ArcaniA

I decided to finally give ArcaniA a try. My first impression after 30 minutes is - meh!
I'll play it a bit more although i don't expect to enjoy ArcaniA much. :D

Got back into Eternal Darkness after a week or so off from it. One of the neat things about the game is that because it has so many protagonists it can mess with your expectations in certain ways. Last night I was playing and the game seemed to be foreshadowing a boss encounter, so I was steeling my nerves for that. It turned out there certainly was a boss encounter, but it consisted entirely of a cut-scene in which the monster basically snapped its fingers and made my guy's head explode. Then the chapter ended and I was sent back to the present day area to find the item to unlock the next level.

Blackguards 2, which is great, just as much fun as the first one, although it's mostly more of the same. Some changes, but nothing bad (or good for that matter) - it's just different.

However, I can't recommend getting the Untold Legends DLC for Blackguards 1. It adds too little, especially if you, like me, already played the game once before installing the DLC.

The current rotation is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl and System Shock 2, but the past few sessions have been focused on SS2. And this time I actually paid attention to the mechanics of the game and know what I am doing now. (Amazing how that works!)

I restarted SS2 after not legitimately playing it for literally 3 years or so. I had been meaning to play it, but it got left on the backburner because I had other games in the backlog I wanted to go through. But now I am back! I just got past the part I stopped playing at several years ago, which was purging the radiation from the coolant tubes on Deck 1, the Engineering floor. I stopped playing at the elevator coming to floor 3 because I have to remove the stuff that is preventing me from reaching level 4 to find Dr. Polito. (And yes, I know who she actually is.)

Hoping to make some more progress tomorrow. I am really invested in SS2 now, and may play just that until I get to the end.

Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online (PS4)

You can forget about me for the next couple of weeks :)

Pokemon Alpha Sapphire

It's turned into a fine JRPG series, especially with the new 3d graphics, it looks like a PS2 game now.

My team currently is;

Gulpin (Poison)
Combusken (Fire)
Shroomish (Grass)
Dustox (Bug)
Gyarados (Water)
Ralts (Psychic)

How does it plays compared to Megadimension Neptunia VII?

Uncharted: Golden Abyss
Got it to make my Vita useful again, at least for a few days :P
It's decent and fairly fun for being a different developer. The Vita tack on elements arn't too bad :P and I think I'm almost done with it.

I've started playing Risen. So far, it's fun, but the game really feels like a clone of the Gothic games...and one that is actually in some ways worse or at least less ambitious than its predecessors.

The Last Door - wow, it's much better I've expected. Absolutely fantastic atmosphere of horror. And I love how they used pixel graphics here.

Gothic

I am on chapter 5 now, "Into the Sleeper's Temple", so pretty near to the end I guess. I find it refreshing how this game seems to have known what is a good size for a game. Not every free-roaming RPG has to consist of hundreds of identical towns to visit, nor years to finish. Also I like how they haven't tried to make the skill or stats system more complicated that it really needs to be. Oh and limitless inventory, how nice!

I've enjoyed the game quite much, you can tell a good game when it keeps you awake late at night and you don't want to go to sleep because of "just one more subquest or place to visit".

Questions to Gothic veterans:

1. So, I am now in the orc camp, finding my way to the Sleeper's temple. I am wearing that Ulu-Mulu something something that makes orcs peaceful (= not attack me). Walkthroughs suggest I should peacefully try to find my way to the temple.

However, I want to kill them all, for extra experience (I'll explain later why). I have a good axe weapon (90+ damage), high strength and mastered 2-hand (as well as 1-hand) weapons, and bow. So I can kill orcs pretty easily now, at least if I fight them one at a time.

Is this safe to do, ie. this will not break the game if I go in a killing frenzy in the orc village? I already killed e.g. those orc shamans who throw fireballs, they were so easy to kill with an axe (just dodging their stupid fireballs, if they could even cast them at all), and I got 500 experience for killing each.

Already in chapter 4 I visited this same village and started killing the orcs (as I thought that's the place where I'd find the friendly orc shaman, but he was actually elsewhere), but that actually seemed to break something, suddenly e.g. the Esc button wouldn't work so I couldn't enter the menu etc. So I reloaded an earlier savegame where I hadn't started killing them yet. Killing them now doesn't seem to cause similar problem, at least not yet.

How will e.g. that friendly orc shaman outside the village react to me killing all his former friends (who now are his enemies, though)? Or will he care at all? Does it even matter at all at this point what he thinks? He did ask me to go peacefully, I think.

2. Ok, so the reason I want to amass much more experience is that in Chapter 3 or 4 I suddenly got a chance to start a career as magician, even though I had already enlisted as a guard in the Old Camp.

So I had joined the Old Camp, and when Thorus asked whether I want to join the guards (and not become a magician), I said yes. Apparently that was needed in order to master 2-hand weapons and get better armor. So I thought that's it, now I will not learn the Circles of Magic etc., it will need another playthrough (at least starting before saying ok to Thorus).

However, when the Old Mine fell and I went to talk with the Water Mages in the New Town... according to some walkthrough "if you were a guard, join mercenaries; if you were a Fire Mage, join the Water Mages"... but interestingly, the head of Water Mages gave me both choices, to either be a mercenary or a Water Mage.

Since I had already mastered 2-hand weapons and I felt there is not much else to learn as a melee fighter (apart from increasing my strength further), i figured why not add a career as a water mage on top of that. So here I am, a water mage just learned the 2nd Circle of Magic, trying to increase my mana, already mastering the 1-hand and 2-hand weapons as well as bow. Everyone seems to treat me as a mage now, e.g. I didn't get the "scale armor quest" from Wolf when we raided the Free Mine (nor will Wolf sell me armor because I am not a mercenary, it seems), so I presume that would have been available only for Mercenaries.

Ok so my question is simply this: was this a glitch (that I could switch from a guard/mercenary to a magician) in the New Town, even though I had already started my fighter career in the Old Town. This worked pretty well to me as I had already mastered the important fighter skills (only missing the crossbow skill, but that's ok), but now I need masses of extra experience in order to gain extra circles of magic, and extra mana power (albeit the mana artifacts help with the latter). So now I am a pretty kickass fighter/mage combo, heck I could even kill a full-size troll alone with my axe! (for the "Ulu-Mulu" quest).

The only question in my mind now is whether I can get enough XP to get the remaining circles of magic etc., as it seems I have killed pretty much all the wildlife and orcs in the colony already, plus completed pretty much all the subquests so far. (Yes I read in some FAQ that was it in this chapter or chapter 6 where you may gain limitless XP by respawning some demon over and over again, but I am unsure if I can at that point go back to learn more stuff with my skill points...).

I'm sure at this point I can probably finish the game as a fighter, but I'd like to try some of the more powerful magic. Anyway, already at circles 1 and 2, I really much like that I can use my mana for utilities like light (using torches while fighting sucks, the light spell works great during combat), and healing (not having to constantly eat mushrooms etc. to heal oneself).

Its an action rpg for starters, modeled after a faux online game. Phantasy Star Universe/Portable would be a similar experience. You can pick the girl you want to control (can change anytime) and the rest of the party is handled by the different AI tactics settings. Story and writing is what you would expect from a Nep game. Lighthearted and 4th wall breaking :)

I killed them all, didn't break anything...I'd recommend doing this, as you wrote the extra exp is quite nice.
Can't really answer your 2nd question, I'd suppose you switched over to mage too late to get all the really powerful stuff. But if it works for you, why not.

Since I finally got a new pc, been going a little overboard. Balrum, Grim Dawn, King Arthur, Ember; plus now I can actually play Fable without problems.

posts like these are killing me :P