Feo Takahari

Have they gotten better over the course of the series? I only tried them in the first game, and found them to be inferior to my sword by the end.

I don't actually remember. If I didn't already say so, it's somewhere in the first game, and I remember it was on the east side of the zone it was in. Oh, and the surroundings were sort of a wasteland--not sandy-colored like the Western Wastes, but with darker-colored ground and ugly trees.

Someone's bound to mention the temple of the ornks, so I'll bring it up just to be first. For those who never found it, it's in the first game. You hear "angry mooing," then face off against a bunch of "rogue ornks" outside some sort of temple. Inside the temple are ornkskin gloves on an altar, but if you take them a glowing angelic ornk will appear and attack you.

Good one! I'll put it up right away.

I need a quote for the Geneforge page on TV Tropes. Got any suggestions?

Didn't I make a poll about this?

Then again, some of A5's comments about the expansion of Avernum's population could be seen as foreshadowing for a conflict provoked by that expansion, presumably with the Vahnatai. It would certainly fit Jeff's recent themes.

Informed by Kirkus Reviews that "it's difficult to imagine a reader who will not be changed by" Disquiet by Julia Leigh, I discovered I am difficult to imagine. This is in large part because I didn't get what the point was supposed to be. Also picked up but never finished a book where an annoying guy and a hot girl try to stop an evil corporation from killing people with bar codes--this is a good example of why I get so snarky whenever I discuss modern literature. Now I'm just playing video games and trying to cool down.

Hey, we don't want to wreck the ecosystem, do we? Seriously, I killed those things that ate their guardian, but let the rest of the guardians and monsters live, and when clearing a path for Dionicio I just outran all the monsters. As for Fae, well, I confess I killed her--in real life folks like her should probably go on trial, but when the choice is execution or a pardon . . .

Edit: come to think of it, the Circle of Life quest was rather unusual. Normally when we're given such a quest in an RPG, we get the option to kill the quest-giver instead. (I considered doing so anyways, but decided not to piss off Highground.)

I'll add my two cents: I don't actually see the resemblance between the plots of A4 and A3, and furthermore think any game Spiderweb has made since at least the original Avernum has been worth playing based on its plot. A4 also has the best jokes of any Spiderweb game I've played. However, something about the combat system seems oddly simplified, particularly when dealing with foes that have no special abilities--with infinite arrows but weak bows, magic only necessary against the toughest enemies, and high enemy HP totals, you just stab, get clawed, stab, get clawed, stab and kill, heal, and repeat over and over. Generally speaking, if you could stand the early Final Fantasy games, you won't have a problem, and if you couldn't, you may still not have a problem, as while the plot isn't up to the level of Final Fantasy, neither is the combat as boring.

Myself, I'm waiting to have my faith in movie reviews revived. Or, for that matter, my faith in humanity. (Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle destroyed both by rooting for the baddies in the third X-Men movie, on the argument that the mutants would inevitably commit genocide against normal people unless they were eliminated themselves, one way or the other.)

I think I just figured out how you got the title of "Dendrophile."

I've gotten the CD ever since an attempt to uninstall a competitor's game led to the permanent deletion of 10 other games. I generally rely on the walkthroughs rather than the hint books, though.

Uh, I don't mean to complain, given how hard you must be working, but won't the links all break the next time the UBB acts up?

So it was by my sheer ineptitude that, playing as a Guardian in the second game, I was literally incapable of killing rotgroths and gazers? (I didn't pump a ton of points into Parry, but I certainly didn't neglect it.)

I have a history of playing a Leadership-heavy Guardian/Warrior, using almost no canisters, killing as few likeable people as possible, favoring "honorable" hand-to-hand combat, and getting my rear handed to me on a silver platter. Returning to the first game with a canister-guzzling, genocidal Agent, I was amazed to discover how much easier everything got, but frankly, I'd rather use my old style. (I think of it as playing on Torment without changing the difficulty setting.)

Come to think of it, we have all those archives of old posts. Is there a "classic" section of the archives? If not, would anyone care to add one? I'd volunteer to search for other topics to add to it, but I haven't been around long enough to remember the real classics.

This is probably the place to ask--in G4, when you get the quest to kill a whole bunch of "infiltrators" in the third quarter of the game, are you supposed to force combat with them? There doesn't seem to be any dialogue to attack them, but in one case forcing an attack made everyone in the area hostile.

The farther you get into the game, the more canisters you'll need to have taken to get bad effects. I think the rule of thumb is 1/6 the canisters available so far in the game.

I'm curious where the one for 2 is. I seem to recall the one in 1 being in the Servile Warrens (I remember it was behind the most heavily locked door in the game.)

Where was I when this topic was going on? Anyways, if we've revived it for some reason, I think that as long as we've only got one image for each class, having them be males and females is much better than having them be androgynous, particularly if they're not wearing concealing hoods and such. The Guardian in the third game was just disgusting. However, as commented on in another topic, it is a little weird to only see female Agents. (Maybe, if there's a G6, male ones could have a townsperson graphic--they're in disguise.)

For school, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Why, dear teacher, why? For pleasure, A Million Open Doors by John Barnes--and to my utter amazement, I have yet to find anything snarky and negative to say about it.

 

P.S. Apparently some people really, really like Invisible Man, so I suppose I should expand upon my above comment. I hate the metaphors, particularly the most obvious ones (like when the whites get the blacks to pick up coins from an electrified rug.)

Looks like this belongs under technical support. Any moderators care to move it?

A word of advice to anyone else who clicks on the imageshack link: beware of disguised advertising.

I do every quest as soon as possible to get it off the list. Good thing they're never the boring and pointless filler found in certain rival RPG series. (Incidentally, kudos to Jeff for avoiding that.)