majestic

The original had more complex hit/miss mechanics and shots that kept going until they hit something or left the area, damaging anything they hit according to their damage roll and some things were easier to shoot through than others. XCOM essentially only allowed explosives to reliably remove cover and you couldn't even target anything non-hostile with normal weapons. I think it is somewhat sad that with so many teams trying to create spiritual successors to the original and each and every one comes up lacking in some way, even the official sequels, though Terror from the Deep was pretty much the same game without the difficulty bug and horrible, nightmarishly anthropomorphized lobsters.

Yeah, TToN finished the remaining stretch goals after the Kickstarter as well, maybe we'll get another one through PayPal. Still doubting that it'll reach the MCA goal.

The remake is a far superior version to the one that came out for the PS1, but the control scheme is the same. You can only walk forwards or backwards and turn very slowly, and you can't run and gun. The controller's gotten better though.

I "finished" (as much as you can, that is) Her Story. Actually it's fairly well done, but I have that song stuck in my head now. Will probably last a while. Damn. edit: Viva Seifert also reminds me a lot of Claudia Black.

Somehow I doubt that the Bard's Tale IV kickstarter will actually end up with 1.9 million in pledges. I hope I'm wrong because I really want that super-awesome MCA horror dungeon.

GSF balance is pretty good. Off here and there maybe, espeially for the Strike Fighter class which only has one viable ship, and that one is a supporter that intentionally sacrifices offensive power for buffs and repairs where the otherwise sub-par combat performance doesn't matter that much - but for a multiplayer PVP game with different classes of ships it works surprisingly well. That's probably because the last thing they have done was toning down the minelayer bomber a year ago, which it sorely needed. Can't break anything if you don't change anything. People still complain in droves about certain things but that is business as usual. Most can't cope with sucking, they sort of expect to be on somewhat equal footing with player who already played thousands of matches, but it really doesn't work that way. Nothing else in SW:TOR prepares you for GSF and the tutorial is somewhat lacking. The biggest problem it has right now is the terrifying skill delta between veterans, newbies and people who will never be good at a gaming mode that requires manual aiming, orientation in three dimensions and has no artifical lock to 40 actions per minute (also known as the 1.5 seconds global cooldown), but that's not something Bioware can fix, at least not without adding cross-server queues which the engine probably can't handle. The difference between players is so huge that a single ace or two can win the game for their team. I even had my very own hate thread growing out of a goodbye message of a player on my server on the German SW:TOR GSF board. It eventually turned into the second longest thread on the forum. /brag

She was also one of the few characters that were sufficiently fleshed out instead of gimmicky or downright silly like Sera or Iron Bull. I don't know what Bioware did with that game, I mean I still liked it enough to play for almost 150 hours but it feels as if it was developed by a team of interns with a little supervision by seniors. What made Iron Bull silly (besides his looks, or is that it?)? His motivations for joining made sense at least, or is it the romance (which I didn't see)? My favourite female character is probably Josephine, she just makes sense and though they didn't turn her into some sort of doll she doesn't look bad (not in the sense that Sera looks like Gollum...), though whether someone would consider her good looking is, of course, a matter of taste. I assumed Jaws of Hakkon was just more Hinterlands style crap, is it actually worth getting? Does it add some meaningful exposition? (which the main story is sorely lacking) Jaws of Hakkon doesn't add anything to the main storyline in any direct way, you just get exposition about the first Inquisition - the quest there starts this way, you decide to help someon look for the grave of the first Inquisitor. It's one of the better areas in the game and quite long too, and also pretty, uhm, challenging at times, compared to the rest of the game. I loved the atmosphere and the ruins, and no, it doesn't really compare to the Hinterlands. I didn't regret spending the money on it, but I also sort of liked the base game except for a few things. Iron Bull was too much of a wannabe badass. Always boasting about screwing everything under the sun and the one time it comes down to a hard decision (his personal quest, essentially) you get to make the decision for him. The romance was worth a laugh at least, but the rest felt rather like Bioware tried to force a badass into the game with a liberal helping of telling instead of showing, not to mention that cutscene where you whack him as training while somehow not managing to miss a single cliché - and not in their usual good way.

She was also one of the few characters that were sufficiently fleshed out instead of gimmicky or downright silly like Sera or Iron Bull. I don't know what Bioware did with that game, I mean I still liked it enough to play for almost 150 hours but it feels as if it was developed by a team of interns with a little supervision by seniors. Animations, character design, parts of the writing, quests, none of that were really up to par, not even when compared to DA2, of all things. It's baffling, and also a little annoying because the potential was there. It can be seen in Jaws of Hakkon, for instance. How typically EA to sell the best content as DLC. Javik anyone? Pfff.

Are you comparing SW:TOR to other MMOs or making a comparison to single player RPGs, especially the KOTORs? Because even WoW, which is arguably the "best" theme park MMO around is pretty bland compared to them. For an MMORPG, SW:TOR is pretty good and I think GSF is something that is still unique to MMORPGs (obviously not talking about World of Warplanes here). It's too bad the genres didn't mesh so well and GSF became a somewhat niche activity in SW:TOR. I enjoyed teasing (and quite literally obliterating the hell out of) those MMORGP PVP heroes who thought they had skill. As if moving in a 2D plane with abilities that auto-aim takes skill.

Theme park MMOs without new content die pretty quickly so it's not much of a surprise that SWTOR still gets additional content. The new expansion seems to take advantage of not being strictly bound by continuity any more.

I guess they added the unlocking trough game completion part after realizing that unlocking them through doing quests in the random insanity of the game is too much of a chore, both of which being decisions I personally don't mind but I can completely understand why you would be bothered with them. I haven't unlocked that many ships yet because of that. I was kind of hoping for the quests to show up but getting stronghold/homeworld sectors is rare enough, and then finding that one system to start? Meh.

I just had one of the easiest games of FTL ever. Started with the Type A Stealth Cruiser and figured I'd be in for a rough ride, but the RNG gods were benevolent this time. Ended up with a Burst Laser Mk. II, the Dual Laser it starts with and a Glaive Beam - and I managed to find a Weapon Pre-Igniter in the second sector which made not getting shields until later on manageable. Nothing except the Flagship survives an opening salvo of five laser blasts and the Glaive, or if it does it's in no condition to fight back. The only downside is that with the cloaking and easy killing my crew piloting and engine crew had almost no level ups, but who cares. Actually managed to survive the first two Flagship phases without hull damage. The third phase was easy as well but they did manage to fire a hole or two into my ship. Bloody supercharged massive attack is on less of a cooldown than the cloak. Of course that luck didn't last and the next game actually killed me off in the first 10 minutes. A failed rescue mission and then a large boarding party out of a refueling station, no, that didn't end so well. Easily the best 4€ I spent on a game in a long while. Yay GOG sales.

There are a terrifying amount of golfers who die due to cardiac arrest each year. It's not just boring, it is dangerously boring.

I guess this thread really just confirms it. Luzianus and MILF Lover are two distinct aspects of the same gestalt. That's some mighty fine logic here, hard to find any arguments.

Tried Xenonauts today after getting a free copy from GOG for buying enough of their summer sale stuff. Haven't played enough to really form some sort of fair judgement but so far it seems like straight up UFO: Enemy Unknown clone with improved interception mechanics and different graphics. I hope it'll give me a reason to continue to play it at some point, rather than starting another game of the ancient ones.

And they are secretly represented by Wael.

It's kind of like that 4% chance that your weapon jams. It seems to happen every other shot until you modify the weapon and the problem goes away. WL2 really seems to have a random number generator specifically built to torture the player, or the interface lies in your face and every fail chance is multiplied by 10 whenever it is below 10%.

Everything planned for KOTOR 3 more or less ended up crammed into the SW:TOR storyline. From the fate of Revan and the Exile, the death (or not) of the true Sith Emperor and the fall of the Empire by the looks of the new expansion. Even Kreia gets a horribly miswritten and mutilated cameo. That particular ship sailed a long, long time ago. If I might be so bold, creating a SW:TOR account and dropping 5$ into the cash shop generates an account functional enough to play the game for the eight class stories and while they vary in quality somewhat there are much worse deals out there as long as one accepts that it is an MMORPG with all the downsides that comes with, like not having any quest variety outside of the class quests, a lot of "fetch me that" and "go kill these" filler and... maybe worst of all, other people. Some of the group content is also quite awesome.

And for the same problems, same "solutions", it seems. They are going to start selling zero-to-hero level boosts. Apparently, for the expansion they are making it a single player-centric MMO-thing of sorts. Not that I'm complaining, mind. I never joined any guilds and pugged group content and PVP all day every day. Still, the lack of cross-faction play is disappointing given the direction they are going in with the story. I don't mind either even though I did do operations in the past. This is probably what Mythic Bioware should have done right from the beginning. It's hard, if not impossible, to out-theme-park WoW, so not even trying seems like a good idea, although some sort of treadmill has to come - it's too late to do anything else at this point. It's also really predictable. EA is heavily banking on The Force Awakens to draw in new subscribers, so let's see them try to keep them without some incentive. Hrm.

Proper dice are a wonderful thing, they can be truly marvelous with a wonderful look and feel, and you'll be using them quite a lot so it's a good thing to have an upgrade. Might not be flashy but I'm hoping that the dice stretch goal will be reached, but that just might be the p&p dice fan talking.

Finished binge watching seasons one and two of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I ignored it when it initially came out because I kept hearing that it's boring and of poor quality, and while the production and special effects are sometimes a bit on the bad side (especially noticable in the beginning where you can literally see which episodes the entire show's budget went into) I'm not sure what people usually watch when they think this is boring. It was easily more entertaining than the last two seasons of GoT, and the plot is certainly no less contrived or silly than that of other, similar shows.

I'll take that back...

Just to clear up for some people who might be interested what AES256 is and why this is more than unlikely. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619 There is a reason why goverments and in particular intelligence agencies are not very happy with privat persons using encryption. There are a number of attacks that can break any encryption, but they have a few things in common, mostly requiring hardware access at encryption or decryption time - a very interesting one analyzes the sounds made by the CPU during key generation and encryption*, but if that is the case and such an attack was used to break the encrypted files than the fault cannot lie with Snowden at all and would have happened anyway. *Which means, whenever you encrypt something, listen to heavy metal amped to max for increased security. So yeah, that story has a real whiff of eau de merde and propagated by someone who cleared watched too much NCIS. 'Twas probably a russian and a chinese guy hacking at the same keyboard at the same time easily breaking into heavily encrypted files. Like on TV.

To be honest it's hard to say. I've read the books before they were made into GoT (except A Dance With Dragons obviously) so I was more affected by book spoilers in the show, or what I believe really are spoilers and not just detours or omissions made in the adaptations. Still struggling with the decision of whether I should even watch season six next near or not (season 5 also had a drop in quality and tension, but so did the book). Back to the question at hand the entire scene was handled a little differently in A Dance With Dragons and was a little bit more of a surprise, as much as such things can be a surprise after the first four books (or four seasons). The show telegraphed a little too much, I suppose to justify rushing through everything a sufficiently cliffhangerish episode ten.

Reaction videos on YouTube are again epic though.