I might have called it a  day at the Crystal Cave if it weren't for summons. There's a sort of balcony that the bonfire's on and it's like a clown car of summon signs. I assume Seath-farming is profitable or something, since there are usually (or were, last I was there) so many summonees available. It's one of the few spots in the game where you can drop a summon sign right at the fire, which is hella handy.

To tell the truth, my description in the Diaries wasn't embellished at all. I'd fought Seath twice as a White Phantom (that is, summoned by someone else, I keep using Demon's Souls terminology) and been vanquished both times, but I had a general idea of what the fight would be like.

Chaotic is what the fight would be like. Roaring and smashing and running around, crystal spikes erupting from the earth, crystal fragments flung hither - and sometimes yon - more roaring, crystal breath from the crystal dragon waving his crystal paws and biting with his crystal teeth while drinking Crystal Light™ from a crystal goblet on a crystal table in thehhrrrgggggnnn

But it's fair to say that I never beat Seath the Scaleless. I summoned two beefy phantoms who seemed to know what they were doing then I hung back and contemplated whether Estus has any calories while they pummeled Mr Monster into crystal dust, which I then sifted through (from a safe distance) until I unearthed the Lord's Soul. I imagine myself standing at the very perimeter of the mountain of crystal shavings, poking gingerly with a halberd or something and then carefully fishing the soul toward me.

Now Simple - an important storyline trigger happens in the vicinity of the Crystal Cave. Assuming you've hit all the triggers leading up to it, you'll see one golem in the forest that's gold instead of blue. Pummel it into submission (be sure to stop swinging as soon as it goes down) and you'll encounter a new character with an interest in someone you've already met. You need to meet this person if you hope to complete one of the most tragic and depressing sub-stories in Dark Souls. If you see no gold golem, don't lose sleep about it; all it means is that you won't be gloomy for several days sometime in the future.

One of the nicest small things they added to Dark Souls 2 is that summons stick around for about ten seconds after the boss is defeated. Gives you a chance to get off a bow and a wave, which I like.

The heady pre-wiki days were also what has come to be known (by me) as The Time Before One Point Oh Five. Like kids these days, who do not have to walk to school through snowdrifts as I did, people have forgotten what the Dark Times were like. But not I, nay. BP (Before Patch) was a cocktail of human misery and pain, spritzed with defeat and garnished with the Cherry of Humiliation.

Curses stacked in BP. Like, infinitely.

Most "minor" foes, such as the Burg Hollows, dropped no souls at all.

Drinking from the Estus flask didn't heal you, it killed you.

I made that last one up. But the others are true.

Better to have a wiki and know what you know than to have no wiki and wish you knew what you know!

EDIT: that fact is what makes Pyromancy so pyromantastic, Helmut. You can boost your Flame to +15 with just an investment of souls, using What's-His-Name -- Laurentius -- at Firelink and Quewhatever down in the Blighttown swamp. I believe that Intelligence still modifies the damage, but I might be wrong in that, it might depend entirely on Flame level.

Hey, mister, Michigan practically is Canada. I understand every single word xtal says when we're on Skype, every word. Every "aboot," every "toomoorow," every "eh." You have to drive SOUTH to get to your frozen realm from where I am. That may have more to do with isthmuses and peninsulae and stuff than geography, but still. SOUTH.

Our snowdrifts are many centimeters high! What is a centimeter?!

Making my way through Sen's Fortress with my magic build. Interesting experience. Several enemies I never defeated before were trivial, while others are more difficult. The oddest are those that have strong body movements when they attack, as the soul spear tends to miss them. Prior to this, I had thought there were a lot more options for spells, but it just boils down to a few soul spears, and now I've got the homing soulmass from Big Hat Bill. At level 30 int, I'm finally starting to deal some serious damage. 

I am disappointed that my "Master of Unlocking" nickname for Helmut has not caught on.

I endorse this nickname, Botch, but you have to understand that technically speaking Helmut is my arch-foe on this site, and we are sworn to destroy each other. Well, actually I think I'm sworn to destroy him; he's never really taken the bait and sunk to my level. But to encourage an amusing nickname like that would be contrary to my idiom, however valid and excellent a nickname it may be. I took over the site from Jen mostly to deny Helmut the ability to use it for evil (which, again, was not something he had, strictly speaking, shown any interest in doing, so my action was wholly preemptive). The invisible war fought for this place's soul is neverending, and most of you should count yourselves lucky that you know nothing about it. Some of the slanders Helmut has committed against me - most notably in the realm of a certain proposed real-estate partnership that would have been awesome - are simply unpardonable. I will not rest until he lies broken before me*.

I'm pretty sure I can fix my DkS crashing problem if I install DSFix and use it to manually disable anti-aliasing, then start the game, then shut down, then tweak my settings and start it up again. I enjoyed my pyromancer playthrough but never tried as a hardcore sorcerer, and I think it would be fun to do that. Some of those Big Hat spells kick-ass.

Simplenoob, you'll be pleased to learn that I visited your lovely nation for the first time (which is kinda sad for a man of my age) just last year, and hung out with Gregg, Mat, Lewis, Harbour Master, and many other fine lads at the Eurogamer Expo. I am a committed anglophile to begin with and I already speak perfect British on account of reading Harry Potter, but it was gratifying to discover that my book-learnin' translated into practice very effectively. Everyone seemed to understand me, and I understood everyone. Well, everyone understood me except when I tried to explain our health care system to Mat C, at which point his face took on a look of such confused horror I can only assume it was borne of terrified incomprehension.

I wish they'd patch Dark Souls so four to six players could go through more traditionally in co-op. It's against the spirit of the game, of course, but we'd have a lot of fun with that.

*That's not entirely true. I rest all the time. In fact I probably rest more than is healthy. I'm thinking about taking a nap right now.

Typical Helmutian distortion of the truth! I ask you: is it wise, really, to listen to real estate opinions from someone who built his house out of straw? Helmut built his house out of straw. And rather than being properly ashamed of this odd decision, he posted photos and discussed the vagaries of straw architecture, right here on this very forum.

My missile silo would've been pimp. It wasn't flooded or seeping hydrocarbons or anything. It had no sludge. You know what it did have? Megaton-rated concrete and steel blast doors. A not-quite-functional-but-we-could've-fixed-it radar dome. 145 acres of prime land in the middle of nowhere, suitable for gardening, paintball games, tag, you name it. And not one but five 350-foot tiered vertical shafts that once held the proud flagbearers of patriotism, the bridges of democracy, the multiple independent reentry vehicles of freedom. That's right, America's phallic inferiority complex thermonuclear deterrent. A little thing I like to call the Minuteman MX. Take that, communism! Pow! 

Simplenoob my good friend, you're talking to a man with a degree in Roman History, so rest assured, I have great appreciation for straw, thatch, wattle, daub, mud brick, regular brick, and what have you. And while we (I) tease Helmut for his straw house, apparently his power bill is, like, a dollar. A year. On account of straw insulation or something. My power bill is a lot more than that despite the alarmingly intelligent and annoyingly cheerful Nest thermostat I inexplicably bought a few months ago.

But straw has two major shortcomings. First, it's proven vulnerable to huff and puff attacks. More seriously, though, it is wholly unsuitable to act as a substrate for the long-term storage of nuclear weapons - to say nothing of its complete lack of utility in the realm of withstanding the high temperatures and pressures common in the staged solid-fuel deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Simply put, a missile silo made of straw wouldn't be a good idea. And in my book, if you can't build a missile silo out of it, it's got a problem.

I'll just say that you stumbled on a very strange place when you posted on our forums. We've been around for fifteen years now, in one form or another, and the origin of the Tunnel vs. Silo War is buried deep in the mists of history. Honestly, Helmut and I may be the only two people with a clear memory of how it all began.

It began, by the way, with an unprovoked attack by Helmut on me. He described my silo as "manky" and "rundown," probably so nobody would look to closely at those horrid, overheated London Below tunnels he tried to foist on us.

We needed a missile silo (or a tunnel network) to act as High Command for the site. A nerve center of sorts. At the time, the U.S. government was selling missile silos at bargain-basement prices. Five million bucks and we could have been That Website With The Sweet Missile Silo Headquarters. Instead our headquarters is WordPress, which is more functional but less awesome.

ON THE SUBJECT OF DARK SOULS, it just doesn't like me. I deleted and reinstalled it yesterday, tried some ideas from the interwebs, ran the Windows Compatibility Thingy, all for naught. Which sucks because all this talk of it makes me want to play again.

Well, there was this site maybe that started our speculation. 

Then we found this site:  

How cool is that? It comes with it's very own MI6 liason officer shown at the :19 mark. And if you listen carefully, I think you can hear the Skrillex beats coming in from overhead. I'm not going to say any more aboot it. What's done is done. 

NLR was my favorite place of the second half. It had the mood and back story worthy of it's place. Once I got my bearings. I'm finding the sorcery build to be very powerful at mid levels. One nice thing is that you don't have to split levels between endurance and dexterity, you can dump a lot into int, with maybe a bit in attunement which gives way more damage early. In the painted world, I was leveling up at 15,000 souls. Last time through, I was trying to farm at 27,000 souls/level which isn't much value. Looking forward to rescuing BHB the second time through to get some of the crystal homing soulmass spells. 

Edit: I like this: http://cvdazzle.com/ Anyone who is facially recognizable when coming to the Tap silo should not be allowed.