Musopticon?

Hahhah, yeah, let's take the least interesting and least personal faction in the universe and have them in! I mean, there's nothing like cashing in with evil robot enemies! The audience doesn't have to think, for god's sake, that's modern filmography!

Borderlands! *hugs the game box*

Jesus H. Christ on a freaking bicycle! This game is a co-op dream. I played 8 hours yesterday with a friend, we played as Mordecai(me) and Lilith, eschewing Brick and Roland for a later playthrough and let me tell you; this game grabs you by the nuts. BY THE NUTS, I daresay. It's a gun-fetishist's dreamland, with tons of gaming references, eerie Mad-Max ambiences, honest hack'n'slash gameplay and great on the fly-tactical scenaries thrown together to form a strong adventure feel in a large quasi-open world. And it's full of humour and makes Fallout 3 look and feel like your ugliest and most taciturn in-law, the one who gets served whiskey at parties and then goes at the guest with a knife. I love how it doesn't hold your hand after the beginning, higher-level mobs are complete murder to take on, but doable with ludicrous special attack use and lots of cover. The areas are interesting and the scope feels so vast, yet they've taken the trouble to put something into every nook and cranny that it never feels empty. At parts the game feels like someone took the Highway 17 level from HL2 and just decided to let the player wander off from the beaten path. No one cares about combine anyway. All things said, it does have its problems as well. Probably the most dire one is respawning. I imagine it will get borderline infuriating once tedium starts to set in. It's frequent and follows no logic(a cleaned base filling up with goons again once you spent enough time in the innermost chamber fighting the boss mobster) and while it does make the world feel less empty, the frequent attacks on road stops are annoying. You are almost constantly on your toes. Another issue is the skill tree, it requires some metagaming to get the most out of it. Never did I realise, until an avid fan pointed it out, that you have to spend 5 points into the skills of first tier of one skill branch before you gain the next tier. This also, along with the later higher costs(10 to gain the next tier, fifteen to get the last one), seems to result in very specialized characters. Have to play more(14 level Hunter right now) to see this issue come to fruition first though. Lovely game, i want moar

Mat and Rand(post book 7) are the only reason I read the series. Never bought any of the books though. Which book ended with the cleaning of the Shadar Logoth? I think I'm stuck somewhere around there. I'll probably pick them up and reacquaint myself with the series once I'm done with the vastly more awesome Malazan Book of the Fallen series. And perhaps after Bakker, Martin, new LeGuins, Donaldson...might be a while.

Three main reasons for procrastinating in my experience as student and coach/tutor/manager: 1. Overstress. Taking a break rallies the reserves and makes work easier. 2. Demotivation. Doing some 'fun' reading around the area or talking to the more charismatic professors may help warm teh embers 3. Self-handicapping. If success becomes too important to your identity [the reverse of demotivation] then you may seek to avoid doing work as an excuse for failing, rather than conclude you aren't any good or aren't clever enough. I can't recall ever having to tackle simple laziness as a cause. The missus thanks you for these. They were...enlightening. Eerily spot-on as well. Hmm, Halloween soon. I have a spare gas mask somewhere, which I'm going to mutilate, meaning that I'll cut off the nose along the rubber lining, to make a hole for my mouth to grin through, drag out the air-filter unit on the side, give one of the eye slit plastics a good whack with a chisel so it looks like a bullet hole and add some fake blood and a raincoat. Finally, I'll spout Ukrainian throaty gibberish and shamble around. I love Halloween.

Congrats. With Alpha Protocol delayed (and a whole bunch of others,too), after that lack-luster summer, it really has been a real primetime for geeks to get paired. Here's to that: Though the missus isn't a geek, bless her.

What do you think so far, Mus? Same deal with Lost Odyssey. I've played only till Grand Staff but it's slow going, for sure. The premise is great - an immortal guy who struggles to remember memories since he's seen so much. But then it just goes downhill from there, and then the goddamn kids show up... I do like it, it's very traditional, which in this case means a good thing - I've needed something like this ever since modernist humbug that was FF12. I've played till just after the kids, meaning I am at the Crimson Forest right now. The biggest problem the game has so far is that everything is so damned slow. Compare it to Tales of Vesperia, for instance. The latter has instant message and confirmation pop-ups during the adventure mode(treasure pick-up, dialogue, etc), very smooth interface and a seamless real-time element, while the former has you wait e.g everytime you "probe" an object like a vase, watch the long-long attack and special attack animations(I really really hate Kelolons) that both your characters and enemies make. Random encounters take time, not because they are hard and frequent, which they aren't with proper leveling, but because everything reacts so syrupy, ugh. Besides that gripe, however, there's really decent writing, mostly the Dreams, but even some of the characterization(Kaim is far easier to like than every FF main char so far) is good. They've obviously taken a theme and ridden with it, and even though mortality and the lack thereof is not a new topic by any means, I appreciate that they've stuck with it. The quips between the Immortals are interesting and the tragic nature of the whole premise makes you come back for more, even though the actual gameplay might(and will) tarry at parts. Art design is rather bleh, I Panzer Dragoon Saga comes to mind at parts, but mostly it's like they thought the art director of FF:Spirits Within was a grand visionary and decided to go with a washed-out colour palette, sweeping geometric shapes for architecture and general airiness to the overall feel. It lends itself to some beautiful scenes, I admit, but pales in comparison to the quirky and beautiful style of Vesperia and tothe "let's feed the art team Assyrian mushrooms"-look that FF12 had, for instance. It's just bland, which, funnily enough, fits the melancholic nature of the story. Doesn't really entice to discover new areas though. I fell asleep in Numara, since the music was too darn peaceful and the surroundings reminded me of blankets and hospitals. Some color, please, anyone? Digressing here; I do plan to finish the game, especially since the the new kid characters have brought some life the cast, but I'll always be drawn to the game's superior cousins, if you know what I mean.

Disgusting has a new bar.

I never had any other bugs but scripting ones when playing Stalker, but I had been well schooled by Rage of Mages (&2) before, so I came into new Eastern-European games with a grain of salt and tendency to wait till the patch schedule starts to shorten, heh. Hopefully this isn't as abysmally optimized as Clear Sky was.

Yesssh. This has the possibility of being quite jawsome. Pretty damn jawsome.

^Brave, very brave, young grasshopper. I've only just left the harbor city to search for the Blood Alliance, so ain't very far into it yet. Ugh, I should play more Lost Odyssey as well. It's just that parts of it make me sleepy and some of the characters can be real bores.

What "leisure time"? What do you mean by "leisure time"? We ain't got no stinking "leisure time" in here, you hear me!! So, two of the worst procrastination 101 offenders combine arms? I'll bomb the Firaxis offices tomorrow, ffs.

Helsinki Book Expo tomorrow, wohoo! Now on to get some shut-eye. Gonna meet the missus tomorrow.

Friday can't come quickly enough. I'm going to a huge book expo tomorrow(and I actually have some spare cash), but still keep thinking about Borderlands. ****.

Both his shield and his weapon drain your health. Don't worry about the guy, I was stuck on him for about a week when I first played(naturally didn't try to beat him constantly though). He is hard for everyone, so here's a few tricks: 1. Give him a wide berth, but stay close enough that he won't teleport. All the attacks he does are life-drainers, so watch out. 2. Start by first estimating how quick a reaction time he has, then choose a long combo attack, say, the Dream, if you've dragged the Elf Sword until Isle of Karum that is. Now try to time the combo so that the final slash connects with the Vampire. If you start a combo from far away enough, he won't react, won't go into defensive stance so to say. 3. Continue this until his health starts to drop, watching that your progress isn't wasted by being drained dry of blood. 4. Once you get him down to a certain amount of health, he starts to teleport constantly. Don't panic, learn to do the "back attack" combo beforehand. It's a life saver here, with good timing you'll hit the bastard once he reappears behind you. Alternatively, you could either a) throw a weapon against his shield until it breaks and then combo like mad until he drops or b) run around and try to kill him by simply doing the back attack everytime he teleports. I've killed him at least with plan "b". The life-draining sword you got from the previous level is also handy here. Give it a go. And, should you find that sword lacking, there's the knight's newest(and so far the most powerful damage wise) weapon inside the dark tower where you are right now. Load a previous save and go look for, if you haven't found it yet. Above all, don't give up. Karum is probably my fave levels, but the ones after it just as good.

That's we call "an opinion" around here. Stalker looked great when it came out. Too bad it was two years later than was supposed, in that engine version.

I think everyone understands Bioware's reasons for the decisions, but a nice alternative would have been the ability to e.g pay money to train the under-leveled whelps in an adventurer school(/whatever)

Still playing Night of the Raven. Got to the pirates, met Cap'n Greg again and realized I had met some kind of power threshold in the game mechanics wise. I have 112 str with an amulet and belt of strength and now I'm starting to finally come through with two-weapon fighting. I guess a real test is whether I can fell an orc warrior without it taking too much time. I have had the hang of combat ever since I played the vanilla Gothic 2, but only now as I'm nearing level 20 in the expansion does my damage output meet the orc hp level. Funny that the game requires an arsefull of metagaming in order to properly maximize a character. The difficulty is horrible in chapter 3 if you've managed to gimp your Hero in the first chapter. Love the game anyhow. Jharkendar has a great atmosphere and some of the landscapes I've missed ever since Gothic 1, such as a massive swamp and decent ruins.

First ogre is easy, they're so slow, but that first troll...sheesh. I used to hate Mines because the beginning threw one with two orcs on me. And one of them was a bloody archer. They're tons easier with the barbarian character though, once you get the hang of him(olol), since you'll have to learn to dodge anyway as a two-handed weapon specialist, and dodging is the key to those bastards. Hell, dodging is the key to mostly everything. Except perhaps golems...brrr...

Period break(read=women and booze).

There's a big difference between an arcade shmup(that's tautology btw) and a tactically sound and challenging rpg. There's a case to be made for hard rpgs, but unfortunately those often translate to metagaming, chartology and munchkinism when it comes to gameplay.

Could someone post the most recent minimum reqs for DA? I want to see how horribly it will run on my jury rig.

I thought Clear Sky was already quite stable. I had no game-breakers and only two crashes. For the first time in a while, I'm going a bit overkill on hype. Stopped looking at screens and fora two weeks ago in fear of getting spoiled, but unfortunately already spoiled a bit on some of the recurring characters from the previous games, heh. Naturally that only fed the need!

And of course, once it's gone gold in Europe they've included all the patches that have been released between the launches! Sweet.