Keyrock

I've mostly been playing The Secret World all weekend. And by playing I mean putting up with the awful controls and enjoying the writing. Also snuck some Broken Sword 5 in.

Gah, the media coverage here is so irritating. We had one of the closest finishes in Olympic history, with gold being decided by 3 thousandths of a second in the men's 1500m speed skating, and 95% of the talk was the suits, the suits, the suits. Stop making ****ing excuses for the disappointing performances of the 'Murican speed skaters and give some credit to the guys and gals that are performing.

I have a low tolerance for anything CDP says, whether it be they influenced Mass Effect or they create romances in video games. More often than not it's not the developer proclaiming their game as <name of game> Killer, it's the author of the article creating a clickbait title. Standard practice for hack journalists.

As with Neverwinter Nights, I tend to give Oblivion somewhat of a pass because I think of those games with the expansions included. For NWN, the excellent HotU bails the otherwise ho-hum game out. In my opinion, Shivering Isles is the best thing Bethesda has ever developed, which is what bails Oblivion out for me. Also, like with any Bethesda game, you can just ignore the dreadful main campaign, **** around, and create your own wacky adventures, though there is no way around the atrocious level scaling.

Are we allowed to speak ill of a Chris Avellone game? That seems like blasphemy.

Lionheart was about 50% decent game. The second half was abysmal, though.

I thought Shadows of Undrentide was about on the same level as the NWN OC. Not bad, but thoroughly forgettable. The one thing it had going for it was that it was significantly shorter, which, in the case of an uninteresting campaign, is a plus.

Legends of Dawn is flat out awful. Yet I played that game for 26 hours and kind of liked it. It's one of those weird games I somehow enjoyed, all the while being fully aware of how piss poor it was. Dragon Age 2 was a game I forced myself through (something I regret since I'll never get those hours of my life back) because I desperately wanted to like it. While I didn't cream my pants over DA:O like a lot of people, I still thought it was a pretty good game, and a solid base was there for BioWare to make a truly fantastic follow up with. If they just kept a lot of the good work they did with DA:O and took a step forward, we'd have a glorious RPG on our hands. Instead they took several steps backwards. There was just enough good in DA2, along with the BioWare name, not yet stained by the Mass Effect 3 Kai Leng and 3 color explosion ending fiasco, to keep stringing me along, desperately hoping it would get better. And it did get (slightly) better after Act 1, only to get so much worse in Act 3.

Dragon Age 2 is probably not the worst RPG I have played, but it was the most bitter disappointment. That game was akin to BioWare walking up to me, kicking me in the family jewels, then spitting on me as I writhe on the ground.

Sexy time confirmed. Someone get Bruce's attention. If they were going to clone a character from Mars: War Logs, I would have rather it had been Devotion. As an aside, I hope they get the voice over guy to do the narration for the game, because holy smokes that's a hilariously bad voice over.

Everywhere I turn to today, video game sites are creaming their pants all over this game. Oh boy oh boy oh boy! /rubs hands together

Wub wub?

That's the one game of theirs I haven't played yet. Is the combat system like Of Orcs and Men?

I scoured the interwebs and found this 25 minute long off-screen gameplay with developer commentary (complete with super thick accent): Looks pretty interesting. One of these days, Cyanide is going to make a really great game. Will this be it?

Styx: Master of Shadows trailer: Looks nice, but it's hard to tell how it will actually play since it's pretty much all cinematics in the trailer.

For all the ladies out there, here's Sexy Putin with dolphins.

I have no issue with the dress. If bitchy witch wants to get it all muddy and caught on low branches and bushes, that's her prerogative, plus if she's trying to schmooze someone up in a royal court to make another demon baby with her, it's probably fairly well suited to the task. The helmet on <protagonist> is flat out doofy looking, though.

Played the Lords of Shadow 2 (fairly short) demo. My reaction:

If you have to find the entrance to it, then it's not the final dungeon. I thought it was the Tomb of something horrors at the top of the mountain? Guess not. There's more to do after the Tomb.

Hmm, I'm not going to do another playthrough right away, so I have time to mull it over, but right now I'm leaning toward either a Quad Barbarian Zero Magic party or an all archer party (since that's supposedly the most useless thing to pursue in the game).

Finished the game. That last level of Ker-Thal is a pretty grueling grind.

That's an interesting approach. My party was very balanced, both with fighter/caster ratio and stat and skill distribution. Worked well enough. I definitely will make a more unbalanced/unorthodox party next time. I'm thinking of doing a zero magic party.