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[Spoiler]

I wasn’t saying that they are always right, just that they develop hardware in anticipation of a game type they want to make, thus they are unlikely to want to be stuck with another companies hardware.

There's nothing "ahead of the curve" with the WiiU tablet controller. Its a blatant attempt to get in on the tablet/smartphone popularity of the last few years. IMO its another gimmick by Nintendo.

Divergent gameplay is a thing though; as far as I know it has never been done before on a console (PC yes).  

Some of the games in Nintendoland do this very well (others very poorly) but give the player with the tablet a unique gameplay experience to what controller users have.  

Rayman Legends also uses this in an interesting way, allowing one player to manipulate the environment with the touchpad while the other player(s) run the course as a normal 2D platformer.  I highly recommend this one; by the way, we’ve been playing it extensively since they release new courses every day.

I can also see this used to great effect for future games that emulate table top roleplaying.  Basically, dungeon master on tablet.

GameCube – Duel Joysticks for better FPS.

The original PlayStation had a Dual Analog Controller released 4 years before the GameCube.  

I thought the PS1 had this thing?  

Spoiler for Hiden:

I don’t know personally, I never owned one.  Just going by what I remember from the article.

Nintendo themselves did divergent gameplay back on the Gamecube with a GBA extension which let you play 4 Swords and a Pac-Man game that is extremely similar to a lot of the games in Nintendoland (the GBA player was Pac-Man and everyone else played the ghosts).

It wasn't built into the console, which I think was your point, but it was a gimmick.

I see the Wii U not so much as a blatant attempt to ride the mobile wave (the Wii U isn't super mobile, though you can buy a car adapter), as much as a way to continue what they've been doing on the DS into the living room.

Your AI Part 2 link is brokey... but easy enough to figure out what it should be. 

So yeah.

Jaime is quickly turning from one of the most hated characters into someone you root for.

Had this discussion at work and  I said "Yea but i can't stop picturing him F'ing his sister and then shoving some kid out a 3 story window"

[Part 1.1 AI (Improvements) - YouTube Demo:]

Before I crack on to Part 2 (Retreat and defense) I would like to quickly cover the minor improvements we made since Part 1 of this AI series. Thanks to community feedback we've added a few more features, removed others and hopefully will have created more realistic behaviour.

Part 1.1 AI (Improvements) - YouTube Demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YttkpNdS5bY

In short, the changes are:

1. If the Skeleton loses sight (raycasting towards hero) and smell (raycasting towards dropped breadcrumbs), he will still continue to head towards the location where the hero was last detected and investigate further.

2. If the Skeleton still cannot find the hero, it will make a best guess where it thinks he has gone and will set a patrol route to the nearest waypoint. Given these changes, we've removed the alert level as we've found this feature has become redundant and offers no extra intelligence. The "smell trails" have been reduced to balance the extra added behaviour - this also seems to help limit cheating in the AI.

Ok, let's bring on the fun stuff!

AI Explained - Part 2 of 5: Retreating and Defense, featuring TinyKeep's Fire Imp Monster!

Fire Imps (and other monsters marked with the "Shy" personality flag) will run away from the player if he gets too close. Put him in this level of distress for too long, and he'll breathe fire on you.

Part 2 AI - YouTube Demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIBuIELYd4c

The interactive demo is here on the TinyKeep website along with all of the previous demos:



As with all of these AI behaviours, what you see on the video and demo are the default settings for each of the personality flags (Aggressive, Cautious, Shy, Lumbering etc...). However we've designed our AI editor to be a lot more flexible than that - so our game designer Ben can choose from a multitude of variables to customize his monsters:

• Enable/disable line of sight (blind monsters)
• Smell/sound sensitivity (monsters with amazing sense of smell)
• Roaming speed, chasing speed, fleeing speed
• Enable/disable wall avoidance (in case some monsters can walk through walls!)
• Distance threshold before alerted
• Require line of sight before alerted
• ...and many more!

We know that this will give us the ability to create really unique and varied monsters, and part of the fun of the game is figuring out the behaviours of each one.

Hope you enjoyed the post, and let us know if you have any questions about the AI!

[Spoiler]

Just finished Season 5,with the end music track i am guessing it is now 1967(You Only Live Twice -Nancy Sinatra)

Spoiler for Hiden:

Gutted about Lane


I am actually not that impressed on how that was executed,i really wanted to see Don in the aftermath...if he did or did not tell his fellow partners that he had sacked Lane the Friday before

It would've been interesting to see Don tell his wife that Lane had killed himself,because she was the only person Don had told about him embezzling and therefore getting the sack

but no,like a lot of times a new episode starts and hardly anything is mentioned on the subject again

Unsure whether to start the season 6 episodes on my DVR(7 episodes)or wait until i have them all

I haven't enjoyed a mmorpg in quite awhile but something about this one just clicks. Have not even gotten one class to 10 yet but so far it appears they have nailed down the hardest part of a modern MMORPG : catering to both the hardcore and casual fans. I see they have one character class coming soon.  Have they given a launch time for that yet?  Also, do they plan on adding more (I certainly hope so) and how often?  Not sure if they have discussed that yet.  I already bought two extra slots and would gladly buy more if they had more variety ; Ranger class, two weapon fighter, alternate healing class, alternate mage, etc.  While balancing can't be easy there are a ton of ways they can go with that.

Vesides slots and maybe a bag of holding, is there anything else wroth saving this Zen for?  Companions or mounts maybe?  Any reason not to convert it to the AD currency or another one? (just how many 'currencies' are there anyway....biggest gripe with the game) 

Whenever i click the show button for a spoiler tag I get redirected to here : http://gamingtrend.com/games/divinity-anthology/

That same exact page every single time.  Only website doing it...strange.  Cookie issue or?  Any ideas on fixing it?

edit to add:  Laos it appears the spoiler button does not work for me when posting, I click it does nothing.  Example :

I think Ceekay is sexy!!    (I highlight it and click spoiler but nothing, it's there for all the unprepared world to see)

So what's the verdict on this? How has their support of this been? AA's write-up in the Weekend Playlist thread sounded interesting (was that a Deep Ocean adventure?) and sadly this is sitting in my Steam game list, never played.

Yes, hydrothermic power plants and tsunamis are two of the gameplay additions in Deep Ocean.  They're part of the expansion's general theme of expanding the Tech faction and associated underwater facilities.

I think it's a great expansion, but I would not consider it worthwhile for a newcomer.  Nearly all of the additions are designed for people who have exhausted the base game, and there are so many unlockable technologies, career perks, and custom challenges in Anno 2070 that you could easily sink eighty hours into it without feeling like you were missing a thing.

My recommendation would be to spend some time with the original release, learn the basics in the campaign and tool around on a Continuous Map or two, and then see how you'd feel about adding underwater trade routes, enhanced black smoker harvesting, and some *very* high-end demands from the new tier of Tech residents.  It's all very cool stuff, but hardly must-have material when you're learning whether or not you even like the game.

-Autistic Angel

[Spoiler]

Saw it yesterday and loved it.  I dug all the little shout outs to the original series.

Thoughts:

Spoiler for Hiden:

The first half was a bit slow, but once the "reveal" happened, the movie was just non-stop action for the rest of its run.  The woman sitting next to me had her mouth covered for the last hour of the film I think.  

I liked the tribbles, the call back to Harry Mudd, the reverse Wrath of Kahn ending, and the amount of time they gave Scotty and Chekov.  

I'm not fond of the trans-warp deus ex machina device.  It needs to go away in future films.  I also really wish they'd stuck with the Klingon design from the movies and next gen.  The design they use now makes them look too much like a Ferenghi in a fetish dungeon in my opinion.  

Also, personal aside, but Spock was enraged during that final fight with Kahn.  I know he's half human, but Vulcans are notoriously strong and I would've liked to see him put up more of a fight for the first two thirds of that fistfight.  They've alluded to the fact that Vulcans pre-Surak would've made Kahn look like a Teletubby.  But that's entirely me being a giant nerd.  

So, two thumbs way up.  A hell of a fun matinee ride.

So were all those suits based in the comics or just stuff they made for the movie? The giant hulking one was reminiscent of the original suit, but modernized.