Ceiling Durkheim

Not necessarily. Avernum 6's main theme, for instance, appears to be credited to Dan Foster, of filmtv-tracks.com. I'm not sure what sorts of deals Jeff makes with the composers, but they may well not be exclusive.

It took a while to think of one, but considering the story I'm not sure why. Maybe I blocked it out: I was a kid, grade school age, not a kindergartner or toddler for whom this sort of behavior would more expected and understandable. My father and I were vacationing on trains across the US and occasionally into Canada. In Vancouver we stayed at a YMCA building, which had rooms without en suite bathrooms. I woke up in the middle of the night, and really had to use the bathroom. My father had stepped out to pick something up from the store or take in the nightlife, I can't recall exactly, but he'd taken our only room key. I was essentially sleepwalking at this point, and didn't realize that without said key I couldn't get into the bathroom, or back to our room. I think I ended up peeing in the hallway, then pounded on the door for a minute or two before giving up and sitting, sullen and naked, in the hallway. Eventually three friendly twenty-something Japanese tourists (who fortunately spoke English pretty well) found me, put a blanket on me, and invited me back to their room to wait until my father came back. He found me there a couple hours later.

Yeah, a lot of trailer music gets reused in both the movie and video game industries. Tracks by companies like X-Ray Dog and Immediate Music get spread around a lot.

Quote: Spiderweb software had no other way to balance the game other than make 2 sets of rules: one for player characters and another for their NPCs? Why in Geneforge/avernum this (almost) never happen? Umm, no. Like, not at all. Enemies in both the Avernum and Geneforge series had many abilities that player characters did not, and vice versa. Enemies are able to shape in combat, players never can. The ways PC and enemy area attacks worked in the second Avernum trilogy were fundamentally different. Also, the assumption that seems to underlie your arguments (e.g. about enemy Shamans having both earthquake and drakes), that enemies have 'character sheets' with skills and skill points like those of PCs, has never been true in SW games. By way of explanation: the multiple actions are Jeff's new way of balancing higher difficulties. In previous games, higher difficulties have usually meant large, simple increases to damage and health. In Avadon, he made these increases relatively modest, but gave higher level enemies more actions to increase their overall damage output. I like this system better, because it means a challenging game that doesn't require five minutes chipping away at the health of every mook, but I can see advantages to each side. The one thing that does really bother me about the 'extra actions' difficulty increases is that stun and crowd control effects don't have any effect on many enemies' extra turns. That's just cheap and deceptive, and makes stun abilities even less worthwhile.

Not quite Cannibal Corpse, but pretty close: (Warning: contains profanity.)

@Neb: As opposed to all those live action pony cartoons. I'm all about those.

And it's not like you really have to choose. You can have both war blessing and haste. We have the technology. We can make you stronger, faster, more resistant to mental attacks.

@Dantius: Yeah, I got the ME CE as well. I think releasing it only in the collector's edition would have reduced the complaints about day one DLC, but I still think something as plot-important as Javik should have been in the main game. If he'd been a party member more along the lines of Zaeed or Kasumi, a DLC/CE exclusive would have been fine, but holding back someone actually important that way seems like going too far.

@Enraged Slith: Luz Piazuelo? Yeah, I recall her making a lot of high quality Avernum-style graphics, and being kind of the gold standard for custom graphics in the "let's all make graphics for BoA even though it isn't out yet!" period on the forums.

@Sprinkles: I agree that the day one DLC thing was stupid and greedy, especially given the Prothean's relevance to the wider story, I just don't see how not buying the game helps. Boycotts are a questionably effective form of protest in the best circumstances, and it's been pretty obvious from the beginning that those advocating one wouldn't be able to motivate the majority of the Mass Effect fandom, let alone most people who were considering buying the game. Quote: The last 2 games are more "crisis mode" from the very start. But I think that having periods of relative normalcy + adventure is good in an epic RPG. And the very beginning of the game when you acted sort of like a galactic constubul on the citedal was really cool in ME1. I agree that ME3 is pretty much all crisis mode all the time (with the occasional Action Movie Quiet Drama Scene), but I'm puzzled that you think that about ME2. The Collectors are a threat pretty much from the start, but most of the game involves exploring the galaxy and solving people's problems so you can get more crew and resources for the eventual suicide mission. Even in a rushed playthrough, the game feels like it's half sidequests to me, and a perfectionist play will take that figure to more like 80-90%. @Alorael: I'm somewhat more sympathetic to those who are annoyed about the DLC. The best way I can describe it is that most DLC comes across as an addition to an existing game for those who wish to buy it, but From Ashes came across more as a subtraction for those who don't want to buy it. Part of this is because it's so clear that they could have just bundled it with the main game, which isn't so much the case with DLC released six months or a year down the road. I mean, they could give the latter away, but in theory at least the prospect of payment acts as an incentive to get companies and game designers to follow up with new content. The biggest main reason this feels like a subtraction rather than an addition is that said DLC is much less 'optional' than many others. Packs like Bring Down the Sky and Overlord were fun and added something to the story, but they didn't have nearly the impact on their storylines that From Ashes does on ME3's. Lair of the Shadow Broker and Arrival were more essential in that they served as bridges between the events of ME2 and ME3, but they still didn't invite a reevaluation of the entire series' back story in the way that from Ashes does.

Quote: Avernum: Seventeen apple roving mirror moiety. Of turned quorum jaggedly the. Blue? —Alorael, who thinks that one speaks for itself. He's also interested in seeing who capitalizes From and who doesn't. Title capitalization rules are weird! Are you thinking of Ocean Bound? I'm pretty sure that was a sequel to Avernum.

@Slarty: interesting. I did not know that. I made the joke because I knew that "id" was Latin for "it" (e.g. id est) but I hadn't realized that Freud wasn't the one who latinized the terms.

@Lilith: The BioWare blog says: Quote: BioWare will expanding on the ending to Mass Effect 3 by creating additional cinematics and epilogue scenes to the existing ending sequences. And: Quote: BioWare strongly believes in the team’s artistic vision for the end of this arc of the Mass Effect franchise. The extended cut DLC will expand on the existing endings, but no further ending DLC is planned. An ending montage seems most likely, though the blog post suggests pretty strongly that it will include FMV (to answer, among other things, the "pick a color" criticisms), rather than exclusively the sort of still montage that ended Fallout or Dragon Age. Playable content doesn't seem likely, given their goal, and they've specifically said they aren't adding new endings or seriously altering the existing ones.

@Slarty: Yeah, Avernum: Escape from Huis Clos just doesn't have the same ring. Avernum: Escape from the It. Written by Stephen King or Sigmund Freud, take your pick.

@Trenton: The term "Crips" for handicapped people...kinda offensive. Also the name of a major street gang, which may or may not have made for a better joke. Avernum: Escape from the Mitt. Bam! Topical.

Avernum: Escape from the Grit: a lighter, happier RPG for those who find Geneforge and Avadon too bleak. Or just really don't like dirt and sand. And after all, how could they? It's not warm and soft and firm yet supple like you, Padme.

Whereas some of us think BioWare made its first good game nine years ago. I was never a fan of the Baldur's Gate series for a variety of reasons that I won't get into just yet because I'd rather not turn this thread into a flame war.

@Dave S: Yeah, pretty much what Soul of Wit and Sylae said. I don't want to turn this into a broader discussion of privilege (please, for the love of God, don't let this turn into a broader discussion of privilege), but maybe you should be satisfied with getting 95% of games sooner and cheaper as a Windows user? Maybe stop telling Mac users to suck it up* when we get games late, or not at all, then treating it as an enormous personal affront when the same happens to you in one case out of dozens, with a game that is abnormally cheap regardless of system anyway? *I don't know if you, personally, do this; at this point in the post, I'm just talking about spoiled Windows users in general.

@Andariel: With all due respect, is this worth getting that worked up about? Your tone is pretty angry and a bit offensive, and I think most of us would prefer to keep the discussion civil. The PC version coming out later is annoying, but it's not the end of the world, and like Lilith said, Mac users have to put up with that kind of bull much more often than PC users. At least AEftP will come out for PC at all, which is better than Mac users can say for the Mass Effect series, most of the Command and Conquer series, Bastion, and a host of other games. Also, the Mac version of the game costs just as much as the PC version. And, to echo Lilith again, there's nothing Jeff Vogel has said or done that suggests he has "politics against PC users." This is a small indie studio, ports take time, and he works on a Mac, which means it's logical for him to put out Mac versions of games first.

@B & MO: well, the fact that you have an account (with a post count, no less!) already makes you less of a lurker than many. –Fnord Cola, who also lives some distance south of Seattle. Then again, given sufficient circumnavigation, pretty much everyone does.

I go for 'epic' music as an accompaniment to (music-free) games, including but not limited to: -Symphonic metal, e.g. Nightwish, Within Temptation, Epica, etc. -Battle themes and similar from other video games, like the Final Fantasy, Starcraft, Mass Effect, and Shadow Hearts series. -Dramatic classical musical like Carmina Burana, the Mozart and Verdi requiems, and various Wagner.

@Dikiyoba: We were all young once. Some of us earned the ire of the forums for insulting Salamander's skull.

@Nightwatcher: Quote: And I don't want anyone to give me their strategy, I just need some info on why my Dexterity Shaman's Javelin attacks are so weak. Basically my party consists of Shaman/Shaman/Sorceress because I thought this might be a challenging way to play. I think you may be missing the point a bit.

@Slarty: Yeah, I recall the E2 list as well, though I think it was after Jeff was posting on it regularly. It seemed a lot less lively than the Blades list (seems to dovetail with what you and others say about Blades being the nucleus of the early community), which is why I didn't mention it before.

Three words: exponential beard growth.