My Steam Awards nominations

Valve organized something new this year: the so called Steam Awards. I would probably have totally missed it if a friend wouldn't have asked me for advice on who to nominate for the Villain That Needs a Hug category (I'm a terrible advisor by the way, I had no clue!) and I would probably have skipped it if it wasn't such a nice thought experiment to fill in those categories.

Only when I read Jeromai's and Izlain's nominations, it occurred to me that this was a perfect topic for a blog post. Not only do you get to compare choices, you also get to find out about people's interests beyond MMOs and may even discover some new titles you want to play. So, without further ado, here are my Steam Awards nominations.

Star Wars characters I would love to dress up as for Halloween

...if only I could sew. And actually be able to attend the two Halloween parties I've been invited for. All I'll say is, chronic diseases SUCK. Almost as much as your boyfriend wanting to watch Heartstone tournaments instead of playing Star Wars: the Old Republic with you. Anyway...

Summarized, if my life would be more awesome, I would definitely dress up as:

(Spoiler alert: this post features the names and pictures of some main characters of the recently released Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion. However, there are no spoilers about the story developments.)

KOTOR 2: Haunted by a magician

Lightsabers are okay, olé olé /random

I haven't written about it in a while, but I'm still playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 from time to time. After initially getting the creeps from Bao-dur's voice, his presence has internalized and I can live with him now. I even got to teach him some jedi tricks and we talk about our time in the Mandalorian Wars on a friendly base. All is well. 

However, I now got a new stalker after me who claimed his own room at my ship: historian Mical. I have only endured him because he was in desperate shape and needed fashion advice. Like, badly.

Yeah, that's him (the right one). It's probably just me having an overly active imagination, but each time I see him I have to think of magician Hans Klok (left) and I just get the shivers. I know, Mical doesn't do the hair that well. So the first thing I tried to do was to find him a barber, but I couldn't find any. Can you believe it? Nar Shaddaa, the underworld trading planet, and there is not a single barber. I did run into an overflow of droid shops, by the way. (I am restraining myself very badly now into not saying something about things I was looking for.)

If you don't know Hans Klok, this video should bring you up to speed.

Meanwhile, the situation was getting more dire by the minute. We had to fight whole armies of bounty hunters and all I could think about was Hans Klok. Needless to say, my concentration wasn't too high, resulting in the capture of my character!

Impersonation of a fallen jedi. Note how I did fall down in style (new robes).

What a worthless jedi I am, getting drugged and captured by a bounty hunter that I trusted just because she had cute feminine looks. I should have seen through that!

We talked a bit on the ship and Mical finally saw the light, exchanged his pink suit for my old jedi robe (a bit of a hierarchy there should be), his vibroswords for a lightsaber. Following the path of Bao-dur, he was robbed of his particularities and creepiness and turned into yet another jedi.

Assimilation complete.

KOTOR 2: I'm a saint

To the left: Dark Jedi Robe; to the right: Zeison Sha Warrior Armor

So what's new? First the important news: I got two new outfits! To the left the improved version of the Dark Jedi Padawan robe, of which the main feature seemed to be that is was larger. It actually was too big: my hands were covered by the sleeves and I was in constant danger of stumbling over - but luckily you don't see it on the picture. The outfit to the right had better stats and an interesting look. The flap thing behind her butt is metallic if you look from behind. It was fun for a change, but I was hoping to find a more robey thing in the future.

Playing the good guy

I'm also already so light-sided that I'm almost floating around. I was talking about it the other day with Rakuno, and we both seem to be of the type of player that gets a headache when trying to play the evil guy in our first playthrough of a game. As he put it eloquently: "On the second (or further) playthrough then I go through the evil path. But by then it is more a sadistic experiment to see how much my choices the first time around mattered than anything else." Somehow, we always end up playing the good guy in my first playthrough.

To be honest, I myself rarely play a second, 'evil' playthrough. Playing evil makes me feel conflicted, and I can bear it only for so long. This is the reason I play the Republic side in SWTOR, even though the Imperial side has many much better-looking cosmetics (!). Even on the 'good' Republic side, there are times that I play a not totally light sided character, and then there's always that slight hesitation before I dare press the dark side button. The other way around, while you can even choose to roleplay a 'good guy' on the Imperial side, the social structure, polluted surroundings and general misery of people around you makes me feel so depressed that I can't bear to play there all the time. Still, I bravely do try to play my sinister Yuniper from time to time to find out how the story continues (as opposed to my five republic characters that I play regularly).

Have Rakuno and I both contracted the good-guy-disease? And if so, is it widespread? Either way, I must be a terrible person to live together with, I'm such a saint. Thank you, Tiger, for keeping up with me!

And finally, I found some robes that fit my saint character: to the left the traditional Jedi Robe, to the right Sylvar's Robe from the Tomb of Freedon Nadd. The latter has the superior stats, but I'm not really a fan of the part that makes her look like a man, if you check the right spot. Tiger makes me wear it, though! Cosmetics vs higher stats, sigh... almost as bad as playing the evil side!

KOTOR 2: Strange new friends

Tiger and I have a habit of playing games together. Sometimes it's even single-player games. Earlier on it was Mass Effect, and now we're playing KOTOR 2 in the hour before we go to bed. It's a bit like reading a book, but then a digital version. The only requirement is that it has to have a story. If Tiger is behind the controls, I'll make the conversation choices and vise versa.

New friends

In the past days, KOTOR has offered me many digital friends, yay! Look:

I always liked HK-47, but these imposters just don't have his style. HK was never into stalking! My new friend is a skill and is called "Destroy droid". It's a bit OP, but that's okay, at least the droids are quickly taken care of.

Then there's this Bao-dur guy who found us after an unfortunate incident in which the Ebon Hawk was - once again - shot down. He really is a friendly guy, but what's up with his voice?! He doesn't talk, he just whispers with this low voice of him. Like these men that might call you deep in the night and make strange noises. Each time he says something, it gives me the creeps.

Pro-tip for male readers: don't constantly keep your voice down while talking to the ladies, it freaks them out!

My third friend has an artificial form and makes the sound of "woosh woosh zoom". You've guessed it right, I have crafted myself a lightsaber, and I'm hitting them where it hurts! I'm using a violet crystal I bought on Telos. I'm telling you, it's violet - totally not pink! *cough*

The strangest friends I've made so far, though, must be Mandelore and his Mandalorian followers. After all the people downing my ship and shooting at me for various reasons (mostly evilness or wanting to collect the bounty on my head), I wasn't expecting to find a tribe of cuddly Mandalorians out there in the wilds, giving a warm welcome to a jedi who exterminated a lot of their companions in the Mandalorian wars.

The best part was of course that Mandalore himself was Canderous Ordo (left on the picture), although he hasn't spoken much of himself yet. For the rest, I'm having fun buffing the group while Kreia shows off her OP skills such as "Force Lightning", "Kill" and "Horror".

It's not much of a challenge so far, but I'm mostly playing for the story anyway. Turning the difficulty up and spending ages on landscape beasts is not something I look forward to either.

KOTOR 2: Fashion in the Old Republic

Since the gaming laptop is gone, there isn't that much to do in LotRO and raiding together isn't an option, Tiger and I have resorted to other games. We've played some Sims 3, but now we've started Knights of the Old Republic 2 (in short: KOTOR 2), which we bought cheap in the latest Steam sale. I've only played the first game and that was ages ago, so I was very curious as to how things were to proceed.

Because KOTOR 2 was rushed and barely finished when released, we installed some mods that fix some things and include parts they had to cut due to time limitations. The PC Gaming Wiki has a great article about it here.

The game started in the right mood, when I met the first guy in the game. He was held in custody behind a force field, I was in my underwear (picture above). Don't ask. The worst thing was that he actually thought my underwear was sexy. I mean, look at that stuff. If this is considered sexy, what happened to fashion in the age of the Old Republic? Or exactly how long was he held behind that force field?

And look at this. Dear god, it's the combat suit disaster all over again! I can't help it, it had better stats than the underwear. Stop. Staring. At. Me.

Luckily, this embarrassment didn't have to take long. Soon I found a badass dark padawan robe to steal the show.

Now we're just missing an explosion to walk away from.

I thought the start of KOTOR 2 was a bit slow: it really took ages to get off the mining station. However, the mystery of what happened there was fun, and Atton and Kreia as companions are okay. The graphics and combat system are cute as always. I'll certainly play this game to the end - if I'll bore you with a report of it is another story. For now it's time to set a course to Telos for "I'm totally not piloting the air" flyboy Atton.