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googoogjoob

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Posts posted by googoogjoob

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

     

  4. 3 hours ago, Dikiyoba said:

    Plus, SW games feel increasingly homogenized. The interface is the same, the art assets are the same, the combat is the same, the monsters (hello, worms and giant rats) are the same, the style of leveling and adding skill points is the same, the items are the same... it's getting harder to tell different series apart, and Avadon doesn't have any way to stand out. It doesn't even have a original-sounding name.

     

    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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.)

  7. 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)

  8. 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.

  9. I also suspect that this has far more relevance to the huge professional paintings that there have been gobs of in recent games, than to basic terrain tilesets, creatures, and other things that Jeff has been using his own stockpile of since 2002.

     

    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.

  10. Consider for example the Holy Roman Emperor, of whom Wikipedia says: "He combined qualities that made him appear almost superhuman to his contemporaries: his longevity, his ambition, his extraordinary skills at organization, his battlefield acumen and his political perspicuity." Sounds more like the Keeper than Ragnar Redbeard does.

     

    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

  11. Hot update: recently read:

    Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville: a very uneven collection of short stories. Too many of them lack endings and close on a striking but meaningless image. But when it's good, it's very good.

    This Census-Taker also by China Mieville: I am not entirely sure I understood this book. It's very short (a novella) and in uncharacteristically sparse prose for Mieville, but very slippery in terms of meaning (the narrator was a child at the time of the events recounted in the book, making him potentially unreliable) and context (the worldbuilding is only ever hinted at very barely). But it was very well-written and tense and unease-inducing, so I liked it.

    SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard: a history of Rome (obviously) from its founding to AD 212, the point Beard identifies as the end of the first phase of the Roman Empire. Good, readable, easy to understand. Unusual for this kind of book in that it's really a social history; she's more interested in discussing the everyday lives and ideas of the ancient Romans than in recounting every war and battle in detail, or moralizing about decadent politicians and emperors. I like this, I like the aspect of history that illuminates the continuity of human experience over time and across the world.

     

    Now reading:

    The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

     

    To read:

    Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo (a dead-serious narrative history) (from the "Discussion Questions" section of the webpage: "What surprised you most about the story of the molasses flood?")

    A Specter is Haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber (which I originally wanted to read based exclusively on one of its covers)

    Still gotta read the Decameron...

     

    —Alorael, who tore through Ancillary Justice and is on to the sequel. Definitely a book meant to be read in a series, although it has enough of a conclusion to mostly stand on its own. Excellent world-building and a fascinating exercise in a factually reliable but very low self-insight narrator.

     

    Important recent work by Ann Leckie

  12. Shrug. This is a debate about the relative importance of an addition to the game, rather than anything factual, and is inherently subjective, so "agree to disagree" etc etc.

     

    I wonder if, to people entirely new to the series, the Kyass stuff sticks out as obviously as it does to those more familiar with it. Most of the text in the re-remake is grandfathered in from the older versions, and most of the additions are relatively seamless, but I felt that the Kyass area and writing were pretty different, tonally and thematically, emphasizing its enclaved-off-ness.

     

    Maybe noticing this made it stand out in my experience of the game more strongly? I don't know.

  13. Although the game gives you a nice "congrats" each time you finish one, you don't actually get the complete ending message until after you have completed ALL THREE game-winning quests. Whatever you think about the way this is presented, it is clearly distinct from the way an isolated sidequest is optional.

     

    What I mean is more like... generally, the games assume that the protagonists have done all the optional sidequests. Every Avernum after 1 assumes that the protagonists reforged Demonslayer and used it to slay Grah-Hoth. Every Avernum after 3 assumes that the protagonists purged the Tower of Magi and dealt with Linda. Whether or not a specific player on a specific playthrough does these things, they're canon insofar as the subsequent games assume them.

     

    So, although you don't have to interact with Kyass to win the game (I think? been a while since I played the new remake), "optionality" doesn't really have any bearing on the relevance of events or their importance to canon.

     

    Basically, I consider the Kyass stuff an important change in terms of narrative and thematic heft, rather than simply in gameplay terms.

  14. As for how canon they are... I believe one scenario is referenced in the later Avernums, but am unsure about that. If you truly wish, you can probably skip Blades of Avernum without worry.

     

    A character in one of the later games mentions having been posted to the Za-Khazi Run IIRC, though this doesn't necessarily mean that all the plot elements of that scenario (many of which are optional) are canon.

  15. I had a friend recommend me Locke Lamora, and I was gonna check it out, but then I discovered that it's the first book in a projected seven-book series, with the four thus-far-unpublished books already titled. And at the current rate, it'll be over a decade before the series is finished. And then there's already a planned sequel series, which also will be seven novels long. So, I didn't read it. I'm sure it's good, but I don't really want to get tangled into the marketing nightmare that is modern fantasy publishing.

  16. In the original A New Hope principal photography, Jabba appears as just a fat dude in a fur coat. They did in fact shoot the scene with Jabba talking to Han outside the Falcon, but did not include the scene in the final cut.

     

    20 years later, they digitally composited a CGI Jabba the Hutt (that is, the big worm thing) into the existing footage, over the fur coat man, overdubbed some alien language stuff to replace the original English Jabba dialogue, and edited the resulting scene into the film.

     

    Basically, "Jabba the Hutt" was a name for some sort of crime lord that George Lucas had floating around, and 6 years on he re-applied the name to the giant worm man in Jedi. Then, they re-edited A New Hope to awkwardly insert some foreshadowing by making use of the convenient fact that this already-shot cut scene used the name "Jabba" for a creditor of Han's, despite the fact that this Jabba was just a guy in a coat.

     

    (Star Wars history lesson over.)

     

    Anyway, the result, as far as the moviegoing public is concerned, is that foreshadowing was awkwardly smooshed into the original film, complete with unconvincing, inappropriate CGI.

  17. The Kyass thing is optional, but then, so is slaying Grah-Hoth, theoretically... the first Avernum is the only one where the player characters aren't actually charged with any task or quest (at first anyway). I think it's a significant change in that it shows a sort of dark underbelly to the governance of Avernum that really isn't at all present in the earlier versions of the game.

     

    The changes in characterization don't really materially change the plot- essentially the same events take place in the same order etc- but they retroactively cast the plot of Avernum 2 (and part of the plot of 1) as a giant power-grab by Garzahd, whereas in the originals/first remakes, I don't recall anything implying that Garzahd was anything other than loyal to the throne, and acting in what he believed were the throne's best interests. (He was still horrible and evil, just in a different way.)

     

    I actually kind of wonder why this change was made... either somebody pointed out to Jeff that it was weird that this archmage guy didn't show up to protect the Emperor at the end of 1 (in reality, because he probably hadn't been invented at the time the first game was written), or he was altered in an a weird ham-handed attempt to put some foreshadowing in the first game (a la the Star Wars "special edition" rereleases adding Jabba the Hutt into A New Hope), or both. IIRC he makes some ominous foreshadow-y remarks at the end of the re-remake of 2, too. (Too bad the heroes of 1/2 apparently never got around to telling anyone about all this foreshadowing: Avernum would've been a lot better prepared for the events of 2/3 if they had.)

     

    Also: I really liked the hydras because 1) they were a unique thing in the river-descent sequence area, which helped give it a different flavor; 2) you could kill them for meat, which mattered a lot more before the re-remake; and 3) there was that one cave where you helped some friendly hydras fight off the despicable, abhorrent, nightmarish chitrachs, which was pretty unique and memorable, despite the relative scarcity of hydras in the rest of the game. The hellhounds/rockhounds (whatever they are) are a lot less interesting, tho maybe I just feel like this cause I've played all the other SW games, and have grown to loathe that big red dog sprite set almost as much as I hate the chitrach one. (Okay, well. It's a distant second, maybe tied with the weird headless buff monster thing, which I never could tell whether it had three or four legs. But still.)

  18. There are no meaningful plot differences. The new ones add minor supplementary material that isn't directly related to the plot (and none of it is related to Erika).

     

    I'd argue that there are some fairly significant plot alterations in the first new remake: (spoilers I guess) the retconned characterizations of Garzahd and Hawthorne are pretty different, and the Kyass subplot casts the Kingdom of Avernum in a different light, in a way that isn't really displayed again until 5.

     

    The re-remake of 2 doesn't really change anything except swapping the lovable hydras for the irritating omnipresent hellhounds.

  19. Erika is incapable of breaking the curse, because if she could, the ending of Avernum 3 would be kind of boring. (If she's so smart how come she didn't bring like an umbrella or something to the fight?) (Also, it's possible, though very difficult, to finish the game without Erika's help, in which case I guess she just stays in one of her towers and sulks.) (Alternate timeline fanfic idea: this happens, then Erika dies of intense shame when Manfred becomes emperor.)

     

    (The weird disconnect between the plot logic/game mechanics and what's intended to be a big climactic emotional event might usefully be contrasted with Solberg's fate in Avernum 6, which, while not entirely perfect, feels a lot more satisfying in terms of character and plot, and is written better in general.)

  20. I was considerably disappointed in the original book of I am Legend. I expected so very much more going in and was left with a lingering disappointment at the big reveal being so (in my view) poorly executed.

     

    It's not really something like The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects or an episode of The Twilight Zone (which the author of I Am Legend actually wrote several episodes of), where the twist is the point of the story, and knowing the twist ruins the effect. If it were, I think the story would've ended much sooner, like an HP Lovecraft story, with the horrible revelation printed in italics as the last line of the novel.

     

    It's more about how the protagonist reacts to the revelation: he's a pretty straightforward everyman character who acts in a way that is presented to the reader as entirely reasonable, and the way anyone would be likely to act under the same circumstances. He's developed to show that he acts and feels the way he does for entirely relatable reasons. Then, suddenly, he finds out that he has in fact been doing terrible things. The reveal per se isn't the point so much as the larger themes.

  21. But a lot of the design random walk is itself fads because in most ways it's hard to have some kind of objective way of evaluating good or bad for video games. (Like art, although that comparison has launched a thousand essays itself.) Is grind good, bad or neutral? Is random catastrophe good, bad, or neutral? It's all taste. Tastes have swung a lot over the years, but there's no way to know they won't swing back.

     

    This is true; my evaluation of the overall quality of games is inevitably only subjective.

     

    Realistic graphics have certainly gotten more realistic, but there's now new appetite for retro everything, including graphics. I don't know of anyone really misses the really blocky graphics of early 3D... but I'm sure they exist. So even that's unclear.

     

    This is already happening: the forthcoming, successfully-Kickstartered Yooka-Laylee is an attempt to play on the nostalgia of 20-somethings for the awkward 3d platformers of the late 90s (albeit with smoother graphics); Minecraft has graphics blockier than any 3d game since the late 80s.

     

    As time passes, I imagine the Window of Acceptable Nostalgia will progress forward in time as the decision-makers who decide what gets funded and made are replaced by younger people... or at least, the marketing people will decide to try to cater to younger people.

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