Enoch

OK, I've played through the intro and bandity mine near where you start off. Made an Argonian named Climbs-Tall-Rocks, and I'll probably aim for my usual first-resort Elder Scrolls skillset (archery, stealth, alchemy, and assorted utility magics). A few n00b questions: Leveling up: Health and Magicka are self-explanatory, but what does increasing "Stamina" help me do? I noticed a little meter when I pushed RMB while holding my Bow-- is that it? I've gone with Health for my first level, as I don't plan on playing a pure Mage-- I figure I'll teach myself some magic later, when I find some better spells. Sound like a tenable plan? Do I have to find an item or set location to mix potions, or can I do it in normal inventory (and if so, how)?

Just had that pleasant experience of a random-play (which I don't do all that often) transition feeling absolutely perfect in an unexpected way. From: To:

I may start messing around with Skyrim this weekend. Is there any kind of consensus-best on the UI mods yet?

Man, Portal 2 has rather a lot of loading screens. And, considering that the game is being run off an SSD on a machine with a good deal more RAM than it needs, they take kind of a long time. I'm finding the game entertaining, but best in smallish doses. After an hour or two, I start to wish for something with a bit more depth than "solve puzzle in the one way possible, take 1 step forward, admire clever design, listen to humorous banter, repeat." That worked with the first game because the concepts were all new and because the game was short. And while they're nailing the atmosphere and writing and such, the new elements in the puzzles aren't quite enough to stop them from feeling a little monotonous.

I think you're selling some of the writing short. The plot-heavy stuff was indeed dire, but the character writing had its high points. Mordin and Legion were interestingly written. Garrus, Grunt, and Samara were largely cliches, but they were well executed cliches that fit well with the overall space-opera mileu. Even some of the more minor characters managed to be memorable, like the cops you meet on the citadel in the missions for Samara and Thane.

There's multiple versions of each ending, which vary based on your previous actions. Oh. <Googles spoilers> Little better. Opaque criteria for the player, with feedback communicated poorly. Making an effort to mold Jensen's internal justification for his decision with the degree of murderousness he exhibited along the way is a nice gloss to help reduce any contradictions that might arise, but it's still a gloss painted onto a "game is over, so here's a room with 4 buttons in it" structure. Which is lame. FWIW, I went with Darrow's ending. Sarif's lie simply didn't seem likely to work, given that he was still bucking the Illuminati. The "blow everything up" was tempting, but felt like a vote for the status quo in the world at-large, paired with an angry and bitter "I'm taking all you **** (and innocent victims) down with me." Which left either telling the truth, or perpetuating the cover-up as the price of entry for joining it. And while Jensen, as I saw him, wasn't angry and bitter enough to drag hundreds of others along with his suicide, I read him as just bitter and resentful enough to put everybody's ugly secrets out into the open. If that makes the world anti-augmentation, well, then there are some good reasons for it.

Well, she's probably one of the more expensive VAs for Bioware to use for a joinable-NPC-size role. But celebrity voice-casting is all the rage nowadays.

With DE:HR done, I'm trying to decide whether to jump into Portal 2 or Skyrim. (Arkham City is also on the "own, but haven't played" list, but I'm less enthused about that at the moment.) I downloaded Portal 2 the other day on the theory that it can be finished more quickly, and that the longer I wait on Skyrim, the more "fixed" it's going to get. And the 11GBs that it's occupying on my SSD make for a nice argument in favor of playing it now. But my mood is trending more explorey-RPG than it is jumpy-puzzley. Plus, I feel like I should at least play Skyrim relatively "clean" of mods for a while, if only for general gaming cultural awareness. I guess I'll try the start of Portal and see how it grabs me (and whether it gives me the same motion-sickness issues that the first one did).

I love that one, too. And you can repeat it as often as you want! Finished DE:HR. [some Spoilers Follow] The ending was pretty lame-- I don't really think a game should even get credit for having multiple endings if the operative choice is the last thing you do in the game, and all it controls is which endgame slideshow you see. On the other hand, as I said the other day, the two levels immediately prior to the arctic endgame bit were really fun. I got the "no alarms set off" achievement. Would've gotten the non-lethal one, too, if I hadn't deemed it appropriate to kill doodz in defense of my pilot. I was also letting the lead fly in the prologue bit, but I'm not sure whether those corpses count for purposes of the acheivement or not. In both cases, I deemed the expediency-driven-roleplaying (i.e., don't let my squeamishness get in the way of my ability to defend the lives of other people) more important than the metagaming for achievements.

The Renegade option I always wanted was an opportunity to call Tali out on her persistent damsel-in-distress habit. The game keeps telling me that she's a useful addition to the crew, but every time I actually see her on screen, she's gotten herself into great danger and needs Shep to pull her butt out of the fire. My 2 favorite dialogue choices in the ME games: First, in ME1, after you rescue Liara, Joker makes some crack, and Liara asks how he can make jokes about life-or-death experiences. The renegade option on the dialoge wheel is labeled "He's a jerk," and the dialogue is "Joker can be a real ass sometimes." Second, in ME2, when Ms Perky Secretary says, "Please, call me Kelly," dialogue-wheel option "No."

Well, I'm glad that I've kept going with my Human Revolution game. The Montreal bit was somewhat frustrating, but the Hengsha Port and the Singapore levels were the most fun I've had with the game.

I'm not sure, but think I just got away with being asleep in my office. I was slouched in my chair, butt forward enough that my head was held up by the top of the backrest, with my back to the (open) office door, and a wall-of-text pdf on my computer screen. Not the most attentive of postures for the workplace, but it's plausible that I could have been reading. Boss-of-my-boss comes by, sticks head in the door, and says "Have a good weekend, [Enoch]." I pulled out of my dozing state to say "Oh, goodnight [bob]" while turning slightly, just quickly enough that I could reasonably have been distracted and surprised, rather than actually asleep. (On the other hand, it could be that he realized what I was up to and decided to be nice, given that it's after 5 on a Friday.) Anyhow, the resulting adrenaline rush was served to rouse be thoroughly. I'm lucky that my screensaver hadn't engaged. I should set it to wait longer before switching on. Also, lunchtime enormo-burrito means high risk of afternoon food coma.

Still Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And, oddly enough, I feel like I'm starting to run out of steam at around the same point I did in the original. The introductory mission, the open hub-area in the downtown of an American city, the underground Secret Base, and the open hub-area in a Chinese city were mostly fun and held my interest pretty well, in both DE and its Prequel. Now that I'm at the Place Where People Speak French, I'm beginning to find the gameplay somewhat tedious. (And by "gameplay," I mean "stealth gameplay." If I was playing it as a shooter, I'd have lost interest about 3 hours in.) It doesn't help that the RPG progression has mostly plateaued (as I recall it doing in the first game, as well). I already have all of the upgrades that look useful to me-- any further progression will get me only marginal improvements in things I can already do, rather than unlock new and useful capacities. I want to finish it (which I never actually did with the original). But the next point of frustration I hit is going to make it rather tempting to jump over to one of the other games on my to-play list.

That's a pretty solid rant there, but could somebody explain why I'm expected to know who this woman is? (Yes, yes, LMGTFY and all, but I prefer to avoid googling the names of women I hear about on the internet while at work.)

OK, that's what I figured. Just wanted to be sure that I wasn't missing anything, like I did before I knew about those DE1 charge-bots.

I forgot that as well when I was playing which led to some confusion. Its because you're only going to use it once or twice during the game total and that's for mines only. It makes more sense as a "feature" when you think of the game as primarily designed for gamepads. Walking slowly is just what you get when you push the thumbstick part-way forward, rather than a separate mode or keybinding. Edit: Actually, I thought of another HR question: Is there a way to regain charge apart from inventory consumables? (I still remember the first time I played the original game and got all the way past the Hong Kong hub before I realized that I could use those orange repair bots.) Do the recharging upgrades let you regenerate more than your minimum 1-"battery", or do they just make the recovery of that minimum go faster?

Ah, thank you, gentlemen. I had forgotten that there was an option to walk slower, in addition to the 'crouch' toggle. I thought I was already going as slow as I possibly could, and I kept setting them off!

Deus Ex: HR. Fun so far. Although it is far better looking and sounding than the original, it is also clear that AI tech has made only the most marginal of advances. (Although, playing this immediately after The Witcher 2, the visuals do look rather weak-- especially the lip synching.) Question: Is there any way to deal with placed mines, apart from throwing something at them to set them off?

I can't find the button for that.

Okay, I either didn't notice it the first time, or issue 2 has already been resolved.

2 things I miss: the little drop down menu that let you quickly switch between sub-fora, and the link at the bottom of each page of results that let you quickly go back to the parent forum.

Far better in that regard. Simply including adult female characters who were neither crones nor potential objects of sexual conquest was an enormous positive step. Although in terms of thematic quest writing, I don't think that it quite matched up to the strongest parts of TW1. There was a group of quests in early Ch. 3 of the first game that, to me, remains the best part of the series. The vampire bordello, the werewolf bit, the cannibal in the Swamp, and the encounter with the talking ghoul all iterate on the core theme of "how does a monster-hunter decide what/who is or isn't a monster," all while the whole "Shani wants to settle down and get away from all this" plot thread poses the question of whether and why G would want to be a monster-hunter in the first place. (It may be coincidence that I was doing all these quests around the same time, but it was a happy coincidence.) There wasn't any part of TW2 where I was so consistently delighted by how simultaneous plot threads resolved. In place of that thematic content, the sequel instead offered a lot of politics, which is a much tougher sell in terms of getting emotional buy-in from the player. That said, TW2 avoided TW1's problem of opening with 10 or so hours of quite dull gameplay that lack much reason for the player to care about the gameworld or any of its characters. Based on that point alone, I feel comfortable in calling it a much better game.

I think you should try Iorveth path on the go, it gives a bit more satisfaction than Roche's one. But if you are bored with the game, skip it and do it when you will replay the game again from the start. I'm not bored with the game, but it looks like there will be some more new content if I wait a couple months. That strikes me as a good reason to play something else for a while. I have DE:HR, Portal 2, Arkham City, and Skyrim waiting for me at the moment. I'm thinking that I'll start with Deus Ex.

Just finished The Witcher 2. Did Roche's path. Haven't decided whether I'll jump into a replay now, or go to one of the other games on my wait-list instead.

The music is quite good. Try to at least get to the point where you're helping robot musicians recover their instruments. It's not too far in, and the payoff for that is worth it, IMO.