kalimeeri
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Posts posted by kalimeeri
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The result of this is of course that the teachers are now practically teaching students how to get grades (ie avoid mistakes by coaching them during exams) rather the the subject.
Worse yet is that (here at least) overall high grade levels on standardized tests are tied to how much federal grant money the district receives, and there is little to no monitoring as to how the reported levels are achieved. Human nature being what it is... I think it was Atlanta where it was discovered that the kids weren't getting smarter or doing better on the tests at all ... those stellar results and fat bonus checks were due to nothing more than teachers "fixing" answer sheets (under orders from on high in the school system itself).
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I don't understand people who try to make Dungeon Seige I and II out as the best things since sliced bread, and hold them up as some sort of shining example. Maybe they look for different things in a game than I do. Or maybe they just haven't played very many games. Dungeon Seige 3 is a bit different from the first two of the same name, and for that I'm glad. I couldn't care less about multiplayer, because that's not what I bought the game for (the Dungeon Seige bar was pretty low in that regard).
Dungeon Seige I was fun; it had gorgeous graphics for its time, beautiful music, and non-stop hack-n-slash action. I played it through several times in sp and multi-LAN; I recently reinstalled it and started another play-through--and it was still fun (and still very pretty) ... something for a lazy afternoon when I didn't have anything else to play, or didn't want to think or get involved. There is actual value in that.
But whatever made Dungeon Seige I enjoyable was lost in DS2. The 'story' only had a very loose connection to the first game, the characters weren't interesting or even likeable, and music/scenery was bleh. But most of all, it was more tedious than fun. I stuck through it to the final battle, and then quit caring whether I finished it or not, because it never did get any better. I recently reinstalled it too and tried to play again, thinking I'd missed something--and had the same reaction. It was a hack-n-slash ... but it just wasn't fun, and had nothing to make it interesting.
Dungeon Seige purists need to step back and take a deep breath (and a second look). And maybe try playing the first two games again. IMO DS3 does more to validate the lore and strengthen the standing of the first game than the second ever did. But ... well, I have to laugh every time I see the statue of 'the farmer', because 'she' wasn't all that great. And while DS3 may not break any new ground, its combat is good and quite strategic; and the addition of an actual plot/storyline as well as the portrayal of characters as individuals enriches the whole franchise. In other words, if DS3 was the first game of the 'series' that I played, it would likely entice me to track down and play the first two--and you know what? I'd be sorely disappointed.
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I've also tried checking/unchecking the read only option.
Still sounds like this is the problem, like maybe the whole drive has been made R/O, or it's being regarded as a CD.
Also, if this is the Story Station... just a thought, but as a backup device its contents may not be freely accessible by any other program but the backup software, for security/safety purposes. In otherwords, a glitch (feature!) in that software or driver (have you recently updated it?)? I've seen this happen way back when using floppies for backup with the old DOS PCTools (I think)--once the media was written to, all you could do with it was re-format. Perhaps check whether program access is exclusive?
Regardless, it may not be a Win7 problem per se. Even XP occasionally blocks full access to files copied from a CD or other source ... you will likely need a program like File Unlocker to deal with that.
Worth a shot anyway.
Probably more than you ever wanted to know: File Locking (Wiki)
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It could be the motherboard chipset is going. My daughter recently had a similar problem--strange graphical corruption and slowdown/bluescreens, particularly in games--which drove us nuts until we finally changed out the mobo. The new one (with the same video card and other hardware) solved the issue completely. Hers was an older Asus board that had been rock solid in the machine for some time... but we started noticing issues after connecting additional SATA devices, and it rapidly went downhill from there.
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An ignominious burial at sea is probably the best thing they could have done, IMO. Taking the body and interring it anywhere would only invite craziness on both sides--a permanent soapbox for those celebrating his death, and a shrine for AQ. That's a recipe for badness, as likely to trigger instant and ongoing reprisal as anything else. So dump the body somewhere where nobody can ever find it, and don't worry about the pollution.
I'm glad he's dead, but only because he became a symbol to both sides. Going on celebrating to any extent is glorifying his existence, which is something he doesn't deserve. And that's all. It's unlikely that his death will change AQ in any way, other than instigate some form of reprisal in the near future ... but even that won't carry the punch it would have if AQ had solid proof. Remember conspiracy theory works both ways; they can't be sure he isn't alive and well and informing against them.
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Changing from XP to Win7 just for the sake of changing isn't worth it, IMO. I am running Win7 and XP on two very hardware-comparable machines (almost identical), and with regard to performance the Win7 machine seems to lag slightly behind XP. I was also unable to run several games (Assassin's Creed and DA:O in particular) without constant crashing on the Win7 machine when I applied the very same (minor) overclock settings as I use successfully on the XP machine--although they did run fine at stock settings--and at this point I am not really sure why. I'm thinking it was DX11 related (hardware acceleration?), since otherwise the OS and other programs are rock-solid stable. Anyway, basically, so far I'm unimpressed with Win7 gaming performance... am keeping that second machine just for the sake of DX11 games (when they come out), as opposed to the strong urge to wipe it and start over with XP.
Note that I am running 32-bit versions of both. From all reports, XP-64 was a dog; however, my daughter is using Win7-64 on her primary gaming rig, and I haven't heard any complaining. That probably means she's been able to overcome any obstacles with older games (and with her hardware, she doesn't have any need to overclock).
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Oblivion still has plenty of life (if only because of its fantastic modding community). Its attraction is not so much the vanilla quests, but the opportunity it presents for free-form roleplaying; and through the overhauls available (some professional-quality), gameplay can be custom-tailored to anyone's whim. The story can be anything you want it to be--about all that's required from the player is imagination. Sadly enough, too few recent games measure up to that; NWN2 being the only one that has managed to lure me away for a time.
Fighter's stronghold is a decent plug-in, something Bethesda had worked up but had never released. As is, it's better than Frostcrag Spire but not as good at Knights of the Nine. But it's still more of the same--a little boring--and I think Beth knew that. IMO, it's a gift to the modders, to see what could be made of it.
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The A8V runs off the Via chipset, which will run rings around NForce4; and this particular motherboard was built with overclocking in mind. There is at least one whole site devoted to tweaking it. It can be touchy, though, with regard to the PCI bus (which is slightly underpowered, IMO), and certain wireless cards can be a bluescreen nuisance. It is a socket 939 board, however, and CPU upgrades are getting scarce, as AMD isn't making any more (not that the 3500+ isn't a great processor--I have one myself).
FWIW, my daughter has one of these with a dual-core in her machine, as she had a 512mb AGP video card that was almost brand new. When I originally installed it, it was totally unstable--I spent so much time tweaking her rig that I almost never saw my own--and I yanked it back out in frustration and gave her an NForce4 board. This time around with slightly different PCI cards, it's rock solid, and she couldn't be happier, runs Oblivion with all settings maxed out.
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It's the DRAIN, and we're circling it.
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What's really sad is when a guest speaker who has worked long and hard on a presentation finds out that his Mac laptop doesn't connect up so well to a PC-based organization's system. And how is it that's all the organization's fault? Hel-lo.
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Light-side, but not eye-blindingly so. Some of the LS choices are too much to swallow, and don't seem in character for anyone, let alone Revan. The LS-o-meter fluctuates up and down, but it really doesn't matter, because somehow I always end up shiny bright at the end.
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I rolled back to 93.71 and the whole machine seems to run smoother and faster--haven't run NWN2 yet, but I picked up a good 4-5 fps in OB. Guess I should've thought of that when I started to get the same kind of artifacts you described (I ran only ATI cards for years, after all; they were the king of buggy drivers), but after the last format/fresh install I just went for the latest. Bah.
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I've seen that happen in Oblivion when Vsync was turned off. (Although I'm not sure that the 94.24 drivers might not be contributing, too. I've been considering rolling back to 93.71.)
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How did you encounter the music, if you didn't play the games? Did you choose it because of the author (sound unheard), or did a friend play the game and you heard it there?
Reading threads like this, lol. As a matter of fact, I think it was here--someone posted a linky to the composer's websites, where the tracks were available for download. Kott: http://forums.obsidianent.com/index.php?sh...force&st=30
The Spellforce link is a couple pages later.
Music like that makes me want to play the games, but discretion won out after reading the reviews. It's rare, but in these the music tells the story better than the game did. Rarer still is the gem that gets it all right, like PS:T did (great music+great game).
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The full soundtracks for Spellforce and Knights of the Temple are both permanently on my playlist, right next to PS:T's. (Never played either game.)
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Having played Morrowind, I thought I knew what to expect when I kicked up Oblivion for the first time. I was wrong. Oblivion was an incredibly beautiful game. one that I feel instantly set a new standard for graphics and character modeling (adding Havoc didn't hurt, either). For instance, no other computer game has ever bothered to make horses that even looked like horses, let alone behaved like them--which has always been a personal annoyance. A year or so post-release, a strong modding community has made it into a work of art. I haven't yet seen anything to compare (from a graphics standpoint, at any rate--not getting into story).
Don't get me wrong, NWN2 did very well for itself, but it was the storyline that had the biggest effect on me. Had it been released prior to Oblivion, I think it would've been the game I'd have chosen in terms of graphics. So maybe that makes it a better game overall, I don't know. But it's just silly to choose one over the other--fooling around in a sandbox has its appeal, as does heavy drama. I can enjoy both for what they are.
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GFW CGW can hype whatever they want. They are the oldest gaming magazine in publication and the only one that doesn't read like it was written by a High School journalism staff.
Fixed that. The switch to GFW brought crappiness to it, and my subscription that ends in a few months (after many years of loyal CGW reading) will not be re-newed.
CGW was the only game mag I subscribed to--for years, I read it cover to cover and so did my kids. Good stuff--if they didn't like a game, they told you why in a way that didn't insult your intelligence ... and they were usually right. Staff changes a couple of years ago brought that to an end, as far as I'm concerned. It's just as well they changed the name; the whole tone of the mag changed, and not for the better. I too told them to stuff it.
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Way too many games to list. I used to buy a lot of PC games (more than a dozen a year) and hate to throw anything away--and some are now impossible to replace by any means. The number of purchases declined drastically over the past several years, mostly because there have been very few that interested me. Since KotorII:TSL was released I've bought two maybe three games, Oblivion and NWN2 being 2 of them. Plain and simple, I don't do MMORPG, and don't care much for the action/rpg hybrid.
There have been a few games that I've ditched right after I bought them, though. As an example, Quest for Glory:Dragonfire and King's Quest Mask of Eternity--Sierra never successfully made the transition to 3D. (I kept GK3 only out of sentimentality for the character; I guess I keep hoping it'll get better as it ages, but I'm afraid to find out, and it won't even install on WinXP anyway.) It was as if the game engine/graphics took priority over all else, and no good came of it. That sounds eerily familiar, come to think of it.
Most of my game CD's are relegated to a couple of CD organizers, but I do keep a Hall of Fame shelf comprised of about a dozen titles that I love and will play and replay. Games like Freespace (1&2), GK1&2, BG2, Diablo2, WC3&4, Kotor1&2 (and now Oblivion and NWN2) all proudly reside there. While Obsidian, Bioware and Bethesda still stand, I think there's hope of adding to it--I think I've lost faith in the rest of the industry. Maybe it will swing back in time, I don't know; anything's possible, but I'm not holding my breath ... and I'm not buying anything until I research/try it first.
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It is possible to slipstream the raid/Sata drivers into an install CD; other than the floppy, that's the only other way I know to make Windows accept them during the installation process. But as Kiwi pointed out, chipsets vary in the way they treat Sata drives, and I suspect it may also depend on the architecture of the drive itself.
In my case, Via installed a fresh copy of Windows and booted instantly (it needed the raid drivers to even see the drive--making raid volumes was optional). Ironically, it was NF4 that gave me fits. Setup could see the drive (the only one in the system at the time), but after install it repeatedly refused to boot, giving me the 'missing NTloader' whether the drivers ASUS provided had been loaded into setup or not. The theory was sound, it just ... didn't work, no matter what I tried. I didn't fool with it beyond that--it was Christmas eve/day, and an old SATA1 drive would have given me little or no performance gain over IDE anyway--so I don't know if recovery console options would've fixed it or not. I was out of time and ticked off and didn't bother. The theory is sound, lol. But I'm interested in knowing if you're able to make it work, because it still tasks me just a little.
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I've got a board with a Via raid chipset, and they do provide drivers for a floppy. But like you, I didn't own one--I ended up buying an external USB floppy for $9 at Geeks.com. True, it doesn't get much use, but the beauty of it is that the bios recognizes it and so does Windows setup, and it can be moved from machine to machine at will.
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I think Windows XP 32-bit will only ever see 3 gigs; for 4 gigs you would have to go to WinXP 64-bit, which can access up to 12. (Also, the pagefile is considered part of physical ram.)
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at any rate, the 3200+ AMD processor with 1 GB of memory ain't up to snuff. particularly if i want to do other things (such as research, or writing) while a simulation is running. currently, when matlab runs, it takes over. nothing else can happen. i can barely move the mouse. not so on the core2 here at the office, however. i like two cores.
taks
I just upgraded my daughter's 3200+ to an X2 3800+, and that was a big leap in speed from what I can see (while still allowing me to use the socket 939 motherboard). I'd originally bought it to upgrade my extra 'media center' comp which is still running on an AthlonXP, but was utterly defeated before I got the thing out of the box. She does video work, and still has stars in her eyes and a big smile on her face. On startup, my single core rig keeps up, but only just. Can't get her away from the dual core long enough to test it more thoroughly for myself.
At any rate, there's something to be said for keeping a second machine around for special purposes (particularly intensive ones); provided you've got the room, you may as well put the unused rotated parts to good use. I've come to the conclusion that with software as heavy as it has become, one machine can't hope to do everything all at once, or at least not without straining or bloat. I look at it this way: with a lean, clean Windows install and only minimal apps, the 3200+ can turn in a decent performance and free my machine to do other things--and I didn't need to go on starvation rations to do it. Of course, I've got the space for it--not everybody does.
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I'm betting your user account got hosed. Look under C:\Documents and settings and check your users. Desktop should be a subdirectory under your normal user logon; there should also be an All users, an Administrator, and a guest account, each with their own desktop settings.
If that's the case, it's possible that your shortcuts and 'My Documents' are still there, but Windox can't find them. Quick and dirty fix is to just create a new user account and copy the old shortcuts, favorites, etc. into the appropriate folders. Log on under that new account. IIRC you won't recover everything, but it will make you feel human again.
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kalimeeri, it still wouldn't hurt to go ahead and scan the system for traces of malware. After all, no AntiVirus detects everything, so its better to be safe. If the virus scans came up safe, then the problems are likely not caused by malware.
Oh, I absolutely agree. Test out every known virus scanner, and run Ad-aware/Spybot as well. I would (and did). Just saying that after all that if you still come up dry, there is a possibility of a conflict within AVG. Most people can and do run it without any problems, but it does take exception to a few lucky souls.
Witcher 2 Again
in Computer and Console
Posted · Edited by kalimeeri
Probably not as much work as you think. Characters that are created for the game, not in the books--may get an honorable mention in passing, but will likely never be seen again.
i.e., much like Yaevin and Sigfried, Saskia, Letho, Iorvath, and Roche are unlikely to follow Geralt in any case, so their fates don't really pose a big issue.
None of the Core characters like Zoltan, Triss and Dandelion were dramatically changed, nor does the political "resolution" in any of the paths end up very different. That's what counts. Setting in the third game will again be different from either of the previous games... but my guess is it'll be north toward Nilfgaard. IIRC the South is the promised land to witchers, a few villages and nothing but monsters to slay (few if any sorceresses); putting an anti-political figure into a political stew makes a better story, not to mention that Geralt's overall personal quest is still hanging.
Heh. Kind of like real life, eh? No manual or guide to tell you what to do, no choice but to live with the consequences.