osmosisch

Man, that's shitty. My sympathies. The good part is, if you learned things in your previous relationship, odds are your next one will be a whole lot better.

If any thumb happens to drop by the Riot/League of Legends booth and picks up a skin code for Arctic Varrus I'd be thrilled to take it off your hands.

The path into blighttown through the Valley of Drakes isn't too painful, but before you head back in there for leech farming I'd strongly recommend exploring Firelink Shrine a bit more. There's a way to get the raven to take you somewhere you can get a ring that lets you run in knee-deep water. The fat bloke headed further into the fortress once the gates opened. There's a vendor at the top of Sen's who sells large titanite shards but they're pretty expensive (couple thousand a pop).

You can buy purple moss from the lady in the sewers in the shortcut between the Capra demon and Firelink shrine. A cheaper option is to head back into darkwood and kill the plant guys there for a bit, preferably with some humanity in your pool (this increases item drop rate up to a maximum of 10 humanity).

There's a setting in the options to make the camera less annoying, that helps a bit. Also use the spider shield in blighttown if you haven't switched to it already, because it blocks 100% of poison/toxin which several enemies there use.

No worries man, we all have moments like that. Good of you to come back in and clear the air.

lol to you too, and yes, WoW showed them that it's a successful tactic.

Well the clone part is just being needlessly offensive these days for no particular reason, but I think the central point is that there's few games mainly featuring combat-free exploration, the most popular early one of which was Myst. That's not a very difficult statement to defend. He's also probably right that Gone Home would be called a Myst clone back then, because that was the era of -clone not being necessarily offensive, witness all the 'doom clones' of varying quality and popularity. You have to call things something before they're a genre. I'd prefer to call Myst and Gone Home "explore 'em-ups" but hey.

Yeah, somewhere in the arc of WoW and the Activision merger Blizzard became a really unsavoury company in a lot of ways. They might improve now that they're on their own again, but we'll see. In the meantime I picked up this game now that the auction house is gone and it was on sale, and I'm enjoying the production values. Path of Exile and Torchlight 2 do/did a lot of stuff in more interesting ways than D3 does, but sometimes you just want to play something where every single pixel has tangibly had millions spent on it.

Another amazing thing about the Souls games is that it is at least as enjoyable to see or hear someone playing through them for the first time as it was to do so for oneself. I don't think any other game series gives me so much vicarious entertainment.

I can see the similarities. It's not too far-fetched.

Parrying only really becomes viable with lots of practice. But once you're there nothing beats it. A small note: almost every direct attack is parryable, it's just that only normal-sized humanoids are ripostable. In all other cases you'll do a partial parry.

Just to be complete: the stability stat on a shield tells you what percentage of the damage of an attack will completely be absorbed by the shield. The remainder is then applied to your stamina. If there's then still remaining damage, it will apply to your HP, plus you will be staggered. This makes stability the most important stat on shields besides having a high block%.

I think the reinforced club beats the regular one in those respects.

I guess that also rules out the 'dildo it' option :/ http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11292007

Oh yeah, I play on PC where load times are trivial. Still, it's a good thing to sit back for a bit after a death and reflect on what went wrong, and what to do better next time. I kind of miss that on PC, and have gotten into the habit of not immediately dashing off again after spawning in, but having a brief pause, maybe checking equipment and the like. Besides that, if your goal is progress the Souls games can be supremely frustrating, because a lot of the progress you make is nonspatial and invisible, because it's you as a player getting a little bit better. It's possible to see Souls as a game that bullies you by preventing you from getting to the 'cool stuff' by putting seemingly insurmountable difficulty in your path. I however see it as a playground that lets you always learn something new, and get better at playing in it. Note that this doesn't mean I don't curse like a sailor at times when playing.

If you want a sword/shield combo that can carry you through the game with proper upgrades, just start as the Warrior. It's very hard to know in advance what moveset will click with you. Just try out every weapon you can get your hands on and have the stats for on the hollows at firelink for a bit to see how you like them. Then once you know whether you prefer swords, spears, big fuckoff twohanders or what, you optionally can check the wiki for that weapon class to see whether a cooler version is accessible early on. But again, fully upgraded, any non-whip weapon can easily carry you through the game. e: I also posted a different reply in the quitters btw before I saw your post here.

There's a huge epidemic of copper theft in the Netherlands as well (usally blamed on East-Europeans) that deregulate train traffic for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_theft#Netherlands

The main thing that made me love the Souls games is that they never actually make you pay anything other than time. Death is meaningless, there is an infinitude of souls available (though 2 messes with this a bit) and you, as a player, are improving all the time if you are focusing on learning. This is immensely liberating once you realise it. There is difficulty in all directions, but without that difficulty it's impossible to feel accomplishment. The sense of trepidation on entering a new area is something to be savoured, not lamented. This is something that will never return until a new Souls game comes out. And if an area is kicking your ass then yeah, explore some of the many other branches you've undoubtedly missed or left earlier. Starting as the warrior gives you a perfect sword/shield combination. You can also buy a heater shield/reinforced club from the undead merchant in the 'burg that can carry you through the game with some judicious upgrading. On Skyrim: I love exploring the world and the freedom, but the combat was completely spoiled for me once I got into the Souls games. Only archery and stealth were fun to me, precisely because the Souls games don't do those well.

We've tried some in the past with just our group but the short timespan doesn't lend itself very well to how systems-driven good (at least to me) boardgames are. Or maybe it's just not something our personalities are very well suited for.

The point under discussion is not the act of imagining which indeed is not inherently moral either way, but of expressing this imagination, communicating with others, for example through fiction. The act of communication is inherently concrete (it changes the perceiver) and thus subject to morality.

Fictitious things do exist, just in the realm of fiction. This realm is connected to reality via people's minds. A snarky example is religion.

There's been no news AFAIK.

Small update: at 3.2 my eldest's favourite game is Bit.Trip runner. One button to push, pretty graphics and nice music come together very nicely for her. In a similar vein, for multiplayer Get On Top has been a great success.

It's a huge benefit having been an avid Magic player because I have tons of sleeves and cards to proxy things up with.