Valorian Endymion

Some just thoughs on a few mods which I have been using: Quickstart: Very useful if you which to skip Gatecrasher to test something or just go straight to the game, you still got the loot and four for your character will get a promotion. Character Pool Initial Start: This mod tries to enforce that your agents came first from the character pool, but you need a great quantity of them, otherwise the game still create random ones to fill potential gaps or unbalance. Timer tweaks: this one add four turn to all timed mission and two for ufos. Mods which free all customization might conflict with or another, right now I have one which just unlock customization which would be locked by rank (which I think is working fine) both two others which I tried didn´t work. I think while trying some mods, caused one of my character to have a non armor visual, where his armors came from that exo armor but he had no legs.

Talking on soft spots... I had one, which changed overtime, for long time I was very in the western rpg aesthetics and "realistic" visuals, but now I am much more in the jrpg spectrum of the aesthetics and visuals, often finding the late western rpg visuals and over "realism" not so good (and a bit boring, specially when get too much in the over realism), save for expections such as games like The Witcher, Warhammer Fantasy, Mount & Blade and old school rpgs, such Might & Magic, Wizardry, ect.... Another soft spot of mine is games where you have lots of characters, like in your typical tatical jrpg or your normal jrpg, specially if they had cool visuals and interact with one another and have those slice of life things , if a game have this, even if isn´t very developed, chances is that I will like it (examples would be games like Shining Force, Last Remnant, Disgaea, Valkyria Chronicles, FF Type - 0, ect....). Also, there was game that was much based on you giving order to people (much like Majesty in a certain degree), which acted on their own, Evil Genius, which much as the name suggest, put you as James Bond style of super villian to build a base,. You had to give order to your minions and hope for the best. However, despite the clever setting and concept, I didn´t find it so good, because often you had to perform very specific tasks, specially to avoid the good agents which invade your base, but you couldn´t really on your minions unless you watch them like a eagle (so while you could not give them orders direct you still had lots of micro management to perform), which get boring really fast (since there is a limit until you yelling at the pc "I am surrounded by idiots!" like a Bond villain stop begin funny).

I am liking this game so much, that last days I spend way too much time planing a lof of original characters for my own character pool, even writing down a quick bio/description of each one... which is something I often do while playing elder scrolls game, I created a main character and with some mods I created a custom made party for him.

Well, I was just wondering if there was a thread to post art related stuff. Here is some thing I have been doing - it is most fan art, but have been helping me a lot to improve, I got to thank to a friend, she is a big fan of Idolmaster and recommended to me check it out, I did and enjoy it a lot and decided to try my hand drawing something and turn to be a great exercise. There is more in my pixiv profile - http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?id=10736454 Anastasia | Avantharis [pixiv] http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=55230163 Minami Nitta | Avantharis [pixiv] http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=54011489

I have been watching a bit of Osomatsu-san, while aware that the first chapter didn´t represent the rest of the anime, I still have mixed feelings, while there was some very good parts, other I didn´t find so fun. On the other hand, Sekko Boys is just amazing, maybe because the format of shorter episodes, so they deliver the jokes and don´t overstay. A nice surprise is Hai to Gensou Grimgar, a anime about normal people which are thrown in a fantasy world, but with no memories of their previous life and that focus much, as someone on twitter said, on the personal relationships and healing (not magical healing, but people recovering from traumatic stuff), there is a much greater sense of struggle, they character aren´t like Kirito like in SOA, but people which spend early episode failling to kill a single goblin and when the manage it, it is a quite scene with some impact, they have to work hard to gain some coin and buy stuff (which somehow remember me a lot of rpg games like wizardry, where there is a much higher difficult early one).

Played a bit of the new expansion yesterday - the map I choose didn´t snowed, but the rain looks really gorgeous. I think that finnaly they add a auto bulldoze for abandoned buildings (or the mod I was using was still running, or not, I disabled everything to test but I might forget something).

Nick´s story about NBA 2K16 sound like a pitch for either a comedy or horror movie, where a random person is draft in the NBA because he was either mistaken with another more famous our skilled player (or could it be a basketball version of the Akira Kurosawa´s movie Kagemusha, where Nick´s character act as double for another player) or because it is one of the "be careful on what you desire" and he got draft but forget to ask the genie to have the actual skills to play. Also from what I could understand, Nick didn´t finish the story mode and based on what I heard about it, I can´t wait to see him comment about that...

Talking about games with many protagonists, I suddenly remembered about Mike Singleton´s works, specially the - Lords of Midnight. The game was a mix between a rpg and a wargame, released in 1980, the main idea was somewhat much like in the Lord of the Rings The Two Towers, where you have several characters spread in a world working to complete a quest. In case of Lords of Midnight, you have to coordinate several characters to destroy the Doomdark´s crown. In fact, if memory don´t fail me, I remember reading about a whole (but maybe small) genre of games based in the similar idea, there was at least, that I could remember, a Lord of the Rings and one based in the legend of King Arthur. I think both or more where from SSI. Another game, where you did control several characters, was a very ambitious adventure game for Apple II called Below the Root. It was based on a book of the same name, begin a history about the conflict between two group of people, one which lived in the Sky Tree and another which lived in the ground, begin the ones the tree represed their emotions (to the point they even use words like death) adn where vegetarians and had psi powers, and the ones the ground which instead try to live with their emotions, didn´t had psi power but eat meat (the game and I guess the book had this strange concept if a character from the sky tree eat meat he or she could lose their powers) and know metal work. In the game you did choose on character but you did also need to coordinate efforts with others to save the Sky Tree and make sure there is peace between the two groups. I was very young when I saw the game for the first time, I couldn´t understand it back there since I didn´t know english at that time, only stuff my father would explain while I watched him playing, also at that time, the graphics and that style game amazed me, for some reason I remember seeing the game in a old monochromatic monitor (this one which where green and black) and thinking it look amazing and the concept that you would you would walk in such huge world entering and leaving places was impressive to me. However, when I tried to play it several year later I did not find it so amazing.... the controls where bad and the graphics in color look bad.

Good episode! While I do agree with some points made about confusion and lack of explanation of certain elements, I think, much like it was said in the show toward the end, that despite that, all the new stuff the game does make it worth and much better and the most issues could be simple solved by small adjustments. The most curious thing is how compared to Beyond Earth and its last expasion, XCOM 2 not only does really try new things (even if some of them might need adjustments or clarifications) but it is rich in flavor and design, while Beyond Earth don´t tried new things (it just follow civ 5) and it design is very dry. I too agree a lot with Badinger and Sclps. In the original game (94) strategy layer was really not informative about the sudden difficult spike you could reach nor informed on what you actually need to do, it was very easy to suddenly find yourself facing sectopods, etherals and other stuff early on, with no way to fight back, let alone know that you need to capture a alien with psi power to have acess to them (even if you know isn´t likely the have the right chance to catch on, when I played I was luckly that the last sectoid attacking my base was the one with psi powers and the situation allowed me to try catch him). The newer XCOM campaign was good but very linear and mostly times you are always doing the same things, XCOM 2 is way more flexible, either in ways to win and how to recover, combining a bit of the 94 xcom random elements and the more linear of on the first one done by firaxis.

On the subject or learning something from a game - well, I could say that playing Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World, helped me a lot to learn english, in fact so much, that even once I got had english classes, I never need to worry about them and could easily get a very good grade (but I got to say, that this classes themselves wheren´t that good or hard, but still the game helped me a lot). Now on lacking a skill to enjoy something, I am not good at all with fighting games, but I do enjoy a lot BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, which I play mostly because of the wacky stories and characters. Funny thing, BlazBlue does have a "stylish" control set, where controls where made very easily to input (specially the combos which where reduced to a single button) which helps a lot if you are in just for the story.

The trick element on apocaliptic and post apocaliptic stories often is that while the process that lead to it is often the most interessing (as it explain how thing there it also explain how people are dealing with it) thing is also the the most negated (you can see this in the average bad zombie story, wheren suddenly zombies and everything is gone). Dark Souls and Bloodborne, however get this right, there is a whole process of how thing got where they are, with a step by step "progress", with bad (where they speed how bad things where going) and "good" decisions (that often just delay thing a bit) begin made at each one, that make the whole thing more natural (as another exemple, think how in the narrative of the fall of the Roman Empire, you got not just "bad" emperors, but "good" ones which where kind trying to keep thing together, even if half of time they just made it worst, and how this make the narrative more interessing). On the subject of Goblins and Raiders, in think, in my humble opinion, the different is in the theme and what it propose/intention to be, the goblins in the cript, unless otherwise said, aren´t doing, or pretending to, a commentary on something, unlike the raider in the division appear to be.

rip birthday bear... ....but it droped any loot? Oh, wait, maybe it is like Far Cry 3, with some more birthday bears you might be able to craft a belt or a bigger holster. Jokes aside, once the noise over, the silence that followed was quite amazing.

Birthright was my favorite campaign background, but I never managed to convince my player to play it much. The game was a very good port of the tabletop rules, it was maybe the last AD&D done when TSR was under Sierra (maybe the only title under them), it had both the kingdom management rules and battle (which played in a very total war way) and even some adventures, where you lead your regent and up to three more followers. The sad part was that they had plans to make expansion to cover more regions, but never happened. Talking about Myth, I decided to pick up my old Myth II manual, and what imense surprise it was when I was looking at the credits and see it that the Scenes (I guess the cutscenes) where done by the Anime International Company (Tokyo, Japan as you might guess by that name, their works include: Tenchi Muyo, El Hazard, Date a Live, Record of Lodoss War and others) something that I had forget, I decided to do a quick check on the director name in the manual: Nakazawa Kazuto. He was director of some works such as the anime part of Kill Bill, Parasite Dolls, and he did lots of character design for games such Sengoku Basa, Ashita no Nadja and others.

I wonder if this Myst backlash could be also,a effect of the saturation or a bad generalization on the adventure genre games and its problems, such as the pixel hunt or the bad design in puzzles, which at one point caused Myst to be thrown among "bad games" even if wasn´t bad as many other adventures of it´s period. You kind see this happen on Jrpgs, where they are labeled "bad" and all thrown in the same bag, even if they where very different or it´s design didn´t suffer from this or that problem. Once I was in a shop, choosing a game to buy and I remember hearing two guys looking at the Myst box (can´t remember which version, but it was one which as sold around the same time, as the pc game AD&D - Birthright: Gorgon´s Alliance, which was the game I bought, which was around 97) and saying, that "they would burn their brains trying to figure what to do" and I do wonder much people started to think that every adventure was like this, even if it was not true. I do agree with Rob, Myth was great game, and I also think that mostly like reason how it deal with death is likely the "physic engines are cool!" the history was however slight more serious (sometimes trying maybe too hard to be serious), but almost a bit too edgy. But my impression might be tainted because the brazilian localization, which was overall very good, but had some problems here and there - some voices and a bit of translation sometimes made things a bit goofy, archers had a very high pitched voice and the localization tried to used some slangs, which sounded ridiculous. The dwarves had a voice that sound a bit like a children (again a bit too high pitched, instead of a deep voice) trying to do a bad imitation a scottish person.

On the subject of fan works and copyrights, here is something I remembered and I wished to share, I just had to dig in my "like" list on twitter to find the right quotes: But before, just quicky explanation, in Japan you do have the doujin, which is somewhat. really keep at a simple level, indie scene, with amateur authors (and a few profissionals too) which do self publishing, many doujin are derivative works but many are original ones - they do all kinds of stuff, mangas, novels, music, games, figures, ect... its a very big thing in Japan (and very particular to Japan too) with a huge market. The curious part is that, despite people might selling derivative work, people kind don´t bother with it as you might expect. Deb Aoki, which is a comic/manga artist on twitter was talking about this months ago, that what she said about. Note: I just removed the person´s handles, the figure she said have asked, is I think, a Japanese editor (or something like that), this are direct quotes from twitter. "i asked him why the JP comix biz turns a blind eye to the huge sales of fan art comics/doujinshi.... he said that many comics pros, editors and creators alike, cut their teeth/hone their skills, built audiences w/ doujinshi so they see the value of doujinshi in two aspects: 1) that it helps young creators learn how to make/sell comics, and... & 2) they recognize that fans who love a series enough to make fan comix are usually big consumers of official manga & goods" Note 1: some manga authors did started as doujin authors. Note 2: As a amatuer artist myself, the first point is very true, fan art (in balance with original works) can help you a lot to improve skills, try new stuff and even gain some visibility.

And think I know this place too, I was there and decided to push foward until nightfall when I foolish think "I heard that when night fall things get very dangerous, but it can´t be that hard..." so I keep going foward, until realized the mistake I did and had to flee using one of those cristals to teleport in such a hurry, with a bunch of undead, bandits and wolfs behind me, that I lost a pawn.

Rob´s story about Call of Duty was almost a reenactment of the main concept behind the Edge of Tomorrow movie (or the manga, All You Need Is Kill, which the movie was inspired):

The page for the Romance of the Three Kingdoms 13 is up and release is 27 of january, however it only the japanese and traditional chinese version - which is much like what happened with Nobunaga, which showed first with the version for Asia and later the english version did show up. So I wonder how much time it will take until (and if) for the RoTK english version (which still appear on the steam database - https://steamdb.info/sub/65231/). I guess, that somewhere after Arslan: Warriors of Legend, which is due next month and also begin ported to pc and is promoted up and down by Koei (that port came out of nowhere, not that I am complaning, as I am a big fan of the anime). On other news, Disgaea, a SRPG, is coming to pc in the next month, the version is the Hour of Darness (the first game) plus the expansion Afternoon of Darkness along with some new stuff (such as improved graphics).

I kind still have nightmares with a documentery (can´t remember the channel, I think I saw it on youtube) about Alexander the Great, where they tried to make all the reencament in a 300 style but with no budget at all, the result, aside from the lack of horses (and even sarrisas too), as just guys weaving swords in dramatic motion with some blood effects. I do agree that a certain level reflection on equipment can be key to add flavor and reflect or represent a certain aspect of a conflict, my only fear is when pushed too far can as it also can lead to balance problems. Per exemple, I remember that in Caesar II, while you could have Heavy Infantry, Light Infantry, Slingers and Auxilia, truth was, that you don´t need anything except the Heavy Infantry, I mean I win the game several times using nothing but them, because they simple win against everything, even the Huns, I only need to change formation a bit. Which was strange, because the game did feature lots of sprites for different units of different regions, but chances where that you are never ever going to see them. Because unless you let yourself begin invaded (or very late in the game or beyond the game ending) you are going to beat all enemies around your city which often had only a single type of light unit.

Some Aksys System titles are a bit strange at first look, such as BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger or BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extended, until you play and and find out that make sense in context. I am not sure what a "Elminage" is, or how it can be "Gothic", but Elminage Gothic is a very good jrpg on the wizardry style. Also I a didn´t know that dragon could have dogmas, but Dragon´s Dogma is just amazing game.

The first lines appear accurate in the sense, that yes, they did send gazillions preview copies to a lot of people, I was giving a look on youtube and you can see the lots and lots of people which got preview copies (many of them which also got RT by Firaxis/2K too), so the guess that among the lot of previews he did recieve one (then again, in ideal place he shouldn´t, but that what happened) instead of special treatment to him. Also I did remember that Firaxis has a "Firaxisoclock" kind of post, where they promote some channels (quill16, beaglerush and llomachomp and their own stream) which do streams or videos from time to time, guess how isn´t among them... TB (not that I could spot). The middle part is curious, because the text there appear to trying to be a bit more natural, not very well worded, but I don´t think the person meant ill (it may sound, but I don´t think that is the intention), and judging by it the person might even have some familiarity with TB and his kind (in negative way), as the rest of the lines maybe a bit PR or some genuine expression (the person behind, might not be working direct on the game, as it can be some sort of community manager) or a default answer for some cases. A bit unrelated: Meanwhile I was looking at XCOM2 twitter, I kind find one photo which show I think a ranger using a later game machete... Talking about late game I am curious how armor will be and if look cooler as the advent ones.

Troy´s comment on bows and archers remind of one thing - people often, maybe due years of bad discovery channel-esque shows/documentaries (specially those deadly warrior stuff...) put too much weight in how "amazing" certain weapons and armor would be, and much like Troy said, they ignore the human aspect behind it (or at least they assume that is the most awesome and manly person ever, instead of people that might be afraid, tired, hungry or don´t have a single idea why they are there). Also they often ignore other aspects, such as economic costs, simbolic or culture meanings that this objects might or how in older period and stuff was made by artisans and craftsmans that might have different levels of skill and resources (by that I mean, that object might have different levels of quality, while many people think that everything was the same level) this kind affect the interpretation how those objects where used (because they exagerate them) or not (because in truth they would be impratical or maybe given the kind of warfare this people fight the object might not be useful) and how we think ancient conflicts.

Really good episode! those talks on production, issues and technical details where really interesing.

While is one of my favorite Visual Novels, Notch - Innocent LunA - Eclipsed SinnerS is a fine word salad. Oblivious Garden ~ Carmina Burana, another Visual Novel is also to a good game and a bit word salad for a title.

If one also want so see a bit more from XCOM 2 from another source (they, I guess, since I am not following close, give preview copies to a lot of people, some which even not be close to popular youtubers and I don´t mean this in dismissive way, but to point that smaller channels might got it too) - quill18 (which have a channel mostly on strategy games) have his own playlist of videos but at that point I kind see everything I need from the game.