Enoch

The Rams are going to beat them to it.

Well, this has gone predictably. And sadly. While I appreciate Al2O3's efforts to fight the usual suspects turning this subforum into a ridiculous social-reactionary echo chamber, it's probably best to leave this to the Dragon at this point. They're taking out the trash in anticipation of Eternity's release-- can't have all the new folks who are likely to start stopping by here thinking that Obsidian is happy with this kind of silly advocacy going on here.

Got the call around lunchtime Wednesday to pick up the baby, as his 102 F butt was no longer welcome in his daycare class. Been home managing that ever since. He's showing signs of improving today, but these things are always worst in the evenings, so we'll see what that brings. We're likely cancelling our planned trip to visit my family over the long weekend. That is something of a relief, but I'm also getting a little pre-emptively stir-crazy, looking at the prospect of spending all of Thurs-Mon in the house doing not much, penned in by frigid weather and a recovering youngin'.

Tough to say. I wouldn't characterize anything I've seen so much as "horror" as I would "encounters with the unexplained and unexplainable." The objective isn't so much to scare the player as it is to lightly describe what makes your character/crew get antsy (i.e., gain points on the "terror" meter). And, you know, you can smuggle souls and resort to cannibalism if your supplies run low at sea, which I guess is somewhat terrifying in concept, but CRPGs have deadened my revulsion to in-game cannibalism by sheer repetition. And, yeah, the combat is dead simple. I have most fun when I don't prepare for fights and instead try to avoid anything that looks scary. Makes the voyages a little more tense. Bats are good to kill because they're weak and you'll either get a unit of supplies with a small terror cost or a small Terror reduction. The weakest of the pirate ships is also easy pickings, and usually produces a useful random find. Everything else gets avoided, which is pretty easy to do if you're willing to take on the additional Terror of having the light off for a bit. I suspect that my fascination will fade a bit after I've been to all the available ports and completed a few of the longer-developing quests-- it's the sense that absolutely anything could be out there that keeps me thinking about the game when I'm not playing it. The mechanics of the trading, combat, and quest design probably aren't enough to keep me re-playing the game. But for a sub-$20-new small-studio game, that kind of long-lasting appeal isn't necessary for me to think of it as a worthwhile purchase.

I mentioned this on the "What are you playing" thread, but I think it deserves its own space. I've been playing this with every free moment I can grab since Saturday (when it came off Early Access), and it is really cool. Plus, it's right up the alley of folks who enjoy exploration, moody atmosphere, and weird/interesting writing in games (which, I've gathered, tend to be shared interests of many folks here). I've seen it described as a Roguelike. It really isn't, in my estimation. Sure, it defaults to permadeath-on, and large parts of the map re-shuffle with each new game, but so far it seems to lack the swingy "Haha, UR DED despite doing nothing particularly wrong" element that defines the Roguelike experience to me. Beyond the first few "figuring stuff out" hours, when you die in this game, it's probably because you attempted something stupidly risky-- tried to attack a large and unfamiliar zee creature; set out for a distant location with insufficient fuel/supplies; picked a chancy dialogue option while in a vulnerable situation; double-crossed some smugglers/Mongols/devils; etc. I'd call it an exploration game with light RPG, action, and trading elements and very heavy narrative elements, in a Victorian Lovecraftian nautical setting. The narrative elements take the form of stories associated with different ports, with officers on your ship, with quest-givers, etc., that you uncover as you explore and complete objectives. And it is written in lovely understated prose, letting the reader's imagination finish painting the picture of all the very weird characters and locations you run into. It's not for everybody, in that you do a lot of reading, and the sailing about goes rather slowly. I find the slow revelation compelling when pushing into the unknown, but if you're shuttling back and forth between London and other ports you've already uncovered, it can get a bit tedious. The ship-upgrading could use more serious design attention. The trading aspect is rather under-developed-- this isn't a game where comparing commodity prices and figuring out trade routes is a significant part of what you're doing. There are only a couple reliable money-making activities right now, apart from completing quests, and repeating those can get dull. So, anybody else been zailing through the 'Neath lately? Any favorite stories you've found that others should seek out? Visage and Nuncio have been my favorite ports-of-call so far.

Sunless Sea. I can see how, after you've been through it a few times, it could get tedious and a bit mechanical. But, man, the initial discovery phase is a fascinating experience.

Seems like it would dramatically weaken the Fighter class, though, given that much of what they have going for them is "lots of engagement." Is an effective Fighter going to be contingent on pumping Res so that he/she can maintain battlefield control?

Interrupts ending engagement sounds like a fairly major change.

Dragon Age: Origins just crashed on me... about 80% of the way through the final battle.

A few jokes go a long way, I guess. And it probably helps that the Maze wasn't on the critical-path like the Fell Wood was. That said, like many others, I totally missed Nordom on my first run through Torment. Really silly decision to place one of only 7 joinable NPCs (and one with a pretty big-name voice artist, no less) in a wholly optional randomly generated maze with a hidden entrance.

Well fortunately none of that is tied to being a Rogue. They just get level one bonuses for it. I wanted one for their class mechanics. The problem being that most of the joinable NPCs are probably going to have at least a couple level-up decisions in the books before we get the chance to tinker with them. Since none of them seem likely to come with built-in Stealth/Mechanics investment, it looks like our options are going to be either to build a PC with roguey skills (whether an actual Rogue or not), use the adventurers' hall to make the same (and lose the narrative appeal of having a compantion with lines), or wait until we have controlled the jNPCs long enough to get one of them caught up to the level of skill checks that we're encountering. (Or stumble into a lot of traps, I guess.)

If you map the Cube it becomes infinitely easier, if I remember correctly the hard difficulty version in which you acquire Nordom and face the Wizard is set in an 8 by 8 cube. The loot and experience from clearing out these rooms is tremendous, and quite easily gained for a reasonably melee focused Nameless One. If you map the Cube, know exactly what to look for, and know to avoid confronting the Wizard until after you've recruited Nordom. You could accidentally lock yourself out of much of N's development in dialogue if you stumble into the Wizard lair without him. I always just ran by the majority of the Constructs.

But then you couldn't use the results of the game to build narratives like "they wanted it more" or "this validates Brady as teh best evar"! The sports-media world would collapse!

Hard to be sure without being in your kichen, but couldn't you simply combine the two and get something pretty close to a non-veggie chili?

Yeah, the wife and I were actually lucky/wise enough to buy our first (and, so far, only) house in the midst of the '08 craziness. We went under contract in September 2008, just days before Lehman Bros collapsed. We'd been looking around for a few months, and it was interesting to see the mortgage company that had given us a pre-approval periodically calling us back for additional supporting information every few weeks as their policies changed. Single-family homes in good school districts and within walking distance to a DC Metro station are never cheap, by the standards of most of the rest of the country, but we probably got a better deal than we would have at any point +/- 5 years from then. A re-fi a couple years ago confirmed that appreciation had us sitting on more equity than we had any right to hope for.

Well, really, what is Brady going to do with a Chevy pickup, anyway? "Hey, dude-with-$100MM-in-the-bank, don't you want to drive the same truck that your gardener does?" (His best move is probably to donate it to his favorite charity. If you give it to an individual, you still have to pay the tax on its value as income.)

That's a bit too deep for me. I think Carroll was being honest in saying that the personnel on the field were important in his consideration. Seattle put 3-wide personnel out there, but the Pats responded with their Goal-line group (i.e., lots of big guys). They were probably expecting NE to use a time-out to preserve time for a potential retaliation drive, but, for whatever reason, Belichick let the clock run down. Running out of 3-wide into a Goal-line D is a poor bet, even if you only have to gain 1 yard, and Carroll didn't want to burn his last timeout on a personnel change, so they called what they thought was their most reliable pass play. (Turns out it wasn't. Or, if it was, then the coaching staff did some terrible play-design work.) The common thread with SF two years ago is getting overly reactive-- letting the opposing defense's apparent weaknesses determine your playcall, rather than being courageous enough to pit your strength against theirs.

Possible, sure, but doing all that hurrying has risks, too. (What do you do if you lose 3 yards on the 3rd-down run?) Assuming 3 shots from the 1, it's not necessarily a dumb move to try a pass on one of them. And 2nd down is the best time to do so-- you can still use the TO if something goes wrong, like a sack or a reception tackled short of the goal. The problem to me is calling a pass over the middle on a timing route to their #4 WR. They run a playaction bootleg there, and Wilson probably either walks in or throws to a guy as open as Baldwin was for his TD earlier. And, if not, he makes an easy throw away into the stands, and they re-set for 3rd down. Anyhow, Congratulations to the Pats. Bill Belichick is the man.

Well, in their defense, there was only 0:26 left in the game, and Seattle only had 1 timeout left (after wasting 2 earlier in the drive). One of either the 2nd- or 3rd-down plays probably has to be a pass. What I don't get is why that particular pass play, over the middle where a lot of things (a DB getting a phenomenal jump on the ball, a lineman getting a hand on it, the receiver bobbling the catch, etc.) can go wrong. Why throw a route requiring precise timing in the most critical situation to a guy with 18 career receptions? They tried to run a quasi-legal pick play, but the inside WR (Kearse, I think) was effectively jammed at the line and couldn't get to where he could interfere with Butler charging to the ball. Where was the playaction fake or the rollout to threaten a Wilson run?

The best part of a DA:O playthrough.

One ice cube (of the size produced by a basic plastic ice cube tray), and enough Rittenhouse Rye to just barely cover it in one of my fancy crystal Old Fashioned glasses. (x3) It really is a damned fine sippin' whiskey, for less than $25/750mL (in my particular jurisdiction, anyway).

Re-connected with my NJ roots tonight and cooked some Italian sausage with onions and peppers. (Locally known as simply "sausage and peppers.")

Finished DA:O: Leliana's Song the other night. Kinda dull. Samey fights, not much in the way of character writing, and the only area not re-used from the base game was a boring ol' canyon. Also had a weird issue with the cutscenes at the very end starting over after they finished. If it hadn't come with the superduper edition (which I bought on sale, primarily for Awakenings), I'd be peeved at having purchased it. I guess now it's time to plod through the final boss sequence for the base game. I recall this being rather tedious, so we'll see how it goes. Still, finally getting the opportunity to tell Morrigan to get lost should be fun.

The ol' water heater started leaking last weekend, reminding me yet again that it's overdue for replacement. It was dripping very slowly around the pressure relief valve, which had a fair amount of visible corrosion. The unit itself was 18 years old, which is a fair bit beyond the estimated lifespan of such things. I got a local company to come replace it yesterday. I'm not daring enough to attempt this kind of thing myself-- I'm generally OK with simple plumbing stuff, but I get nervous when gas lines are involved. Plus, it's a 75-gallon unit, so just moving it is a 2-man job. So we got some recommendations from the neighborhood email list and picked a local company. I took the day off work and stayed home with the baby to supervise. As I think I've mentioned here previously, the little guy's daycare is in the building where I work. That's fantastically convenient on most days, but it means that, if I'm not going into the office, I have to either be watching him or find somebody else to do so. Also, my employer's leave policies are generally friendlier than my wife's, so a father-son play-day made sense. The youngin' is now 11 months old, by the way. He remains a bit behind on the gross-motor-skills stuff, and is only barely crawling. He can transition from sitting to a crawling position and back again, but, at present, he hasn't quite mastered shifting his weight and moving each knee independently as one does when crawling-- he just barely did it today for a step or two. Instead, for the most part, he moves like a Knight. From his typical sitting position, he goes sideways and a little forward to all-fours, then pushes backwards while pivoting over the other knee and gets back into a sitting position. It looks to me rather like a Knight using 2 moves to move 2 spaces forward, except that he ends up facing in a direction opposite to the one in which he started.

What? The absolute best part of roasting a whole chicken is tossing the liver in a ramekin with a little oil, salt, and pepper (and, if you're feeling fancy, a tiny splash of sherry vinegar) to cook for the first 10 minutes you've got the bird in the oven, then eating all of it yourself on ritz crackers as an appetizer while still standing in the kitchen! (I do literally this, like, every other weekend. Except when they screw me over by not having a liver among the extra parts that come in the chicken.) I've never figured out anything decent to do with the heart or gizzard, though.