LadyCrimson

I'm definitely glad I don't live in snowstorm territory. I like the rain, even if it does create a giant puddle in our garage sometimes. My litter-boxed challenged cat Mr. Grey, however, hasn't been too happy about it, since he was banished outside early this year. All huddled in his small outdoor hut - it makes me feel so terrible. ...but not terrible enough to bring him inside to pee all over my floors/walls again. Still, need to build him a small partially covered area that isn't just for sleeping. There's not much covered area in our yard.

Rain today, and I think...mind you, this is just a guess...that it might rain this weekend too.

bwahaha....the kind of call that makes you hope the caller is actually pulling their own prank.

"bullfrogians" ....best word ever.

So? And your point is what? That games cannot be resold? That's against the free market laws. Why game developers should be treated differently from all the others developers and manufacturers? Used cars is a billions dollar market, yet you don't see Mercedes shouting to ban the reselling of used car. I bought it I can resell it, end of story, There is often confusion about copyright vs. patent, and patent vs. industrial design rights and trademarks and so on. They are not all the same and are not all governed by the same laws/management. This is, of course, just a matter of legal definition - with some grey areas (and loopholes) I'm sure - which tends to be challenged periodically....but while I understand when people use the "I can sell a car/bike" reasoning, legally, I don't think it's quite the same thing as this topic is talking about (software piracy), at this time. P.S. I should add, "in the United States." Also, I'm not a lawyer.

Theme Hospital. Never played it before. Liked the intro movie with the Horned Reaper in the waiting room, harhar. Like it so far, although it might drive me insane on later levels. Keeping track of grumpy docs, slacker handymen and all the patients.

Not personally, no. Hubs tried both...the most recent one, he started it, killed some bad guys, saw that the first quest was an Arena thing, did that, and quit. (there's more to it than the Arena, we don't know how that works exactly). Then he started the Pirate one. He skipped most side quests and finished it last night (he went in around lvl 21/Siren). I watched him play it here and there. It looked ok ... some new enemies (some that look/act like Zero, heh)...not something to write home about but the usual mix of stuff with a big reward at the end. The jetspeeder boat vehicles were kind of cool.

I'm personally waiting for Grim Dawn ... and waiting, and waiting. Path of Exile, on the other hand, isn't exactly a secret/has been playable by many for a long time and you can get in the open beta with $10 now. Sometimes I wonder if PoE is ever going to be out of beta. Haha. Tried Settlers2...talk about old skool graphic sim/strategy. I think I need to read the manual. Seems like my kind of thing, however. Miasmata - man are the nights dark in this game. You have a lighter (which basically just lights up a tiny circle right at your feet so you have to look down the whole time), you can carry torches (they go out after a while) if you find a stick to pick up, but it barely helps. It's worse than the flashlight in Doom3 thing. I'm still falling off cliffsides in the dark, lol. So....pretty much I think I'm going to try to stick to exploring during the day.

The new castle movie is a lot shorter than the old one. I suppose this could be a bonus, if you can't skip them, but between that and the content/layout of the new castle movie (the gate doesn't open, no panning of camera, no sensation of actually "entering the castle" etc), it makes me think they shortcutted things. Maybe it's because of money, I don't know. But I don't like it. Would agree it's not that the old ones are some kind of cinematic masterpieces. The new ones just aren't improvements, so I don't see the point...and I personally don't like the artwork. I think it's flat and ugly, even compared to the old movies. Anyway...I might get it one day, but from the sound of it, even beyond personal taste in cinematics, it needs some patching and stuff before I think I'd want to fork over money for it.

I would never! ... ok, I'm lying, I did try throwing the rock at one but it didn't seem to do anything. There's rabbits, giant roaches in the grass, huge dragonflies etc...so far the wildlife seems purely decorative. It's pretty limited to what kinds of actions you can do, I think. Rock, dagger, stick, drink water, grab/pick up certain items, hold three total plants at a time (can't be 3 of the same, either). Mostly exploring and sneaking/hiding. At least so far.

Picked up Miasmata from GoG. Total impulse, never heard of it, but watched and said "looks cool." Graphically, it has some aspects/times that look nice when in-game/in motion, but is dated. It seems poorly optimized and has a hard time getting much more than 35fps in 1920x1080 (max settings) but if you drop it to 1600x900 it's better. For me, at 35fps it ran ok but felt a bit "jerky" when you spin around too fast. Some people are getting very bad lag and have to play at even lower resolutions. Known issue, they're looking into it. And when I change resolutions, it sometimes freaks out and I have to restart it for it to apply properly. Other than that, since it plays fine for me one notch down, I'm having fun. As an "adventure/action" game I like it a lot better than Walking Dead. Sorry. It's about exploration, avoiding some kind of boogey-animal if you can, whilst finding a cure for your disease and maybe finding out what happened to the people before you etc. Plus, it has squirrels.

Miasmata: the game where I... ...can pick flowers! For research! And thus can... ...combine plants, chop them up with what looks like a plastic butter knife, mix them up - to essentially make some Extra Strength Excedrin! Which I need every so often, since apparently I have some kind of plague. ....I know, sounds silly. But it's actually a fairly nifty little exploration/adventure/little bit o' suspense game.

I spent an hour trying to jog my memory on what nickname I used on the old Interplay message boards. Darnit, I just can't recall. It's driving me crazy. I probably wasn't on them regularly too long (3-4 months would be my guess) but I posted a lot when I was. Chatted with some on mIRC too. Had some old letters and notes on 3.5 floppies that I could've checked, if I still had a floppy drive in one of my computers. Bah, the info probably wasn't on those anyway. Oh well. It's not a big deal...sometimes you just get a bug up your you-know-what about something. But I still wish I could remember.

I hear ya. I was so disappointed with the MMO notion when it was announced (and which I didn't buy) ...

... ... No offense intended to the hard work they probably put into that, but outside of the better resolution aspect, I prefer the original.

I loved the Glacial bit of music in BL2 (the first boss on that ship) and some of the other boss-fight music, but yeah, the overall soundtrack was a bit of a snooze. Same thing with BL1 ... loved Krom's valley piece, was ho-hum about most of the rest. Often I'll like a main theme or a piece of combat music these days, but that's about it. This is in sharp contrast to some older games when I'd like almost every single music bit, like in Stronghold/Crusader and Nox (heck in Nox, I even loved the Main Menu music....). I like it when the whole ST feels like it all goes together thematically (even between the slow and fast pieces), rather than being very different/discordant with itself. (BL2-Glacial) (Crusader-Strong Spice) (Nox-Wander1) (Nox-Shell) (..I really don't like the auto-embed of videos, when one wants to post multiples.... )

They looked ok when I played BG1 on my current PC a while back. Not HD or great or anything, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't giant square pixel color-mush. I know the resolutions have changed, but it's not like I played BG1 on an 8" screen back in the day. More like 17" or 19" (CRT). Which honestly isn't that much physically smaller than playing it non-stretched/non-widescreen on a 23" LCD monitor. I don't always understand the resolution game in terms of gaming vs. monitor, tho. I can play some old games (like DK) on LCD monitor and it looks perfectly fine (again, when not stretched/black bars on sides), and I can play other games and it looks "softer" or smaller than I remember on the CRT's of similar size.

What shoes, Tale? I had this pair of Asics, once, years ago. Best, most comfy shoes ever...I have mildly flat feet and those shoes kept all arch-fatigue and much ankle fatigue away for as long as I owned them. I wore them to tatters. I still haven't found anything like them...not even from the same company. :/

I think having a certain range/amount of options within a game is the awesome. More characters, more skills, story decision choices, more difficulty choices. What difficulty choices are available is up to the dev's and what might fit the game (or is easy to implement as an on/off sort of thing). I remember in Casear3, being able to turn the God's effects off. This meant you didn't have to deal with worshiping them and their anger effects if you didn't, but at the same time, you didn't get any benefits of a happy God, either. Up to you. I liked having that option when I was playing freemaps and was more interested in building (design) then playing a campaign level (story) and was irritated when they took that option away in later CB games. So, I like plenty of options when it comes to my single-player game. That said, there is a point of having so many options that you may as well just hand over a giant toolbox and let people design their own game instead, and then what's the point. It's a fine balance sometimes.

I like that quite a bit. Thumbs up.

Nothing interesting going on today, unless you include the entertainment of opening the front door and watching a cat "freak" out over the very, very loud rainstorm noises. Run to the door to watch/look at thick sheets of rain, dashes around the room like a kitten who drank too much coffee, repeat.

*reads article* ...well, only more time will tell how much success/failure KS ultimately has re: actual games being released (I do think a lot of them are too optimistic in those "estimates" when they create the KS process), but that article did make one thing clear to me .... I want that Castle Story game. Why didn't I hear (or remember, or take note) about that one earlier? I want it, I want it.

Well, since I really only seriously played 4 games this year (er...I think. I lose track), I would have to say Borderlands 2. It didn't have the longevity I was hoping for, but it was certainly the most fun during the time I was playing it. Torchlight2 was/is light fun, but not a GoTY type thing for me. Diablo 3 got mileage out of me, partly from stubborn hope and partly from "It's Diablo" habit, but its faults were too many. Risen2 was ok but nothing special, and I didn't play quite enough of it to feel comfy making a judgement. I have Crusader Kings 2 now, but I won't have much idea how much I like it or not for a while, if ever. Walking Dead as a whole package might be ok but good chance I won't ever know. ....I'm terrible with games these days.

Don't know if you've read it, but Update #14 featured this topic and has some replies from Justin Bell. Might want to browse through it, if you haven't already. My main hope music wise is as much variety as possible, given the budget, because hearing the same 4 tracks 100 times gets old, or if all the tracks sound too similar, that becomes kind of dull as well. Some calmer, some more bombastic, some wind instrument pieces would be nice. That said, music tends to be a very personal thing ... I really wouldn't want to have to listen to that zombie track for more than 10 seconds, myself, for example ... so I'm not sure I have anything really specific in mind. Either I'll like it or I won't.

I did click on the "Register" button of the initial splash screen, and it did just take me to a website, which I promptly closed/ignored. So seems like that's probably what the key is for. I have not had to use it to play the single-player game. The loading thing is still weird tho. I don't mind a few minutes or something, but it was over 10, plus the odd thing of alt-tabbing making it ready all of sudden. Just weird. Anyway...fiddled with Universe Sandbox. I don't think I'd ever get to a point where I'd personally do anything really cool with it, but it's definitely fun to play around with a little. Also watched hubby play some of the BL2 Pirate DLC. Other than the amusement of seeing him fight what looked like enemy versions of Zero, just looked like more of the same. Brown and sand and more brown and sand. He seems to be liking it, at least for one playthru, however.