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Go into torment.ini and change Full Screen=1 to Full Screen=0

Indeed. Everyone who hasn't played Bloodlines must play it. Source Engine, good writing, good voice acting, highly modable and hackable content, and a basis in a terrific P&P system. What more could one ask for? Okay, one could ask for a less buggy game, but with patch 1.2 it's really not that bad at all. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Speaking of mods, where are the mods for this game? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The former home of all great Bloodlines mods, vpaine.com, was seemingly shut down by the owner simply for financial reasons, unfortunately, and many of the mods which found their home there went with it. Under the circumstances, the best English-language Bloodlines mod site right now is the Modding forum on PlanetVampire. A good site in the meantime (or anytime, if you speak French) for things like mods is the French-language http://www.vampire-network.net/. Files can be found here.

Indeed. Everyone who hasn't played Bloodlines must play it. Source Engine, good writing, good voice acting, highly modable and hackable content, and a basis in a terrific P&P system. What more could one ask for? Okay, one could ask for a less buggy game, but with patch 1.2 it's really not that bad at all.

Jennifer Hale herself, I suppose. I think Bastilla should have an imperfect or at least idiosyncratic beauty. Perhaps something of a harshness to her. I actually think of Bastilla's character in the abstract as being less physically attractive than her model made her appear in the game and in FMV, but consider her very attractive nonetheless, odd as that may sound, that one should conceive a physical abstract of a character.

NWN2 obviously. I had forgotten that Barbarian Invasion was coming out, but I dropped by the local gameshop for a browse and picked it up recently. Other than that, think I'll do another run through Bloodlines.

After all, it's not as if there's an officially correct spelling for any given Japanese word in English, anyway.

My googling turned up this: http://touch-ds.jp/mfs/ouendan/index.html <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Ah, I originally turned up nothing as I googled "Ouenndan" exactly as the original post transcribed it rather than "ouendan" as it seems to be.

Could you provide evidence that this thing actually exists? Where did you hear about it? A google turns up nothing.

But there's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from shutting down every single Windows process they don't like or even forcing Windows to boot without them. What anyone bothering to check would inevitably find, to their disappointment, though, is that things like file indexing, network management, print servers and other potentially non-game-related services occupy effectively no system resources whatsoever in the final tally these days (I simply can't justify any desperate need for those 708KB spoolsv.exe is occupying) and their presence or absence will not change the game experience one measurable iota. The reason people used boot disks in the DOS days was to allow for compatibility with application-specific memory management settings. They were used to allocate memory to function according to an application's expectations, not to increase system performance. This was not done because any given memory settings were the most efficient way to get the most out of your system in any general sense. It was necessary because late 80s and to some extent early 90s DOS memory management was extremely crappy. And it was certainly not even because particular memory settings were in "faster for gaming" or any such thing. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, boot disks were used for backwards compatibility with games using outmoded and inefficient memory allocation schemes. Allocating 2MB to Extended Memory didn't make sense when running a game which had no idea what the Extended Memory area was. The game you're playing might just want to use your 640KB of Conventional Memory and expect to fit everything else into the 384KB Upper Memory block. So what do you do, because your game can't conceive of computing over the 1MB memory barrier? Create a boot disk. Boot disks were a way of coping with either extremely stupid memory management or applications expecting extremely stupid memory management. They made things neither faster nor slower. They made things compatible. If you were loading a pile of strange proprietary DOS services occupying lots of Conventional Memory, then you could free that up by loading them to Upper Memory or XMS. Skipping them completely if you didn't need them, or loading them to UMA or XMS on boot would allow your Really Dumb Application to boot up with Really Dumb Memory Management. Dealing with Upper Memory Blocks stands for D.U.M.B. in my books, at any rate. Boot disks were a solution to a problem we no longer have. And it's a problem we have no reason to want back. Without the inherent constraints of early PC memory management, we can just terminate system services at will and leave only the bare bones running, should we wish it. But usually, system services don't use enough system memory in the present to really be a meaningful concern. So even that's superfluous. Hardware Abstraction Layers are good for system stability. A strong set of APIs is good for game development. Wishing them away is a wish for a gaming platform inferior in every way to our present one.

Putting a PC in a stylish box does not make it a console. It makes it a PC in a stylish box. I suppose you could put the word 'console' on the box. But I don't see what difference it would make. Windows, DirectX in its current version at any given time, along with the ability to access the web and all Windows system settings to manage game patching and driver updates as needed are fundamental to even the basic functioning of the PC gaming platform. A PC 'console' would just be a gaming PC under another name.

Exactly. Quake 3 for Linux, using either Nvidia or ATI drivers, tends to run more slowly than Quake 3 for Windows on identical hardware (said the chap who owns both). Why? Because the drivers are generally pretty poor. Various system processes occupying miniscule amounts of memory and even fewer CPU cycles has effectively nothing at all to do with the relative 'efficiency' of Windows as a gaming OS. Nor even does the Hardware Abstraction Layer really do a substantial detriment. This is a myth that started in the DOS days and has bafflingly survived to the present day, despite the odds, and despite all evidence to the contrary. Compare Windows 98 performance (missing the HAL's overhead) to Windows NT/2000/XP performance assuming equivalent driver optimization under the same DirectX version and you get an essentially negligible performance hit from the stability the HAL provides. And no, making the Start Bar look all shiny does not cause a hit to game performance, in case anyone was wondering. 90% of game performance consists in high quality code utilising efficient and full-featured APIs supported by high quality drivers well-optimised for those APIs. As far as PC game performance goes, the major failing is in driver quality and in the consequent inability of game coders to support the quirks of multiple variously flawed driver implimentations while pretending to write for the API itself and not for the screwed up proprietary manifestations of it that gamers are really using on their home gaming PCs in practice. We've come a long way since 3DFX short-sightedly decided to kind-of-sort-of support just the parts of OpenGL that it determined were necessary to rendering GLQuake. But there's a ways to come yet. And it has nothing to do with getting rid of a GUI in favour of a command prompt. Absolutely nothing at all.

Yep, Dosbox is definitely a great ap for full-featured dos emulation. Or, alternatively, if you want to use Microsoft's own built in DOS VM, you can install VDMSound to improve its hardware emulation. The Windows NT/2000/XP VDM does come with sound hardware emulation, but it's somewhat lacking and can use some help.

Welll, they have a huge selection of game listings, but still much smaller than Underdogs, and unlike The Underdogs, many of the better titles can't actually be downloaded at all, because even if the company's dead and gone and the game abandoned for a decade, it may still be judged to be under ESA protection, due to the silliness of certain *cough*EA*cough* game companies.. To download the 15-year-old Eye of the Beholder I by deceased and forgotten Westwood Studios, or 13-year-old Lands of Lore I by the same, you'd have to go to Underdogs, as Abandonia doesn't provide the game.

When it comes to abandonware RPGs, Albion and Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos both come highly recommended. Lands of Lore was one of the first games ever to make significant use of the CD format. It makes use of the format with voices by actors including Patrick Stewart.

I knew someone would. Didnt think it would be you though. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm weak. Weak I tell you. It could not be resisted.

If you want to watch porn there are much better options. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Totally baited. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Masterfully baited. A true master baiter.

Just to add one last note of ATI fanboyism to this thread because I feel the urge: I got a Radeon 9700 Pro when it first came out. Right at release. Retail. A little over $600CDN I think it was. Rip-off, right? I certainly thought myself quite the schmo at the time for spending like that. But in the long run, amazingly, I tend to think not. Because I'm still using it, and it's...well...it's still pretty fast. Well over three years later, and this card is certainly no slouch. I've been waiting for the next big leap forward ever since, and it hasn't come. The Geforce at its inception (later designated 'Geforce 256' to distinguish it from successors) was a beautiful step forward. The Radeon 9XXX line at its inception was a beautiful step forward. I'm still waiting on the next big jump that can manage to wow me like the Voodoo once did.

I think it's fair to consider the (1996) Rage a gaming chip for its own pre-voodoo moment in history, and it was billed as a 3D accelerator, which was a perfectly reasonable title for it at the time and was accurate in practice, insofar as it did provide some limited support for hardware acceleration of, for example, Mechwarrior 2. At any rate, it was no worse than the NV1 or Virge (which, was my own first 3D card) among pre-3DFX attempts at gaming chips, even if the Verite did ultimately outclassed it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I was actually referring to the Rage128, which came out in the 1998/1999 area. I know. And I was disagreeing that it was ATI's first gaming chip, as you described it, my point being that even the original Rage3D was a chip aimed at a gaming audience interested in 3D acceleration, back in 1996, and actually did accelerate MW2 in hardware using a Rage-optimised edition of the game. I recall ATI ran a marketing campaign directed towards gamers for the Rage, which included PCGamer ads for the Rage illustrating the effects of anti-aliasing and their collaboration on the custom edition of MW2.

My Quake era 3D card history went Number Nine Imagine 128 (2MB - S3 Virge): Awful. Nicknamed the 3Decelerator by users. Unfortunately, like the NV1, a product which didn't find a historical purpose, though at least Nvidia learned and continued to improve after their own first problematic attempt, whereas for S3 it was all downhill from there. Matrox Mystique (4MB): Alright. Not great. Provided some pretty impressive acceleration for Tombraider, and was a pretty good 2D card with some interesting options, at least, which was what Matrox was famous for with the Millennium line. Diamond Monster 3D (4MB - Voodoo Chipset): And so the revolution began. Incredible stuff. The tech demos that 3DFX produced were even more impressive than game performance. I was painfully jealous of the folks who had the (6MB) Canopus Pure3Ds or Obsidian dual-chipset voodoo cards though. Those Obsidian cards were like the holy grail, for the time. To touch one would have been ecstasy. ATI Rage Pro (8MB): Interesting attempt at support for higher colour and a wider range of 3D resolutions. Also, a typically imperfect ATI attempt to bring proper OpenGL to the desktop at a price below that of the horrifically expensive and underperforming (in games) contemporaneous Permedia OGL cards. All good, well-intentioned ideas. Problematic execution. Diamond Monster 3D II (12MB): Yeah, I got the 12MB version, for whatever difference that made. And so the slow decline of 3DFX began. It was fast, but it was the antithesis of everything 3DFX's opponents were trying to do: they were trying to innovate. Most of them would fail, but by virtue of its own failure to make any attempt to revolutionise its chipset design, so would 3DFX.

I think it's fair to consider the (1996) Rage a gaming chip for its own pre-voodoo moment in history, and it was billed as a 3D accelerator, which was a perfectly reasonable title for it at the time and was accurate in practice, insofar as it did provide some limited support for hardware acceleration of, for example, Mechwarrior 2. At any rate, it was no worse than the NV1 or Virge (which, was my own first 3D card) among pre-3DFX attempts at gaming chips, even if the Verite did ultimately outclassed it.

Another Bloodlines song I really like is Genitorturers' Lecher Bitch, which if I recall correctly is played in the Last Round (Anarch bar). It works pretty fantastically as an Anarch tune.

Does not compute. Does not compute. Yeah, seriously, I just can't imagine Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale as a Source Engine sort of game. What would Baldur's Gate be like as a Source game? All the energy of the creative enterprise undertaken in Infinity Engine development seemed oriented towards the utmost exploitation of the IE style of design and gameplay. To ask me what an Infinity Engine game would be like with JE style graphics and perspective is to ask what a game which crafts a gameworld from masterfully portrayed 2D sprites, beautifully drawn backgrounds and text-focused storytelling would be like if none of those things were present within it. It's madness. It's like asking what Shakespeare would be like if Hamlet didn't have any words in it.

When it comes to story focused RPGs, I'll take content over grinding, thank you very much. I don't think that narrative duration and character development are getting shorter or more stilted, by any means. I think time spent on story telling and character development has increased greatly on the whole since the early 90s, among CRPGs. And what's more important, they're being increasingly tied directly into the underlying system of these games (e.g., through conversation skills) in a departure from Chosen One hero dialogue linearity (or in some older RPGs, total absence of protagonist dialogue). I appreciate the quantity of time dedicated to roleplaying and story telling in Bloodlines or Jade Empire. If you threw a hundred more sequential rooms filled with Generic Mob #1, Generic Mob #2 and Generic Mob #3 into these games, they wouldn't feel beneficially longer to me. They'd feel like bigger time-wasters, not bigger games. As long as story, quest and character content doesn't shrink, I'm happy. Consequently, I'm happy right now with the way RPGs are going. Most of the time these days, I can't justify sitting for 100 hours, 90 hours of which consists of killing nameless goon monsters who contribute nothing to story telling, when I could sit for 30 hours, 20 hours of which consists of meaningful story-driven roleplay content. I can still get a kick out of IWD1 (just played through it and both expansions last month), but justifying gigantic amounts of dungeon crawl gameplay as a scheduling choice is pretty hard when I could get so much more with a much less problematic time investment.

That's an actual licensed song actually. I know because I ripped the MP3s out of the game files so I could play them out of game. Cursed by Morgoth apparently. I liked Cain by Tiamat more though personally (song that plays in the Asp Hole). <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The tune being Isolated by Emileigh Rohn, a.k.a., Chiasm, from Disorder. And the tune was indeed fantastically atmospheric in the club. The entire club's aesthetic was incredible. A masterpiece of gameworld set design.

Favourite? There are so many. But to name just one, suppressing my urge to name so many others... Presently I am a pretty big fan of the PST Credits Theme.