Keyrock

MCA barely mentions his work on Pillars and quickly moves on, while he talks at length, and, dare I say, lovingly, about Wasteland 2 and TToN. Hmm...

Do you want more Wang? I bet you want more Wang. It sure looks like we'll be getting more Wang. http://shadowwarrior.com/

Rest in Peace

Fan made spiritual successor to Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara released for free. Get it while you can because WotC is almost certainly going to cease and desist this game out of existence.

I'm definitely interested. Hopefully it's good.

Yes, but those use an Apple emulator. They work fine for some people, for others, not so much. Hopefully this means that whoever has those games already but doesn't buy TBT4 still gets the reworked versions as a free upgrade.

I'm glad the original trilogy is getting overhauled. They work through an emulator now and the version they ship with no longer works on Linux. While it's possible to compile a new version of the emulator to get the games to work, it will be nice to just be able to install them and play them without having to jump through hoops.

Answers to some questions about the game from Brian Fargo:

10, if you're working in binary.

I'm not sold on this game. I'm not a fan of the art style. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these people that freaks out over stylized graphics and everything must look realistic or kill it with fire, but these stylized graphics look kinda meh. It's like they tried to find a middle ground between stylized and realistic and I'd rather they went full on in either direction because their middle ground looks really boring. Also, there's a disturbing lack of feedback in most of the animations I've seen. Outside of some specific abilities that knock characters down, they all might as well be swinging at thin air because weapons just pass through characters and they just keep on keeping on as if nothing happened. Of course, I can overlook the art style and animations so long as the story is good and the combat encounters are well crafted, varied, and posing unique challenges (for the love of god, don't have 95% of the battles be filler battles against trash mobs). As for DM mode, it's certainly an interesting idea and it could be really good. I guess it all depends on how much control the DM has over the adventures. If it's just here's a random dungeon, you can move the monster spawn points around and tweak a few stats and that's it, then I don't see a point in it. Hopefully it will be a much more robust system.

Another day another Strife match (I generally play 1 or 2 matches a day, they usually take 35-40 minutes each). This time I had better map awareness. I was more cognizant of hiding spots for potential ganks and I paid better attention to enemies being missing from lanes and the map in general and was extra cautious when enemies were missing and checked on Cindara and Baldir if I was nearby to see if the enemy team was trying for an objective. I even managed to set up a gank or two of my own. On the other hand, I got reckless and pursued and pushed too hard a couple times, leading to a couple very avoidable deaths. Baby steps. Our team won though, so that's a bonus.

Kidnapped by aliens so they could steal his game design secrets, managed to escape but decided to go back to the aliens because they have more advanced technology and a better medical plan. On a serious note, I think the most popular theories right now are: a) Going to InXile b) Going to Bethesda c) Burnt out and taking a break from game development

MCA wised up and realized that the real money is in F2P microtransaction-based mobile games. /hides

That's right, I forgot about Kinect.

What party games does the XBone have?

He said he "can't say any more at this time". E3 is just around the corner... what if he shows up on stage... during Activision's presentation? Swerve Yes, I did post that just as an excuse to post another ridiculous wrestling gif.

My hypothetical erection level has been upgraded to raging boner.

So, hypothetically, if a certain Brian Fargo drove a dumptruck full of money over to Irvine to lure Chris over to Newport Beach, that would, hypothetically, coincide well with this mysterious Van Buren trademark that InXile have stashed in their back pocket, not to mention that Chris could then, hypothetically, have a larger, more full-time role on Torment: Tides of Nomnomnomnomnom. Hypothetical erection level = fully engorged

We may be missing the bigger picture here. With MCA gone, who's going to fill the role as Obsidian's sexy beast?

Lord knows they desperately need someone who can actually write a character.

I didn't see that coming Wherever MCA is headed, I hope it's well paying and he gets to continue making great games. Best of luck, MCA.

The first video of Iga's Bloodstained in action. It's a super duper early prototype/proof of concept type deal, so, obviously, everything is very much subject to change.

Still playing Strife. I'm definitely fairly comfortable playing as Vermillion now and I have a pretty good build dialed in, but my map presence leaves a lot to be desired. In the last game I walked right into several ganks that I really should have seen coming, those patches of grass are there for a reason. We still won though as our team worked really well together and we steamrolled through objective after objective. I think I'm going to drop them a few shekels as I think the game has earned it. I'm closing in on 25 hours played with not a penny spent and I've had quite a bit of fun the whole time, win or lose. I think their business model is reasonable too. Unlike a lot of MOBAs, you get every character for free. You can use the gems that you can buy with real money (you earn gems in-game too, albeit slowly) to craft items, changing the components that make up existing items, changing their stats, and you can optionally add an extra effect on top of that while crafting, which does make a better item, but also a more expensive one, so it's not necessarily always better (the extra effect does you no good if you can't finish assembling the item because the recipe is too expensive). Plus, you can craft items with a different in-game only currency that you acquire relatively quickly, so the pay to win factor is pretty dang low. If I do drop some cash on the game, I'll likely spend the gems on skins and dyes, rather than crafting, anyway. I also scooped up Cities Skylines on sale 30% off from Greenmangaming. I suppose there's always the chance it will get a deeper discount during the inevitable Steam Summer Sale, but it's a pretty new game that has sold quite well, so I don't expect a very deep discount on it. I'm downloading the game now. I'm pretty excited, it's been a long time since I played a real deal city builder, unless you count Tropico 5, which is more a comedy economy simulator than an in-depth city builder.

It's on the El Rey Network at 8 PM EDT on Wednesdays. If you don't get El Rey Network you can find episodes on dailymotion. Not sure how legal that is, but they're there. Also, they have a guy who wears a deer head to the ring, because, why wouldn't he?