othersean

Sorry about that -- it was a bad day for me, and I should not have been posting. I'm still not a fan of knockback, though, using my usual party of two melee fighters, a priest, and a mage. The old disciplines used to be tactically useful when fighting a tank-ish boss, since you could take off its armor with shieldbreaker, then hack away with melee and the odd mighty- or well-aimed-blow. Unfortunately, the new disciplines knock the enemy around the room, forcing you to chase it or use missile attacks. They may be more useful for a missile-oriented party, but they're much less so for melee. Also, when both you and the enemies have this ability, fights turn into some weird kind of pinball.

Many Spiderweb games, even the older ones, peg the CPU even when doing nothing (e.g. hit "ESC" to pull up the menu, then switch to a terminal, run "top -o cpu", and watch Avernum suck up 100% CPU). I just suspend the offending game when I switch to something else ("killall -STOP Avernum" in the terminal), then resume it ("killall -CONT Avernum") when I want to play again.

Originally Posted By: FnordCola Not so much "terrible" as "entertainingly petulant." Thank God I'm at least worth a chuckle for "FnordCola".

I'm a terrible person, and apologize for spoiling your universe by existing.

I'll try to think of creative uses of knockback, but I can only repeat something I already wrote: Originally Posted By: othersean There used to be a useful "take off his armor" battle discipline; now there isn't. When you knew you would be hacking away at something for awhile, there used to be a battle discipline to remove its armor. Now that battle discipline also removes said thing from melee range. (And no, "hit first, then 'd c'" doesn't work, since the second hit is random.) It's not a big deal -- the game is fun enough that I bought it, unlike the original Avernum -- but the ability to use melee to weaken a foe and simultaneously remove it from melee range is kind of silly.

Let's say I'm using it on Bob Melee, who has 8 AP and strong defensive stats. I "d c" him to cut down those stats, and he's 2 steps away. Joy. I can't hit him, but he uses 2 of 8 AP to walk back up and stab me. Granted, I'm playing on "normal" and am therefore not a real person, but... really? There used to be a useful "take off his armor" battle discipline; now there isn't.

Why, oh why, did "knockback" have to make its way from Avadon to Avernum? Battle disciplines "d c" and "d g" are almost useless, since they move your enemy out of melee range, forcing you to use a missile weapon for your second hit (with haste).

However, most or all of the dialogue is in the plain-text script files, so a volunteer fan translation wouldn't be that hard if a bilingual player took the time. I assume Jeff wouldn't mind, since people would still have to buy the game.

(EDIT: What Randomizer said last week. Teach me not to read to the end of the thread...) Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity But really, where is left for Geneforge to go? Maybe, nowhere but back. What about Geneforge 0? Maybe way back, to the origins of shaping on Sucia Island. The stuff about creating diseases and warping your enemies as an attack, plus shaping being less of a well-developed science, could allow for new types of gameplay. Personally, I'm looking forward to the remakes of A1 and A2, since I've never been able to put up with A1's primitive interface -- especially the lack of a quest log -- long enough to even finish the demo.

I've recently been playing around with G1 endings, and tried the following: SPOILERS, DUH! Help Trajkov -- good ending as his second-in-command. Kill Trajkov, use forge, destroy it -- you're a god. Kill Trajkov, use forge, keep it -- massive world war. Kill Trajkov, don't use it, destroy it -- you're respected. I was unaligned, and did not kill any of the faction leaders. I didn't notice a difference between killing Goettsch and merely stealing his gloves, and I didn't keep a save before stealing them.

There's no such thing as "terminal format." I broke out the terminal to see what's going on, and all the data is in some apparently non-standard format in the file's resource fork. Your best bet would probably be to use some program (audio hijack?) to record the sound as the game plays it.

Food is actually pretty useful near the beginning, since you can snack-n-hack in one turn.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Apparently self-plagiarism isn't a big deal outside of academia. Or inside it. If you don't "revise and extend" your conference paper into a journal paper, you're wasting a perfectly good opportunity to add to your CV.

All joking aside... Clocknova -- It seems like Avernum 3 and Geneforge 2 would be right up your alley. Both have a short, linear warm-up followed by extended combat tourism. In both, you can attack just about anyone you want, in any way you want, and live with the consequences. You can do anything from pleasing almost everyone to being treacherous to them all and ending up the last, gore-spattered one standing. I often prefer this kind of wide-open game (if Jeff remade A1 with modern controls, I would buy it), but sometimes it's nice to have more of an "interactive story."

Google Translate is way off (other than the "Hello world!" easter egg). Wikipedia has the full story, but basically it doesn't mean anything.

Are the relevant pillars highlighted when you hover over them? Do you have to be close enough when you click? Are the clickable pillars always the same? Do the tan ones and the red ones both count? I have spent quite some time clicking on pillars in various ways, but haven't seen any ore.

Originally Posted By: Master1 FYT WTF? You don't have to buy anything from them -- they'll try to diagnose your problem for free -- and IME they're reasonably competent. YMMV, etc.

Originally Posted By: All the VAgaries of Space & Time Alorael, who is most convinced by customer service. Having dealt with both Jeff and Apple's tech "support" in relation to the same faulty hard drive, I have to say that the difference is worth more than $5. (Apple tech support is abysmal and condescending unless you take your machine into an Apple store and talk to the genius bar people.)

Originally Posted By: VCH But who pays more for a loaf of bread if they don't have to? Everyone who shops for bread without clipping coupons, or chooses a loaf without calculating its calories (or oz.) per dollar compared to the others. I don't understand the $5 difference, and would prefer that they be priced the same, but if $5 actually matters to you, you probably have needs more pressing than computer games.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Are you listening to Ice Ice Baby? Forever. (Sadly, I still remember most of the lyrics.)

Originally Posted By: VCH And I would definitely feel cheated if I bought a game from his website, then found out I could have bought the same thing cheaper at the App-store. Oh, FFS -- it's $5. Skip the drink the next 5 times you eat at McDonald's. I'm hardly rich, but I don't mind the $5, and would rather give $(X+5) to Jeff than $(X*0.7) to him and $(X*0.3) to Apple.

Originally Posted By: Spidweb The choice comes down to who can write a clear and coherent application with full, grammatical sentences. This happens less often than you might think. Having spent significant time both as a TA and on the internet, I doubt my estimate of the number of people who can write complete sentences can go any lower. "Its there doin stuff that would drive my high school English teacher insane lol!"

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES If you approach it analytically, it's not about guessing at all -- rather it's more an alternating combination of empirical research and logic puzzles. I think I understand where you come from, and am honestly impressed by your analyses of the games. I play them casually, so I don't treat them as math puzzles. That said, it's just plain un-fun to reach a point where a strategy that has worked well so far can't complete the game (e.g. "you need Dexterity 17 to open this door"). I don't think such obstacles should exist, and if they do, they should be blatantly hinted-at in advance.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Basilisk Games have lots of players complaining that part way through Eschalon they find that their character builds become unplayable because they made them too general. Or only a tiny way into Eschalon they found the controls utterly unusable on a trackpad. Someone apparently thought that "click and hold on a spot in some direction relative to your character" should move your character in that direction. I would probably have bought the game if the UI hadn't been completely insane.

Originally Posted By: Master1 There is no replay value if people give up on their first play through This. I don't mind suffering a bit from a suboptimal build, but it's no fun to make reasonable-looking skill/class decisions for most of the game, only to find yourself hosed near the end and unable to finish the game. The retrainer mostly fixes this in Avadon, but I don't see how guessing the right things to pump makes a game fun. In any case, I'll play this one at least twice for the stories: once with my current blademaster/Shima/Janelle party, and once with ?/Sevilin/Nathalie.