Alberich

Miranda from Avadon, because she's willing to see the country overrun and its defenders slaughtered just for a personal revenge on Redbeard. If you're playing with forces that large, and you haven't thought past the pleasure of staring at heads on pikes for the rest of your life....retire to private life already. Zakary and Barzahl from Geneforge 2. Hard to say which I hate worse. Barzahl drives himself nuts with canisters, and doesn’t seem to mind that he’s making creatures that will get scarier and scarier ‘til they overwhelm the earth…or Zakary because he’s sane enough to know this is going on, but hides it from the Council to save his own hide for a little while longer. Such contemptible cowardice. Agree with the badvotes on Rawal too...such pettiness in the face of disaster. The shapers, having elevated themselves to such power, ought to have an ethic of noblesse oblige. Some do, but he’s run to the other extreme. (On the other hand I am a Redbeard lover for reasons I gave here - http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/15219-fighting-redbeard-a-poll-spoilers-within/#entry194696 – in the constant crisis he faces, you really do have to be tough and ruthless.)

He's added a couple more, but is a little disappointed in the longer fights. Ep. 79 has a clever section where he speeds up the fight and adds some soothing music to make it easy on the viewer....if I'd thought of that, I'd've recommended "Yakety Sax" ( ). Good user friendly speed-up anyway.

Meeting the first Drakon in G2 -- on the toll road -- because he spooked me. Some of Litalia’s dialogue in G5…first when she tells you that the effects of self-shaping (the arrogance and so forth) can wear off with time if you stop doing it…and then, near the end, when you’ve done her quests and she gives you her weapon and tells you she’s finished killing. There’s something about her dialogue there that lets me feel the weight being lifted off her shoulders, and makes me really happy for her.

I have faith in your inspirations.

To which I will only add -- I am really looking forward to how you do his voice.

"He was Scottish, and he disagreed with me!" -- love it! Interesting to see how you consider the different factions; I like that part of your Let's Play. I don't know if your latest took you all the way to Taygen so I won't say anything about him just yet. (I don't remember in enough detail to know how close he is to places you've been.) Glad you kept your Drayk...just because I like drayks so much. And as you have seen they are handy for fighting drakons.

Okay, now I have a second favorite Blxz Geneforge voice, after Alexia. Half Royal Scots Drakon Guards, half Kamikaze Highlanders. Btw, in “sneak” situations I used to go into combat mode and hit myself with a speed spell…then I could run around all I liked and the guys I was avoiding had to take turns. It’s a little irritating with lots of creations because you have to skip through their turns, so you may not like it for a Let’s Play, but it saved me a few reloads.

Still loving the voices and accents.

I see you spotted one of my favorite attributes of the Drayk....that Drakons preferably attack them, but they resist Drakon breath very well.

(On reflection, maybe not 90%. I know I went to his palace and I know he was perturbed my control tool was gone...and I know I raised some hell and did some very satisfying harm. I think I killed him but it has been many years.)

But I'm 90% sure I killed Rawal and 100% sure I got the "Litalia" ending. (She took out the tool for me.)

Now hang on, I remember killing Rawal...after I got the tool removed...that would change some of these.

The Awakened pretty explicitly tell you to go use the Geneforge...but when you come back all glowy and arrogant, they start to have misgivings. Or my memory fails me.

There is indeed. I once saw a great courtroom cartoon...see if this link works: https://books.google... court"&f=false - and scroll up a little. The Geneforge games normally include a really tough but optional combat area where you can “top” just about any achievement you care to name. (I honestly do not remember what that was like in G5.) But even if you skip the hardest fights, I think you’ll top this one when you decide on the right faction, and bring the best possible end to the war. (The suitable values for "right" and "best possible" being left up to the player, which of course is you.) Btw, I looked up one of your older episodes where you confronted a captain guarding the approaches to the western lands. I loved the “bored civil servant” voice you gave him, though your reading of Alexia is still my favorite.

Oh, he didn't stop with just one. Habit-forming, that is. (Too bad he can't shape one, right? He could name it "Prometheus." I kill me.)

Blxz's next episode, where he goes after an Unbound, is called "Unbound, Unravelled, and Undone." Which is rather witty if you know this -

Exactly, Triumph. It's what you do, not what you say. (The Shapers aren't going to listen to your views anyway.) I was as pro-Awakened as you please, but I destroyed the Geneforge instead of using it...so the Obeyers came out as the winners.

You can think of it as, "Look, y'all, here's what life would have been like if you'd listened to me." (Works well for G1 Awakened ending.)

My baby brother tried another possibility I didn't..."get on the boat and leave before you even reach Trajkov." From what he tells me it's basically ending #6, though I don't remember if you are jailed.

I'm not laying odds on Toroth next time. Interesting how the different creation types have different attack priorities.

Snakes kill you with icky saliva, so I guess it's not so far from life.

They sure treat you like a piece of meat, and not a choice cut either...

This may be what it was like for US citizens living during the 'McCarthy era' in the early cold war. You either go full retard and salute your flag 5 times a day while facing mecca I mean Washington or you admit that maybe a little bit of balance is important and get branded a traitor commie and shipped off. It wasn't like that, not even close. As an example, Time Magazine ran a famous cover story on "Demagogue McCarthy" in 1951 with no repercussions; the Socialist Workers Party (our main Trotskyite party) sailed thorugh the 50's intact. There's no equivalence to what would happen to, say, a person in the Islamic State who printed an article on "Demagog al-Baghdadi" or tried to start a Shiite or anti-Islamic organization there. McCarthyism was mostly about getting Communists out of federal employment (his infamous committee was a subcommittee on Government Operations); for most citizens the greatest danger was prosecution under the Smith Act. Which you could avoid by not "advocating the violent overthrow of the United States Government"..."a little bit of balance" didn't enter into it and didn't get you "shipped off." The Shapers are a lot more despotic than the U.S. government in that or any era. Grimm's original point I think analogizes more closely to Benjamin Franklin's in the First Continental Congress...he'd spent so many years in London, and was associated with an earlier effort to give Pennsylvania a royal governor, so that a few members did suspect him of being in British pay no matter what he was advocating then. But he was able to overcome that in time...as the PC usually is in most Geneforge games, except I believe in the first one, where if I remember the heavy canister use makes you a suspect character for the rest of your days.

I remembered it from the Awakened...I thought the Barzites just gave you canisters, but this is an old memory.

I was long ago persuaded by this post -- http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3173 -- that there is no need to demand outright original creatures in fantasy tales. (Though I give applause to writers who really try, especially if the creatures are supposed to be more like sci-fi aliens...Lovecraft's efforts with the Yithians and the starfish-headed Old Ones come to mind.) Cliches can be used to tell a story and cut through the need to build everything from scratch. The Creations are supposed to be designed by humans, what's more natural than that they'd reach into human imagination and legend, and make what they found there? Besides, the Vlish aren't so different from what you might see on the cover of an old sci-fi pulp. And the real point is, original or not, Jeff uses them to tell a good story, and let the player make it his own. I don't deny that some of the other creatures have stronger abilities...but by the time I met the Unbound, I knew they were coming. That first Drakon was something I wasn't prepared for. (Scaring me, even for a moment, with a cartoony-looking dragon ought to win Jeff some kind of award!) And the ending was spooky too, as the implication was that time was against the Shapers and humans in general....as the geneforging Drakons would shape themselves into more powerful creatures, who'd in turn shape themselves more powerful, growing less restrained as they grew stronger...and the humans unable to join in the "arms race" because of their laws. In the later games, I was used to it; but in GF 2 it was new.