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Alan Wake did take a pretty dramatic swerve half way through its development though. It went from being something huge and open-ended, to something very scripted and on-rails. (More Max Payne, less Deadly Premonition.)

I've been playing around with these games some. The emulation is very bare, not even a virtual manual in the packages. (I assume the MP features in all of these games are essentially broken. Nintendo having their emulation package trick these into working over wi-fi is probably too much to dream for.) These are all pretty great games though. I had forgotten how many GBA games had really awful pre-rendered CG sprites, that stuff doesn't hold up at all. I had also completely forgotten, or maybe just didn't appreciate it as a kid playing it on the SNES, how absolutely incredibly gorgeous Yoshi's Island is. F-zero is still a thing i find awesome. (Pro-tip, in addition to leaning into turns with the triggers, repeatedly tap the accelerator to maintain your grip. The game doesn't tell you this, but it's very essential.) Amazing Mirror is a weird goddamned Kirby game, but i think i'm going to stick with it for a bit. Wario Land 4 is cool. Mario Vs DK is very cool. I recommend everybody give Sacred Stones a honest chance, that is a fantastic game.

So i was having problems with 1.2 and decided to put the game aside until 1.3 came out. So now i'm playing on 1.3, and had a dragon fight where my conjuration spells wouldn't work. Then i had another dragon fight where the dragon turned invisible half way through, and didn't give me a dragon soul when i killed it. So yaaaay. I want 1.1 back.

In Skyrim, I really like how they've developed the Imperial Cult and the conflict between the Stormcloaks and the Empire. With the Stormcloaks basically fighting the Empire for the right to worship the man who founded that Empire. It's a weird conflict that makes for a lot of great context. All the stuff with the Thalmor is really fun too, they're such smug assholes, it's great. The Empire is crumbling and stuck in a bitter cold war with what are, there's no way around it, totally nazis. Ok, so you really, really didn't see much of the game then. Yeeeaaaaah. I mean, and magic is even one of the core tenets of the gameplay, there's even a skill dedicated to conjuring otherworldly creatures to fight for you. I'd agree that Oblivion had kind of a pervasive blandness about it. It was a lot of small little things that added up to it being probably the least interesting setting Bethesda has created for one of these games. Beyond just the aesthetics, there's a lot to be said about how uninteresting the dungeons were and how much the overworld was just crying out for more diversity in its landscape, neither of which i would say Skyrim suffers from. Skyrim also brought back a lot of Morrowind's Roman Empire-inspired flourishes for the Imperials, something that seemed completely MIA in Oblivion.

The dremora might be distantly related to the Mer races, but it's best not to think about it. The metaphysical stuff in TES gets real, real weird. You're trying too hard to have it all be neat and tidy, the only real point of the double names is so that they can establish their unique mythology while still calling on familiar, recognizable fantasy-tropes. In universe, the dwemer are called dwarves because of a misconception that they were a race of little people. People thought the dwemer were literal dwarves. Which is to say, not fantasy dwarves, fantasy dwarves do not exist in TES. They're extinct and greatly misunderstood by living peoples. As for orcs being known as orcs instead of "elves", i believe there's also an in-universe justification for that too, though i don't recall the specifics. Check it out though - Bosmer, Falmer, Chimer, Dunmer, Altmer, Dwemer, Orsimer. There's your consistent naming scheme. The only elves that don't follow suit are the extinct Ayleids of Cyrodiil. (Which were, i believe, supposed to be the earliest settlers of Tamriel.) I remember reading that the series was borne out of a D&D game some of the original Bethesda leads used to hold, so that's kind of where it's coming from. It's definitely pretty standard high fantasy, but there's a lot of small touches and flourishes that make it unique and more believable than a lot of other similar settings. As already noted, it has a unique approach to mythology and history, by purposefully presenting you with numerous conflicting accounts and stories, and encouraging you to draw your own conclusions. I think the series also generally portrays a lot of believable politics and strife between different groups. But definitely a lot of very traditional fantasy tropes are in play. The provinces of man, like Cyrodiil and Skyrim, especially lean towards more traditional european fantasy. Things can get really strange and out there in some of the other provinces though, which as of so far we've only seen one of. (Morrowind.) From there, if you take time to read about some of the more metaphysical elements of the lore, things only become increasingly stranger and more out there. So on a surface level it's kind of familiar, but thought through and believable, and has kind of hidden depths.

Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island - Which one was this a remake of, again? Mario Kart Super Circuit - Never played this, i hear it's a great Mario Kart game. Metroid Fusion - Normally, I would have said this was my least liked Metroid game, but now i think that goes to Other M. WarioWare Inc Mega Microgames - A hilarious and totally charming game, still better than any of the sequels. Mario vs Donkey Kong - This one is in the style of Donkey Kong 94, isn't it? I never played this, but it's apparently very good. Wario Land 4 - Never played this, i know nothing about it. Kirby and the Amazing Mirror - Isn't this the remake of Kirby's Adventure? (Which is sometimes regarded as Kirby's best game.) Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones - This is a very, very good Fire Emblem game. I played a lot of this one. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap - I do not like Minish Cap. F-Zero: Maximum Velocity - This was one of the GBA launch games. It's straight-up SNES-style F-Zero with no modern flourishes, and it's a lot of fun.

When they made that statement about it not coming out on the PC, they probably believed it. Microsoft wanted to push it as a 360 franchise. Anyways, with the game now rumored to be finally coming out on the PC, perhaps you'll get the sequel on the same date it launches for XBLA. I'm just pleased that more people are going to have a chance to play it, considering how it sort of went unnoticed on the 360. It was such a great game, easily one of my favorites of the last few years. Also, this sequel thing they're doing, Alan Wake as an XBLA download game. It's directly continuing the story, though. Perhaps they're kind of going episodic, maybe they're looking at Valve's HL2 episodes as inspiration.

No, they're elves. Yeah. Not even short.

For Game of the Year - Skyrim and Dark Souls tie for me. Honorable mentions to DX3, Gears 3, Child of Eden, EDF:IA, and probably a ton of download games i can't remember because they aren't sitting in a shelf to my left. Best 2010 game i played in 2011 - Resonance of Fate Biggest disappointment? - Rage.

Maybe i'm just tired, but i'm fairly certain what you're saying doesn't make any sense. I think you're having a misunderstanding about the naming conventions for the series. This interface naming convention applies for other things too though, all elven items are named like that. I mean, they're "elven" weapons and armor when the people group on a whole is "Mer". It's repeated with the Orcish items. (TES Orcs are elves, they're the Orsimer.) Dwemer items being labeled as such only occurs in Morrowind, and it makes sense, since that was their home province. This sounds like a case of "always wanting more", honestly. This game deals with the dwarves a lot, and so did Morrowind. I don't think you can go much further into any of that without ruining the sense of mystery and ambiguity that is supposed to define the history of that race in the context of these games. As for an engineering skill, presenting a situation in which people are easily reproducing Dwemer technology, i think it would be very out of character for the series. It's lost technology, lost science, lost industry. It is, exactly as you say, so you have cool steampunk dungeons to explore that don't clash with the swords and sorcery setting. I think Valenwood would be cool, it would make sense with the way the fiction is leaning in Skyrim, and some of the things that have been described about Valenwood would make for a very cool setting.

Well for one thing, NPC's in Skyrim will still yell at you if you run around naked. And it's kind of an edge case, going around pick-pocketing everybody's clothes. That's not even a perk you can get until pick-pocketing is maxed out, isn't it? It's easy to say that it would be kind of nice if they'd acknowledge that they've been robbed, and then maybe went to stores and bought items to replace things they've lost, hey? Wouldn't that kind of be getting into some feature creepy territory though? There's always going to be something more they could have done, in a game like this. At some point they've got to ship a product and call it done. Which is all to say, i don't think that's the sort of thing whose omission is worth being bothered by.

This, at least, is justified. Now hold on a second, let me get my nerd on here. The races of men generally refer to the elves by different names than the ones the elves use for themselves. So it makes sense that the Nords of Skyrim would know the Dwemer as Dwarves, when in Morrowind they were properly referred to as Dwemer. There's actually several books detailing this specific naming confusion. (Specifically, "Dwemer" apparently means "deep folk" with "deep" having at some point been mistranslated as "short" and the western provinces as a result coming to know the Dwemer as Dwarves.) It's one of the more interesting aspects of TES, that a lot of contradictions and inconsistencies are built up as elements of the lore, embracing confused and conflicting histories as flavor for the setting. (The above story about the origin of that name is even only one of several accounts regarding why the Dwemer are called Dwarves in western provinces!)

Probably so, i think one of the daedric quests takes you right by that spot. They've just kind of front-loaded those quests, made them exceedingly difficult to miss. I mean, pretty much everybody is going to end up with the Mace of Molag Bal with the way that quest is just thrown at you seconds after entering Markath. There's always been one daedric quest for every daedric prince since Daggerfall, so that's not different, but they were always hidden away and hard to find. In Skyrim, they're just kind of shoving them in your face. I'm sure they probably looked at some kind of data that showed a depressingly small number of people playing what are usually some of the most out-there and interesting quests in each respective game, and then decided to make them much easier to find as a result. I think it's fine having a lot of the quests start in towns instead of out-of-the-way shrines, but the way they're so impossible to miss kind of kills the fun of discovering the artifacts. (The Wabbajack has never been more awesome, though.) Also, having all these asshole gods so upfront kind of fucks with the low-fantasy tone they're trying to establish in this game.

Also, it's just worth knowing that, like Oblivion, the maximum protection armor is able to offer is at 80% damage reduction. In this game, that apparently equates to around 560 armor points. Also, has anybody here had troubles with the 1.2 patch? Been seeing horror stories all over the place, the entire region around Riften causing hard lock-ups on fast travel, dragons incredibly flying backwards, progressive performance drops and gradually decreasing stability, etc. Magical resistances were also apparently broken for just about everybody. Like, all of it, all the magical resistances. (Simple way to check - Summon a fire atronach, shoot destruction fire at it. Does it take damage?) Bethesda even issued an apology and is promising a fix early next week.

Watching this news spread around the net today, it was depressing seeing the relative apathy this was met with. Have definitely been seeing a lot of "Well i already played it." A sentiment justifiably from people who went through the trouble of importing a legitimate copy, but also somewhat less justifiably coming from people who simply ran emulated copies. So way to go, Internet. The people who were demanding this the most are probably the least likely to support it. Anyways, i'm hearing the game is genuinely quite incredible and actually worth all of this fuss. I look forward to having the opportunity to play it.

I had a friend telling me he had a problem with NPC's wandering through his Riften house to leave the city, heh. (Since it's situated on the outer wall of said city.)

I haven't really bothered with the wood-chopping, but if it's like mining ore, you can probably "exhaust" the wood pile. What are your builds all looking like? I'm playing an Argonian with a focus on shield/one-handed, conjuration/restoration, smithing, and archery. (And while i wouldn't say they're focuses, as a result of the way i play, i have sneak, light armor, lock-picking, alchemy, and speech all built up really heavily too.)

It is my understanding that the patch has finally gone live and is apparently wonderful and fixes everything that was wrong. Which is great, i'd like to play more Dark Souls. But i can't. Because Skyrim. These two games have done more to fuck up my sleep patterns than anything else in recent memory, man.

I suppose this is the right place for this? YXh9RQCvxmg I was thoroughly entertained.

I have played this game for over 110 hours. I am level forty... something... I still have not seen two of the game's major cities. Big game is big. Some more random thoughts - The main cities, in general, seem probably smaller on average than the major cities from Oblivion. (To be fair, there's more of them.) The dungeons are generally quite great, there's a lot of good variety. It's made me realize that Oblivion's dungeons were on the whole quite shit. (While also remembering that Morrowind had a lot of particularly great dungeons.) I find Skyrim a very visually interesting place, and i like exploring it. The winding roads, the peaks and valleys, and the diverse terrain all remind me very much of the way Morrowind was. I always felt that one of the biggest weaknesses of Oblivion was how dull the rolling hills and endless forest of Cyrodiil were. Bugs, i've seen a lot. There are a small handful of situations where i've had to backtrack to an earlier save because something broke, but the vast majority of the glitches i've seen are harmless visual or audio defects. (But, holy shit, i've seen a lot. My Argonian's face even broke for a few hours at one point, had a really weird contorted look.) Playing Bethesda's games, you eventually develop a radar for the kinds of bugs you're likely to encounter, it's usually the same kinds of issues popping up again and again. You can just feel some of the scripting straining at certain spots. It's pretty creaky at times, especially when there's a lot of moving parts in a quest. NPC's acting strangely, incidental events obviously failing to trigger, and worrying if that will affect the overall quest script. Like i said, it's only outright broken for me a couple of times, and i was able to backtrack out of those situations because i had been saving frequently. The game does have issues, but it's probably still the most solid a Bethesda game has ever been at launch. I mean, hey, it's even pretty stable, that's important. Had maybe four lock-ups in all the time i've been playing. Speaking of quests, the vast majority have been very, very basic. Though, on the strength of the dungeons, it's not really an issue i've been bothered much by. Scaling also works really well, it's basically what they've done in oblivion and Fallout 3, but with much more restraint. You never, ever run into a party of bandits decked out with full suits of glass armor, for example. Better items are slowly trickled into the world economy, but never in such a way that they become commonplace. Even a hundred hours into the game, glass armor is still pretty rare, and that's the way it should be. I do take some issue with the fact that a bottom-level bandit NPC can, as a result, be visually indistinguishable from one that can kill you in two hits. I'm not sure if that's something worth complaining about, but it doesn't really bother me that much. I've grown to find Dragons annoying. I still think it's awesome and laudable that these big sprawling battles can happen at any time, with you tracking them across potentially miles of terrain. Honestly though, speaking practically, i'm not especially cool with them going around killing quest givers in the outlying settlements. That's dumb, i don't like it. I don't care if they're useless and totally incidental quests, I want to do them. They seem to be on a timer though, and i've kind of gotten a hang of it. When i think i'm due for a dragon battle, i fast travel to a location where i think i can control the battle more effectively, i kill the dragon, and then fast travel back to wherever i was previously. Stealth has really been improved so dramatically much, the basic last-known-position search routine they added to the AI really changes everything, and a lot of the dungeons have much wider layouts and things specifically in place to fuck with stealthy players. (The noisy chimes made of bones will alert enemies in the area if you bump into them.) I'm feeling, now, that the melee combat in this game might actually be worse than it was in Oblivion. The perk system is awesome, and in general i still really love the things they've done with the stat systems. Does pick-pocket really deserve to be its own skill? I haven't used a companion at all, it feels weird to have party in a TES game. . Also, internet people did math, the level cap is 81. That gives you 80 perks, if anybody wants that number for planning their builds accordingly. (Though there's a soft cap at 50 that dramatically reduces exp gains.)

Wards are more for defending against magic, which is extremely important, but wards drain too much magic for use in all situations. (Unless you're applying perks in such a way that their costing costs are reduced to relative viability.) The alteration spells are what you need for a non-armor builds to survive in physical combat. Their casting cost isn't as huge and casts as a passive ability, but those won't defend against magic.

That isn't even the first one, it's the sequel.