Vindekarr

Yeah but everything is crazy expensive in Canada. You guys sell Maple Syrup for like, $80 a bottle.

I do feel compelled to give a minor little warning about Diablo though. I remember not too long ago somebody, I think it was you(apologies if it wasn't) mentioning that they aren't a fan of gore. Well, if that is an issue you may want to give Diablo a miss. Most of the time it's 100% fine, but there are a couple of Skills that turn it into an absolute snuff-film. The Crusader's Chains and the various Fire spells are the major culprits, leaving trails of shredded, broken, mangled corpses and gruesomely charred enemies respectively. I don't think you can switch either off.

Diablo continues to impress me. I'm level 31(of 70) now and beginning the second(of ??) full World. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the second world has a totally different biosphere of enemies to the first: the first is gloomy and full of Humanoids, while the second is bright and hot, with mostly Demons and Beasts. I also tried crafting, and created my first Set armour. Green being the highest tier will take some getting used to, but the gear looks incredible for mid-game. I also discovered a fairly robust companion system. It's hardly Mass Effect, but they are extremely useful. Each companion has their own Skill Slots, and their actual skills are pretty powerful. Best of all, just having them along provides you with a potent buff, either healing, armour or crits. They talk a lot, and their dialogue is fully voiced. On the whole I'm really impressed: companions have to be really good for a lone-wolf like me to have used them from the moment I got them. As a tip, Irena is the best IMO. She's a bit naive and might get a tad annoying after long enough, but she gives a significant armour boost(and I'm a tank afterall) and has powerful ranged spells. Best of all, she's absolutely invaluable in World 2 because she passively destroys Illusion magics. All things considered she more than pulled her weight and even I was happy to have her along. I must stress how rarely I say that about AI companions.

I think he wanted to stop as well, but unfortunately it wasn't an option. Lewis Hamilton is currently locked in a battle with Nico Rosberg for the World Driver's Championship, and the way F1 works a failure to finish would be catastrophic. It's been a fun championship so far, because both drivers are enormously talented and have great cars, but unfortunately it's starting to turn very ugly now. At the beginning of the year they were best friends, and now they aren't even speaking to eachother.

I'm sure you'll have all heard the phrase "bee in your bonnet" If you've got a bee in your bonnet, it means you're grumpy, crabby and generally irritable. Well last night I saw a very literal case of bee-in-bonnet. Spare a thought for British Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton. During yesterday's Monte Carlo grand prix-arguably the most prestigious auto race on the planet, a stinging insect became trapped in his helmet before the start of the race. Formula 1 drivers wear sealed helmets; Hamilton had to drive the entire two-hour race with a bee or similar buzzing around in his dome, and came out swelled up like a marshmallow. An hour in he was complaining of trouble seeing, but kept fighting and managed to finish second to his team-mate. Even making a single lap around Monte Carlo with one eye blinded is a staggering achievement, as it's the most dangerous and narrowest circuit still in use today. Completing 48 laps half-blinded, fighting off one of the most talented rookies in the last thirty years and finishing second is nothing short of amazing.

I've never played Titan Quest so I won't comment on that. I have played Torchlight 2 though, and D3 is superior on every level. Reaper Of Souls pushes it even further. I don't want to over-hype it, because it's still "a game" and has flaws like all games do, but it is a very, very high quality product and beautifully polished. It's also fun, genuinely actually fun to play. Diablo's biggest advantage, besides overall build-quality is it's story. It's fully voiced and quite well written, and has an epic feel to it that Torchlight's very much doesn't. What makes it even better, is that it stays fresh with each playthrough. Your own character is fully voiced and takes part in all cutscenes, as well as "passively" interacting with their Companions. Each class has a different voice actor and completely different dialogue; a Crusader will see completely different dialogue and cutscenes to a Demon Hunter, although the base story will remain the same. The classes themselves, and the level system are also significantly better. In Diablo you have four Skill Slots(numpad 1-4) and left and right click attack slots. You put a Skill into those slots to use in combat, and each class has five skill options for each slot. Where it really gets interesting, is that each skill also has multiple Skill Runes. The runes radically alter the way that skill works, and you can re-slot your skills and runes for free whenever you aren't in combat. It sounds primitive compared to games where you also have attribute customisation, but each Rune VASTLY alters each skill and there's enormous variety. Take Provoke for example. It's a Crusader skill which projects an AOE around the player. The default version forces mobs in the AOE to attack you, for tanking. With Runes, it can become an AOE lifedrain or an AOE stun, an AOE fear, an AOE buff and even more. When I say "vastly change" I mean it, runes change the very concept of how a skill works, and gives Diablo a vast depth of customisation-all available on the fly.You won't miss attributes points, I guarantee that. Skills and runes are already a challenge to memorise, and there is an in-depth attribute system on your gear. Finally, boss and combat design are significantly superior to Torchlight. There's some really great boss fights, and each one feels unique. You'll also be glad to know that this game doesn't hold your hand at all. Once you reach level 10, that's it. No more assistance, you're on your own. Difficulties range from Normal T1 which is pretty easy, to Torment T5. I recommend T2 Hard for melee classes especially; it's just-right. Play well and you'll never die, but a single mistake could be fatal. It's a beautifully balanced game in that respect; you really can complete the campaign on a single life if you're vigilant enough. You won't ever die unfairly.

Looks great Billy, really fits the times and theme. Textures great as always. I would say, with Diablo you've got to make a decision. Is it worth that money to you? For me the answer was yes because I really enjoy RPGs, and this happens to be a very, very good one. If you aren't into RPGs, then don't bother. It's too expensive for a non-fan to worry about. I think Blizzard made just a single mistake with Reaper Of Souls, and that's the price. If they sold this for $50 or less, it would be selling like hotcakes. As is, there's a huge community but the uptake has been slower than it could have been. It's a classic case of selling one thing for a million dollars or selling a million things for a dollar. Blizzard made the unusual choice to make this quite an exclusive, premium game and that's had some... interesting side-effects for the community. If there's something I've noticed, it's that everybody is very polite and there's an almost Nexus-Like respect for the rule of law. Diablo 3 isn't a cheap game, infact it's a bloody expensive game, and nobody wants to get banned. The players I have met-and there is a lively multiplayer aspect-have been extremely polite and well-behaved. By making this a comparatively up-market game they've rather amusingly created a community that behave like ladies and gentlemen some of the time.

Do it, you'll probably like it. Just whatever you do, don't start on Hard. That 75% XP bonus looks tasty, but this is a very unforgiving and very skill-based game, and you'd just get pulverised. Especially with the ranged classes that newbies invariably go for.

The TL:DR of it is, it's a great game but it's not cheap. As Iv000 suggested you're best off trying the Demo as that will show you the basics, although unfortunately most of the really great features that make R.O.S. so good, aren't in the demo version.

Waiting was the right decision, at launch it was an excellent RPG but a very average Diablo game. Reaper Of Souls is absolutely worth it now, though. The price is a serious problem, but I think you get your $70 worth. The graphics are beautiful, the combat is nearly flawless, the story and characters are excellent and genuinely feel "epic" the way a game like this should. It's also spectacularly high quality, I haven't seen a single crash or noteworthy bug in my playthrough thus far. It's probably a bit different to what you're used to, as it draws on older RPG heritage. There's limited character customisation and a rigid class structure, but oddly those are all done so well that they aren't problem. Every class has a full dialogue tree all to itself: you get completely different dialogue from act I to the final fight based on your class, and they all have radically differing personalities and interactions. It's all 100% voiced as well, with some excellent acting to be had. The female Crusader particularly is a lot of fun, a bit like a British Femshep with a wry sense of humor.

Finally bought Reaper Of Souls today. To be fair, Diablo 3 was a fiasco. The launch was terrible, the game had serious flaws, and ultimately it couldn't live up to people's rose-tinted memories of it's legendary ancestors. Reaper Of Souls goes a long way to fixing those faults. I don't know if it's the game Diablo 3 should have always been, but it's a class act and arguably the best isometric RPG around at the moment. There's an immense list of changes, but two of them in particular caught my eye because I suspect they'll eventually appear in all RPGs. The first is pretty simple: loot-tables are now unique to each class, and skewed so that you're more likely to get items that you can actually use. Crusaders and Barbarians often get 2H melee weapons for example, while Wizards are more likely to get Staves and 1H Crossbows only drop for the Daemon Huntress who can use them. The second system is an intelligent difficulty scale. It's vevery similar to Borderlands 2's system, but a little bit more polished. Monsters do have levels, but they're automatically scaled to you. What makes the system so good, is that it doesn't just scale based on level. Difficulty settings make the biggest difference; higher difficulty = higher levelled monsters. It also scales based on environment, with more dangerous areas always producing worse creatures. The system is incredibly polished, and I've been able to smoothely play my way through the story without ever having to grind. As a final note, higher difficulty means you level up faster. As someone who has multiple characters, I cannot tell you how welcome this change is. When I replay an area, I always play a harder difficulty-usually Expert-because I know what to do. With this system, playing on Expert means I also get double XP, allowing me to create new characters without agonising grinding-especially with the near-flawless scaling mechanic.

I know that feeling. My two grow thick winter coats and their breed originated in frigid Canada, and yet act like complete sooks around cold water or cool winter days. They literally won't go outside in frost, and run in terror from the hose. Baths have to happen outside, and usually involve chasing them around with a hose, which is always funny. *sigh* they're great. They look like a pair of bloody direwolves; huge dark-furred monsters which at around 9 months are already quite large. And yet in temperament they're as savage as a pair marshmallows, very obedient when not water is not involved, and have a particular fondness for lying across people's feet.

I think Congressmen should have to wear sponsorship logos on their clothes, kind of like a racing car. Not only would it show exactly where the money is coming from, it would also be funny and humiliate the congressmen and that's always a good thing. Honestly though, I admire the idealism but this is sort of how capitalism works, and always has worked, when mixed with democracy. Ever since organised governments, let alone democracy got started there have been advisors, retainers, men and women of influence who can use their power to influence the laws of the land. A lot of this influence falls into moral grey-areas, but it's as old as time and isn't always a bad thing. A ban on lobbying would only hurt the few people who use it for what it's intended for. The corrupt people you're worried about would simply go even further under-board, and continue what they've been doing. I understand where you're coming from and sometimes wish we could just get rid of all of them, but unfortunately in doing so we'd only damage our own democracy-the cockroaches would evade the boot so to speak.

I really hope you've been listening to what people have been telling you. > You only have yourself right now. You don't have any programming experience, let alone game design experience. > No funding whatsoever. > No clear idea on how to get funding. > No workspace. > No plan for what sort of game you're actually going to make. > Limited knowledge of how games are even made in the first place. > No experience or formal training in running a business. Right now your project simply isn't going to happen. You don't have the money for it, and you don't actually know how to make games. What you should do, is go to college and then university. Study business, study coding, get a job for a programmer and gain practical experience. Come back in five or six years when you know what you're doing, and I assure you that you will succeed. If you're serious about this, then these things will be no problem at all. If you aren't willing to study and work for your project, then you should probably quit now. That will sound extremely harsh, but it's true. If someone with no background could simply snap their fingers and make a good game, we would have a lot more successful indy titles. Making anything takes blood, sweat and tears in enormous quantities. Are you really willing to make the life changes this is going to require? that's what you have to ask yourself. I wish I could say something positive, but I would be doing you a disservice by lying and sugar-coating the situation. You can't make the games you want to make as a hobby, if you're serious then go make this into your career. Otherwise it's just not going to be possible.

I can also recommend the second game if you enjoyed the first. Dawn Of War II and Chaos Rising had excellent campaigns, Chaos Rising especially. For the bloodiest of all the '80s pulp sci-fi franchises that are still alive, Dawn Of War II is surprisingly cerebral. Chaos Rising is ultimately a story about what it means to be a hero, and far more intelligent than people gave it credit for. Plus the gameplay is still highly impressive-it's Company Of Hero with Boltguns.

There's been a coup in Thailand. Not a huge surprise after martial-law was declared on Wednesday, but still disappointing. This is Thailand's 19th coup, and 14th military coup since gaining democracy. Infact it's been less than seven years since the last one. Nobody killed as of yet, but the military's seized control of the capital and taken over the governance of the country... ...again. On a lighter note, I finally bit the bullet and got into Game Of Thrones tonight. The writing quality is everything I'd hoped for, and I can tell I'm going to enjoy it. For the sake of fun I'm keeping a tally of how many characters get killed off, I'm at chapter 2 and we're already at fourteen. Most KIA in combat, one executed. What's staggering is that George Martin even managed to kill 14 characters at all... ...in 12 pages of script. Sure, some of the bloodthirsty '80s sci fi I like kills off billions but they aren't fleshed-out characters. If you actually tally up characters who are fully introduced the bloodiest would have been the Ravenor series, and it only killed off a few dozen(IE: nearly all of them)

Another one with graphics to savour was Unreal Tournament 3. Love it or hate it, you can't really deny the impact it's engine had on the outgoing generation of games. It wasn't the prettiest graphics engine around, but it did put fairly good graphics in the hands of relatively small, low-budget studios. And for that I think we should be grateful.

Another game that still holds up well is the original Halo. Halo was a blockbuster when it first appeared in 2001, and still remains one of my favourite games of the 2000s. A few years ago 343 created a special Anniversary Edition which ports the game onto a modern graphics engine, and I was amazed by how well it actually holds up a decade and a half later. The movement feels a little heavy and the difficulty is unforgiving, but overall it still feels like a modern game. Well worth a look if you're bored, since a PC copy on the original engine can be picked up for around $2. http://einfogames.com/news/files/2012/11/halo-anniversary.jpg Fifteen year old tech, but still looking fine.

Aye Thor, I'm waiting for that game as well. I like a lot of different genres, but Space Sims are among my favourites. I would STRONGLY urge you to seek out the original Elite, and see if it works on your PC. The developers of Elite: Dangerous originally worked on Elite back in the 1980s, which was itself also revolutionary. The new Dangerous is a modern slant on the original game, which still feels modern even in it's 30th anniversary year. This is a game everybody should atleast try and play, because it's a true legend. Elite made it's debut in 1984, and has an incredible number of firsts. It had cutting-edge 3D graphics(one of the first ever 3D games) and an open-ended sandbox world, complete with everything you would expect to find in it. The universe was procedurally generated, and arguably the first randomly created world of it's kind. Elite would be an impressive game today, but in the context of when it appeared, it represented a quantum leap in game design. http://www.elitegameonline.com/img/download.jpg

Sir Jack Brabham died on Monday morning; Billy's probably sick of the story(it's been all over the local news) but I feel compelled to mention it. Australia has a dubious history of worshipping successful sports people as heroes, but Sir Jack was more heroic than most. He won the World Driver's Championship(now F1) three times, but what's more amazing is that he won his third title in a car he designed and built himself, on a shoestring budget. He died at home aged 88; not a bad achievement considering how dangerous his two careers were(the air force and top-level auto racing)

GT5 was a great game, but it wasn't a simulator. Marketing it as such was very irresponsible on Sony's part, as I frequently see players who played GT5 with assists off get humiliated in more hardcore car games. Assetto Corsa and Project CARS are both soft-core driving sims, and even they're on a different league of realism to the GT lineage. Sadly most people don't realise that; thinking GT5 is realistic is like thinking Call Of Duty is realistic, as Gran Turismo is the Call of Duty of racing games.

I do know that feeling, I get it at work sometimes. It will get easier as you get older, but it never goes away entirely. Learning to manage it would be a very smart thing to do. This is what people mean when they talk about stepping outside your comfort zone; it doesn't feel good but you have to do it, and you'll be stronger for it. Fun night tonight, Steam has just begun another sale. For the next few days all things car will be 66% off, with a lot of great games for less than $5 AUD.

I've begun work on my first Aircraft Carrier in Space Engineers. The HMASS Megalith is just an unfinished frame right now; neither the inner nor outer hull as been even begun, the decks aren't laid nor are the corridors even built. She's literally a floating skeleton, devoid of any mechanicals or even hull plating. And despite all that, she already weighs thirty-seven point-nine MILLION KG. Her tonnage will be off the scale once finished; standing on the command deck you're situated eight stories above where the main outer hull will be(for ease of piloting) and yet the bridge still looks low-slung and sleek by dint of her shear size. She's only at half-length now, with the frame only having been built halfway through midships, but standing on her prow she'd already be about as tall as as Taipei 101. She's 25 stories tall from keel to command deck floor, and will be around 35 stories tall once her comm gear and sensors are fitted. Aesthetics? she's truly ugly, deliberately so. The idea here was to give her a series of "belt" zones that are nearly impervious to incoming attacks. Because of the thickness of the armour in these regions the ship itself has a messy interior layout and a hideously blunt exterior. She vaguely resembles a Hel from EVE online, although she's matte Grey and possess vastly more armour. I'll post some screenshots tommorow when I've had a chance to do some more work on her. She's a pretty unimpressive site right now; anyone can make a vast frame, the trouble is turning it into a ship. I still don't even know if she'll actually fly at her weight; I suspect I may even breach a billion KG by the time the stern and all her armour is fitted. Still, it's been a fun project and my later aircraft carriers will be smaller and yet probably have more interior space.

"I disagree with your review therefore you have no credibility and are terrible journalists"

Nice! Contests like this benefit everybody, especially the knights who'll no doubt be merrily beating eachother stupid on these in short order.