Gwardinen

Just watched the Ides of March, based on the recommendation that followed my post about Drive. Good film, I greatly enjoyed it. Reminded me somewhat of the good old days when I was watching the West Wing start to finish. However, it did make me wonder a little at the praise that so many people (including myself, to an extent) seem to be giving Ryan Gosling at the moment. Undoubtedly, both Drive and the Ides of March impressed me, and he was the protagonist and therefore most important character to enjoy, and enjoy I did. However, they didn't feel particularly different. I like the whole softly spoken with a clever, strong side that comes into play when necessary bit. Ryan Gosling seems very good at it, and very good at keeping his face and voice calm and level during intense scenes before letting just a little emotion leak out of them at other times. But uh... that's all he does. In both films. The whole time. I began to wonder how much of the characters I was projecting myself, because there was a comparatively blank slate there. I don't really remember the Notebook well enough to contrast his performance there, unfortunately, and this consideration is likely tainted by simply having watched two strangely similar films (in terms of the way the main character is used) in quick succession. I still think it's possible Ryan Gosling might be a great actor, but watching these two films so close together made me wonder how much of it is just that he's seemingly so well suited to playing these kinds of characters.

Probably want to spoiler what comes after "The 1.2 or 1.3 patch seems to have broken the whole thing where" in your post, Sno. I'm willing to bet this is because Skyrim is essentially a console game ported to PC. LMB will usually be performing the actions that are bound to the right trigger/R2 on a gamepad, such as swinging a main weapon or shooting an arrow while RMB will be performing the left trigger/L2 action such as blocking with a shield. A Bethesda representative said at some point during development that the team had heard the criticisms of Oblivion and Skyrim was going to get custom-designed controls and UI for the PC that would make sense for PC players. Heh.

Organic pod things, Ridley Scott involvement. Is it something to do with the Alien franchise? I don't really have as much affection for that as most, but it looks to have some decent actors in so I'm cautiously optimistic. On the other hand, how many times are we going to have people run in a straight line away from a giant rolling object?

Glad iTunes Store apps are being posted about here as I never notice when they're free. That jetpack game is surprisingly great and I'm interested in the Broken Sword thing too.

That Buffy game looks surprisingly good. Does anyone know whether it actually is?

I don't know about hot drinks, but that video really gets me going. I honestly can't tell if that's real or not at this point. Reality has become too bizarre for me.

I agree that they're better than Oblivion, but yeah that whole segment of the game just doesn't interest me all that much. As soon as the objective becomes "go into a place, kill everyone, loot everything" it suddenly feels like every other RPG. It's not bad, per se, it's just the weakest part of an otherwise pretty unique game for me. It is worth noting that now and then there are moments in dungeons that are very interesting or cool; occasionally you come into a huge, beautiful water-lined cavern or stumble upon necromancers trying to summon an ancient evil or whatever. Again, I feel like I need to give the disclaimer that I enjoy most of this game, but that doesn't mean the experience is always interesting. If the debuff isn't there anymore, great, that solves my problems. Ideally there would be good reasons for mages to wear robes (since every other mage in the world seems to) but it would be properly balanced within all the systems. Just not having restrictions is a good second place, though, so I'm happy. I definitely understand and agree that starting skills aren't that important in Skyrim, and I get what they're going for with the "more experiential than numerical" and even approve of it to an extent. However, as you said it doesn't change the fact that the games have always been guilty of not properly informing people of things that might be important to them. I think this bothers me at the moment more than usual because Dark Souls is fresh in my mind. I'm not going to make out that Dark Souls informs its players better about anything, as that would make me a crazy person. Its systems are just so solid and considered in the way they interlock that as soon as you actually figure them out (probably with the help of wikis) the whole thing makes sense and you can see how certain restrictions work and how there are many viable ways to play, but they all have sensible advantages and disadvantages. The Elder Scrolls games, by comparison, don't seem to really balance the different manners in which characters can be created at all, and just rely on the fact that the normal difficulty level is not super challenging and certain skills and items and tactics are so strong as to make unexpected weaknesses in other parts of a player's build irrelevant.

My brain had to reboot after reading that sentence.

I don't think I've played a single game that wasn't on a 64 man server. It never occurred to me to do so. Indeed! Should we try to get a proper Idle Thumbs platoon deployment going sometime over this holiday period?

Yeah, the dungeons themselves are the weakest part of the game for me. Which is a shame, because you do a lot of them. Regarding armour debuffing magic: if that's true, and I kind of suspect it is, that actually sort of pisses me off. They really need to explain things like that. Even the races aren't properly explained anymore. I understand they wanted to get away from the character creation screen where people had to look at a bunch of stats and make a hundred small choices they don't understand yet, but some things do need to be spelled out. I didn't even know there were skills that started off better for different races, for example. If magic suffers heavily while wearing armour, it makes my plans as a Smith/Enchanter kind of stupid. In fact, it makes Enchanting in general kind of stupid as a mage skill (which, lorewise, it's absolutely meant to be) as you're not realistically going to want to enchant non-armour clothes. The robes you find are better than anything you could create. The only reason to enchant the non-jewellery apparel as a mage is to get some benefit to defence by wearing armour while still making sure you have magical bonuses. I know I sound like I hate everything about this game ever time I post in this thread, but that's not true at all. Actually it's the fact that I enjoy it so much and have spent so much time playing it that makes these (comparatively) minor problems so irritating to me.

I just watched Drive. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, especially since I'd already heard others say that the start of the film isn't really indicative of the rest of the film. I will definitely echo that sentiment, as whatever it is that I was expecting, Drive was not it. In a good way. I almost feel like I'm ruining the experience for someone else just saying this, but the film sets itself up as one thing, then as another and then ends up being something else again. The one thing that's undeniable is that the film is relentlessly stylish throughout. I'd also note that through some combination of writing, directing and acting, the performance of the main character is just fucking magnetic. I could scarcely take my eyes off him. Recommended, even if I'm not totally sure why and don't want to spoil the experience for another by trying to figure it out here.

I don't necessarily agree that gold is always going to be bountiful. That may be true for certain characters, but I've had plenty of problems affording the things I want. Most notably, certain skills are quite difficult to level unless you seek training, and training is very expensive. I'm at a point now where my Conjuration skill is lagging seriously behind everything else, but realistically I only use it to summon one atronach per every three fights (and again since doing this before the fight doesn't count I either have to wait and use a bunch of magicka right off the bat or use it beforehand and not get the skill increase), and using soul trap on whichever things I need soul gem souls for. I am not getting a lot of Conjuration increases just dynamically at this point. As a result, I'm relying more and more on training to keep the skill up, which means I absolutely require as much gold as I can get. Meanwhile, I'm also trying to increase Smithing and Enchanting, which I could do by very slowly gathering the needed items or much faster by buying them. The pace I prefer to go at in this kind of game dictates that I (at least occasionally) buy such things. I'm 60 hours in for god's sake, the honeymoon period of not minding when certain things require a great deal of time staring at menus and searching dungeons I have no real story investment in for miscellaneous ingredients for the sake of levelling skills has kind of worn off. That's always been the weakest part of this game for me, but that requires a different post entirely. I'm well aware that there are tips and tricks I can use to help myself out, like only smithing one thing or enchanting one type of enchantment, like abusing the fact that soul trap works and generates skill even when used on a corpse, like just using the wait function to farm soul gems from certain restocking dungeons. However, if I go down those roads, why not just open up the console and give myself the damn skills? I prefer to have my skills raise organically within the systems present, but it just so happens that one particular lynchpin that was stymieing me was the carry weight. Since I carry all the aforementioned books, not to mention a bunch of smithed goods that I'm waiting to enchant/sell (let's not even talk about the weird behaviours that come out of fast travelling around to every Hold to sell shit) and have no stamina upgrades due to being a pure mage, my scope for things I could realistically find and carry in addition was very small. I happened to think disabling this one part of the system was better than breaking all the other parts for what I wanted to get out of the game. All of that said, I have mentioned before and I'm willing to reiterate that usually the best experience in these sorts of games comes from working within as many systemic limitations as you can be happy about. So I'm not saying the rest of you are crazy for living with encumbrance; quite the opposite. I'm saying I wish I could, but for how I desire to play this game and how I think I will enjoy it most, that was one compromise that had to be made to save many other systems.

I go back and forth on whether the whole carry weight system is a good idea. It does promote less totally insanely unrealistic behaviours at times, but a fairly equal amount of time it just ends up promoting other behaviours that aren't much more sensible and are considerably more time consuming and irritating. It's become OK to me that I'm able to carry a ton of shit in games at this point. Until we have a genuinely much better inventory and economy system in games in general, I'm all right with the idea that I can just carry whatever I need to carry. Encumbrance does not qualitatively improve my play experience. So I essentially turned it off (console commands to increase my carry weight beyond the point at which it matters). I rarely recommend anything that could be classed as "cheating" in a game like this, as it really survives on you buying into a certain amount of hardship and beyond that buying into the consistency of the world as an "other" to yourself. However, having thought about how I played the game before and how I play the game now, I can honestly say I enjoy it more without encumbrance. In my case I just didn't want to be penalised for spending a lot of time outside of Holds, and for questing geograhically. By which I mean just going in the direction of something that is nearby and relevant to me, and exploring things I came upon on the way and then continuing in any given direction as long as there is a sensible reason (within the quests and so on I'd already taken on) to do so. That's hardly what I'd call really hardcore wilderness exploring, particularly in a game like Skyrim, but I was constantly either having to interrupt it or just abandon a bunch of items (some of which would be important to skilling up for me) everywhere I went. Additional reason: stopping to read every single book everywhere I went was totally screwing with the pacing of the game for me. So now I carry a lot of books with me, allowing me to read them when it feels thematically appropriate or when I feel like a change of pace. Books are not weightless.

I think pieces like that infographic are most useful as a blunt object to shove people into more useful and reasonable information sources like that Wired article. If you don't agree, TP, and believe that infographic to be balanced, objective and well-researched, then feel free not to associate yourself with what I'm saying but it's possible we're on the same page here. Flashy, sensationalist and exaggerated information dumps such as that - which, as Nappi pointed out, are ironically kind of the hallmark of the "social media" that it was decrying - can get people who otherwise might not spare the time to actually go and read into a subject more deeply. However, as soon as you are at the stage of being genuinely interested in the issue, you have to immediately leave them behind and start going into things like that Wired article (and actually once you're at that stage it's a good idea to go further and look for actual scientific articles rather than a popular journalistic interpretation of them). As I said, the article was much more balanced, objective and well-researched than the infographic and points towards the "conclusion" that most genuinely considered pieces of thought point to: life is complicated. Most activities, attributes and events have both positive and negative consequences, and which any given person considers to be positive and negative are also often divergent. The article itself was of course written with more of a slant than that, but that's because it's journalism. I believe one of the greatest lessons we can learn in life is simply that remaining aware, curious and willing to analyse one's own thoughts and even manner of thinking is very important. You don't always have to be "right", just try to be open to possibilities, even difficult ones. Edit: Quick edit just to make sure everyone doesn't think I'm a complete hippy. I'm not saying that facts don't exist or that everything is relative, either. Just that we all, especially those of us who grow up being aware of our own intelligence and having a fairly unfettered access to information, have a tendency to want to be on the "right side" of an issue at all times. It's often worth trying to distance yourself from that desire, whatever the issue, and try to just look at what is going on as clearly as you can and see what genuinely benefits you most rather than what confirms your position most.

Yeah, I actually think I know which quest you're talking about. Pretty much the same thing happened to me. Even worse, I hadn't so much as started the actual related quest yet. So I just had to sit on this information until someone else was murdered and someone finally asked me to look into it. Additionally, I recently found evidence that someone in another quest is planning to betray me. I've actually looked for ways to use this information, but it doesn't seem like I can do anything except go in knowing there's going to be an ambush rather than just reacting to it. Since the game punishes me for preparing for a fight by using spells before I'm combat by not giving me skill experience for doing so, that is useless. I will have to wait to activate my flame cloak and conjure an atronach and so on until they attack me anyway, because I desperately need to level Conjuration and Destruction at this point.

I just bought a Russian key for Battlefield 3 - though admittedly not from this site specifically - and it came Russian. That said, the seller gave me detailed instructions for how to download and apply English language packs. I would imagine that site has something similar going on if it's necessary.

So this is a crazy/awesome thing: Thu'uMic As some of you may have guessed from the name, it's a set of programs and mods that ends up with you being able to trigger shouts in the game by shouting into your microphone. I just spent a good hour or two screwing around with the various parts of it trying to get it working, and I have about 9 of the shouts working pretty solidly now (only 10 at a time will work at the moment due to an issue in the current version of one of the required ancillary mods). The only real issue is that saying just the first word is often still dodgy, and while saying both words often works, only saying all three has a genuinely good success rate. Since there's only one shout in the game that I actually have all three words of, it ends up with me shouting, for example, "Fo krah diin!" and the game version of me only shouting "Fo krah!"* Even worse when I shout three words and in-game only one comes out. Also, it comes with a Dragon Shout cheat sheet! Some of the story ones are deliberately omitted. *Part of the mod allows you to switch the in-game shouting voice off, so it really is just you shouting, but I prefer to leave it on. Edit: Does anyone know of a better place to host images, particularly with the option to have clickable thumbnails, than ImageShack? They're kinda skeezy these days.

The Witcher 2 is 40% off on Steam right now, in the UK at least. These deals are usually worldwide, right? Anyway, if you haven't tried the Witcher 2 yet I recommend it. The recent 2.0 patch really helped some of the early game issues, so the only real problem I have with the game at this point is that the last act is a bit... abrupt. Still heavily recommended!

My honest first thought is when Bethesda was creating an RPG for the first time they went to the fantasy well with orcs, dwarves and elves and then tried to differentiate themselves from there. Maybe it's an attempt to make the world more realistic and history more fallible, but I suspect it's as simple as starting generic and gradually going specific. Regarding realism and an uneducated populace and such, though, if that really is the idea it does make some sense. Humans are apes, yet almost no one actually refers to them as such unless they're specifically being scholarly and that's in a supposedly educated and scientific society. That's even before you consider that I constantly hear the idea that we're "descended from monkeys" and indeed that chimpanzees, gorillas, etc. are monkeys. That's beyond just daily classification laziness, it's directly incorrect. I don't see why the supposedly mostly peasant population of Tamriel would be so much more logical and accurate with the way they name and classify races.

Well that's a purely semantic distinction. That's basically the point of what we've been saying. There are men, mer, beast races and what D&D might call "celestial" - various otherworldly shit. Orcs aren't really ever referred to as elves, and nor are dwarves, but in terms of all actual species classification, they are. Mer are elves. Orcs even have pointy ears, if you want to judge things that way.

I'm not hugely informed on the TES lore, but as I understand it people are generally split into "men and mer" (the beast races don't even seem to count, most of the time, in scholarly books). Literally anything with a "mer" at the end is essentially a kind of elf, including orcs (orsimer, as Sno mentioned) and dwarves (dwemer, obviously). It's just that, as in real life, official terminology is not used at all times.

Man, I just spent money and you're already pushing more purchases on me? Why you do this?

Actually, I have read the books. Admittedly, the first was a gift and I was then encouraged to read the rest to maintain the dialogue I was having regarding the books with the person who gave me the first one. Nevertheless, I read those things that the internet doesn't like. Even having read the books... there's nothing that really counteracts the possibility that they could be experiments. The only thing that might count against it would be the length of time they've existed for, and if we go down the rabbit hole of ancient hidden technology are we perhaps getting back into fantasy, or maybe even crossing into conspiracy theory/alternate history? Genres are weird.

Giant Bomb just interviewed Nolan North regarding an Uncharted-related book he's created. The interview itself is actually pretty great, and my favourite part comes early on when Can't wait for this year's Northies!

In terms of existing genres I'd probably call Twilight modern fantasy (as well as teen romance, of course). What "counts" as science fiction gets debated a lot, but Twilight definitely doesn't feel right for it in my mind.