Korax

I just played a great Versus game on Dark Carnival. My team regularly got at least 75% of the way, and we managed to murder the other team before they got past 25% each time. It looks like people are still trying to use L4D1 strategies; one map we managed to keep the other team from moving forward for around five minutes because they backed into a dead-end room to defend themselves and ended up being trapped by constant Spitter and Boomer attacks.

There's totally a story. Just like the first one, all the campaigns link together, but this time it seems they've taken steps to make it more obvious. Just played through Hard Rain. It's pretty interesting. Without being too spoilery, instead of five chapters of going forward to find the rescue point, it had you go find an objective and return to the starting point. Hard Rain is the campaign with the much-touted Director-controlled weather, and it can get intense. There are little differences. I suppose it depends on your play style. The M-16 seems to be more accurate than the AK, but I think the AK may hold more ammo. The "combat rifle" shoots 3-round bursts. The combat shotgun fires faster than the pumpy. I haven't really looked at the hunting/sniper rifles, but I would think that maybe magazine capacity or fire rate differs. Maybe scope magnification, too.

I like all of the little musical variations, too. The weird, discordant calliope/theremin in Dark Carnival, the touches of Deliverance-style fiddle and banjo in the Swamp, and the blues trumpet in The Parish add to the individuality of each campaign.

If you've got room, shoot me a message/friend request. Getting familiar with the campaigns sounds good.

Played Dead Center and Dark Carnival on single-player. I don't know if anything can top Carnival. Trying to do "Guardin' Gnome" with AI characters is frustrating as shit, though. They treat you as the leader, and won't try to press ahead at all. Trying to get through "gauntlet" sections by alternately throwing the gnome a few feet and then killing 40 guys with an axe was an exercise in near-keyboard-breaking patience.

I think it goes regular -> cut -> polished -> star -> flawless -> perfect.

Balls, balls, balls. I can't say I'm surprised, but the game has yet to unlock. Also, the Steam forums are so bogged down that it takes forever just to find out that there isn't any word on when it will be ready. Screw this, I'm tired.

The only anatomy you need to know is the head. 'Cause that's where the bullets go.

I've had it for a while, but didn't get around to playing it until a few months ago. I finished the original campaign, and I got a couple hours into the first expansion before a ton of awesome new games came out. I'll get back to it eventually. I enjoyed it right up to the end boss, which was a fairly unreasonable ramp-up in difficulty. I always play spellcasters, and the fight is definitely balanced for the fighter classes. Fortunately, my "DebugMode 1, dm_god" spell went off without a hitch and I kicked some ass.

I'm expecting delays, too, but at least in this case it's delays from a midnight launch, rather than one at noon. And if my math's right, midnight in Toronto is 10 here in Denver. Does Valve usually do rolling release times, and if so, is this an exception? EDIT: Nope, it's right:

Huh-buh? This means it unlocks at 10pm MST, today! FUCK YEAH!

I had a love-hate relationship with Hotel Dusk. I enjoyed the setting, art style, and story, but it took everything that I hate about adventure games and stretched them to frustrating extremes. Unless you did every single action in the exact order that they wanted you to, nothing would happen. There was no room for exploration or experimentation.

I closed the video as soon as I heard that. Ridiculous.

I'm not sure how exactly the experience works out, but your non-party characters should maintain level progression with the rest of your party.

I very much enjoyed the BBS Documentary. I've been waiting for Get Lamp for a while now, so this seems like a good thing.

Weird. I just watched a documentary special about the "science of cold," a major part of which was the pursuit of Bose-Einstein condensates.

Small worlds was awesome. Exploring the little pixel art environments was interesting, especially because the game doesn't really give you much context for them. The ending could be interpreted as a little sinister, though...

I think it may have been because I'm a mage with a lot of spells centered around disabling enemies and crowd control. Fireball and the Walking Bomb spells are great when a lot of enemies crowd together. Winter's Grasp and Stone Fist are good for temporarily removing enemy combatants from the action so you can concentrate on specific enemies. It may also help to turn the AI off and hang back, only dealing with guys as they come. The tactics options are fine most of the time, but when there are a bunch of guys on the field, the rather broadly defined conditions can make the characters run from enemy to enemy, landing a hit or two before moving on instead of killing the guy who's killing them.

That's weird.

IW may have crippled the PC version, but at least it prevents people from hacking the game, right? Oh, wait, nevermind. But that's easily solved because you can just, y'know, kick him from the ser... ver... Huh.

Argh, I keep forgetting about these scheduled games until it's too late. I'm gonna try to join in next Sunday, but my terrible memory can make no guarantees.

Damn. I always forget about my Shield. I'm playing on Normal, so it's gonna be a while before I try it again. I'll have to make sure I'm all stocked up before I do it, too.

Someone released a really nice tool called TorchLeech. It's a mod manager that allows you to activate/deactivate mods, check for content conflicts, and has some sort of search within the Runic Mod Forum, Runic Games Fansite, and Torchlight Insider that allows you to browse and install mods through the tool. EDIT: So, the whole "activate/deactivate" thing doesn't seem to quite work, but the other features are good. Unfortunately, the database of mods it has integration for is limited because it's manually updated by the project members, and only after they can take a good look at the mod and make sure it's stable. Fortunately, it doesn't ruin the use of any "non-supported" mod, so anything you might have already isn't affected.

As soon as she started attacking, I just gave up and re-loaded.