Cougar that is hilarious 🙂

totally agree cougar. My “using the game mechanics to your advantage isn’t cheating” comment now looks a bit silly.

Is the levelling anything like the stupid setup in Oblivion? I wasted 30 hours playing the game to realise I’d got a monumentally flawed char. I then had to spend ~200 hours fannying about to get a decent chat stats set up.

It’s completely counter intuitive and I suspect only there to annoy people like me.

As for FF7 – I lost the weekend it came out and a coupla days holiday. I got to the final boss in ~67 hours seriously underequipped. I then had a monumental +4hour fight throwing everything at it until I was defeated.

I started again, went stat chasing (Crashed gelnika for the win) and went back to the final boss with 200+ in each stat (‘cept luck) and whalloped him in about 2 minutes (with Kotor).

Back in the days I was single and childless….

I’ve not got the game yet, concerned my 3 year old pc might struggle a bit, but my all account the leveling system is a lot better. You’re not forced into a picking a type of character at the start and you get additional perks when you level up, allowing specialization. That and a lot of the enemies now dont level up when you do, so it makes things more worthwhile.

Glittergary, no it’s not essential you have the patch. I’ve been plating it all day on my internetless 360 just stopped for food. I’m told the patch makes it much better, but to be honest I’ve not encountered any glitches. Internets being connected in a few weeks so will see.

catflees – Cheers for the update mate, I didn’t want to fork out the money only to have an unplayable game all weekend, that would be torture!

Oh, and chvck – Get an xbox 360, Fallout 3, New Vegas and GTA 4 and that’s the next year of your life sorted/ruined, all for less that £200 quid. Bargain. 😉

Well my sneakily ordered copy for Mrs Grips arrived about 11. I’ve been looking after the kids since then.. Mrs Grips is currently frowing at the game controls and system…

Looks nice, though.

560ti works well in graphics department.

D0NK – Member

Someone I worked with told me while at uni FF7 came out a couple of guys from their group of friends dissappeared for a week

I blame squaresoft for me almost failing third year Still nothing else to touch it.

Our special effects coder had the collectors edition delivered today, in a huge box, complete with dragon, making of DVD and ‘Art of Skyrim’ book. Cost him £129. O_O

Sillies

Twist gently in one direction, when the pick gets trapped you need to adjust it in the same direction. If the pick starts to break exit the screen. When you go back pick is good as new.

Can you hotkey your d-pad? I can’t work it out 🙁

She says she has no idea at all about lock picking. And she doesn’t like that you can’t equip a spell, a shield and a weapon at the same time. Can you?

You can equip either a weapon and a shield. Or a weapon and a spell from what I can tell.

Lockpicking is very similar to Fallout 3 and New Vegas, rather than oblivion. Tried to play it on our CRT TV in bedroom I can’t make the text out. You really need HD for this game, day off tomorrow and my girlfriends working all day 🙂

Got workmen coming tomorrow at midday, so obviously that calls for a day off playing Skyrim just incase they are a few hours early or a few hours late.

You need to find the locks ‘sweet point’ do it pops open. By turning the pick you put stress on it, if it’s in the sweet point there’s no stress and the lock just opens. Slowly move the pick, if it hits something your going the wrong way. Harder locks have a smaller sweet point. I’ve managed to pick everything I’ve found so far, as the picking system is the same as fallout and I wasted a while on that… It’s really hard to explain, there should be some YouTube tutorials of it.

Are the rumours about the PC version control/menu system being awful true? I read that you need to get a wired 360 pad to get the most out of it. If so I think I’ll probably wait for a bit til it goes down in price as I need a pad as well!

What’s a crap character though? In Oblivion Mrs Grips chose a race that I thought was distinctly poor and ended up with naff skills but she developed them to an awesome level. She was so good at sneaking that she could walk right up to anyone and kill them without a fight.

There’s a worrying thread on the official forums about the dynamic levelling which has me second guessing how to play. Apparently it’s not just your primary skills that count against you (when it comes to determining the difficulty of the mob you’re fighting) but your secondary skill and inventory as well. So spend hours working on alchemy and carry around a load of potions (but not done much more than average with your primary skills) and the mobs are much harder than they would have been if you just focused on primary skills. It’s crap if true IMO (although admittedly I rarely do all the trade-skill stuff :p ).

I get that open world game play needs some sort of dynamic mob difficulty scaling but it also sucks that fighting a bandit at lvl 20 is just as hard as at lvl 4, in fact it could be harder if you have spent a lot of time working on secondary stuff and not just doing the hack and slash thing.