Enoch

Damn, this game looks so right up my alley... Any chance that the recent series of Playstation-related problems has caused a major price drop? We do now have a 2nd HDTV and a couch in the basement, so a console system wouldn't be as unworkable for our household as it has been. (I often play games when my wife is watching TV that I don't like, so a system that used the only TV was pretty much a non-starter.)

Check the first post in the official thread for The Witcher 2 over at neogaf. They have many different The Witcher savegames you can download and import to The Witcher 2. Also, I just finished the first game (Enhanced Edition, if that matters), and made exactly the decisions you mention. PM me if you'd like me to email the save to you.

It probably helped me that I wasn't still in a combat mindset. After killing those last two White Legs, I had detoured to explore the cliff's edge to the right before I crossed the bridge.

I didn't have trouble with meeting the first NPC, but I see how you could if you weren't looking in the right direction. I caught just enough of the animation of the dude who had been shooting at me getting whacked from behind to conclude that the guy standing alone up there may not be my enemy. (One thing about Follows-Chalk: When he's following you, his dialogue options don't seem to have an "end conversation" choice that isn't "Wait here." You have to tell him to wait, and then use the Companion Wheel to get him to follow again.)

I played for a couple hours, but after some indecisiveness over what I would bring (FYI, the weight limit is 75, but can be raised to 100 if you pass some dialogue checks with the characters you meet in the cave) I've only gotten so far that I've met Graham and heard his story. I'm looking forward to exploring the Narrows, because I've actually done that walk IRL. (I've been to other parts of Zion, too, but that was about 18 years ago and the Narrows is the part I remember best. Something about a rather long hike through a narrow canyon in knee-to-waist-high water with many signs relaying flash flood warnings tends to stick in the mind.) The pair of Fallout 1-2 references you get from talking to the other caravan guards before departing both had me laughing.

Well, it's 7:21AM Bethesda time right now, but Obsidian and Steam are both on the West Coast, where it's only 4:21. I don't know what Steam's general practices are, but it wouldn't surprise me if they only bother to queue up major titles with a lot of pre-orders for a midnight release, while more minor titles like DLC require somebody coming into the office to flip a switch. It'd be nice if I could get the download started before I left for work, but it probably wouldn't save me much time in the long run. Hopefully, I can download and install it while I make dinner tonight.

Huh. IIRC, some ammo rounds and some crafting components have weight listed in the hundredths of lbs. So you're saying that Lead has weight, but it's lighter than that?

I'll continue my trend of saying "No" in the bluntest way possible to any crewmate who expresses an interest. My two favorite dialogue-wheel choices in the ME story so far: 1) ME1, Liara asks how Joker can make jokes about life-or-death situations. Wheel option: "He's a jerk." 2) ME2, Kelly says "Please, call me Kelly." Wheel option: "No."

I'll be using a 27th-level character, but my game is modded to raise the XP thresholds for leveling by 40%. So I've explored the majority of the map, recruited all the companions, done almost all the NCR sidequests, and completed Dead Money but I haven't progressed the main plot past the 'dealing with Benny' phase. Haven't met the Boomers, and I've met the Khans and BoS, but haven't done much in their quest-line. Maxed Guns, Speech, Lockpick, Repair, near-max Sneak and Science, and 75 or so in Medicine. What I bring will depend on what exactly the weight limit is. The first 20 lbs. will probably be a Sniper Rifle, This Machine, and a big pile of .308. The rest is TBD. (Sidenote: given that ammo components have no weight and that hardcore-mode ammo does, if the weight limit is problematic, I'm thinking that we could game the cap a bit by bringing our ammo disassembled and re-packing it at the first ammo bench we find. It always makes me laugh when I see that, of all things, the inventory item described only as "Lead" is weightless.)

I haven't been watching the series, but I'm guessing that you're talking about Varys (the eunuch spymaster) and Lord "Littlefinger" Baelish (the delightfully manipulative Treasurer). I'm going to wait for the series on DVD-- I'd rather read book 5 with my internal visualizations of the characters intact. The Tournament in the first book (which is what I assume the jousting bit was about) is one of my favorite parts. It's narrated from Sansa's point of view, and her naive impression of the grandeur of the spectacle is a great juxtaposition with the political subtext of everything that's going on.

I'll buy it tomorrow, but I don't know how much time I'll get to play before the weekend. Will post any impressions.

Granted, were I approaching the game based wholly on what I expected from an "old school" RPG, I'd probably be a good deal happier with the game. (Although, in that context, the defined protagonist probably bother me more than it does today.) But my expectations have changed to a certain degree over the last dozen years. Partly because I no longer have the time to happily grind on for marginal stat/loot benefits with little narrative incentive, and partly because in the intervening years I've seen something of games that offer more character, narrative, and thematic elements to draw and hold my interest. The Witcher has the skeleton of something interesting in it, and at least some of the writers and quest designers were able to craft some memorable experiences. Hopefully the sequel can flesh it out in a more compelling fashion than the first one did. I'll wait and see.

So, I've actually finished the first game. Short version: There are some things in there that are worth seeing, but not nearly enough that I would recommend slogging through the whole game to see them. Long version: The first time I played the game, I had abandoned it early in Chapter 2. The game just felt pointless-- I was playing one **** in a world of ****, none of whom gave me a reason to care what happened to them. The game presented me with a compelling (if hackneyed) mystery at the outset: Who am I, why am I presumed dead, and where have I been for the last 5 years? And then it proceeded to ignore that mystery entirely, instead assuming that I would care that some dudes I just met had some stuff stolen. The gameplay was quite dull, and the rather misogynist indulgent-sexual-fantasy elements in the writing made confident that I wasn't missing anything by walking away. Anyhow, at the urging of a friend, I picked the game back up again a month or so ago. And it did get better. The highpoint of the game-- the bits that made me feel like I hadn't entirely wasted my time-- were the Chapter 3 quests that really get into questioning why I was doing what I was doing. The confluence of the vampire whorehouse, the cannibal hermit, the talking Ghoul, and the whole werewolf arc made for a nice exploration of the "I am a Witcher, and Witchers kill Monsters, but who gets to decide what is or isn't a Monster, anyway?" theme. And the "woah, Shani's getting all clingy" subplot actually brought up the "Why am I doing all this stuff, anyway?" question in an interesting way. But this stuff comes about 20 hours too late, and the remainder of the game from Chapter 3 on didn't really live up to that standard. Sure, later sidequests presented some dilemmas, but they were nearly all of the type where there was one clearly-better "make everybody happy" option (Do what the Lady of the Lake says; cure Adda rather than kill her). And the main plot choice was easy to me, as neither side ever gave me any reason why I should put my neck on the line to help them. The game never really did anything that made me question the choice to go Neutral after I made it. (I suppose it made the fighting in Old Vizima more difficult, but the only fights that presented any challenge at all after Chapter 2 were the gimmick encounters like the Kikkimore Queen.) And, as I said, the gameplay is dull. The "combat as rhythm game" model is not one to emulate in making a single-character RPG. It's neither tactically interesting, nor action-game challenging. (Maybe the tactical elements shine a bit more if you use more Bombs and Signs that aren't Aard or Igni. But the game never gives you reason to do so, introducing those elements late enough that you've already developed tactics that work fine for every challenge.) As alluded above, the difficulty pacing wasn't particularly well done. The most challenging part of the combat experience is usually the fault of the camera swinging about and making it difficult to click where you want to. And the minigames are terrible, too. So, as to the sequel, I haven't been following it too closely. (I skim the thread here, but don't generally click-through to the linked articles and videos.) I'll look into whether I want to pick it up in 6 months or so, when there's a good consensus of informed opinion out there and when (hopefully) I have a CPU that can handle it.

I'm a pirate ninja instructor. In my spare time I do legal research for the Brazilian ladies' beach volleyball team, when I'm not test-driving Ferraris. I'm a Federal Bureaucrat Attorney. You can get paid, like money, for that? Nepenthe is a professional hobo as well, so I'm guessing the answer is no. I essentially get paid for a combination of legal research and what I'll call law-related technical editing (advising several teams of non-lawyers who are researching and writing reports and reviewing the final products for legal sufficiency). Anyhow, I'm playing a mix of Civ V, The Witcher, and Magicka, depending on the particular mood that strikes me. Also, crushing the souls of the righteous.

That's not true. The basis of the conventions generally in force now were negotiated in 1949, but there were predecessor treaties going back as early as the 1860s.

Yeah, it certainly says something about the present state of our polity that pretty much everybody has taken this development and pointed towards it as evidence justifying that they were right all along. They do so with dreadfully incomplete information, while the people who are in a position to know the truth would be prosecuted for saying a word of it. On the torture stuff generally, here's the take of one Republican with personal experience in the area.

Maybe people just don't like re-living their experiences on projects that were among the biggest disappointments in their professional lives.

That's, uh... quite a range. I think that's a Linkedin thing. There are only a few "employer size" categories, and that's the one that OEI fits in.

I like the music and voiceover.

I know nothing about the particulars of the case, and if this is actually an exercise of pure moneyed influence doing at the state level what it couldn't at the local level, it is alarming. But, in a more general sense, there is often a counter-argument for when higher levels of government 'overstep their bounds' and override more local levels of government: Sometimes-- pretty often, actually-- local governments suck. It's a common and often unfair criticism that governments are made up of people who couldn't cut it in the business world, but in certain areas it has an element of truth. And it is more and more true as you move down levels of government. In the vast majority of cases, the pay, the prestige factor, the standards of acceptable performance, the level of institutional oversight, and the level of scrutiny from the media and the voters are all dramatically lower at the local government level than they are at the state or federal level. A higher incidence of third-rate employees and politicians, combined with few oversight mechanisms makes for some really bad situations. Federal waste, fraud, and instances of moneyed influence get talked about a lot (largely because there are dozens of media organizations watching the feds quite closely), but if you actually had reliable data and looked at all the comparable governmental waste and fraud by local governments as a percentage of expenditures, it would absolutely dwarf what happens at the federal level. Also, at least the citizens of Benton Harbor get to vote for representatives at the state level. Congress does this kind of thing is done to the D.C. government on a regular basis, and, due to a series of historical anomalies, D.C.'s representative in Congress doesn't even have a vote.

Tyrion sees a lot of large-scale combat, as do Jon and Dany. Other individual fights include Jon v. Quorin (as well as his training yard scenes), Bronn v. Lysa's champion, and a couple of instances involving Brienne.

My 'why not' guess explanation: TIM has always been on the side of the Reapers. But the Reapers aren't monolithic. The Reaper handling the Collectors was part of a splinter group, going off the reservation with their "human reaper" experiments. TIM, allied with the main horde, was working towards the same goal via a different path-- making Shep into badass zombie cyborg. That he could test this badass zombie cyborg by using it to capture/destroy the work of a rival Reaper faction was a nice bonus. There is, as I see it, a certain similarity between both the Collectors' and Cerberus' pre-ME2 activities (sampling different weird galactic species and experimenting on them, etc.).

I'm in the same situation as you three-- a just barely sub-minimum processor. I'll probably go with a whole new rig at some point this summer. A CPU upgrade isn't going to go very far without going to a new motherboard with a more modern socket. Plus, changing out a CPU + heatsink + fan is a real headache. Other new stuff out there (including Dungeon Seige III) is going to present the same problem, and I'd rather not play games like Shogun 2 (which I haven't bought yet, but intend to) or Deus Ex: HR on a just-scraping-by system. (I've done past Total War games on minimum specs, and it was not a comforting experience.)

So, what is the least-bad outcome: Having a huge defining event in the protagonist's life happen between games in a series, and covering them only via cutscene outside player control (see: ME2 opening cinematic), or covering them only via optional for-pay DLC (see: ME2 Arrival)?

It also has to do with the society moving around people. For example, my parents were born in 1955. They were quite on-board with the then-progressive ideals when they were young voters in the '70s, like feminism and racial integration. But those previously-somewhat-leftist ideologies are rather moderate today. And they're less comfortable with more modern progressive movements like gay rights. They haven't changed much, but the definitions of where the 'center' is on certain issues has. Youth has a tendency of winning its political battles with the more aged over the course of a few decades. After they've won those fights, though, they tend to want to protect what they've achieved, rather than keep on fighting the new battles that have captured the imaginations of the next generation.