New word in my vocabulary: assbucket. I cannot wait to use it in a sentence.

All kinds of goodies in the Painted World, Helmut. It's the place where the Powers That Be locked away all kinds of stuff they were (A) afraid of (B) didn't want to take responsibility for or (C) afraid of and didn't want to take responsibility for.

If you can survive a bit of a fall, here's a tip: past the first few toxic gasbags, note a sort of catwalk/causeway that leads from one tower wall to another. Below you'll see a statue and some trees. Fling yourself hence!

Like I said, it's a drop, but if you survive you can hang right (avoid the slimelets for now) and open a pair of huge double doors. Presto! Shortcut open. The Painted World is small, but rough. Those slimelets - little bit of asset reuse from the Phalanx of Demon's Souls there - are susceptible to fire and worth... I want to say 800 souls apiece. Doesn't seem like much, but there are probably 20 dry-humping the statute down in the courtyard, so it can't be beat as a soul-farming run. Pyromancy is helpful there.

As for your soft skills, I feel you man. If it helps, in Dark Souls II I'm playing a Knight. My intelligence? 3.

Three. One two three.

I keep telling myself that Steerpike the Knight is street smart, but not book smart.

Dying repeatedly today at the hands of the two assbuckets on the building edge shooting the large bows with the large arrows. That is the first time the game has felt unfair to me, which induces a different response than all the deaths I have had previously. 

I just quit for the night in frustration. I also just watched a youtube vid and the author says that once you get close enough for them to draw their sword, you can run away, and they'll just fall off the ledge. Duh.  He also jump rolled all the way to the battle, so as to not waste estus and time getting there, and half those sword demony things will fall off the ledges too. 

Tomorrow. 

Chaos is dicey because its damage scales (in part) with soft Humanity, which you drop when you die. This can lead to unpredictable damage ranges, and in the next 15 hours or so you'll likely be visiting a place where your soft Humanity is even more vulnerable than usual on account of what I like to call the "spiritual Dyson," which others may know as the Darkwraith Covenant.

I'm told by certain experts that elemental damage will never match the value of pure physical damage, and that you'd do better to upgrade your katana to +15. Numerically this is surely so - I actually watched some of Epic's awesome videos on weapon scaling over at YouTube and the math doesn't lie - but I've never exactly understood how it all works since looking at the numbers (base plus elemental) it does seem like a great way to go. Of course, some enemies are resistant to elements.

I'd say it's worth it to do less damage, even a lot less damage, to work with a weapon whose move set "clicks" with your style. I was never comfortable with the Great Lord's Greatsword even though I did bongo damage with it, and that hurt me later in the game. So keep that in mind. These days I'm a big fan of the mighty Balder Side Sword, which is a rare drop around the Gargoyle church but so very worth it. It combines all the benefits of a spear with all the benefits of a sword, and has none of the drawbacks. The Shotel from Sen's Fortress is also a favorite. I like spears too. But those huge ultra-greatswords don't work for my style.

With a katana in hand, I think you can upgrade to Queelag's Furysword if you still have her soul. That's a favorite of many players, though I never tried it myself. It's good-sized, though, and you might lose some katana speed.

...next, Dark Souls is not Dark Souls 2, which is a polite way of saying that Dark Souls doesn't punish you for experimenting with upgrades. You have access to limitless Titanite, even the all-important Large Shards if you're willing to farm the Blighttown Swamp leeches for a while, so there's no reason not to get yourself a little elemental toolbox of weapons. I'm with Pokey, I like lightning (probably a less-than-optimal choice for you at this particular moment). Most enemies are vulnerable to fire as well.

I also recommend getting a Divine backup weapon. It'll be handy later on. Doesn't need to be your mainstay or anything, just good enough and blessed all to hell.

Invading works more or less like summons, unless there's cheating. You use a Cracked Red Eye stone and it looks for a suitable player - not Hollow, within the level formula (level +/- 10, +/- 10%), in the same region, etc. Then you invade, just as if you'd been summoned.

Two (three?) Covenants are designed for invasions. If they put on their Covenant ring, The Forest Hunters and the Blades of the Darkmoon will automatically invade certain non-Hollow players - Forest Hunters auto-invade any non-Hollow (who isn't a Forest Hunter) in Darkroot Garden (this is why you should avoid being not-Hollow there unless you want to get killed). Blades of the Darkmoon automatically invade players in Anor Londo based on the amount of Sin they have amassed for various crimes, and/or based on how many times they've been Indicted. I think in both cases, there are no level rules, so you can get invaded by a level gazillion Forest Hunter even if you're level two. 

I also think there's no friendly fire when you're a summon, or at least you can't harm your world master with your own weapons. That's true, right, Botchtal? You can harm them with environmental accidents, knocking them off cliffs, activating traps, etc. In DkS2 I got summoned by a well-meaning but exuberant player who almost immediately blasted me with a ballista by accident; that goes both ways.

Accidents happen and kindly players understand this. There's a certain chivalry to co-op in Dark Souls, assuming everyone follows the "code," which I really love. But over-eager summons can get their master killed, and careless masters can get their White Phantoms killed, pretty easily.

On the PC there's a lot of cheating. I don't know how it all works, I just know it's pretty rampant. It really harmed the PC experience, which is too bad. Games for Windows is so broken that it wound up being a boon, since for me at least, invasions rarely succeeded due to broken infrastructure.

So Helmut, what are your thoughts so far? I gather you're enjoying yourself or you wouldn't have continued, but I'm curious about your reactions.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. had various media elements which I encountered at the same time. There was the novella and the film which I read and watched at the same time I played. These offered a complete (although all three were different) picture into the ideas and the world. And it was batshit crazy and dislocative, if that's a word.  Various aspects of that game: the weird lighting, the funny handling guns, the glitched pda, the sinister laboratories,  made the experience so alien and it was a particularly memorable and rewarding journey, over all.

Dark Souls could be like that, except it isn't, at least not that I've yet discovered. The map design is top notch, by far the strongest part of the game. The sound design is pretty good too. Waiting for a summons on the stairs to S&O's lair, you can hear the giant knights wheezy breathing, and it's off-putting enough to make me take my headphones off after thirty seconds. So that shows love and care and attention. Missing is access to the lore and back story. I still have only the vaguest idea what I'm doing even after 100 hours of monkeying around. I have to say that a number of the transient popup screens that do give information don't stick around long enough on the pc to read entirely, and that doesn't help.

Despite having died billions of times, I wouldn't say the game is overly hard. I've been having lots of success (after the two assholes) with varying my strategies completely. I went from a middle weight sword and shield character at the end of Sen's to a lighter katana and shadow gear char at the beginning of Anor Londo to now a cloth sack, no shield, +5 black knight sword in two hander mode. The game seems to reward constant rejigging strategy and equipment, almost for each and all types of enemy. I see a lot of bloodstains on the ground in the halls of the castle I'm for people with shields and halberds but I find the 1000 soul knights in the castle to have just too much endurance to slug it out with them. The difficulty is in finding the right strategy. The farming areas conveniently let you get up to the level you need to be to succeed, and conveniently get tedious before you get overpowered. 

However, had I not been leaning so heavily on the wiki, and were there not multiple wiki's to lean on, I would probably have quit by now. If I hadn't known to persevere in ringing the first bell in order to achieve cheap access to the purging stone, prior to encountering the basilisks, that would have been the end. It would have been too hard to defeat the tower gargoyle at 1/2 strength. I do feel compelled to play Dark Souls when I'm not, but at least equally frequently, don't feel very interested at all in continuing. I'm certainly not driven to finish any particular area to get to the next, and I think that's a lost opportunity.

Multiplayer is both brilliant and frustrating. I'm sure it was better at the height of the game. Now it can be pretty slow going, in both directions. Once it gets late out here in PDT land, I don't see anyone around.

I watched a youtube vid by Epic, and it's interesting to see how much information and discussion there is on such simple things as which weapon does more damage with dexterity. That he would have to stand there and whack on a monster with all the weapons just to see which one does the most damage is funny. The equations are complex enough to be confusing, which leads to arguments, discussions, and flamewars, and that's good for the vitality of the community I guess. Imagine when (maybe some of you played it at this time) this game was new and there were no wikis. From Software has created a game where spoken lore between players is way more important than the documented or in-game factual information. That's a pretty hard thing to do, well, it's easy, but it's hard to do and still be a financial success.

So I guess overall I'm enjoying the game quite a bit, and I can certainly see the appeal, but for me it's not going to change my world, at least not yet. 

Feeling somewhat mired down in the Crystal Cave area. Ambivalence. Hear me Dark Souls? I'm bored and growing distant and thinking of SpaceChem. You better perk the place up with something other than 64,000 hectares of library and shitty invisible paths. How about a disco or a brothel home to all manner of sin? That too much to ask? That's all I have to report. 

Had an epi-tragic power failure while I was playing on the weekend. When I restarted, it said the savegame was out of sync with the cloud and asked which copy I wanted to use. I wasn't really thinking, and I didn't want to lose my big pile of souls, so I chose my local copy. That was a mistake as it turned out to be corrupt and the game could not load it. A double mistake since my original choice over wrote my last good copy with the bad on the cloud, so I said farewell to my level 75 (whatever he was) character, and restarted. 

I had made some mistakes with my character, having divided my leveling between strength and dexterity, not understanding how some weapons that I liked scaled chiefly with dexterity. I really did suck at this game when I started, or maybe it was the lack of familiarity I should have had, had I played Demon's Souls. In either event, things are going so much faster. I think I played with the broken straight sword for 20 hours the first time through. I'm going to try a dexterity character with a little more magic, and we'll leave the strength at a reasonably low level.