googoogjoob

Civilization: in general, the actual thing, people living in cities Revolutions: American, French, Russian, but also English, Chinese, 1848 Word Rescue

Rank: Cats The Crusades (Nos. 1-9, individually) Subinfeudation

The -punks: Cyberpunk Steampunk Biopunk Dieselpunk Elfpunk

Avernum 4.

Because Solidarnosc led to free elections in Poland and thus the downfall of the Stalinist state!!! It's a video game 'bout organizing and agitating and stuff. "the guy" is LECH WALESA, you philistine, he founded Solidarnosc and won a Nobel Peace Prize, then became President of Poland, and it turned out he was a much better union leader/dissident than president, and now he's a pathetic marginalized old man The Speedy Gonzalez screenshot is maybe my favorite game screenshot ever. Also, rank this post itself.

rate these three video game screenshots:

No. You gotta go sleep in an inn repeatedly, or something.

You don't get any reward specifically for ending the Beast plague, you have to keep going past Tinraya to the Vahnatai fortress and defeat Rentar-Ihrno.

All the signs in Grindstone still refer to "serpents" despite the nagas the giants worship having been replaced with the deep stalker monsters. Also, in a few places "east" and "west" are confused in the text, but I cannot immediately recall where.

Do you have a character wearing the Pyrrhic Gauntlets? They are also radioactive.

You have a bar of uranium in your inventory.

There are 10 Xian items. Or at least, there were in Avernum 3.

You have to buy maps from cartographers to fill out the actual map graphics, the map pins are automatic.

1. You gotta buy a beer from the bartender, then buy another one, then she points you to Irvine. 2. This didn't work out for me either... you're supposed to see the ghost of the previous owner of the mansion, and he shows you where a treasure is, but I only ever got the basilisk event and the ghost in the courtyard event. Maybe it's bugged in the remake? 3. Is this uh. There's a sailor you can talk to in Shayder who mentions tossing a wand down the sewer once he joined the Anama, and I think what you mean is the place where you find the wand? But you gotta know it's there first from talking to the sailor.

Really you gotta play 4-6 to answer this question better. But: without spoilers for them: 1. If the barriers had stayed up, no. If the barriers had not stayed up, well, maybe? The player characters only rise to prominence and are assigned the task of destroying the portal because of the coincidence that they happened to be the ones who the Vahnatai contacted. Maybe some other party of adventurers would've destroyed the portal eventually, or the existing party would've done so in some other way, but it probably would've taken longer, and time was on the Empire's side. 2. Yes. The Vahnatai live in caves the Empire has barely any knowledge of, and access to even deeper and more defensible caves if it came to that. Further, we only actually see one polity of Vahnatai in Avernum 1-3, the Olgai Vahnatai. There are at least several and potentially many other Vahnatai tribes and states in the deep caves, and the Empire would never be able to root out and destroy all of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H3ki1FhBlM "those with no homes to go to, please dig yourself holes" maybe more appropriate for 6, with the overpopulation theme.

I got a new PC semi-recently and I just recently went to replay N:R, and have had some, uh. Difficulties, which are hard to describe very well, but bear with me. My monitor is 16:10, native resolution 1680x1050. When I launch the game, it does not ask whether or not to change resolution (as the Geneforge games properly do on this PC), even if I delete the settings file. Instead, the game changes my screen resolution to 1280x720, with the game taking up the entire width of the screen, but squished drastically and very noticeably, with large letterbox bars taking up the rest of the screen above and below it. I can't take a screenshot of this, because it only screenshots the 1280x720 area of the screen, which is undistorted back to normal proportions afterwards, but here is a mockup of what I'm getting: (click) This topic suggests that maybe this is intentional? But obviously the aspect ratio is wrong, and the game looks awful. For reference, I am using 64-bit Windows 10, with a GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card. I'm using version 1.0.1b (as seen in screenshot) downloaded from the Humble site. No compatibility settings (disable DPI scaling, disable fullscreen optimizations, compatibility modes, etc) change this behavior.

This is maybe unfair, but I gave the Avernum 2 remake a lower score partially because of how hydras were replaced by the dull, omnipresent hellhounds. Pray god the Avernum 3 remake doesn't replace the slimes with chitrachs, or the alien beasts with hellhounds.

I'm kinda shocked that Avernum 5 scored so low... I mean, I can understand not liking it as much as Avernum 3 or Geneforge 2, but... below Geneforge 3? Really? Same with the Avadons. Personally, I really liked Avernum 5 (and the Avadons, to a lesser extent) for simply trying new things: showing us more of the world below Avernum, getting into Imperial politics, and providing two diametrically opposed endings, in the case of 5. If it didn't totally succeed in all these things (a lot of the "new" areas felt rather like the old ones, Manfred and Dorikas aren't fleshed out quite enough, etc), at least it tried. Maybe it's just that some people haven't played Geneforge 3 in a while and/or have their view colored by nostalgia.

You are a: Communist Pro-Government Interventionist Bleeding-Heart Libertine Collectivism score: 83% Authoritarianism score: 17% Internationalism score: 33% Tribalism score: -100% Liberalism score: 100% Got a couple issues with a few of the questions tho, eg "Our nation should never intervene in civil wars or rebellions, let them take care of their own problems" which seems to be correlated with "internationalism" as in "should my country be in the UN"; I said yes to the former because the USA has a terrible track record of intervening in other countries' conflicts, but I said that we should be in the UN. I don't think these are somehow contradictory: interventionism and internationalism are not the same thing. I don't know where the hell the authoritarianism score comes from... because I said maybe governments have the right to dictate what people can and cannot do? But that's a potential definition of government? If a government can't make laws, it can't do anything. (Also for the record, whatever the test says, I'm an anarcho-syndicalist.)

Since my last post, I have read: All three Imperial Radch novels (very good) The Decameron (very filthy) A Specter is Haunting Texas (baffling) Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker (also good) Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (good, but turned out to be much more about Chinese-Western relations and competing visions for the future of China than about the actual war, which was okay, but I kinda wanted more on the background and course of the rebellion)

I would recommend skipping Geneforge 3 and playing 4-5. GF3 and Avernum 4 are kind of the nadir of the Spiderweb oeuvre (doing six games in five years, then pumping out two in one year, is not good news for the quality of those last two games). Starting with Geneforge 4, though, Jeff put a lot more effort into the writing of the games, and they're a lot more satisfying in terms of dramaturgy as a result: not that the prior Spiderweb games are poorly written by any means, but the games starting with GF4 have much more in the way of stuff like character development, foreshadowing, thematic patterning, etc. The characters in Geneforges 1-3 are generally prototypical representations of certain perspectives on Shaping, while in 4-5 they tend to be more complex and rounded. So, if emotional disconnect with the stories is a problem for you, you should definitely try em out. (Likewise, the characters in Avernums 1-4 are mostly entertaining but inconsequential eccentrics (X) or eager straight-faced questgivers (King Micah) or both (Erika), whereas in 5-6 there's a much greater attempt to develop them (mostly), and 6 in particular tries (with mixed success) to provide satisfying character arc conclusions for established characters (esp Solberg, X).) Avadon is very different from either Avernum or Geneforge, and, though it's written by the same man and is mechanically quite similar, plays out more like a modern Bioware RPG (eg, KOTOR, Dragon Age). I think it's totally possible to love Avernum or Geneforge and dislike Avadon, or vice versa: it's a really different kind of game- more being told what to do, less exploration, more emphasis on plotting your course through the interpersonal politics of the game world. If you didn't really feel connected to Avadon, then that's kind of it.

We can hope. I'm not concerned that the game itself will be bad, of course. I don't think Spiderweb is actually capable of putting out a bad game at this point, given the level of experience Jeff has, and I don't think Spiderweb ever HAS put out a bad game. My concern is that cutting costs and using premade assets might harm the game's prospects. In that blog post Jeff talks about the "discoverability" problem devs have on storefronts like Steam, and it strikes me as ironic that he then talks about using Unity Asset Store stuff, which can only make his game less distinctive and memorable, because for any given asset you get from the Unity store, at least a dozen other games on Steam are gonna be using it. I dunno, it just gives me a creeping bad feeling... I have a friend who released a Unity game on Steam, with 100% original assets, backed by a decent-sized publisher (which had published other games that were hits on Steam), with sexy professional commissioned banner art... and it flopped, likely because it really still didn't stand out very much from the crowd.

long, long sigh

If Frederick Barbarossa was so superhuman how come he was too dumb to take off his armor before fording a minor river in Anatolia? Checkmate, Hohenstaufens