Dues Ex Again

So I caved. Just between our little group we have four copies of Dues Ex. I don't think I really need to point out that it's a damn good game to anyone, but just incase any of our Ukrainian readers were still on the fence; ya, it's good.

I'd like to write up a full review but I haven't got near enough into it to feel comfortable doing so. A good chunk of my opinion is going to come from how the roughly ten zillion story lines play out in the game, so I'll need to either finish it or make it most of the way before I can start talking. Same thing goes for the stealth gameplay - it's struck me as incredibly fun thus far but we'll have to see how that evolves with use of augmentations later in the game before I can properly gush.

Right now it's just ludicrously ripe with potential and forcing me to cut this blog short because I really want to play it. On a closing note though, mini bosses in the form of conversations has to be one of the more interesting things I've come across in a while, and not one I was expecting from an action FPS RPG. It's a welcome addition though.

Now I'm going back to playing it already.

Psychic Community

My latest attempt to look into the the world of magical psychic Ki wizards took me local. My goal was to try and identify if Ottawa had any sort of community dedicated to this stuff and hopefully get in contact with some of them, possibly even manage an interview or two. The follow up to this would of course be to try and find out if any of the locals had ways to prove what they were doing was in fact real, since I assume the question must come up often enough that anyone significantly involved in the community would have at least a response to it, even if its only scowling and telling me to fuck off.

I've come across a stumbling block however. It seems the various occult communities of Ottawa are isolated, with very little to no contact between them, or at least nothing on an leadership level. There may be friends between the assorted groups, but certainly nothing so convenient as a forum or regular meet up. I've found their organizations to be very similar to the way Martial Arts dojos are set up. Each has it's own creed, lineage and tiny supporting community, but very little intermingles on an official level. They may all work in largely the same area of expertise but the tiny distinctions in philosophy and practice distinguish them enough that they retain a very definite sense of identity separate from the other groups.

What's more most of these groups are operating out of houses or other very private settings, making any sort of unobtrusive investigation difficult at best. I'm not entirely certain how to proceed from here. I'm hesitant to commitment myself to any of these groups in order to learn more about them. There's often a financial cost associated, but even in the groups that don't necessarily require a fee I can't be certain I'd be able to get very far if I was frank about my intentions to verify their practices rather than merely participate. I could lie of course, but it'd be quite time consuming to try and investigate each independently like this, even assuming I'm convincing in my lies.

My personal experiments in meditations and psiballs have remained inconclusive, I can't for certain distinguish what I'm feeling from anything other than voluntary nerve firings and have failed in my attempts to prove anything through external tests. I need another practitioner that can verify these tests, preferably some one who is further along and more confident of their abilities, so as to not bring the results into question with incompetence. I may just have to bite the bullet and commit myself to a local community to see what results I can find.

Dues Ex

We're maybe four to six hours into this game, and I'm finding it incredibly entertaining. Granted, this might be more because of our tendency to punch out anyone who so much as looks at Adam funny while we play, but that's still an entirely valid part of the game. Besides, the remainder ain't too shabby either. The combat is proving to be difficult, but difficult in the sort of way that makes you feel proud when you over come the long odds, not the sort that makes you look up walkthroughs on YouTube. 

Speaking of such we've made it a bit further into the Catherine and it has become clear it's going to be completely impossible for us to pick one of the moral sides to commit to before the end. Even when blatantly trying to skew our answers to get a 'committed' ending we've managed to stay firmly middle ground. Maybe we're just bad at this stuff, or maybe we should just Do What Robertson Would Do whenever we get a choice. That seems to be the only consistent path we can take.

Actually, despite the fact that Adam Angryman from Dues Ex doesn't look a thing like our red bearded enormous nosed dwarf he's quickly becoming a Robertson Of The Future. Oddly enough I'm not getting this impression from the few moral choices we've been presented thus far, but rather from our general demeanor whenever we play an RPG as a group. The Robertson seems to be a our default personality. I'm not sure what that says about us, but it can't be good.

More Dresden RPG

Okay, so it turns out making an entire city down to the personal level of detail is a lot of work. I mean a really, really lot of work. 

I didn't think I had at any point deluded myself into believing it'd be particularly easy, but damn, if I want to give the guys any real chance to run around all over the place I need to build quite a bit. Also most of them seem to be under the impression that they don't really need to know about the city to play the game, but I'm getting the sneaking suspicion if I just cobble something together myself I'm going to get a lot of blank stares when I ask them what they want to do next. They need to know about the world to interact with it, or it'll basically be a bunch of tourists floundering around.

Luckily we've more or less finished character creation, though it appears I didn't put enough emphasis on the characters needing to know one another. I was sort of hoping they'd put a probably reason for them to help out one another into their backstories, but it turns out they've all picked characters who either hardly know one another or actively disdain social contact. I'm going to have one hell of a time making up a unifying story unless Trevor does something close to a miracle with his yet to be finish character. To give a reference for how likely that is, the last idea he had was a neo-nazi that hunts other nazi's... In Canada... Just kinda because. In morbid fascination I tried thinking up a way I could actually make that relate to our story in ANY way, and I think that just made him latch onto the idea more.

I'd like to entertain the false hope that he'll have a new idea come tomorrow, but not even I can bullshit myself that much. I think my best hope will be bluntly telling him his character needs to be friends with both Peter's and Josh's characters. Like best buds forever. I'll mull on it all tomorrow. Maybe I can make both of Trevor's path-crossng experiences be apart of some big adventure central to his character and involve the other two. I just need some sort of precedent for them working together.