Just finished the Mass Effect games for the first time, contemplating a second playthrough of the series or clearing out some HD space for The Witcher or Dragon Age: Origins.

Playing Monaco with friends.

Awww shit. Only now I realized that apparently I have already reached the level cap of Baldur's Gate + TotSC. I just noticed that after winning some ultra hard battles, my party members were still stuck at 161000 XP points. Little googling revealed that is indeed the experience points cap with BG + expansion pack. Oh well, no reason then to try to complete any more sidequests either, but just to rush to the end ASAP.

So much for my idea to level up my party a bit more to handle some ultra-hard encounters. Maybe I just need to turn down the difficulty setting instead, I guess I made a mistake cranking it up to the max earlier. The game didn't feel that hard before, until the werewolf island on the TotSC expansion pack. But at this point, many of the more difficult encounters feel to be mostly about luck. If I get lucky, the powerful enemies either miss my characters enough times so that I am able to kill them instead, or they concentrate on summoned monsters instead of my party members.

Frankly, even though I've now reached the experience cap, my party still feels like a bunch of weaklings. :(

It's Bioware, they never had a clue about difficulty setting design. I don't think they even test it, they just make sure the game works and then add a bunch of multipliers to damage received and taken. Don't go above Core Rules mode, unless you're a masochist.

It was quite ok (and nicely challenging), up to those damn werewolves... Fortunately the difficulty setting can be changed any time midgame. I changed it back to medium, and on a second try I cleared the fourth level of the shipwreck without any casualties.

I guess I'll stay with the core rules also with the other Interplay/Bioware RPGs.

I'm playing Fallout New Vegas and really enjoying it.

A lot of unique quests, characters, FO-like jokes. I have been playing it for 40 hours and I still have quests to finish. I like a lot that one incident or person is acknowledged by various persons across the world; almost always underlined by their own experience. And Vault 22 mission is my favorite so far.

I'm playing the game of trying to find the time to play games, unfortunately...

There's a new "release" that makes NOLF and NOLF 2 super easy to install and play on modern systems, and I am enjoying NOLF very much right now. GOG needs to get on that shit.

Also dabbling in Shadow Warrior on Dosbox, as I found the Steam "redux" version lacking.

On the RPG side I'm deeply into New Vegas again, this time hopefully doing the DLC I have so far ignored.

Also have one more Dishonored DLC mission to do. Kind of spreading those out for maximum enjoyment.

Name? I can't be arsed to look for my Russian NOLF2 discs.

It's called "nolf anthology" and has all three games. The games are English though, only the installer is Russian. I just kept hitting the next arrow until they installed lol.

I know from my time in Georgia that Russian scene releases are pretty well done and smooth to install. I assume because they actually make money off them.

Discovered Scribblenauts. Unique concept. Addictive.

Recently played:

Eador: Genesis
Darklands
Phantasmagoria
The Cat Lady
Talisman Prologue

Outcast, for the second time. A game far ahead of its time in many aspects.

I just finished MIrror's Edge on Wednesday, which took me nearly an entire frozen pizza to do, so now I've been going back to some older games. I've been playing a lot of X-COM: UFO Defense, Master of Orion, and I just started up Thief again tonight.

I've also put in some hours into Burnout Paradise, but I'm kind of pissed that I was sold "The Ultimate Box," which to me implies that it includes all the DLC, but not only does it not have the DLC included, the Burnout Store isn't even online anymore so it's impossible to even get it if you want it without editing save games with a Hex editor. If I paid more than $1.01 for the Humble Bundle I'd be p. upset, but whatever.

Dead Space 3 (PC).