Kingdoms of Amalur: The Same’maning


I LIKED the demo. I bought the game. The demo SOLD me on the game. I especially enjoyed the combat. The fighting felt solid and fluid. I had control of the action and it mattered that I timed my blocks, dodges and attacks. I was playing Skyrim at the same time and was amazed at how much better the combat felt in Amalur. The skill choices in Amalur are spread out over three main character types. These skill trees seemed cool and interesting in the demo. The game let you spread your skill points over the three skill trees, never locking you into any particular path (this is the first problem and you’ll find that out much later). So as I said, I LIKED the demo. That is where I should have stopped myself I think.

Insert EA rant: People this is a EA game. FUCK YOU EA. I can safely say I will not buy another EA game ever. When I pay 60 dollars for a game I don’t want to be reminded about DLC EVERY FUCKING TIME I START THE FUCKING GAME EA! I don’t want to see that fucking STAR by the Downloads menu item in the main menu for the game EVERY FUCKING TIME I PLAY! YES I SEE EA THAT YOU WANT ME TO SPEND MORE FUCKING MONEY! YES I SEE EA AND NO I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING BUY ANYMORE EA SPACEPISS! EA GET THAT GOD DAMNED STAR OFF MY SCREEN YOU FUCKING COPORATE FUCKASSES!

So here’s how Amalass plays. You’ll play the game for about 3-4hrs and more or less at this point you done EVERYTHING in the game. From this point on you’ll be playing a rehashing of more or less the same enemies, quests and find similar loot for the next however many hours you choose to spend playing. AND YOU CAN SPEND A SHIT TON OF HOURS PLAYING THE SAME SHIT OVER AND OVER. I was maybe 20hrs in when I finally stopped with the non-main quest shit and just powered right through the main quest in 6hrs. I didn’t need to level up anymore and the game was fucking so gawd damned easy on normal. I just got to a point in the game where I was fucking bored and upset with how generic and shitty everything was feeling and said, “Okay, how about now I just win this shitty game.” And so I did, I followed only the main quests, running from yellow circle objective marker to yellow circle objective marker, skipping all the useless dialogue, fighting the same fights over and over and won.

Yes you get more skills on your way to the fucking boring ending but the new skills don’t do anything that great! I got a crowd control skill that I had to use over and over as a melee fighter. Unlocking shit skills that have to be used is a GAY! Where is my choice now? I level up and if I don’t use these new skills I lose. Fucking dumb. AND if I do use them I win instantly. The game is balanced in this strangely perfect way, when you are doing the “right” thing the game is insanely easy and quickly becomes boring after your 10-12th victorious battle.

OH ya I tried to play a fight/thief character, it FAILED. Once I respected and put all my skill points into the fighter tree I instantly became 100% more deadly. ? Why the fuck let me break my character by spec’ing into two or SHIT three trees at once? Is that some way of making the game cooler? Here gamer, put points into any tree you want. If you happen to use only one tree, BINGO you’re good! If you experiment with using multiple trees, FUCK YOU, you’ll hopefully get around to respec’ing into one tree only and quickly see HOW FUCKING WRONG YOU WERE!

The game is worth 10$ tops! Normal people will play 4-6 hours and stop cuz that is all the fun there is in the game. Shitty buffet trough feed americans will play all the fucking way through and buy all the DLC and want more. This game is the mount everest of mediocrity and I climbed all the way to the fucking top and took a GIANT piss on the dead diabetes ridden gamer corpses that littered the peak.

All that said I did craft a fucking KICKASS great sword that did 50+ more damage than anything I found in the game, so that was cool. The crafting system was cool. The fighting system is cool for 4-6hrs. The animations/enemies are very Todd McFrainer or whom ever the fuck that comic guy is. The world art is okay, very wow’ish but it’s fine. I can’t help but think a great number of people wasted a HUGE amount of time making this incredibly so so game.

Lead Painter’s League Season 6

We all see the golden demon and all the GW stuff, Warmachine stuff, etc.  Lead Painter’s League has a painting competition that includes everything from just about every category– and it’s just great to see bare breasted amazons painted up next to non-Warmachine/40K mechs, plus all the glorious historicals.   Check out round 2 here.

And the obligatory picture:

Well crap, Winter’s over…

We went from the best snow we’ve had all season to NO snow in less than 6 hours here Tuesday and today it was 60 again–so there went any chance of snowboarding until next December without a 6+ hour drive.

That said, I did get some runs in here and there and went four times. Mostly, the snow was an icesheet barely covered by the machine made, graded snow from the night before, but there were two days where the snow was in the “OK for here” zone.

This was my year to go off some jumps and do some funboxes.  Failed.  I went off one jump and crashed and slammed my knees on the first funbox I tried.  So, yeah– next  year when hopefully Jack Frost won’t be such a cunter.

Awesome RPG initiative system

the game looks to be the tits.

The new Marvel RPG is all the rage this week and it’s only out in PDF format so far. It’s very Fate-like, except it uses a bunch of the funny dice like D&D and is very abstract where stuff like Champions/Hero (and Exalted) are very precise and crunchy. While I find it completely impossible to imagine running an actual superhero RPG with my group, I like reading about the systems. I’m a bit of a Systems Addict actually so I stumble upon stuff of variable usefulness. Yesterday my stumbling came across a post about the Marvel RPG initiative system by one of the FATE creators, and apotheosis followed.

Initiative is a tough nut to crack in pen and paper RPG’s because of turn angst.  Ideally you want something that rewards players who have spent some sort of resource for their speed, whether it’s in items or their character build or even gotten a good die roll, but as RPG’s have moved towards characters taking ‘actions’ or a ‘scene’ or in Marvel’s case: a ‘panel,’ rather than attacks (with or without the stunts we so love now since Feng Shui) you don’t want some characters dominating the combat scenarios by getting to take a turn more than other player’s characters because then those people without fast characters just sit there… and sit there.

This has typically been solved, unsatisfactorily in my opinion, by a ’round the table’ method where everyone rolls a die, maybe modified, and gets to go in that order, or someone on the player side goes first, then it goes around the table with the GM going last.   In contrast to this method is the tick-based systems of Exalted and Champions, where a character’s actions determine how long it is until they can take another action.  While this is the most realistic of the systems and fun when all the players (not necessarily the NPC’s) have the same action counts, woe is it to be the archer or a player with a high tick attack action– because you sit there waiting and waiting to take an action, only to take one and have to wait and wait again.  While the tick systems are the most tactically deep, in practice, when you have outliers like someone too fast or too slow, it breaks down in play (i.e.: don’t play an archer in Exalted)

As this post discusses, the new Marvel RPG has a hand off mechanic where the player or NPC that takes and action gets to choose who the next actor in a fight is and this is simple and downright brilliant.  There is tactical depth, the ability to team up attacks, the ability to out-manuver your opponents by making them take their turn before they want to, etc.   What’s more, this could easily be tacked on to ALL non-tick-based initiative systems and looks to work just as well for social or physical conflicts.  Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay? Yes.  FATE (Dresden, Bulldogs, Anglerre) in all the incarnations I know of?  Yes.  Even in OD&D this could work.  Sure, some skills players have in each RPG may not work with this in some systems, but they could simply be adjusted since the ‘actor’s choice’ mechanic is so simple.

Hey! I’ve now got a good reason not to buy Bioshock Infinite…

…other than because the end of Bioshock and Bioshocked 2 sucked.   The inclusion of a robot George Washington put the final nail in that coffin for me.  Other than looking  insipidly steampunk stupid, it’s NOT a fitting testament to the one single person in American history that made all of this possible– i.e.: that we aren’t serfs to some milksop douche with peerage from an American crown.  So you make a robot of the one good guy in American history that you have to shoot?  Stupid cunts.