marelooke

I think I finally made it past the hardest boss in WL2: character creation. I've only made it to the Ag Center so far but I feel the skill selection I have now is finally covering all bases. Phew.

Discounting Kickstarters that would probably be Skyrim, whenever that was released. Otherwise: Divinity: Original Sin.

Hmm, I started with 4 of the premade party members, I figure I'll learn more about which skills/weapons I really dig by actually playing. Anyway, my starting party members: Cherry Bomb Cold-Eye Widow O'Neill Big Bert Hmm, I just realized I don't have a medic/surgeon, that might be a problem...is there one I can pick up early in?

Ironically, Resi 4 is the game that dumped the horrifically bad controls of the early games in favor of more modern shooter controls, but also signaled the move away from horror and toward action, making it a bittersweet game. It also has the distinction of being one of the most notoriously awful PC ports ever. They released an updated "HD" version earlier this year (because, of course they did) that supposedly works a heck of a lot better on PC. I haven't played the new version so I can't speak from experience. Well, pretty sure the Steam version is the "HD" version, at least it has the "mouse aiming" (I don't want to imagine how it even used to be) that I hear they added in the HD version, but moving around is entirely done with the keyboard (this includes turning the character) and everything just feels horrendously sluggish in a very bad way. The HD version certainly didn't fix the game enough to make it playable in my eyes, unless there are mods that fix the control issues (most of the stuff I found is years old and probably intended for the original edition), I'll just write this one off as a loss as using a controller for this type of game just won't do for me.

I'd think the opinion of a guy that ends up in similar situations (eg. wars) on a regular basis is at least somewhat relevant to a game that pretends to attempt to create an immersive experience in a similar setting.

What? It's Sunday morning. Let me report my weekend experience with D:OS. OK. I have been given a rare 3 day weekend which began Friday. So, Friday morning I decided to browse Steam for a game to buy. Divinity: Original sin caught my eye. I had not been following its development so I spent about an hour researching it. I went to Metacritic. I came here. I looked at youtube etc. Everything pointed to the fact that I should be playing this game. So I bought it off Steam. Then I began playing it. The hours passed. The entire world flew by me. I did not go to bed Friday night. And last night I was planning on watching the Mayweather vs. Maidona II fight on PPV. But I didn't do that either. Instead, I played D:OS. It is now Sunday morning. And this game has sucked me in thoroughly. I think I've gotten about 7 hours of sleep in the last 2 days, and I was playing rock-paper-scissors in my dreams for the majority of those 7 hours. lol If that's not immersion then I don't know what immersion is. This game is fantastic. It scratches the itch. It fills the void. If a game of this quality and polish can be done with just $4 million, then I shudder at the bloat and utter financial incompentence from other companies who can't create a game with HALF the content and depth of D:OS even though they've got 10X the funding to work with. Too many face slaps from the developers inside the game: 1) Grave next to cyceal healer which insta kill you with no common sense warning. I'm sorry, but I think you have to confirm three times that you really, Really, REALLY, want to dig up that grave. If that is not a big fat hint that digging it up might just not be a good idea then I dunno what is. (I quicksaved before just to find out what would happen, granted, I expected a boss level enemy to spawn over what happened, but still, I expected nasty **** to happen) My main gripes so far are: 1. it doesn't run properly on my laptop (UI is horrendously sluggish for some reason) so I can't actually play it 2. inventory management 3. random nature of loot (and especially the fact that this also applies to ability tomes, if unlucky you could never see some abilities for your chosen class, which, if the forums are anything to go by, has actually happened to some people)

Since I had quite a bit of fun with Resident Evil: Revelations I decided to catch up on some of the older games in the series that I could still get my hands on. Big mistake apparently: RE4 has beyond horrible controls (Not even mouse look? Really? What is this? Doom?). I made it to the first savepoint and then just uninstalled the game.

A War photographer's take on The Last of Us: http://lightbox.time.com/2014/09/15/war-photographer-video-game/#1 I guess a lack of distress about the situations they find themselves in is a fairly typical thing in video games.

My favourite RTS of all time must easily be Warzone 2100, it's also the only one I ever properly finished the main campaign of, twice (finished the Nod side of C&C: Tiberian Sun as well, sort of anyway, but that's another story). The ongoing campaign was a very big plus (each "base mission" in a chapter was set on the same map that you gradually unlocked more parts of until you moved on to the next chapter. There were also occasionally "away missions" where you had to pick a bunch of units and fly to some objective you got to assault) Warzone 2100 is open source now btw, but the new AIs they added are just way too hard for me, but I still occasionally fire it up. Total Annihilation went too fast for me, I always go stuck on the mission where you had to defend that base (3rd or 4th mission iirc), haven't actually tried much other RTS games in the past 10 years though I've been meaning to start TW: Shogun at some point.

The first Revelations was a return to the series slower paced, atmospheric, claustrophobic roots, this looks to be more of the same, except they're trading in a ship for a prison and Jill and Chris for Claire and Moira (Barry Burton's daughter). It seems like the "core" numbered series has gone down the action shooter path to stay while the "offshoot" Revelations series will provide the old-school Resi experience. I'm fine with that as long as they keep making the Revelations series. Also, I'm super excited to get a game where you play as Claire again. It's been a really really long time. What was the last game she starred in? Code Veronica? Hopefully they have her Resi 2 and Code Veronica outfits unlockable, as well as her Browning Hi-Power, assuming she doesn't start with that as default. I *really* enjoyed the setting on the ship, I thought it was just awesome. But I wouldn't have considered it a "scary" game per-se, certainly not in the sense that F.E.A.R. (1) or Dead Space (1) were scary to me (I actually had to take the first Dead Space in chapter sized chunks and similar for F.E.A.R.). I do hope the controls will be better optimized for PC this time around (not that they did such a bad job with Revelations, but being able to look up/down when not aiming would be rather nice to have for starters) and that the boss fights will be less obnoxious (at least on the lower difficulties) It's been a very long time since it's last happened but it appears I'm actually looking forwards to an AAA game again!

Currently mostly playing Warframe and still enjoying it. I tried making a new account recently to see what it's like through new players' eyes, and boy, is it horrible, glad I'm no longer a new player because given how broken the new player experience is I'd probably quit rather early in (they somehow made the new player experience *worse* compared to a year ago, that takes some skill!). Since I don't have access to my desktop the selection of games I can actually play is rather limited, looking forward to Wasteland 2, which I assume will run just fine on the laptop (unlike D:OS, for some reason ). I also still need to play some more Firefall, the mechanics still don't do it for me for some reason, maybe because they took a bit too much inspiration from Warframe so the constant subtle differences might be annoying me. Also not a fan of the graphical style, but that's something I could maybe get used to. Destiny sounds like something I might enjoy as from the very little I've read about it so far it's in a similar ballpark as Warframe and Firefall. I should probably check it out sometime (though if it's a huge download that'd probably kill it for me, at least for the foreseeable future).

See, it's male only game, i don't want Your lack of ability to roleplay a different gender does not make it a male-only game. I had no problem playing, for example, KotOR2 or Mass Effect with a female character and pursuing some of the romance options. While I can respect that a set protagonist with a set character and one of a different gender to boot might not appeal to everyone calling it a "male only game" because of that is a rather shallow view imho, especially since the "banging chicks" part of The Witcher is, as far as I am aware, entirely optional (not sure if the major romances are entirely avoidable, but all the others certainly are, as they should be).

Just received a Gog newsletter: http://www.gog.com/newsletter/4_0-start-newsletter_20140827 Apparently they now also do DRM free movies. They are also removing a bunch of games from their catalog and I'm not quite sure why (gossip more than welcome ). Among the victims are Jack Keane, Gothic 2&3, Penumbra, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Spellforce (looks like all of them), Desperados,...

Whether ME3s MP was good or not didn't interest me in the slightest. In my mind it was money they wasted on an unnecessary feature instead of using that money to improve what was basically a single player experience anyway (and there was certainly enough to improve about ME3 when compared to its predecessors. And I don't just mean the ending.) I'm still not sure what the point of ME3 style MP in DA:I is. Co-op, now that's something I could get behind (though then they'd probably force it upon us the way they did with Dead Space 3, which also was pretty uncool. Basically you can "get lost" if you don't have a fixed co-op partner as far as EA is concerned.)

Hmm, I'm not usually fond of running into "myself" when playing sequels, and given the amount of options there were in DA:O that's surely bound to lead to disappointment for quite a lot of people that will find out "their" Warden doesn't behave like "their" Warden *at all*.

Messed a bit with PoE, just walked around a bit and talked to some people, they sure got the vibe right. EXCITED! And of course I went through the settings and well, wouldn't you know: colorblind mode, and it was on by default. That is just friggin' awesome!

I tried it for a bit and found the story intriguing (though not necessarily all that original) but I thought the gunplay felt.. off. Can't put my finger on what I think is wrong with it I'll have to test some more. On another note I started and finished Resident Evil Revelations. It was a fun romp, and I liked the setting (abandoned ship, yay!). Some (well, most) of the bossfights were just simply annoying though and often disproportionally hard (especially the final boss, ugh). It's obviously a console port and it shows, though the only thing that really annoyed me was how the camera was locked in the horizontal plane except when you are aiming, it made looking around more annoying than necessary and they could easily have done away with that limitation on the PC.

The day Origin starts respecting my locale settings instead of just showing the main page in French each and every time is when I'll consider it less than a totally broken piece of crap that can only be saved by a total rewrite (because if they can't even get something that basic right then I have very little hope for the rest of the design). Oh, and while they're rewriting it they could decouple language from the rest of the locale settings, that'd be neat and save them this kind of embarassment (would also be rather a nice feature for people working/living abroad, I'm sure, as well as the people in this country speaking the 3rd official language, which Origin doesn't even allow them to pick) EDIT: just checked, apparently they now offer the latter as an option, yay. Hopefully the French issue goes away when I pick UK English... EDIT2: nope, still French, *lesigh*

Pyrodactyl (the developers of Unrest) posted a post-mortem on their (just released) Kickstarter project.

I would pay good money for Grand Theft Effect. Main character a sympathatic, but still criminal Krogan on hard times. Gets dupped into crimes. Breaking into flying cars, punching people, paying for Asari prostitutes. Bioware, take my money now. Genuine interest: I like the idea, NKKK, that would likely be a lot more fun than whatever Bio is actually cooking up. Matter of fact: However, no playable Elcor, no sale. Maybe a playable floating jellyfish could change your opinion? That said, my biggest issue with the Mako was the awful terrain on those randomly generated planets, not the thing itself (and the ME2 replacement was even worse,...)

Created a second profile in D:OS since my first is stuck (due to crashing on level up, sorta gamebreaking ). I'm more or less back where I left of now, still trying to figure out a way to solve the murder mystery without breaking any laws (might make you wonder why I picked a rogue and a wayfarer to start with )

Torturing someone wearing armor, that must be new (I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though and assume that's placeholder material) Tactical view looks annoying at best, I'd probably avoid it unless it turns out better than what's shown here (aka, closer to the DA:O view, wich already was too limited in how far you could move the camera away from your party) and just power through the fights, DA2 style.

There's always been a significant market for CRPGs, and since there's barely any competition, any decent one is garanteed to make a profit. And if the game is actually good, it will inevitably attracts players that aren't necessarily fans of the genre but will still want to try it out. It's actually a bit surprising CRPGs simply stopped being made. The more CRPG-y games of the last 5-10 years were commercial successes (Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age). There hasn't been a huge profile game bombing miserably to point at and say "see, this genre is dead!" either. Why no other big studio ever tried to get in the market? My assumption is that the big studios/publishers (or at least the suits running them) have caught a severe case of consoleitis. Making these kind of games (thinking cRPG and RTS mainly here, though I'm sure there are other genres) work well with a controller is something nobody has pulled of as of yet (and I frankly doubt it's even possible, but I guess that's another discussion), as such they didn't consider it a viable investment (aka "No controller, no care!"). After the resurgence of PC gaming (or rather, with people finally realizing PC gaming isn't dead, hasn't ever been anywhere near dead and isn't going to be dead anytime soon) they just forgot about all these genres they'd been neglecting all this time and just kept pushing out these console ports to PC gamers instead of playing to the strengths of the platform. Maybe all these successful Kickstarters will change their minds, we'll see. Though honestly, as long as the likes of Obsidian, inXile, Larian, etc keep cranking out great "niche" games for use to enjoy I could scarcely care less about what generic crap the big publishers keep shovelling out the door*. *I'm aware that's a generalization, of course it's not *all* generic crap.

Probably referring to the huge day one patch which included all the voice-overs, don't think there have been any really big patches since. Hope the large patch will include my KS pet, oh, and it'd be nice if they solved my crash issues, love the game, but crashing on level-up sort of makes it unplayable ( this only started happening after the one-but-last patch too )...

Well, since my CTD-after-combat-ends problem I went around finding other ways to level up. Turns out my game just goes wonky on level up. Leveled up on quest completion and the game world went black but the UI stuck around (first time the UI started blinking like a strobe...), couldn't do anything anymore though, except Alt+F4 out of the game. Looks like I'll be forced to wait for the next patch