I continue to gambol across Skyrim doing things for the Wizard’s College. (You’d think that they’d be among the smartest people in the world, right? You’d be amazed at what they can’t do for themselves.) Sneak skill is the highest at 80 and I imagine it’ll be the first to 100.
So… what are you playing?
How do you remember these commercials? I’ll be darned if I remember anything before the turn of the millennium.
It is my blessing.
It is my curse.
Still Skyrim, naturally. I’m at level 43 (I’m playing this character until I hit level 50 for the achievement, then I’ll start again. I have Smithing at 100, one-handed at 98 and I’ve got the perk that makes heavy armour weightless when you wear it.
Do you have any smithing secrets? Just “keep making rings, dummy?” or some variant thereof?
1) Transmute is your friend. Buy iron ore in bulk and transmute it into silver or gold ore to make jewellery. This has the advantage of training your alteration skill as well.
2) Don’t sell gems, make them into jewellery instead. I think you get a bigger skill bump from making fancier jewellery.
3) Improve all your gear, and all the gear you find (if you can). It makes it worth more, and also trains your Smithing.
I’ve been doing #3 but it never occurred to me to do #1. (Well, I cast it on occasion but never as a deliberate “we’re going to do this until we go up a level” kinda thing.”)
I haven’t been selling my gems, just keeping them in a dresser in my house. I will start making rings/necklaces with them.
I’ll buy an even amount of iron ore every time I sell stuff at a blacksmith. So I don’t do it as a full grind, but every little bit helps.
I got LIMBO on sale and played through it this week – I thought it was incredible work of game aesthetics. As a game it’s not nearly Braid, to be sure, but it is engrossing to play and watch.
I also started Dead Island but you can tell it was created for consoles, the controls are simply awful.
I picked up Dead Space and the sequel, not sure if I’ll get to them this weekend or not.
I loved Limbo. The scene with the spiders? That was worth the price of admission for me. Was it as good as Braid? Eh. It didn’t strike me as a game that was trying to do anything close to the same thing.
For better or worse, I saw them constantly compared in reviews, probably because they were side scrolling platformer puzzlers that were trying as hard to be art as to be games.
Icewind Dale! News flash: First-edition magic users are lame lame lame lamey lame lamey lame.
Also, the “two clerics” thing is working out nicely. Not having to rest after every fight or spend all my gold on healing potions is so far making up for the lack of firepower from having a third fighter-type in the party.
Clerics are fighter types, kinda. They’re like fighter-lite.
Not 1st-ed clerics. Their to-hit tables are awful. I made one of them (the male one, because I’m sexist) a strong, dumb, barely competent brute-priest in heavy armor.
Icewind Dale is 2nd edition, not 1st.
Ach! I suppose you’re right.
Re-playing Syberia (and then will play Syberia II) for the first time. Advenure games from 2002ish.
Fun, and thematic as fish. The graphics and story hold up pretty well, though I’m discovering the dialogue and acting is a little bit on-the-nose, and js a bit more wordy than I like.
Finished Saint’s Row the Third – 2011’s game of the year. Will probably hit Castle Crashers with my son today (for about the 200th hour).
Feel like writing a review?
I really can’t write a full review – I am super-busy. What I would say is that for an open-world game there is a laser focus on fun and not wasting the player’s time. They really respect that you’re at a game like Saint’s Row to have some fucking fun. It has a tremendous sense of humor, and the game is mechanically rock-solid: good driving and shooting. It has the typical open world issues – people getting caught in weird animations, etc… I call it my game of the year because it was so much fun, I had to pause several times because my laughing made it impossible to control my character. I’ve never had that happen before – the embrace of breathtaking absurdity is what propels the story. Every time you start a mission it’s like “Ok, what fucked up shit are we going to do now?” Also, the soundtrack is fucking great – jam, after jam, after jam and well-used within missions. I hadn’t hungered to play a game this much since Mass Effect 2. Yes I just said that and I didn’t like GTA4 or Red Dead. In the end, I applaud the fun factor – and respectfully refuse to list specifics so that others may have the same joy of discovery I did
BTW, there are a lot of big games I haven’t played (Skyrim, UC3) but I liked SR3 a bit more than Arkham City, and I really liked Arkham City.