majestic

You can safely sell any Oddities that don't have a "use" option, and even those with one in case they stick around after being used. There's also a truckload of healing items that restore your pools, uhm, make use of them. Actually that's probably the biggest thing to keep in mind - don't hoard consumables. Use them. I hoarded them as I always do in RPGs and it was mostly for naught. There really never comes that one time where being at the cypher limit with everyone pays off.

Well, now we know where luzi's gotten to. edit: Spoilered the videos to make the post more readable.

The original game was completely unplayable with a mouse, how does that work? Like Freelancer or more like Privateer 2 which officially supported mouse play but was nigh unplayable* with it? * Not that Privateer: The Darkening was ever "playable" with even the best input hardware. That game's a mess.

Whether you are convinced by the marketing is a wholly different matter. Looks to me that, for the first time ever, you aren't, and it shows. The game may be bad alright (mediocre is the vibe I've been getting, personally), but it won't be as bad as the collective circle-jerk makes it out to be, that's simply not possible. It's rather amusing to watch, really. It's as if all these people suddenly forgot the frequently cringe-worthy dialogue of previous ME titles, the Shepard Rape Face meme and the fact that he literally limps his way through the whole of ME2 -- not to mention the really bad bugs and ****ty consolified UI that plagued previous installments. If I didn't know how the bandwagon mentality works, I'd be tempted to think that it's a directed thing. But hey, I'm not here to piss in your corn flakes. You want to hate on a game you haven't even played? Have at it. This thread made me pre-order ME:A two days ago. There's a certain fun irony in this board in particular complaining about the shortcomings of ME:A's animations and graphics. What happened to "graphics don't make a game" mindset that we, umh, superior serious gamers should have? Anyways, I'm back to Call of Duty. Errrr. :look:

I suppose someone's ripping him off, the channel sure doesn't look official (and it doesn't have ads).

Just finished Death Bed The Bed That Eats, a horror flick from '77. It's... about a bed eating people. If you're wondering if the film is as awesome as the premise sounds then here's a spoiler:

Yeah, that was pretty neat. Except I accidentially spoilered myself so I already knew going into the scene...

Finally caught up with Agents of SHIELD. Funny how these things go. Before the start of season 4 I had severe misgivings about Ghost Rider being a part of the season, and now I ended up kind of disliking the LMD storyline more than the Rider one.

Volo has been stalwartly defending Neverwinter Night's terrible OC ever since it came out. I'm sure he's just being contrarian for sake of it. So he's not broken, more like working as intended.

Mass Effect 2's Insanity mode was pretty tedious. Oh, and yeah, great difficulty concept Bioware. Boss fights? Laughable. Collectors? Haha. Preatorians? Pssh... 50 armored Husks converging on your position and you just messed up your only team fire aoe ability? Yeah, bring me the brown pants.

I loved it. The premise is silly, but its so gorgeous and I don't need my space opera to be award worthy. I don't know. While I agree that entertainment doesn't need to be award-worthy (far from it, actually) I'm rapidly approaching a point where gorgeous visuals can no longer polish a turd, for both movies and games. Even low budget schlock like Iron Sky looks visually impressive these days (not that I don't like low budged schlock, I loved every moment of Iron Sky). Point in case, well, Avatar. When it came out I went to an IMAX cinema and the movie gave me vertigo in certain scenes (I hate heights, really, standing on a chair is enough to make me queasy) and I thorogouly enjoyed the three hours of special effects porn. I caught a rerun on TV recently and... boy is that one dumb film that has loads of distracting obvious CGI stuff, most prominent obviously being Saldana's blue space elf brigade. On the flipside Volo's much disliked Avengers (the first one, that is) is almost as dumb in its story premise but at least it has a roster of decent actors and some really funny dialogue. Jupiter Ascending has Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum and a Sean Bean character that actually survives. That's just wrong.

He's just a member of the master race and bothered by peasant imperfections. Understandable, if a bit extreme in his outlook.

No. I mean, yes, they do, but it's nothing like the ice skating madness of the first playable version.

Well nobody's perfect.

I'm pretty sure Unity has a host of problems related to it working on virtually any platform you can think of, from a toaster oven to high end gaming PCs, but terrible pathfinding was always a feature of all the Infinity Engine games. TTON wouldn't be a worthy spiritual successor with good pathfinding so inXile probably broke it on purpose.

It also shows - again, much like Pillars of Eternity did - the problems with stretch goals on crowd funding platforms. I mean those that affect the game and its content directly, like new cities and different gameplay mechanics, not stuff like more localizations. First of all one ends up modularizing the game world and mechanics right from the start and perhaps worse it puts the developers in a bind. What if something ends up not working at all? Do you leave it in the game or are you going to break your promise to the people who actually gave you their money maybe specifically to make these stretch goals happen? Are you going to half ass them if you run out of money or the game's direction changed too much? Are you putting in Cad Nua knowing it doesn't really work that well and knowing the mechanics are strange (oh hello "time" passing on quest updates) and that the whole stronghold concept feels tacked onto the game afterwards? Do you remove numenera crafting? Are you putting in Twin Elms or cutting the extra oasis city rather than having it underdeveloped and boring? Tough choices I guess. Wouldn't want to make them.

I finally finished the game. Technical issues like the path finding and weird reponse times aside I think inXile tried too hard and ended up "Michael Bay'ing" the game. Where Michael Bay movies are essentially a string of scenes happening for the sake of showing off flashy explosions, great special effects and action shots with barely a coherent plot to connect them TTON is a string of dialogues happening for the sake of having lots of - admittedly well written and interesting - text in the game. So, so, so much of it is simply there to be there, not because it furthers the player's uncovering of what is happening. In PS:T, for all its faults and verbosity at times, you're uncovering what is going on, step by step. There is focus and coherence, especially during the first two thirds of the game. Sure there are sidequests that are completely unrelated and far too many of them are fed ex quests, but compare one of the core dialogue mechanic for both games: In PS:T, remembering tells you more of what is happening around you. It furthers your knowledge of past incarnations or helps to understand the connection TNO and his companions share. It is part of uncovering the mystery of what is happening. TTON, with a rather similar premise the same mechanic uncovers bits and pieces of your past, but almost none of that has anything to do with uncovering what is going on. A missable side quest has more connection to the plot than remembering... anything. In PS:T I ended up talking to everything and everyone because I wanted to know more. I did the same in TTON hoping it do the same but for the most part it just didn't. There are 1.2 million words of set up in TTON and preciously little payoff. All things aside, I still enjoyed the game and reading the epilogue text about the companions sometimes put a smile on my face or made me sad, and that speaks to the written word's strength in the game, because the companions are a bit underdeveloped.

Oh nice, hello Immortal Edition upgrade.

Bonus points: Get Feargus Urquhart right. Both the spelling and the pronunciation.

No Man's Sky never looked bad or boring in their videos. The final product was both. Regardless, I'd say those exo-vehicles are a step in the right direction, assuming its not a total pain to get them. Not that they would have been necessary if we could just, well, fly below the enforced minimum altitude like shown in past trailers. *cough*

Rule of thumb: If you can read the parameters in the URL it's GET.

Great, seeing Timo Tolkki in that video is sure as hell going to make me wander down the nostalgia lane tonight. Even had to look twice considering he looks a bit like Meat Loaf these days.

Considering that sandboxy open world garbage is all the rage right now I find that highly... unlikely. It's just the way the big publishers are making their games these days. Analyze what sold well in the past years, create lists of buzz words describing these really successful (in terms of sales) games, pick the 10 highest matches, look which one of your studios fits the description most and have them produce a game with some hefty corporate interference. And it is only going to become worse with the proliferation of fast and easy "big data" analysis tools.

Really? If anything that makes me save scum even more because I need to get through every check with two different outcomes to see when exactly failure is the better option, at least when it comes to items and, ridiculously enough, stat increases. Succeeding gives you 50 shins and failing a permanent +1 to Quick Fingers? Riiiight. No, not gonna scum that. No way.

They actually do. It just doesn't work most of the time because not enough players are in the queue and the matchmaker eventually gives up and starts the game. It worked (at least on my server, which was Vanjervalis Chain) back when GSF first launched and for a week after the introduction of the galactic conquest event with the special GSF objectives. It still is an 3D arcade third person shooter in a game where the average player is a headless chicken unable to navigate a 2D space so they don't stand in the fire. To be honest I'm surprised GSF works as well as it does. It also probably is the most balanced part of the game, mostly because there hasn't been any fiddling with it in three years or so.