Keyrock

That is potentially a difficult fight, I've had trouble with it in the past, but it was a piece of cake this time. The trouble with the floating swords is that they're rather hard to hit physically and they hit hard themselves, so if you're a melee character, like I often play, it can be really difficult to take them down. For my druid it was a easy. My meat shields (companion bear and summoned spider) kept them busy while I cast call lightning > call lightning > call lightning. Battle over.

It was BY FAR the hardest battle I had in Ch1, and, to the best of my knowledge, I did every single quest. I absolutely steamrolled every battle before that, and never died once in battle (I did die a couple times from traps on chests, including getting hit for an ABSURD 97 damage once). What makes that battle hard isn't so much Desther himself, though he is fairly powerful, it's the metric ****ton of undead in the room with him, including specters that instantly made my companion bear flee in terror. I'm sure with certain builds that battle is much easier. He's one of Maugrim's underlings combing the countryside in Ch2. He's in the caves in the room with the Ogre Mage.

So, I just killed Ganon in Neverwinter Nights. Whodathunkit, theGreat King of Evil defeated by a half-orc druid. And I didn't even need the Master Sword.

A game is going to have to be SPECTACULARLY good for me to want to do a 150 hour playthrough. As an example, I've recently been playing Pirate Creed, and I was enjoying it a lot, I think it's a great game and it has a good variety of different things to do, but after a little over 40 hours, I got very worn out and had to stop. Now, I'll eventually go back to it, but if it takes me more than another 30, maybe 35 hours, I'll likely stop again (knowing myself) and every time I stop again and the game is not yet finished, the likelihood of me coming back to finish it decreases considerably. Crazy as it may sound, there is such a thing as too much content. Of course, a different way to play is to only do some quests on a playthrough, with the intention of doing different quests on a different playthrough. There are a couple caveats with that, though. First, the game has to be good and interesting enough, and allow for different enough builds to warrant multiple playthroughs. Second, RPGs, in particular, tend to lend themselves to players doing every single possible quest in a playthrough, because of the desire to amass maximum exp and make the character as powerful as possible.

I love animal empathy. Why fight the dire wolf when you can add it to the party?

just a reminder in case some of you happy backers didn't see it. the beta is tomorrow, I have two weeks off, so I'm still game I'm looking forward to impressions. Preferably non-spoilery impressions.

Romance?

Good to see Tony Romo is already in mid-season form:

I've moved on to Port Llast in Neverwinter Nights. I had forgotten how insane a difficulty spike the Desther fight is. That battle had to be at least 3 or 4 times as hard as any battle previous to it. I suppose if I was playing a cleric it would have been relatively easy. Oh well, I got through it and I'm on to the next part of the game. At least I'm not cooped up in the city any more.

"The amount of stuff to fetch for other people in the game is enormous" - Mark Darrah I keed. I keed.

3 districts down, 1 to go in Neverwinter Nights. I'm off to Blacklake. Hopefully I clear that district out tonight and can move on to the next part of the game.

He's the Bawitdaba guy.

I think it's obvious why. Pillars of Eternity lets you play as a female character, if you choose, while AssCreed does not. The gamers have spoken, we don't want female characters! On a serious note, AssCreed is a well known series with a built-in fanbase of millions of gamers. Pillars of Eternity is a new, completely unproven, mostly unknown IP.

HoMM VII Gameplay: Keep in mind the difficulty is turned to st00pid easy for this demo.

Playing and loving Golden Sun on the Wii U virtual console. This is a very highly regarded game, so it's not a big surprise, but, man, this is a really good game. It's crazy how much the addition of puzzle elements helps break up the monotony of the standard jRPG grind.

That Melkathi character looks almost exactly how I pictured a Melkathi in my mind.

She's either gotta have some kind of tattoo or birthmark on her breasts or really really nice breasts that would stick in your memory. Here's hoping it's the latter.

They make a variety of harnesses ans dollies that make picking up objects much easier and safer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae1gLl-YfJo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyLS4QF0jmA

Youtube comments? Really? I would hope that by now people know that reading youtube comments is a descent into madness. You can read youtube comments about pretty much any video and find people lobbing insults and complaining about the most ridiculous stuff. Youtube comments are probably the absolute worst gauge a person could use to measure the interest level for any given project.