Keyrock

But we have sent a probe beyond Pluto, both Voyagers are now much further from the sun than Pluto at its furthest orbit. In fact, both Voyagers are now leaving the solar system or have left already, depending on the definition of the edge of our solar system... I guess it would be the outer edge of the Oort Cloud.

Just wanted to show off how awesome the start screen is:

The Mac and Linux versions of the demo for Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun came out today, so I immediately started playing that. I haven't played Commandos or Desperados in many years, but this game is instantly familiar and it feels right, really right. I haven't played one of these types of games in far too long and I'm really excited. There seem to be lethal and non-lethal ways to get past most obstacles and multiple paths to take. I'll play a bit more of the demo before making a decision, but I'll very likely be buying this game (it comes out in a few days). I wish more publishers would have enough faith in their product to release a free demo before release. I guess that makes Daedalic Entertainment the anti-Bethesda.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun demo

@Llyranor - I can't say I encountered that bug.

I completely forgot about The Game Awards, not that I would have watched them anyway. Did anyone watch them? How awful were they? More importantly, any cool trailers debut there?

Morrowind has the excuse of 2002, this doesn't.

I have no clue whether or not this will be a competent shooter, but it looks metal as ****!

Is that a weather effect or will the game always look so hazy and muddled? I have a feeling it was a deliberate design decision to mask poor texture quality and draw distance. If so, while clever, it makes the game look horrible. I don't know if I want to play a game where I'm perpetually stuck in fog.

I'm probably very much in the minority here, but I, for one, don't miss vancian magic one bit. Mana based systems and cooldown based systems both have their downsides, but removing the need (and temptation) to spam resting after every battle or two is a giant plus in my book. This got less horrible in the days of NWN with things such as priests auto-healing and rememorizing healing spells on rest, but it was still a time waster. Back in the days of the Gold Box games... having to camp, select each and every spell to memorize manually every time, having your clerics manually cast healing spells, then having them rememorize spells, then rest again... ugh, that's the main reason I'll probably never play Gold Box games again. I tried playing Champions of Krynn a few months back and just couldn't deal with the tedium. It was mindunmbingly awful. I know it's taboo to say around these parts, but I've kind of grown to like cooldown-based systems. I know that makes me a traitor and I should probably keep it quiet lest I be burned at the stake as a heretic to RPG tradition, but there it is, it's out in the open now.

I agree about the Mako. BioWare took negative response to the Mako the wrong way and scrapped the Mako altogether in ME2 instead of fixing something that was a good idea just really poorly implemented. The reason the planet exploration in ME1 was so bad was because it was repetitive, uninteresting (after the second or third planet visited once you found out it was going to be pretty much exactly the same every time), and, most of all, the Mako was one of the worst handling vehicles ever created in a video game (probably not, but hyperbole for the hyperbole gods and all that). Rather than adding more variety to planet exploration missions and giving you a land rover that didn't handle like complete and utter garbage, Bio instead replaced it with something even worse (scanning).

I hope we do. The one piece of bad news for you is that we don't play the Lions until week 16 and there's a chance that we will have nothing left to play for at that point in the season, so the Lions may be playing against the Boys 2nd stringers for half the game. To that end, I would expect you to root for the G-Men next week since a Dallas loss means they'll have to play hard the rest of the season while a win means they can start resting guys a bit. Of course, the Pack need to take care of business this week for any of that to matter. Who y'all playin'?

The Boys are in a weird spot where they're almost certainly either going to be a 1 seed or a 5 seed. The G-Men are the closest team to catching them and if they do that drops Dallas down all the way to 5 seed, that's why this win against the Vikes was so important, because if we went into next week with only a 1 game cushion, the G-men could take the division lead with a win. With this win we will have at minimum a 2 game cushion and a win basically wins us the division and the 1 seed while a loss means we're still in 1st place but sweating it out the rest of the season. With that in mind, Pittsburgh, do us a favor and knock the Giants off please, pretty pretty please, with a cherry on top. Also, I hope we get Mo Claiborne back by next week's game. Getting Barry Church back helped our extremely thin defensive backfield, which isn't all that great even at full strength, but we desperately need Mo back too.

Never thought I'd read those words written by you. Cowboys won a real ugly game tonight, their worst performance of the season, worse even than their week 1 loss to the G-Men. They shot themselves in the foot again and again and again with fumbles and horrible offensive penalties. The Vikings D probably had something to do with that, but mostly it was obviously the horrible, ugly color rush uniforms the Boys wore. The lesson here is that no one should wear color rush uniforms ever, they're terrible and bring nothing but misery to anyone who is associated with them. A win is a win and I'll take it. We really needed that win to ensure at least a 2 game lead heading into the critical game against the G-Men a week and a half from now. Out of courtesy for our fellow Obs Forums members I will break my weekls Jerry Jones picture tradition and post a Jason Garret pic instead this week:

I finished my first playthrough of Tyranny. It took me about 32 hours, though that's likely significantly longer than the average because I play so slowly. I liked the game a lot. It's not my favorite Obsidian Entertainment game ever made, Alpha Protocol still holds that honor (that game was so f'n good), but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. Hopefully we see an expansion in the future. I would be remiss if I failed to do a comparison with Pillars. It's not a completely fair comparison because I played Pillars when it first came out and didn't have companion AI, something the game does have now... On the other hand, maybe it is a fair comparison sine I played Tyranny at launch too, who knows what improvements the game might get 3 months from now? Anyway, I enjoyed Tyranny exponentially more than I did Pillars. I thought the combat in both games was fairly meh. Pillars had more strategic options with flanking and such, though I will give Tyranny points for some really cool animations. Tyranny had a lot less combat, which is a MASSIVE plus in my book. Also, I made the decision of turning the difficulty to Story Mode after a couple hours of playing and I am so glad I did. I wasn't playing the game for the combat anyway, and Story Mode made combat take less time, which is a plus to me. More importantly, by making combat fairly trivial, this removed all temptation for me to try to power game and make choices based on getting reactions that would help me get bonus abilities based on reputation. Instead, I made all my choices based purely on role playing (role playing in a role playing game, who knew?). I set a vision for my character and I made all my choices based on how she would have decided according to that vision. I lived with the consequences of all my decisions, no matter how painful or detrimental, it was great. I really enjoyed the power fantasy of playing a cog, albeit a powerful cog, in a great and powerful military and political machine, and I loved manipulating said machine to further my goals. I thought both the world and the characters in Tyranny were more interesting than in Pillars. The amount of detail that went into making the world of Pillars a living breathing place was impressive, but it never grabbed my attention the way the Tiers did. Not all the characters in Tyranny were great, but there were enough compelling characters that I managed to form bonds and stay invested throughout. To that end, I feel Tyranny's relative brevity, if you can call 32 hours brief, was a strong point. I rarely have the patience to stay motivated through a game of such epic length as Pillars any more. While Tyranny's last act felt rushed, overall I feel the game length was just right. I feel like I got my money's worth and the game didn't outstay its welcome. I am very likely going to play through Tyranny again at some point and make wildly different choices, but not for a while. For now, my thirst for power has been sated.

Quern - Undying Thoughts

I picked up and started playing Quern - Undying Thoughts. It's a Myst-like game. You know the drill: Fantastical looking world, weird objects that you need to figure out what purpose they serve and strange puzzles that you need to figure out on your own how they work and then solve them. Much too early to tell if it's a particularly good Myst-like, but, given that I love these types of games, I should get some enjoyment out of it regardless.

I am, presumably, really close to finishing my first playthrough of Tyranny. I control all the spires and Now it's time for me to which, I'm guessing, begins the end game. /rubs hands together

Well, I have a passenger car, a nice passenger car at that. I don't own a big rig, though.

Great game, isn't it? I put over 100 hours into ETS2, loved every minute of it. These days, I've moved my virtual trucking across the Atlantic to American Truck Simulator. Same game, just different trucks and setting. ETS2 is more full featured at this point, though, as ATS is currently only California, Nevada, and Arizona, though they plan to add the whole continental US eventually. Like you wrote, those games are just really chill and relaxing. There's a certain joy in rolling lazily down the open road with good tunes playing on the radio. Makes a man want to become a long haul trucker in real life... Edit: Here's another truckin' song for ya:

How Muriel the Unyielding deals with those that would dare challenge her authority and march upon her spire: Step 1: Eye of Sauron Step 2: Giant Pillar of Flame Step 3: Charred Corpses

Or that new team is the Patriots.

The Cowboys got some unexpected help today from the Bucs, of all teams, who beat the C-Hox in a ugly game. This makes the Boys' path to the 1 seed that much easier, though they have to take care of things in the division first, as the G-Men could still send them all the way down to a 5 seed.

I haven't been able to finish D:OS either. I've tried twice now and both times I just kind of stopped playing it after a while with no desire to return. I have no problem with the combat outside of battles taking FOREVER, but I could get past that. If anything, I thought the combat was the game's best quality. For me it was a matter of the game being... well, dull. The world just felt really uninspired, the characters boring, and the fanfic level humor and writing completely fell flat. I couldn't get motivated to play the game because I didn't care about anything that happened or any of the characters in the game, largely because they all seemed like piss poor cartoon characters. Compare that to Tyranny, the game I'm currently playing. In Tyranny I have a clear picture of the world, the military and political struggles going on. I have an image and a personality in mind for my character. I have goals, both short term and long term, and I am actively working toward them because I care about achieving them. There are characters I like and characters I dislike... plus some characters I couldn't give 2 ****s about, but hey, they can't all be winners. The point is, I'm invested in the world, the people living in it, and the events that are transpiring. It's not all roses, though. I could definitely do without the spire management aspect of the game. It just seems like needless busy work to me. There is no strategy to it beyond which upgrade you build first, since you'll eventually be able to build all upgrades. It's not even like there are any mutually exclusive hireables either, it's only a matter of having enough money, which is a piece of cake. I mean, I've been taking a steaming hot **** on the Disfavored for most of the game, yet Disfavored hireables are still open to me and they don't even speak ill of me when I talk to them. Why even bother assigning factions to the hireables at your spires then? I would have been much happier if, shortly after you activated a spire, trainers and merchants just sort of all showed up of their own accord and settled there, though I would have much preferred if they settled in the Ascension Hall below the spire or the land surrounding it. Who the **** let that common filth up to the top of my spires anyway? The top of the spires should be reserved for me and any companions I deem worthy of allowing up there, no one else. Bunch of disgusting peasants dirtying up my spires, ugh. I could do without the uninspired crafting you do at the spires too. I've really grown to loathe crafting, especially when it's this lazy. It's just lame and needlessly tedious. There are no choices to be made outside of what to research/forge first and managing the extremely plentiful different forms of currency used. I wish the game just gave me the sigil or the armor instead of having me waste time bringing a piece of the armor or the untranslated sigil to the spire, spend 4 of whatever currency which I have more than enough of, then make me wait a few days to receive my item or sigil scroll. What a needless waste of time, and for what? Anyway, after that rant I feel I should end on some positives, since I really do like Tyranny and the stupid spire management aspect is a collection pet peeves I can get over and, thankfully, mostly ignore and just not take part in. I really like the magic creation system, it's flexible and surprisingly intuitive. I also really like receiving missives and answering them. It makes me really feel like a part of this political machine I am trying to leverage for my own gain. I really enjoy political intrigue and espionage in RPGs and Tyranny has that in spades.