Jamie John

Ganking dark wraiths in NL can GTFO, as can the Four Kings. That is all.

@Broker, I haven't talked to her, no, but I didn't remember doing it last time. It's been years though! Where is she?

Balls. There was still one left in the pit but for some reason when I spoke to him he thanked me and gave me the ring. Oh well. Just a few more places to go on this before I take out the big G, and then I'm done. It's a shame they didn't port the achievements from the 360/PC version as that would have been incentive enough for me to play another run through immediately after finishing my first.

If you get the Speckled Ring from.

Inside because of the weirdness. Dark Souls because of the lore. The Witness because of the hidden lectures, but also because I couldn't stop seeing the connect-the-dot puzzles bloody everywhere for about a month after completing it. And a slightly left-field one, but Machinarium has always struck a chord with me for some reason, mostly because of the art-style, perhaps. Out on Switch this week so may have to triple-dip.

Didn't know you were into furries.

You need 25 faith before you get anything from the Sun Bro covenant, and I don't think you get anything from Solaire directly. If you're not levelling faith at all then the Sun Bro covenant is a waste of your time as far as the rewards go, as they're all faith-related. You can still join it if you want to engage in jolly cooperation, however. Some NPCs, like Solaire, are side quest NPCs who pop up later in the game in various locations, so it's worth talking to them every time you see them in order to advance their quest line, and eventually get the end of quest reward.

Just completed PWoA. What an utterly fantastic piece of design that is. Surely one of the best levels in any game ever.

I've never really played Diablo. Are the dungeons randomly generated? How come people end up playing it for hundreds of hours?

Covenant stuff is mostly for online play. Some covenants are for PvE co-op and others are for invasions and PvP. If you help or hinder another player online, depending on the covenant, you get some kind of token (like Sunlight Medals) that you can then offer to the covenant leader for rewards. It's worth joining every covenant you come across, regardless, especially if you're playing offline anyway, as most of the time you'll get a unique item when you do. You can chop and change covenants you've joined at bonfires.

You may well have done this already, but check your armour to see what the fire def is like. The Crimson set, which you find is particularly good and it probably has better defensive properties than most of the heavier armour available to you at this point, despite being a lot lighter. You won't find much better until quite a lot later in the game when you're equip load is such that you can start wearing the heavy sets without losing speed. It doesn't have any poise, however, which is the stat that determines how much damage you can take before being staggered, but you need a fair amount of poise to avoid being staggered in any case, so I wouldn't worry about it for now. The Tattered Cloth set, which you get offers even better fire def, but I don't think it's other defensive stats are as good as the Crimson set's. Also, the Dragon Crest Shield, which you find has some of the best fire def of any medium shield in the game.

Well done to those who have met their targets! I'm going to fail miserably my target of 30 this year with less than two months to go until 2019 and having only read 21 books. I'm also going to fail miserably my other goal for this year: to not buy any more books. The lure of the Kindle sale is too strong for me. 20. Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman I enjoyed this a lot, especially after playing God of War earlier this year and being able to see all the references the developers made. Gaiman uses a sort of faux-biblical style that is very accessible and perfect for dipping in and out of. Lots of these would make for cool bedtime stories for kids. 21. The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth Like The Etymologicon, which I read last year, this was excellent, a must read for anyone who likes words or is interested in the English language. It's essentially an overview of different rhetorical devices with classic and modern examples, tracking their usage from Ancient Greek tragedies up to Quentin Tarantino films. That may sound quite dry, but Forsyth's style is witty and engaging, and (for me at least) the content is very interesting. I've added his third book (the Horologicon, about obsolete words) to my Wish List. Having decided that the only way I am going to get through my Kindle backlog is by starting from the oldest title I've bought and going from there, I'm now a third of the way into The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber, which I'm enjoying, but at nearly 1000 pages long it may be the last book I read this year. Last month, I got about a quarter of the way into a biography of Stalin (The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore) before I gave up. This always seems to happen to me with weighty history books like this one: they seem really interesting at the time I buy them, but then I just find that they go into so much minute detail I end up just getting bored. I've had A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes, about the Russian revolution, on my bookshelf for about six years now. After reading about 100 pages when I first bought it and then giving up, I've been too scared to go back to it.