Obviously, I haven't been making huge tweaks to the blogs after the recent change of some enormity, but today I did add one tweak that's been on my mind for a bit: a bar along the top of the page so that it's easy to return to your own profile if you visit a friend's blog. It's something some of you had asked about, as well.

Another change I may implement today is a change to add replies to the "Friends" page, so that it's easier to see discussions friends might be having that you aren't necessarily aware exist. It's likely I'll put that change in place today, perhaps even in the next few minutes. It'll make it easier for more people to join interesting discussions.

This section of the site is obviously still a work in progress. I hope that you're enjoying the streamlined design as much as I am. Thanks for continuing to frequent the site and for posting in your blogs when you have something to share.

I always (as in, both times thus far) enjoy reading about your expliots at Gamejam. Long may it continue!

Excerpt from another forum I frequent.

"...A few days ago my roommate who's been playing this p. steadily for weeks did something that we think might have been, if not unique in pvp then at least vanishingly uncommon. For starters he's doing a Faith build which I gather is rare in itself, but it's made a few of his spells quite powerful including Wrath of the Gods, that fat white aoe that the giant knights in Anor Londo do. It's been quite effective by itself during world invasions, but one night we decided he should combine it with the Chameleon spell that turns you into a vase. And the giant dragon helm that breathes fire.

So he invades a world of the guilty, and places himself behind one of the pillars in the hallway leading to the twin bosses in Anor Londo, and turns into a vase. It takes a while, but the guilty player eventually starts fighting the giant knights just to clear them out, since he's not seen my friend and thinks he's safe. Miraculously, he ends up running right past the vase, whereupon my friend immediately explodes out of it with Wrath, hounds the player into a corner in front of the white boss door, hits him a few more times with Wrath, then finishes by breathing fire on him. We erupt in laughter."

I found it worth reading through too. Kind of jealous really :). Great that the event grew so much.

Awesome write-up describing what sounds like a wonderful event. Thanks for sharing!

I downloaded Pushmo this afternoon. Now a few hours later, I'm at 4-6 and ready to stop for a bit. I didn't skip any puzzles, so my brain is a bit fried at this point. Getting to the top of the Christmas Tree was quite the ordeal, and there were a few other tough puzzles along the way, as well (the NES controller comes to mind).

I use Microsoft Word and sometimes Open Office. I also write a surprising amount of stuff in regular Notepad if I'm in a rush.

I've tried other text editors but can't believe I didn't discover Notepad++ until recently. I really like NoteTab Standard for organizing things that need chapters, but Notepad++ is great for typing one-off stuff like reviews I don't need/want to take too many notes on--it even tracks the # of bytes a file is, and so forth, which is nice when I don't want to bloat a piece of writing too much.

I'd actually heard of Notepad++ before but assumed it was too much like Notepad for some reason. But it's not. After trying a pile of other text editors geared towards HTML coding and such (which I bet some people here might find useful) it took me about fifteen minutes to realize that I'd found something I wanted and probably should've done so years ago.

So what finally made me take the plunge? I got sick of Windows 7's Wordpad asking if I wanted to save a text file as text, because it might lose all the formatting I never put in anyway. I could kill this in XP or even Vista by closing and reopening.

Can't give any non-windows recommendations, but it's great to find a freeware that -works-.

Cool. You should post maps of every day for this week, then slow it to once every few days / every week as the game progresses. (Since I imagine after a while, a map a day will become too much).

Why does EmP already have five orbs while everyone else has four?

Better map:

I'm playing through Longest Journey myself right now.

The only one of those games I don't own is Pushmo. I'm thinking I probably need to get it. I hear overwhelmingly good things about it. Lucid I picked up on the Steam sale, like you. In Zelda, the skulltula spiders got me, too. And you know how I feel about Mario Kart 7. It's like we're the same person this week!

Myself, I've been playing a game that I'll be reviewing next week, so I'll save up anything I have to say and talk about it then. I haven't had much motivation to do anything lately or I'd have more game progress to share. I need to shake this funk.

Well...yeah. I was confusing. It's good to see people glad to have me back.

Basically I have to admit I'm not trying to hit a home run with my reviews. But I don't want them to be low quality and boring all the same. I just want to make sure I am writing when I want to write. And it felt good writing the last one. I'll see where I go from there. Who knows, maybe I'll discover some old NES games I never played and I'll have something to say about that.

On the other hand there are games I'm glad I played like Kickle Cubicle that I have nothing to say about. I guess I needed some time away from review writing and feeling I really should--now that other writing is picking up, I feel better coming back to it every once in a while. I mean, it's great to read everyone here's writing, but just being physically around writers (regardless of talent) and throwing around ideas has its benefits.

Because when I think "not hardcore," I definitely picture Mega Man. A game isn't hardcore unless it's downright gritty, don't you know?

it;'s like a hardcore version of megaman

Someone commenting on Power Blade for the NES.

Wow, you're alive!

Also, this post is largely confusing in its vagueness.... So I'll just say, you should do whatever makes you happy. As long as you feel satisfied doing what you're doing, then nothing else matters.

Here's a weird thing I noticed online. Epic Dungeon is no more. It's now called Cursed Jewels or something like that with an extra class to play as.

I tried to read why, but can't remember. It just seems kind of lame because you and Joe have outdated reviews of a game that no longer exists in that form, I have a game I have no reason to review for that reason AND, most importantly, even if you have "Epic Dungeon", you still have to pay $1 to get this updated version. I mean, the money's no issue, but the principle of the matter is. To me, it'd be like if Bethesda came out with a patch for Skyrim where they fixed things, added a couple minor details, changed the name to NordWorld and charged you $50 more for it.

Since I'll be reviewing it in the next couple weeks most likely. Love the game, but am starting to get a bit tired of it. 150ish hours of something does do that.

1. Avoid Fast Travel when possible. I only use it to get back to base and/or collect quest rewards, but try to walk everywhere. The game's really attractive and immersive, but when you rely on fast travel, it really devolves. Which is why I'm still going strong after 150 hours. That walking takes time.

2. Most alive world I've experienced. Just the sheer number of quests you can get from just about everyone, as well as all the little randomized events that can happen as you're walking around the countryside.

3. If you play aimlessly with the purpose being to wander around and see what trouble you can get in to, it's near-perfect. If you play in a more regimented style, things kind of fall apart, as most of the game is based on a repetitive style. Get quest, go to dungeon, kill stuff, get item and/or kill boss, go back and get reward. If you're freestyling, you don't notice (or you notice, but don't care), but if you're planning to sit down and, say, knock off 4-5 missions for a guild or something, it kind of grates on you.

4. Even that's better than in Oblivion. Just because the dungeons look so much more varied. You might be getting sent to 30 different caves for fetch quests, but at least they don't all have the same general look.

5. Difficulty balancing is still an issue. Around when I hit the late 30s level-wise, virtually everything got very easy. It might have been because, thanks to smithing/enchanting perks, I massively boosted my armor rating AND added superior enchantments to everything. But, whatever, when you get to a certain point, it does get a bit depressing, as I went from needing to use stealth and guile in many situations to just being able to destroy everything with my fire-enchanted warhammer.

6. And by "stealth and guile", I mean "exploiting enemy AI issues". Hello, Mr. Bandit Marauder! You're a tough mofo, so how about I use sneak to peck away at you with arrows while you only make lackluster attempts to find me even though I'm only about 30 feet away! Man, I got pissed when I fought Movarth the Vampire, as he apparently regens health, so that strategy didn't work and I had to actually man up and fight melee style.

7. Gotten lucky with glitches compared to things I've read. Only quest that really glitched in any way was the Brotherhood quest where you have to assassinate a woman during her wedding in Solitude. Apparently, the town gets hostile and one of your DB buddies creates a distraction. Neither of those things happened and I also didn't get the reward for the perfect kill even though I did push the statue on her while she was addressing the crowd. The most annoying thing is that I did all three Bard's College fetch quests, but the special instruments never left my inventory, so I have 10-12 pounds of non-droppable quest items cluttering things up.

8. The inventory, for MISC items, is a bit glitched. Things don't always stack, which makes the list obscenely long. Also would have been nice if they created sub-menus for ores/ingots and soul gems and quest items. MISC just gets so long and cluttered.