Keyrock

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.

Secrets are optional and not supposed to be found by everyone. If they were easily found by everyone then they wouldn't be secrets. If you miss some because your party isn't set up to find them, oh well. Not to mention that you can still find and open secrets without "detecting" them.

She's much too pretty to play Morrigan, at least DA3 Morrigan.

That was a pretty awesome finish. The Dubs are in a bit of a free fall, the last game not withstanding since losing to the champs is no shame. They have a fight on their hands just to get into the playoffs at all. I hope they get their **** together after the break, since they're an entertaining team and I'd like to see them in the playoffs.

Whenever I don't play a game for THAT long and come back to it, I just start over. Call of Prypiat is such a great game. I tried playing it recently-ish with the Misery 2.0 mod, but I gave up on that. While I like certain aspects of the mod, it completely ruins the game in other aspects. I'm all for making the game even more ruthlessly challenging, but some of the changes are just plain ridiculous. The rate at which items wear is insane. The toughness of some enemies is insane. I mean, I don't care what kind of helmet they are wearing, no human should ever survive 3 headshots from a SVD. That's ridiculous. Then there is the part where I'm at the very edge of my range with the SVD, where I can just barely even see enemies through my scope on my SVD and they are somehow hitting me with almost perfect accuracy with assault rifles at that distance. Gah. I'm going to play the game again soon, but this time only with maybe the Atmosfear 3 mod. Edit: As an aside, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are in many ways a lot more role playing than most RPGs.

@Humanoid - What's so terrible about the secret passage mechanic? Might for cracked wall, perception for gears, magic for ward. It's a pretty straightforward mechanic. I don't think I ever failed a secret passage check after lev 10, and I never had the dog in my party. @Darkpriest - Do you mean 3 levels of The Vigil and 2 levels of Ker-Thal?

Lara Croft is guy?

I'm into Ker-Thal now. I gotta be pretty close to the end. I'll finish up tomorrow. Edit: How many levels of Ker-Thal are there?

I though Bocce Ball was Italian, or is this something else?

Those two might be safe for the hipsters because I have no clue what either one is.

I'm in the wait, let others be the guinea pigs, and if everything turns out much better than I'm expecting, I'll see you in a 75% off Steam Sale boat as far as Thi4f is concerned.

I'll be the guy that didn't bring any beer or chips but mooches off everybody else.

What is your stance on bull shark testosterone?

Curling is surprisingly entertaining to watch, both men and women. I used to laugh at it too, then I kept getting sucked into matches. Now it;s something I really look forward to during the Olympics.

I'm not completely sure, but I think the only decisions that originally imported over from TW1 (with any impact at all) are Adda alive or dead and Order/Scoia'tael/Neutral. In the Enhanced Edition of TW2 they add in a journal entry if you hooked up with Shani in TW1, so the Triss/Shani choice carries over too.

I hope so. I wonder if Adda (or the lack of Adda) will come into play in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt For More Poontang.