Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited November 2013
Love both of those games. What graphics card did you upgrade to?
State of Decay
The progress on turning Ed into from useless to master samurai continues.
A man that can survive getting a chunk bitten out of his neck by a zombie has got to be worth something.
Marcus will be avenged.
Also: new home! Big ass warehouse, we're no longer stepping over each other and with storage for days. I've taken to calling it "The Warehouse of the damned" when no one is around to laugh. Used to house trucks but no trucks in sight sadly.
@DrChaos: a 780, with a very cool new chassis to keep things cool. Also bought a spiffy CPU cooler for the weird ports that are so CPU intensive. The new temperatures are a gigantic change from old 560 in a small case.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Playing Miasmata, 2 minutes in an I already have the cure,
This should be easy enough to replicated and ......
Well fuck....
This is where I would have post more pictures, but sadly, this game gave me the blue screen of death.
Miasmata has rough edges, sure, but it was one of the coolest, most unique games I've ever played. It genuinely does a great job of replicating what it would be like to be stuck on an unexplored island. A very, very, very different experience, which ends up leaving you with a pretty solid sense of accomplishment when you get it all figured out. Make sure you do yourself a favor and DO NOT look up any strategy guides unless you get yourself pretty stuck; I like the exploration, but at one point I was looking for the next item and had been up and down the island at least once already. That takes quite a while, so I didn't feel bad about looking up a hint then.
And to be honest, I would actually like to see the mapping element in a number of other games. Also neat that you don't want to go out at night for the same reason you wouldn't in the real world: you don't want to fall in the dark and get yourself hurt in some stupid, severe way.
Playing Miasmata, 2 minutes in an I already have the cure,
This should be easy enough to replicated and ......
Well fuck....
This is where I would have post more pictures, but sadly, this game gave me the blue screen of death.
Miasmata has rough edges, sure, but it was one of the coolest, most unique games I've ever played. It genuinely does a great job of replicating what it would be like to be stuck on an unexplored island. A very, very, very different experience, which ends up leaving you with a pretty solid sense of accomplishment when you get it all figured out. Make sure you do yourself a favor and DO NOT look up any strategy guides unless you get yourself pretty stuck; I like the exploration, but at one point I was looking for the next item and had been up and down the island at least once already. That takes quite a while, so I didn't feel bad about looking up a hint then.
And to be honest, I would actually like to see the mapping element in a number of other games. Also neat that you don't want to go out at night for the same reason you wouldn't in the real world: you don't want to fall in the dark and get yourself hurt in some stupid, severe way.
this is what I want in an open world game and as soon as my drivers are repaired, I should be good.
The Borderlands influence is really obvious in the little intros for duels/boss fights/major characters.
Hey, how would you describe Old Man Clanton?
So I get the impression he's not really a nice guy.
Special weapons can get their own intros too, because it's that kind of game. This is the only one I've found so far though. In fact I am a little disappointed with the seeming lack of variety of weapons, I thought I was going to be finding different kinds of six-shooters and stuff all the time but I haven't. Not Borderlands-esque at all in that respect.
The dueling in this game is a bit of creative game design, though I'm not sure yet whether or not it's actually good game design. It seems a lot harder in the separate duel mode than it does in the story mode. It's possible that my poor performance is caused by drinking too much as I play. Or it's possible it's caused by not drinking enough. The point is I haven't been drinking exactly the right amount.
There's about three or so different revolvers plus a few you unlock in Gunslinger. Shotguns there's two or three and rifles I think had the least.
Mostly the weapons aren't that variable, one Revolver shoots slower but is more accurate, another is less accurate but reloads super quick, it's little play style defining stuff that lets you get on with the feeling like a complete and utter bad ass.
It's a crying shame that Gunslinger doesn't have multiplayer or at least co-op...though I guess since it relies so heavily on slow-mo/bullet time stuff it would get complicated. Then again, Max Payne 3 had multiplayer...
So two years ago today, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released. There aren't many games where I could tell you the release date off the top of my head, even other ones where I was counting down the days until release like I was with Skyrim. In fairness I guess the catchy 11-11-11 date they picked makes it easier. Still, it's also easier for me to remember personally because the release of Skyrim is inextricably linked with what was going on in my life at that time. I think I've talked about it a little bit before on these forums, probably in the Steam thread, but if you'll indulge me...
The fall of 2011 was an eventful and difficult time in my life.
I had finished my degree but hadn't been able to find any full-time work in my field, and so I had just started my second straight holiday season tramping a bleak sales floor in the thankless service of Lord Geoffrey. (Penny Arcade's commentaries on thissubject have the insight and accuracy only firsthand knowledge can provide.) Due to my inability to find full-time employment, I was still living with my dad, and though he was understanding and never gave me grief about it, the fact I was still "living at home" weighed heavily on my self-esteem.
One thing that Gabe and Tycho did not cover in their comics Gabe's touЯs of duty is that you are pretty much continuously sick. Well, maybe they didn't cover it because Gabe didn't experience it. But the thing about toy stores is that they are full of little kids every day, and little kids touch everything, and little kids, God love 'em, are basically just ambulatory virus sacs, and I didn't seem to have much resistance for some reason, maybe because I was homeschooled so I didn't get exposed to this stuff when I was a kid myself, but anyway I was coming down with or getting over a cold about 75% of the time I worked there.
Meanwhile, my best friend (who was also my former girlfriend, whom I wanted to be my girlfriend again...possibly, maybe, if I could just get my life going somewhere first...) had finished school the previous spring and come home to find out her family was losing their house to foreclosure. They had a good amount of notice to prepare, but due to my friend's mother's depression and denial and packrat tendencies (which emerged following the death of my friend's father in 2005 and caused her to quit working regularly, leading to the foreclosure) they had failed to take advantage of that and so found themselves only a couple weeks from the date they had to be out of a house with basically no packing up done at all. It fell to me and a few other family friends to try to help them sift through a decade and a half's worth of stuff at the last minute, sifting through the clutter and trying to save what we could of what was actually useful and important.
Finally, the other event which coincided with all of this was the death of my mother. My mother had suffered a series of strokes in early 2005 at the age of just 49, and it had left her unable to take care of herself or even speak. She had been living in nursing facilities for the six years since then, and then at the beginning of November of 2011 she passed away. It was not completely sudden or unexpected; we had seen signs that her health (even such as it was) was beginning to decline, and at the end of October she developed problems with her digestive tract that would have required invasive surgery to correct, with no guarantee of success. My father, who had visited his wife's bedside in hospitals and nursing homes every day for six and a half years except when forced to leave town on business, decided (rightly, I believe) that he was not willing to put my mother through the trauma of surgery in her condition, and so she was given several days of palliative care before the inevitable. I had had six years to come to terms with no longer having my mother be a part of my life and fully believed I had come to terms with it, but her actual death affected me much more than I would have predicted. Even the day of the visitation I was composed and expected to remain so right up until I got to the funeral home and saw her in the casket.
So, to sum up, that was me in November of 2011: living at home...working a shitty, stressful, temporary part-time job... trying to help my best friend who was also my ex who I had a lot of complicated feelings for salvage what could be salvaged from her family's life as they lost their home and be as supportive as possible to her...waiting for and then dealing with my mom's passing after 6.5 years of her being alive but not in a way where I could have any meaningful interaction or relationship with her and trying to be as supportive as possible to my dad and little sister...and oh by the way, just to cap it all off, continuously sick.
So when Skyrim came out on November 11, you could say I was looking forward to it quite a bit. I didn't have much of anything else to look forward to. And yes, I badly needed an escape. Video games get criticized often for being "escapism" but I will always believe that providing that means of temporary escape is one of their greatest virtues.
I remember coming home from my shift that night and starting up the game...I remember the images of that wagon ride and the opening titles.
The first time I saw this...
The first time I ran Bleak Falls Barrow...
I won't say I played into the wee hours of the morning, but I played into the night much later than I should have...considering I had to get up for another shift the next day.
Skyrim isn't the only game strongly associated with that time in my mind. Unfortunately the other associations are mostly negative. I was playing Renegade Ops when my sister told me that our mother's death within days was basically a certainty. I played Dungeon Defenders to pass the time during sleepless nights until after just a couple of weeks I couldn't stand the game anymore. I've barely played either since.
But Skyrim gave me something to look forward to during the darkest moments of that time in my life, and when the worst was past it allowed me to escape, gave me something else to think about. Even beyond its inherent merits as a game (which I believe are substantial), Skyrim will always have a special place in my heart for that.
It's been two years now. I'm happy to say I have a decent full-time job in my field, a place of my own, and have been in a happy, committed relationship with my best friend and one-time ex for over a year now. As for Skyrim? Well, according to my Steam stats, the total amount of time I've put into playing it is just a tiny fraction of what some here have put in...hell, I've never gotten around to playing any of the DLC. But I keep coming back to it a few hours at a time, two years later...and I am quite certain I will keep coming back to it for years to come. Because the game has such special value for me, I've made it a point to try to give away several copies during the Steam sales, and if funds permit me to join in the reindeer games again this Christmas, I expect I'll be giving away at least a couple more.
OK, sharing time is done. If you've actually read all of this, then you have my sincere thanks for "listening." In honor of the release day anniversary I fired Skyrim up earlier tonight, and in the next post I'll share a few screens from the evening's adventure.
As promised, a few shots from tonight's Skyrim session. Nothing too special or brilliantly composed, just what I happened to be doing this evening.
How Anung the Red Orc Ruined a Tea Party
Meet my current character, Anung. Anung was adopted by soldiers of the Imperial Legion when he was just a child - the strange crimson skin he was born with probably caused him to be abandoned by his tribe. An outcast even from a race of outcasts, Anung grew up in the Legion and learned the ways of war from his adoptive "family." He lost many friends on the battlefield, and others to old age, but Anung found that once he reached his prime his aging seemed to simply stop. With few of his friends left alive and active, and disillusioned by the outcome of the Great War and ensuing civil strife within the Empire, Anung now wanders alone. He looks for clues about his origin and the reason for his mysterious agelessness. Along the way, Anung has experienced repeated brushes with forces of the divine, daedric, and otherwise supernatural Tamriel...making him, if not entirely by choice, one of Tamriel's leading adventurers specializing in the paranormal.
After arriving in the ancient city of Solitude, Anung first found himself helping the Bards College solve a dispute with the local authorities by means of a little grave robbing, a lot of poetic license, and (disappointingly) absolutely no drunken carousing which is supposed to be like half the point of even being a bard I mean come on. The next order of business was to restore the peace of mind of a leading ginger-bearded citizen by investigating strange goings-on at Wolfskull Cave in the nearby mountains.
Anung poses, somewhat stoically, for a brief photoshoot upon arriving at his destination, before descending into the cave. He's been trying to get in touch with his roots; he earned the set of Orcish armor for helping a down-on-their-luck tribe deal with a minor giant-related problem.
Inside, Anung encountered some draugr (not unusual) and a few necromancers (somewhat unusual). Not an issue except while dodging a draugr's swordswing, Anung kind of sort of accidentally absent-mindedly fell into a small pit. Embarrassing, but nobody was there to see it. Except the draugr, of course, and as anyone will tell you, draugr do not count. Honestly the Draugr was probably angrier about it than Anung was.
(Frustrated draugr not pictured.)
Unable to climb back up, and with nothing at the top of the pit giving him an incentive to try except the aforementioned frustrated draugr who really isn't worth the effort anyway, Anung dusted himself off and pragmatically availed himself of the exit leading deeper into the cave.
On the other side of the archway, the cave suddenly leveled up to cavern. Also, the forecast for necromancers had been revised from "A few necromancers" to "Hella necromancers." And even by necromancer standards, they appeared to have some weird shit going on.
The necromancers appeared to be setting out the doilies and crumpets for a delightful afternoon tea they had been planning, and had invited as their guest of honor the "Wolf Queen," Potema. The fact that Potema has been dead for centuries was not deemed a major hindrance given that this tea was being hosted by necromancers. Anung's grasp of ancient history based on what he picked up from soldiers of the Legion (not the most scholarly bunch, alas) is fuzzy but he's pretty sure what he remembers hearing about Potema was not terribly flattering.
Anyway, from what Anung could hear, the necromancers and Good Queen Pottie seemed to be having some sort of unfortunate disagreement, vis-a-vis Potema's attendance at the event, so Anung decided to resolve the conflict. If Potema wouldn't come to her fanclub, they could come to her. When Anung sends them to meet her IN OBLIVIONNNNNN.
Easier said than done, though. Did I mention there were hella necromancers? Fortunately one thing Anung picked up from his old Legion buddies that he is definitely NOT fuzzy on is basic tactics for fighting a numerically superior force. Such as, use chokepoints to your advantage.
(The necromancer tea party invitation ritual, visually impressive as it is, unfortunately is not conducive to clearly seeing anything else going on, but in case you can't quite tell Anung has a nice little pile of necromancer corpses going here.)
After killing all of the black-cloaked rank and file (and re-killing several after they were reanimated because necromancers...yo dog, we heard you like necromancers, do we had the necromancers reanimate some necromancers?), Anung finally reached the top of the tower where the rune-inscribe tea service was all set out. Only one foe remained, and judging by the fact she had remained at the top of the tower having a frank exchange of views with Her Infamous Majesty while everybody else lemming'd through doorways into Anung's axe, it seemed a fair bet she was the HBIC. Also she had the face of a person who has been drinking tea for many years and is very passionate about it.
Not one to take chances (actually this is a lie) and expecting a possibly tough final showdown, Anung called upon the power of his mighty berserker rage and charged at the old hag! Er...old bag. Teabag!
Then he hit her with his axe and she fell over and died. Yeah, just once. Don't you just hate it when you waste a once-a-day racial power berserker rage? It makes me...so...ANGRY...!
(Picture taken immediately prior to teabagging.)
After that there was nothing left to do but trudge back to Solitude and tell the grateful citizens they could rest assured that the return of one of history's greatest monsters had been prevented, and I don't know what you were so worried about because it wasn't like a big deal or anything, but I guess you can't put a price tag on peace of mind, well actually apparently you can and that price tag is all of 600 gold.
(Anung basks in the gratitude of the populace. And also finally some decent lighting.)
So all in all Solitude has been a bit of a letdown for our hero. Joining the Bards College involved significantly less alcohol than expected, and the Wolfskull Cave investigation involved significantly more tea than expected (by which I mean tiresome tea-themed jokes that seemed sort of funny when I started writing this I swear).
But some guy in town said something about vampire attacks on a temple somewhere...?
It's nice to see skyrim shots that aren't all modded up with the doll skin and boob armor
Oh, my Skyrim is modded up. The crimson orc race is a mod, and I'm using an ENB and a lot of other visual stuff. I know what you mean about the doll skin and boob armor though. I do have a mod to improve and smooth out facial features for human characters, and sometimes I think it does look a little too plasticy but it's better than the craggly, wood-carved faces look of the stock game.
That XCOM pic reminds me of the guy from Phantom 2040....google tells me name is Graft.
edit: and he was voiced by Ron Pearlman, Ron Pearlman rules my childhood.
Posts
Think that was in the search I did last night, I was just too stupid and tired and ended up mistaking it for the steam thread.
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (The scenery is just so pretty. Screenshots don't remotely do the foilage and lighting justice)
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
State of Decay
The progress on turning Ed into from useless to master samurai continues.
A man that can survive getting a chunk bitten out of his neck by a zombie has got to be worth something.
Marcus will be avenged.
Also: new home! Big ass warehouse, we're no longer stepping over each other and with storage for days. I've taken to calling it "The Warehouse of the damned" when no one is around to laugh. Used to house trucks but no trucks in sight sadly.
If she wants more outposts, she can spend her own currency.
This should be easy enough to replicated and ......
Well fuck....
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
@DrChaos: a 780, with a very cool new chassis to keep things cool. Also bought a spiffy CPU cooler for the weird ports that are so CPU intensive. The new temperatures are a gigantic change from old 560 in a small case.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Miasmata has rough edges, sure, but it was one of the coolest, most unique games I've ever played. It genuinely does a great job of replicating what it would be like to be stuck on an unexplored island. A very, very, very different experience, which ends up leaving you with a pretty solid sense of accomplishment when you get it all figured out. Make sure you do yourself a favor and DO NOT look up any strategy guides unless you get yourself pretty stuck; I like the exploration, but at one point I was looking for the next item and had been up and down the island at least once already. That takes quite a while, so I didn't feel bad about looking up a hint then.
And to be honest, I would actually like to see the mapping element in a number of other games. Also neat that you don't want to go out at night for the same reason you wouldn't in the real world: you don't want to fall in the dark and get yourself hurt in some stupid, severe way.
this is what I want in an open world game and as soon as my drivers are repaired, I should be good.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Switch: 6200-8149-0919 / Wii U: maximumzero / 3DS: 0860-3352-3335 / eBay Shop
Every time we pass the Disney Infinity section in a store I have to basically pick my daughter up and carry her away from it.
I wonder if it's gonna get any black friday sales. That and the Lego games I wouldn't mind picking up.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I'm glad that Disney still gains kids attention like it did when I was young
Yeah, but now they do it with alcoholic pirates in eyeliner with questionable sexual orientation
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
"Nope, not giving up smoking until I hit the ground."
I wish it was less MMOy. Because the settings seem super cool but I don't have time to grind myself through that world.
Hey, how would you describe Old Man Clanton?
So I get the impression he's not really a nice guy.
Special weapons can get their own intros too, because it's that kind of game. This is the only one I've found so far though. In fact I am a little disappointed with the seeming lack of variety of weapons, I thought I was going to be finding different kinds of six-shooters and stuff all the time but I haven't. Not Borderlands-esque at all in that respect.
Steam: abunchofdaftpunk | PSN: noautomobilesgo | Lastfm: sjchszeppelin | Backloggery: colincummings | 3DS FC: 1392-6019-0219 |
Mostly the weapons aren't that variable, one Revolver shoots slower but is more accurate, another is less accurate but reloads super quick, it's little play style defining stuff that lets you get on with the feeling like a complete and utter bad ass.
The fall of 2011 was an eventful and difficult time in my life.
I had finished my degree but hadn't been able to find any full-time work in my field, and so I had just started my second straight holiday season tramping a bleak sales floor in the thankless service of Lord Geoffrey. (Penny Arcade's commentaries on this subject have the insight and accuracy only firsthand knowledge can provide.) Due to my inability to find full-time employment, I was still living with my dad, and though he was understanding and never gave me grief about it, the fact I was still "living at home" weighed heavily on my self-esteem.
One thing that Gabe and Tycho did not cover in their comics Gabe's touЯs of duty is that you are pretty much continuously sick. Well, maybe they didn't cover it because Gabe didn't experience it. But the thing about toy stores is that they are full of little kids every day, and little kids touch everything, and little kids, God love 'em, are basically just ambulatory virus sacs, and I didn't seem to have much resistance for some reason, maybe because I was homeschooled so I didn't get exposed to this stuff when I was a kid myself, but anyway I was coming down with or getting over a cold about 75% of the time I worked there.
Meanwhile, my best friend (who was also my former girlfriend, whom I wanted to be my girlfriend again...possibly, maybe, if I could just get my life going somewhere first...) had finished school the previous spring and come home to find out her family was losing their house to foreclosure. They had a good amount of notice to prepare, but due to my friend's mother's depression and denial and packrat tendencies (which emerged following the death of my friend's father in 2005 and caused her to quit working regularly, leading to the foreclosure) they had failed to take advantage of that and so found themselves only a couple weeks from the date they had to be out of a house with basically no packing up done at all. It fell to me and a few other family friends to try to help them sift through a decade and a half's worth of stuff at the last minute, sifting through the clutter and trying to save what we could of what was actually useful and important.
Finally, the other event which coincided with all of this was the death of my mother. My mother had suffered a series of strokes in early 2005 at the age of just 49, and it had left her unable to take care of herself or even speak. She had been living in nursing facilities for the six years since then, and then at the beginning of November of 2011 she passed away. It was not completely sudden or unexpected; we had seen signs that her health (even such as it was) was beginning to decline, and at the end of October she developed problems with her digestive tract that would have required invasive surgery to correct, with no guarantee of success. My father, who had visited his wife's bedside in hospitals and nursing homes every day for six and a half years except when forced to leave town on business, decided (rightly, I believe) that he was not willing to put my mother through the trauma of surgery in her condition, and so she was given several days of palliative care before the inevitable. I had had six years to come to terms with no longer having my mother be a part of my life and fully believed I had come to terms with it, but her actual death affected me much more than I would have predicted. Even the day of the visitation I was composed and expected to remain so right up until I got to the funeral home and saw her in the casket.
So, to sum up, that was me in November of 2011: living at home...working a shitty, stressful, temporary part-time job... trying to help my best friend who was also my ex who I had a lot of complicated feelings for salvage what could be salvaged from her family's life as they lost their home and be as supportive as possible to her...waiting for and then dealing with my mom's passing after 6.5 years of her being alive but not in a way where I could have any meaningful interaction or relationship with her and trying to be as supportive as possible to my dad and little sister...and oh by the way, just to cap it all off, continuously sick.
So when Skyrim came out on November 11, you could say I was looking forward to it quite a bit. I didn't have much of anything else to look forward to. And yes, I badly needed an escape. Video games get criticized often for being "escapism" but I will always believe that providing that means of temporary escape is one of their greatest virtues.
I remember coming home from my shift that night and starting up the game...I remember the images of that wagon ride and the opening titles.
The first time I saw this...
The first time I ran Bleak Falls Barrow...
I won't say I played into the wee hours of the morning, but I played into the night much later than I should have...considering I had to get up for another shift the next day.
Skyrim isn't the only game strongly associated with that time in my mind. Unfortunately the other associations are mostly negative. I was playing Renegade Ops when my sister told me that our mother's death within days was basically a certainty. I played Dungeon Defenders to pass the time during sleepless nights until after just a couple of weeks I couldn't stand the game anymore. I've barely played either since.
But Skyrim gave me something to look forward to during the darkest moments of that time in my life, and when the worst was past it allowed me to escape, gave me something else to think about. Even beyond its inherent merits as a game (which I believe are substantial), Skyrim will always have a special place in my heart for that.
It's been two years now. I'm happy to say I have a decent full-time job in my field, a place of my own, and have been in a happy, committed relationship with my best friend and one-time ex for over a year now. As for Skyrim? Well, according to my Steam stats, the total amount of time I've put into playing it is just a tiny fraction of what some here have put in...hell, I've never gotten around to playing any of the DLC. But I keep coming back to it a few hours at a time, two years later...and I am quite certain I will keep coming back to it for years to come. Because the game has such special value for me, I've made it a point to try to give away several copies during the Steam sales, and if funds permit me to join in the reindeer games again this Christmas, I expect I'll be giving away at least a couple more.
OK, sharing time is done. If you've actually read all of this, then you have my sincere thanks for "listening." In honor of the release day anniversary I fired Skyrim up earlier tonight, and in the next post I'll share a few screens from the evening's adventure.
Meet my current character, Anung. Anung was adopted by soldiers of the Imperial Legion when he was just a child - the strange crimson skin he was born with probably caused him to be abandoned by his tribe. An outcast even from a race of outcasts, Anung grew up in the Legion and learned the ways of war from his adoptive "family." He lost many friends on the battlefield, and others to old age, but Anung found that once he reached his prime his aging seemed to simply stop. With few of his friends left alive and active, and disillusioned by the outcome of the Great War and ensuing civil strife within the Empire, Anung now wanders alone. He looks for clues about his origin and the reason for his mysterious agelessness. Along the way, Anung has experienced repeated brushes with forces of the divine, daedric, and otherwise supernatural Tamriel...making him, if not entirely by choice, one of Tamriel's leading adventurers specializing in the paranormal.
After arriving in the ancient city of Solitude, Anung first found himself helping the Bards College solve a dispute with the local authorities by means of a little grave robbing, a lot of poetic license, and (disappointingly) absolutely no drunken carousing which is supposed to be like half the point of even being a bard I mean come on. The next order of business was to restore the peace of mind of a leading ginger-bearded citizen by investigating strange goings-on at Wolfskull Cave in the nearby mountains.
Anung poses, somewhat stoically, for a brief photoshoot upon arriving at his destination, before descending into the cave. He's been trying to get in touch with his roots; he earned the set of Orcish armor for helping a down-on-their-luck tribe deal with a minor giant-related problem.
Inside, Anung encountered some draugr (not unusual) and a few necromancers (somewhat unusual). Not an issue except while dodging a draugr's swordswing, Anung kind of sort of accidentally absent-mindedly fell into a small pit. Embarrassing, but nobody was there to see it. Except the draugr, of course, and as anyone will tell you, draugr do not count. Honestly the Draugr was probably angrier about it than Anung was.
(Frustrated draugr not pictured.)
Unable to climb back up, and with nothing at the top of the pit giving him an incentive to try except the aforementioned frustrated draugr who really isn't worth the effort anyway, Anung dusted himself off and pragmatically availed himself of the exit leading deeper into the cave.
On the other side of the archway, the cave suddenly leveled up to cavern. Also, the forecast for necromancers had been revised from "A few necromancers" to "Hella necromancers." And even by necromancer standards, they appeared to have some weird shit going on.
The necromancers appeared to be setting out the doilies and crumpets for a delightful afternoon tea they had been planning, and had invited as their guest of honor the "Wolf Queen," Potema. The fact that Potema has been dead for centuries was not deemed a major hindrance given that this tea was being hosted by necromancers. Anung's grasp of ancient history based on what he picked up from soldiers of the Legion (not the most scholarly bunch, alas) is fuzzy but he's pretty sure what he remembers hearing about Potema was not terribly flattering.
Anyway, from what Anung could hear, the necromancers and Good Queen Pottie seemed to be having some sort of unfortunate disagreement, vis-a-vis Potema's attendance at the event, so Anung decided to resolve the conflict. If Potema wouldn't come to her fanclub, they could come to her. When Anung sends them to meet her IN OBLIVIONNNNNN.
Easier said than done, though. Did I mention there were hella necromancers? Fortunately one thing Anung picked up from his old Legion buddies that he is definitely NOT fuzzy on is basic tactics for fighting a numerically superior force. Such as, use chokepoints to your advantage.
(The necromancer tea party invitation ritual, visually impressive as it is, unfortunately is not conducive to clearly seeing anything else going on, but in case you can't quite tell Anung has a nice little pile of necromancer corpses going here.)
After killing all of the black-cloaked rank and file (and re-killing several after they were reanimated because necromancers...yo dog, we heard you like necromancers, do we had the necromancers reanimate some necromancers?), Anung finally reached the top of the tower where the rune-inscribe tea service was all set out. Only one foe remained, and judging by the fact she had remained at the top of the tower having a frank exchange of views with Her Infamous Majesty while everybody else lemming'd through doorways into Anung's axe, it seemed a fair bet she was the HBIC. Also she had the face of a person who has been drinking tea for many years and is very passionate about it.
Not one to take chances (actually this is a lie) and expecting a possibly tough final showdown, Anung called upon the power of his mighty berserker rage and charged at the old hag! Er...old bag. Teabag!
Then he hit her with his axe and she fell over and died. Yeah, just once. Don't you just hate it when you waste a once-a-day racial power berserker rage? It makes me...so...ANGRY...!
(Picture taken immediately prior to teabagging.)
After that there was nothing left to do but trudge back to Solitude and tell the grateful citizens they could rest assured that the return of one of history's greatest monsters had been prevented, and I don't know what you were so worried about because it wasn't like a big deal or anything, but I guess you can't put a price tag on peace of mind, well actually apparently you can and that price tag is all of 600 gold.
(Anung basks in the gratitude of the populace. And also finally some decent lighting.)
So all in all Solitude has been a bit of a letdown for our hero. Joining the Bards College involved significantly less alcohol than expected, and the Wolfskull Cave investigation involved significantly more tea than expected (by which I mean tiresome tea-themed jokes that seemed sort of funny when I started writing this I swear).
But some guy in town said something about vampire attacks on a temple somewhere...?
Oh, my Skyrim is modded up. The crimson orc race is a mod, and I'm using an ENB and a lot of other visual stuff. I know what you mean about the doll skin and boob armor though. I do have a mod to improve and smooth out facial features for human characters, and sometimes I think it does look a little too plasticy but it's better than the craggly, wood-carved faces look of the stock game.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
That orc is baller.
Steam: BrocksMullet http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197972421669/
the answer is fuck yes, if you were wondering.
No.
No awesome screenshots of the game we Europeans don't have yet. You bastard.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
I'm playing Fear for the first time. They told me about the shotgun, but I had no idea.
There was a full grown man in this frame before I pulled the trigger.
edit: and he was voiced by Ron Pearlman, Ron Pearlman rules my childhood.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534