Pretty sure they're making the same moves re: the arctic wilderness that Twin Peaks did with Washington woodlands. The mammoth carcass, the mystery illness that it might have carried, the reindeer fetuses, the mystery bloodstain - it's all about making the glacier an unknowable and dangerous place.

In addition to being an asshole to most everyone and a possible assassin, the sheriff is clearly stalking the waitress. That shit's gonna come back on him next episode.

I bought the season on iTunes and it works pretty well.

It's not out for another 2 months or so, but I played the beta for Pillars of Eternity and the minor quest at the center of it was pretty good (spoilers for a sidequest to follow) - you start in a village in which a traveling nobleman is looking for his missing daughter, and due to his aristocratic bearing nobody in…

There's a book in the Aldmeri prison that strongly suggests that Ulfric Stormcloak is a deep cover agent (or at least, a rogue asset) inciting unrest to weaken the Empire. Which makes sense in the long term - the worst-case scenario for the Aldmeri isn't the Empire losing its hold in Skyrim, it's the Empire united…

Which is what the Hitman series always did, to make 47 into an avenging angel type

A lot of Legion stuff got cut in the later months of NV's development, which is why they have very few unique missions (plus it wouldn't be very practical, with the NCR's presence so heavy in most of the map, to be anything but an agent saboteur). What the game really lacks is a companion character who's sympathetic…

An easier way is to provoke the bartender next door into fighting you, take the psycho off his corpse, and go into the slaver compound high as a kite. All the slavers use 10mm ammo so their shots do anywhere from 0-2 hit points of damage when you're on psycho (4-8 is the average for a crit, which you're likely to…

I enjoyed that one of the Tigerhawk goon mentions the Denver Biscuit Company, that place opened like 3 months ago down the block from me and the Franklin Sandwich IS great. Basically a fried chicken and bacon biscuit sandwich smothered in sausage gravy, it's internet as fuck and it hits your stomach like a brick but…

It seems like most people saw the opposite, at least insofar as ME1 renegades were unapologetic space racists. Curiously, that angle was unceremoniously dropped for the sequels.

Why a player character should care is always a somewhat tricky question to answer satisfactorily - it can sometimes be bothersome that I can't just say "lol nope" and walk away (it usually isn't, but sometimes there's ME2). The easiest and most common way of going about it is to set the end goal and make it so either…

So you're thinking of Dead Rising, then? ME3 is actually not unlike this the first (or second) time you play, because so many of the sidequests are gated by the primary missions even as the game never actually tells you this. If you go straight from one story mission to another, you automatically fail at least a few…

RPG combat is so rarely balanced well that it's difficult to imagine anything made harder in the late game by early game choices.

Allegedly, the story is that the creative lead on ME2 (Drew Karpyshyn I think?) planned for dark energy / star death to be the fulcrum point of ME3's central plot, but he was assigned to the KOTOR MMO and plotting duties for ME3 fell to someone else. The thread was dropped and we got the Catalyst hooplah instead.

It's the entire thematic crux of KOTOR2!

All game morality systems (really, any system with numeric totals) are metagaming systems though, in that they are normative. If they matter at all they compel you on some level to aim for a score

ME3 couldn't be less ambiguous about it, tbh. The series is roundly pro-military, but ME3's heart swells with romance for the soldier. The council of admirals in ME3 is more or less a civilian authority, in that, as alurin points out upthread, they're pencil pusher officers, not battlefield commanders like the Turian…

Ulfric is actually a deep cover Aldmeri agent acting to weaken the Empire so that his masters can finish what they started. You learn this in the Aldmeri dungeon!

Not quite. It's a nested choice, like a few others in ME3. It doesn't matter whether or not you tell Mordin about the sabotage, he's smart enough to figure out it's there - the decision to reveal is for the benefit of the Krogan leadership. Mordin will only live if you killed Wrex in ME1, because it's the only…

I would seriously hesitate to characterize any sentiment in the Mass Effect series as "anti-establishment"