melkathi

Yeah. That sentence left me speechless.

You are right. There are no race restrictions. 6x6 combinations it is. Abilities are then based on Class, Race and Spheres of Magic. A city's basic military units are based on the city's race, but through your class, higher tier special units are unlocked - though again using the race template. There is a big change in alignment. All racial units are inherently neutral, so there no longer is a moral penalty for having orcs and elves in one army. There still are some units though that are "dedicated to good" or "dedicated to evil". Neutral cities will have an alignment, influencing your starting relationship with them when you first encounter them. Your character starts as neutral and the alignment will shift based on your actions (razing cities bad, letting weak armies run away good etc).

I pre-ordered. That is: I got an american friend to pre-order and gift me the game, what with regional pricing The classes look very interesting - if you haven't I suggest going to the official site and looking at the class pages (4 out of 6 have been put up so far). It is still a shame that the game starts with only 6 races. But it will still be a good game I hope.

So we are talking about Alpha Protocol?

I finished Aarklash: Legacy The game is real time with active pause. The Bad: The boss fights were easier than the normal fights. At least on normal difficulty. Character progression / customization is quite limted: there are 8 characters, each of which have 4 pre-determined abilities. You can upgrade these abilities as you level up, even changing the way they behave, but you are bound by the four things that character can do. The game is too short for the story it is trying to tell. It ends rather abruptly and the end is a bit forced; I felt as if a chapter had been skipped. There are no side-quests as such and no real exploration - maps are pretty straight forward, you start at point A and need to reach point B. Later maps are fairly large though, making up for that. And there are at least a (very) few little things to find (treasure chests that need solving of little puzzles to reach). There are some minor gameplay issues that weren't necessary. For example you can't cancel a spell that your character is already casting (though you can cancel it if it is just in the queue). Icons for buffs/debuffs are tiny. Loot is boring and items don't affect appearance. The Good: Quite a lot of love has gone into the game and I at least felt that it shows. The devs really tried to do interesting things. Fights can be rather challenging and require quite a bit of thought. Every one of the 8 characters you have is unique. Some have more interesting mechanics than others, but they all have something that sets them appart. A lot of the characters' abilities are more than just click button and forget. Some travel in a straight line hitting the first person in their path. Others are area of effect. Others are channeled. After the beginning, pretty much all enemies have special abilities, attacks, auras etc. So one enemy may heal allies when taking damage, another may lock the use of player attack powers in a radius around them etc. As a result, prioritising targets is very important but may vary from battle to battle (though certain enemies it will always be good to take out first). Except for a certain map, you can swap party members any time, outside combat. You may die quite a bit. There are a lot of puzzles to solve with activating switches etc. They start simple and become more complicated, combining different elements. The game though usually ramps up the complexity gradually, so that you know what you can do. I managed to solve them all without too much difficulty, though one took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to do. Overall, I really enjoyed it. I played relatively short sessions mostly, so it lasted longer than it may for others. It was challenging and not that many rpgs are these days. I got it on sale and at that price it was deffinitly worth it. Worth it at full price? I got the "amount of" enjoyment out of it that I would have required, had I payed full price, yes. I may even replay it, though not right away. It is not a game you play for the story/writing. Even though I actually got to like the characters, the game isn't about that, it is about the tactical combat using a 4 character strong team.

My favourid as well! Though I did enjoy most of the other levels too. The race-track was boring. The circus damn annoying. But most other levels had a lot of personality and charm.

I never could get past the Circus level...

Annoying that they have been doing this whole holier than thou thing in the game-retail world, and now they try to put a spin on it how they are doing it for the cause.

I've bought several early access games that were well worth even at the stage I got them: Full Mojo Rampage Age of Decadence Dungeon of the Endless Xenonauts But I am careful with what I buy early access wise. Don't want to accidentally get something which is just a tech demo, get bored and then not give the game a chance when there is stuff to do.

A playable Steven Heck...

I have work to do. Need to finish these drawings Stupid work.

Hurlshot is playing Alpha Protocol. I'm sitting in front of my laptop, looking at my steam contact list and seeing Hurlshot playing Alpha Protocol.

Now you do what I do: play something else.

I think the most obvious reference was the boss lady talking about being achievement driven like the XBOX...

Was going to go to bed. Instead I reached the Iron Age in 7 Grand Steps. Then I played three generations to reach the artisan's caste again and slowly work on regaining the family's legendary Bronze Age glory, when generations of family doctors saved the city from the plague, and even provided one of the kingdom's greatest generals. Now we are tax collectors... Death and Taxes, baby. Death and Taxes. Damn this game is addictive.

I just got 4 Broken Age -25% vouchers thrown into my inventory by Double Fine. They are valid 'till 15th March if anyone wants one.

Actually... At the current exchange rate that is $5.16. the Euro is stronger than the dollar. But Steam transaltes dollar prices to euro at a 1 to 1 ratio. So while LadyCrimson would pay $3.75, we are paying more.

So impressive as a matter of fact it borders on being expressive

Hmm, so a while ago I had made a guide for Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe on Steam. As the game is a bit obscure, of course initially it had very few views. About 50 in the first couple of months. Now it has reached 351 views and finally got enough (25) ratings for the rating to show up. So out of 25 ratings I received 3 Stars. Ratings are thumbs up or thumbs down. The thumbs up obviously include myself, the two devs and a couple of other fans of the game. Now if the 5 star rating is 100% thumbs up and the 0 star rating 100% thumbs down, then the 3 star rating is around 60% thumbs up 40% thumbs down, right? So one could asume we are talking about 15 thumbs up in this case and 10 down. Some of those upvotes obviously have the afforementioned positive bias. Equally one would assume there is a negative bias in a small number of downvotes. With such a small sample though these biased votes can't really be evened out. In this case we could for exmple assume that only 15 votes are statistically relevant. So the rating is a result of 4-5% of the total views? For other guides with more views even less? And all you need is a small group of trolls to push down ratings of random content... That whole rating system seems like a joke now that I bothered to look at it. /end rant edit: I am also fully aware that the rating probably works completly differently and I have no clue how

The Melkathi Family took 7 Grand Steps: Khet married Selk and had 5 children. They were poor farmers. the children were hungry with drawn in cheeks, as the fields had grown salty. Khet begged the priests for assistance. Even though the granaries were ull, the priests only rationed out the bare necessary grain. While buying amphorae from the city kilns, Khet talked with the potter about city life, and though the man decried crime and murder, Khet decided that his family too would some day escape to the city and a better life. Khet and Selk's eldest son Amasis married Tjetmutiu after saving her life, even though she originaly rejected his advances. They toiled their whole life to realise Khet's dream. But it would be their eldest daughter Magdy who, after being driven out of the family home, would succeed, alongside her husband Menkheperure. Magdy became a potter, like the one who had inspired her grandfather, and rose to the Artisan Caste. Of course other craftsmen resented her, but she did not mind them. Khek was to follow in his parents footsteps, but the gods had other plans. Spurned by the women of the caste, he eventually adopted an orphan named Khepri. Perhaps it was the pain of seeing her foster father die a poor man, forsaken by his caste that drove Khepri to honour his memory and succeed. And though pottery had been the family;s rise, it had also been her father's downfall. Thus Khepri turned her bright mind elsewhere and it was through her insights, that the army was reformed. Eventually even the amphorae trade picked up again. Khepri's and Jeroen's son Hamadi was a rich man (for his caste). That did not save him from being drafted and placed in command of seven other men. He tried his best, but the ilness that swept through the army did not spare him and when the battle was upon them, nothing could salvage morale. He was pronounced a War Hero, but his wife, Meretseger, was left to provide for their child alone. She was a lot like her mother in law though, and soon the galleys' captains talked about her ideas. Again though, recognition and fame did little to protect the family. When Meretseger found out about the growing tension with the City of the Sun God and spread this knowledge, so people could prepare themselves for the inevitable war, she was branded a traitor and forced to flee the city with her daughter Jamila. (the story coninutes a century later with Jamila's decendent Xeno)

Well the game has just released on GOG. So you can get it there about 8 hours before its Steam release if you really can't wait

I only found out about it yesterday by chance myself.

Aarklash: Legacy 60% off... damn I already own it on GOG

The field in the survey with the most information would be the "other" section, where every forumite would tell you about the games they have played and you didn't include

Impire has terrible writing. The writer thinks he is funny and witty but isn't. The squad management is interesting, but the dungeon building is a let-down (LadyCrimson, do not buy this game, you'd be disappointed). I had fun enough with the game, trying out all the different units etc, but the campaign is not interesting enough to play it to the end, and the dungeon building is too underwhelming to spend much time in skirmish mode. Aarklash: Legacy is very typical Cyanide: trying to do a lot of interesting things, always constrained by size, money, whatever. Disappointing for some who were looking for a RPG with loads of stats and classes and character creation, fun for people who want to run around with a small 4-man party and try not to die. And then there are the older games like Loki, Cyanide's diablo-clone, that again tried to do interesting things but somehow never managed to reach the popularity of games like Sacred, Torchlight etc.