Keyrock

Agreed. Also, I'm a bit disappointed by it looking so medieval Europe-ish. One thing I really liked about Risen 1 & 2 was the lush tropical setting. Supposedly there will still be some tropical areas in the game. I really hope so.

I did the Fred Bonaparte level in Psychonauts last night. I like how there are some basic elements of point & click adventure in that level to spice up the platforming. Also, picking up the cannon ball shooting armored guys with telekinesis and hurling them into the river never ceases to be satisfying. Edit: Also, I run off a 5400 RPM HDD. Suck on my eliteness, bitches!

They should make a completely unrelated game called Baron Atomic: Mass Destruction RPG instead.

You put way too much faith in my, Bruce, I'm flattered. I LOVE the concept (RPG in an Arabian Nights type setting? What's not to love?), but I have no clue who any of the developers are and whether they can actually make a halfway decent game. There is a demo, which I have yet to play (but will), so that's probably the best thing to go on at the moment.

I liked Sacred 1, and, oddly enough, I liked it because it was a mess of a game with massive balancing issues (which, for loot em' ups, is usually kind of a big deal) and wacky exploits. My favorite exploit was the developers forgetting to include a crossbow animation for the Daemon while in Soaring Daemon mode so the game reverted to an unarmed "kick" animation which was infinitely faster than any crossbow animation (unarmed was pretty much the fastest animation in the game). Since attack speed was based on the speed of the attack animation, while in Soaring Daemon mode the Daemon became a machinegun bolt throwing (out of her hip) death from above ranged master of destruction, when the character race/class was meant to suck with ranged weapons.

Yeah, with the way both Nvidia and AMD rebrand old chipsets into new cards, that first number doesn't mean much of anything any more. You add to that the new GeForce 750 and 750Ti, which are the new Maxwell architecture while they still use the same first digit (7) as what are mostly Kepler cards, then you have some cards with the same first digit that are still Fermi architecture... It's a bloody mess.

You're telling me that a 2gb dd3 card is entry level? It's a compromise for sure, but I would rather call it mid level than entry level. http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-710M.84746.0.html Generally the Nvidia naming scheme goes like this: GeForce x10 - x40 = entry-level GeForce x50 - x60 = mid-level GeForce x70 and up = high-end Edit: Triple-ninja'd

A GeForce 710M is an entry-level card. It will run any game, but you ain't maxing out any recent AAA games on that card. I run a 650M 2GB GDDR5, which is a mid-level card, and I'm not maxing out any recent AAA games either (though I can run them at very nice looking levels at 1600x900). It ain't the drivers, your card is simply nowhere near as powerful as you think. Forget any anti-aliasing options (super duper resource hogs) and keep anisotropic levels to something sane like 2X or 4X. Stick with low shadow options (tend to be resource hogs) or disable shadows entirely. I haven't played XCOM:EU (/ducks) so I can't comment on that specific game.

Which games are you unable to max out setting on? As a laptop owner, I generally am able to max whatever settings I want, it might just make the game into a slideshow for me (in the case of something like The Witcher 2). Also, the graphics driver is generally the same whether you are running a desktop or a laptop card, at least that has been the case for me with Nvidia (what I currently have) and AMD/ATI cards. Are you running a lappy with an Intel GPU? I would expect newer games to support Intel cards just fine, older games may have problems, or no support at all, as Intel GPUs only recently have become up to snuff for gaming.

Yeah, so far the consensus for Thi4f seems to be: A few truly good side-missions, crappy main story and characters, hit or miss level design, buggy mess. Seems all the red flags that popped up during this game's development were warranted. This is just too bad. I had hoped this would have turned out better, but oh well, maybe stick to Dishonored. Anyone looking forward to South Park: Stick of Truth? This game looks good and I believe Obsidian to make a good game, but I haven't watched a lot of South Park and wonder if the greatness of the game will be lost on me. I am chomping at the bit for South Park. I am ba-chomp ba-chewy-chomping at the bit.

Seriously, Risen was stronger because it was a smaller gameworld. I am a bit worried about them going for a bigger world again too. I mean, I'm certainly not against the idea of a bigger world, it's just that last time they got really ambitious with the scale of the game world... Gothic 3 happened. Granted, with Gothic 3 they were not only making a new game, they were also creating a new engine, with Risen 3 it's using the same engine as the previous game. In fact, I believe it's still the same engine (modified, no doubt) they've been using since Gothic 3. Note: I actually like Gothic 3 quite a bit with the unofficial patch and the content packs, but holy smokes was it an unmitigated disaster when it originally released.

Yeah, so far the consensus for Thi4f seems to be: A few truly good side-missions, crappy main story and characters, hit or miss level design, buggy mess. Seems all the red flags that popped up during this game's development were warranted.

Gah, the dreaded 'focus mode' or 'eagle vision' crap! Oh well, as long as I'm never forced to use it and can simply ignore the feature, I'm fine with it.

Meanwhile in the peaceful city of Lungfishopolis... Oh no, it's the dreaded Goggalor! Goggalor vs. Coachamera!

9 years old and still looks fantastic... outside of the jarringly low res cutscenes, that is.

High five, baby! We have Kamil Stoch and his golds to cheer us up. It definitely helps to have the best ski jumper in the world on your team.

To the best of my knowledge, you make a new character from scratch for Dragonfall.

Final Fantasy VI needs to be added to that list. It's the best jRPG ever made.

I'd be just as happy if another Tolkien-esque game of any variety never gets made ever again. The thing is though, Tolkien-eqsue doesn't just mean elves and orcs. World of Warcraft has elves and orcs and it's not even remotely like Tolkien's work. There are suprisingly few good cRPGs in the same style and level of quality as Tolkien. I understand, and I stand by my statement. High fantasy, in general, is far and away the most played out setting in RPGs, and video games in general. There are so many other great settings that have barely, if at all, been explored. Let's make some games in those settings and give high fantasy a rest for a good long while.

I'd be just as happy if another Tolkien-esque game of any variety never gets made ever again.

Biathlon is the bomb diggity. The element of having to target shoot after skiing for 10 kilometers and with your heart rate going off the charts is such a fantastic dynamic. Too bad Poland doesn't have a top level biathlete right now. We (I'm a 'Murican citizen and live in 'Murica, but I'm still Polish by birth, blood, and heart) have one of the very best cross country skiers on the planet, Justyna Kowalczyk, but she doesn't do the shooty shooty.

Excessive grinding should be punished. Those that engage in it deserve any pain that it brings. It's not so much that The Last Remnant punishes grinding as much as the leveling and scaling system is quite cryptic and poorly explained in the game. Grinding can actually be somewhat beneficial, but only if you understand the system well (good luck with that, there are some 5000+ word wikis I can point you to) and grind with specific goals in mind.

I'm assuming that the members of the Russian biathlon team that won the gold are going to have statues built of them and will never have to pay for anything ever again. It's been a great Olympics for my mother land of Poland: 6 medals, 4 gold, 1 silver, 1 bronze. That was pretty much best case scenario heading into these games.

The game I've played that handled QTEs the best I've ever seen is The Last Remnant. You never know when they're going to happen, the timing on them can be wildly different, from hit the button within a split second, to wait a couple seconds to hit the button, they never do the crappy mash the button as fast as you can variety, and the mechanic serves only as a means to get a counter on some blocks, or to get an extra critical effect on some attacks. If you fail the QTE, you just don't get the bonus effect, the game moves on.