that versatile and over-powered cleric-building. But the most comforting words from people here, seem to be: I need to pick a PE paladin instead. I really hope it's much more fun and versatile than the NWN2 3.5 ed version, though. I've actually rolled up an undead-hating paladin in NWN2 that slowly progresses through the OC, and then side-jumped into Mysteries of Westgate (which I had never played), and then it aims for the big reward at the end of that and some more OC: MotB! Problem is, paladins in D&D have been so stiff and knight-in-shiny-armour for so long that I have a hard time liking it. And in IWD2, my paladin keeps giving away all the party's hard-earned money, just because he's so darn nice.