Amentep

Trial of Iron can lead to people dying and being horribly frustrated because they have to start the game from 0... oh wait, they selected the mode for it themselves. Right, in a perfect world people would take responsibility for bad choices. Unfortunately, in our world, people wandering some place and ruining* their experience in the game by either making it too hard or too easy for themselves leads to poor reviews, snarky videos and lots of accusations of "Obsidian can't balance their game properly" and "Obsidian's QA is hopeless". At least that's my experience. *I've never thought a game being too challenging or too easy was a deal breaker when it was my choices that made it that way, but that does not seem to be the case for all people.

If the option to change is trivial to implement I'm all for it as mentioned previously (Violet for allies! Yellow for enemies! Chartruse for neutrals!) But the default colors (and thus the only selection circle colors if creating a "change circle options" is not trivial to do) really should take into consideration red-green and yellow-blue color blindness (which, I believe would make the enemy-ally choices something like red-blue or yellow-green or something)

I'd imagine its vague simply because of the stage of production with regard to how many optional and critical areas/encounters there are - I could be wrong. I don't mind the kind of level scaling that he mentions (only on critical path, only within certain narrow constraints). In someways I can see it as a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" proposition. No level scaling can lead to people encountering things to high level for them and complaining or doing so many side quests the critical path is a cake walk and then complaining the game had no challenge but level scaling will have people complain as well because it exists. Of course I suppose you could argue trying to do something just to avoid complainers might not be worth it or something.

Yeah I was iffy about Shadowrun Returns (never played the previous SR video games, only marginally familiar with the P&P setting). But if it continues to shape up well it'll certainly be worth getting ont he backend.

And all other areas, that are on the crit path, will scale by level? J. E. Sawyer on a previous thread about Level-Scaling said: I think we've said this before, but the only things we're likely to scale with player level are crit-path special encounters and even then, only within a range of levels. E.g. take a boss like Sherincal in IWD2. Maybe you'll encounter her at 5th level, but it's possible you could encounter her at 8th level. If 5th-8th is the most common range, we'd scale around that, but if you encounter her sub-5th level, you'll have to deal with the difference. If you encounter her at 9th or 10th by some x-treme XP mining, it will be a little easier for you. The reason to scale the crit path special encounters is to allow for the fact that not everyone wants to do a lot of side content. Some people want to (largely) stick to the crit path with minimal side quests. When it comes to the optional/side content, there won't be any scaling at all. Rats in the cellar will still be rats and may explode from your mere presence and the dragon Chrysophylax will probably burn you to ashes if you mosey up to his lair at 3rd level. See the full thread at - http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63017-level-scaling-and-its-misuse/

Ah well, the Eastern Carpenter Bee that we get here looks like a giant bumblebee here locally (although not fuzzy on the abdomen - a bit hard to notice when you're ducking for cover thinking that's a wasp out of the corner of your eye). Many different types of Carpenters though as well as bumbles (the ones here are distinctly smaller than the similarly colored Carpenter bees).

I got Tomb Raider, X-Com and Bioshock Infinite. Tomb Raider is quite grabby in its immediate pull; played it a good bit yesterday because the story has natural hooks. Love X-COM but can already see I'm going to be in financial trouble fast (always my problem with strategy games - I suck at managing resources) and Bioshock Infinite looks really good (haven't gotten enough into the shooty part to know how that's going to do with me yet).

One dead center in my forehead (taken care of by a receding hairline...except for like three hairs that spring forth in different directions from that spot on my head) and two on the back of my head. Pretty much makes trying to have any kind of hairstyle other than "cut very short" an exercise in frustration (or rather expensive in use of hair products). That's on top of having motley beard hair (brown! red! blonde! now with grey!) that's thicker on the neck than on the face (awesome if you're planning on being a politician in the 1830s-1870s or so, not so much today) and the fact that my sideburns grow in different directions (possibly due to another cowlick) making one side look cool and rakish and the other as if I tried to grow muttonchops and failed miserably and well, frankly, you can see why I welcomed baldness from an early age. Thanks mom! EDIT: Aren't the "large bumblebees" Carpenter bees looking for wood to bore a home into?

Watched HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA. Laughed so much my face hurt. Ow.

Makes me want to fire up Arcanum myself in someways.

Cool. They are fun to watch but I'm surprised really there's so much interest in it.

You'd think so with the omnibus (?) collections they did, but they're difficult to find in my experience. I think the stores local to me got one volume.

I'm a bit ambivilent towards shooters - I'm not terribly good at them and really fast paced FPS sometimes trigger motion sickness (thank you, Far Cry 2) - would a non-shooter guy like Bioshock: Infinite? I've avoided the series because of that, but I've always liked the "look" of the games.

I wish Judge Dredd was better reprinted in the US. Maybe with IDW we'll see some decent reprints come along. Also wish I could get some Don Lawrence reprints without having to order from strange European countries*. *I think it was Denmark; the use of the € sign had me hightailing out of there, being the poor insensitive USAer I am, so I'm not 100% sure.** **Just kidding

Doesn't the second pretty much follow from the first?

The disconnect for me between ME2 and ME3 didn't destroy the game for me, but I felt like I was missing something (which since I don't have a way to get DLC, I was already feeling put out about). My experience with BSN is similar to Alan's, I remember the complaints about the NWN Official Campaign being rather loud (although many respected the fan creating game aspect of it). There was a lot of hate for Jade Empire in my time there. The fact it was on XBOX first, for it not being a medieval fantasy setting, for not being real-time with pause, for it being "racist" that a North American company was making a game set in "China", for picking character looks that were based off "chinese action film bad-guys with no understanding of Chinese culture", for putting "ninja" and "samurai" in a game set in "China", for creating a new language and more. It wasn't a pleasant time to be there and I was primarily a lurker. Mass Effect generated a lot of "Bioware is going to become a FPS company and ditch role-playing games" as I recall, too. I don't think any of the Bioware games haven't received a significant amount of flak; I think DAO did better in pre-release than many of the others. That said, it was the "Bethany should be romanceable" threads that ultimately made me abandon the forums even as a lurker. (As a side note, I don't mind DA2 being action-RPG oriented. I loved JE and ME. I think it would have made more sense to release it as a "Dragon Age: Sidestory" than as DA2 though because of the expectations).

I quit marvel after that whole Schism debacle in the X-Men turned into the Phoenix Five, the blundering stupidity of the characters was too much for me to maintain any suspension of disbelief. Would you recommend any of those for a now jaded ex-Marvel fan? Well I thought Hickman's Fantastic Four/FF was the best take on the group since Stan and Jack. But I know a lot of other people who can't connect to Hickman's writing, so I'm unsure. Avengers/New Avengers is just starting out, so its harder to say but I think its shaping up along the lines of the Fantastic Four/FF stuff. I skipped all of the crossover events of the past few years, though, to be honest so I don't have the same perspective either.

For me, though, that doesn't work since the end of the ME2 doesn't indicate that Sheppard is going back to work with the Alliance at all. I pretty much did not know what had happened between the end of ME2 and beginning of ME3 and nothing in the game really made it make sense (I went online to try and figure out what I was missing). Luckily the face import bug made my Sheppard look different so I pretended it was different character.

"And now, your highness, we will discuss the location of your hidden rebel base..."

To be fair, US society - in the form of "child advocates/protectors" prevented the medium from growing up in the 50s when it was expanding and tackling a variety of subjects. The publishers retreated to "safe" superhero, teen hi-jinks and funny animals. This fate was sealed when the distribution model in the US began going belly-up in the 70s and everyone moved to the direct market or died. It did leave room for independents (more than there had been in years in the shrinking mom & pop, spinner-rack days) but superhero comics are the bread and butter of the industry. If Image weren't doing SPAWN and WITCHBLADE they wouldn't be able to do WALKING DEAD, FATALE or SAGA. I enjoy a good superhero comic though (current highlight for me is Jonathan Hickman's Avengers and New Avengers; his Fantastic Four/FF was a brilliant take on that series). Besides the aforementioned FATALE, I've been enjoying Hickman's THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS (he has a way with strange alternate reality/sci-fi stuff) and THE SIXTH GUN of late.

You could name your barbarian "Norwegian Blue". He'd have beautiful plumage.

I bought PS:T last of all the IE games because the cover art didn't really appeal to me. Unlike IWD and BG2 (which I bought based on playing BG1), I picked PST off the shelf and ultimately put it back. The cover didn't appeal to me. I went back and read reviews then went and bought the game because postive reviews and by that point I'd enjoyed IWD and BG2. But that cover art really didn't do anything positive for me.

Seems to me that they could have given more than one area over to the market, for example, and increased the amount of locations. One of the quests has you looking for someone "shopping" in the market district for example. But there's really only three places they could be - Wade's, Wonders of Thedas or the market stalls out front. This could have been made more interesting by having the market split into two logical parts.

According to imdb she's only appeared in three films, all of them Japanese. Is there a story there? According to a newspaper article published in Japan in 1966 (and reprinted in Japanese Fantasy Film Journal) while making WATER CYBORG (the Japanse name of the film), Neal was a student at Sophia University. She had been a model since childhood (and perhaps had a current modeling contract in Japan) and had lived in the country previously for 2 years when younger. It wasn't unusual for films in Japan to cast US models (and US servicemen) as US characters. While Sonny Chiba is clearly the star, this film being a co-production had a lot of non-Japanese roles amid the heroes and villains since it was intended for a Japanese cinema release (on a matinee) and a US Television release (supposedly intended to be in 3 parts) and US Cinema release. None of the actors had the same degree of US recognition as Nick Adams in Invasion of the Astro-Monster/Godzilla vs Monster Zero or Robert Horton and Richard Jaeckel in The Green Slime, however, and are primarily thought to be individuals who were already in Japan at the time rather than imported actors. A lot of the same cast of this film ends up in THE X FROM OUTER SPACE, in fact, which was filmed around the same time.

While there were aspects of the buggy that I liked (I enjoyed humming the Moon Patrol theme while doing it too), ultimately the big drawback is that it consists of large swaths of nothing to do. This was replaced by the planet scanning which consisted of large swaths of nothing to do. Both would have been better by more focused use of the time. That said, I didn't hate either and actually always do as much as I can on both when I've played the games.