LadyCrimson

After Bokishi's studmuffin graphic goodness, I shall now regale you all with a couple of 640x480 shots of Darkstone, blown up to 800x600.

Yeah, it was a slowish start this season...focusing more on character perhaps, with all the the Hank and Walt's wife stuff. It took 3-4 episodes to get going and even then it remains a bit more of a slow burn season. But it's building up and the last couple look to be pretty important chr/plot wise, in terms of Jessie/Walt/Gus. It's been interesting because Jessie is the opposite of Walt for me - not terribly likable at first but he's become a lot more interesting this season.

Hm, thanks for looking that up. I knew some did that but didn't realize most did. The line runs in the direction of the almost-every-day afternoon wind that we get here, so if he started from the left side and cast it out, it might have attached to the blackberry bushes if the wind was strong enough that day.

Item DLC's? I'll have to look them up to see if I'd want those too. I hope that's it...I wouldn't mind playing it again once in a while, I just became fed up with having to alter/redo all my own and downloaded mods so often. :D

Television: Breaking Bad's episode on Sun. was awesome. It's great to see more of Gus' world...and Jessie, where's his plot going? Going to be Gus' new right hand man when the other guy kicks the bucket? Used to be Gus wanted to get rid of Jessie & keep Walt, now it may be the other way around. I'd still like to see Walt's wife eat it tho...her sub-plots at this point are annoying, imo. (edit) Love the turn around of Walt's chr...from someone you can mostly sympathize with, to someone you love to hate.

Rick Astley, the 'rickroll' song. It's 80's, so I kinda like it...sue me.

Hubs sister's husband was out of work for multiple years, when his old job got rid of his dept. long time ago. He did PT/temp work here and there but one, he's on the older side and two, his career area/skills were a bit outdated (some kind of design engineer), so even w/some retraining it was difficult. When he finally got one, they had to move out of state. They kept the house they own here tho (they rent it out). ...as for me, I tell my morning tale in casual photos, as the orb weaver backyard takeover continues: What I'm wondering is how in the hell does the spider bridge this huge of a level gap (can't just jump downwards) to string it's upper web support line? ...but it loves this spot & keeps rebuilding the main oval every morning for days. Fun to watch cause it's so big. Different spider, where support lines have such tension they bend over a small branch. Yet another diff. one. Just liked the lighting/colors.

So the 4th one is out....has there any word on whether there will be more, and/or more patches? If not, it may be time for me to patch up, get the last couple DLC's and play the game again soon...maybe in Oct.

Still Darkstone a couple hours a day. Still rather fun re-living it again. I'd like to play/try Two World II, but so far I haven't found a PC version in a retail outlet. I could do the Steam thing but as usual I'd rather not.

If I do editing it's always in the first few seconds of hitting "post." Usually from typos or wanting to clarify a sentence or two. The time limit was implemented a while back....I can see how it'd be bothersome if you're trying to edit the first post of some info/link thread I guess, but generally not an issue here.

Don't know about Dilbert (never read that much) but that sure makes me think of ST:TNG. Worf: "Captain Picard, the warp engines are down, the Klingons are powering up their phasers and the Borg are on their way!" (long pause) Picard: "Ready room, meeting."

I think spoof would apply, altho some might prefer to call them satirical farces/parodies, perhaps. I'd also disagree that Blazing Saddles didn't parody known films. High Noon was a big one, where they even recreated the church scene, among other films & references. Even the famous 'we don't need no stinkin badges' line is a reference to Sierra Madre I think. It's just that Blazing Saddles wasn't parodying only one film, and did have more generalistic parody as well as the specific, and the way the parody was done made it still resonate to those who hadn't seen specific films being referenced.

No idea. Yeah, ditto, which is why I was surprised I laughed. Like I said - not saying it was good in general...just some of the jokes resonated with me re: the absurdity of Twilight films. Airplane - just the first one - was one of the few that I really liked back then...and I hadn't even seen the Airport films. And some of Mel Brooks stuff is fitfully amusing. Most of the time I don't bother watching such movies tho. Judging from the film, I'd say the makers of the spoof had at least seen the first one. It was made a couple years after I think.

Spider caught a honeybee. Luxury meal. But I was slightly sad since there aren't many bees around here anymore. Time for some din-din.

Vampires Suck - any movie that makes fun of the Twilight series is all right in my book...don't get me wrong, it's stupid & inane like you'd expect from such a film, but I LOL'd several times in spite of myself.

*waves at tarna* ... hope you're feeling better now that you're back home. It's the time of year when orb weavers take over our backyard. They're everywhere, like Kingdom of the Spiders, big webs between house and fences, in the bushes/trees etc. Great fun for me tho.

I'd hazard the guess that many are becoming used to the way MMORPG's work and thus come to expect that sort of formula in 'rpg's.'

Oh yeah...I forgot about bullets in New Vegas. Never did that either. Since the regular bullets still killed everything just fine/with relative ease, I had no incentive to craft those in NV either.

I KILLED SANTA...but it was self-defense, I swear. MONEY.

Today is the 4th day I've been able to get 3 hours of sleep all in a row. Which is an improvement from an hour. Makes me happy. I really really need more uninterrupted sleep. Heh. Currently making some noodles for lunch, then it'll be errand time. Can't believe it's Sept. already. We had thunder and a brief rain shower here already. Weather is so kooky now.

Still Darkstone. Thanks to a blog article on the topic, I was able to get it to run on the Win7 pc, which is nice. Had to use WinXP compatibility, not Win98, to make the TCP/IP play work tho (for solo, not actual mp-lan - it's good for muling, haha). Been long enough I guess that it's been fun trying to get all 4 chr. classes to into Legend difficulty. The first couple difficulties are fast/not hard to achieve, but it'll be a while before I have the 4 anywhere like I had them years ago. Can't wait to have my Thief running around invisible in Legend, trying to steal things off of all the monsters that can kill me in 1 hit. Good times. :D

Problem with that statement is it shows how subjective fun is - there are lots of people who find crafting (and all that time spent) fun, as well as many who dislike it. So I don't have a problem with crafting being an option in the game as long as it's not absolutely needed to win the game...that is, finding a few pieces of something to put together to create a one-item at the endgame to defeat the boss is fine, but imo things like alchemy, campfire crafting, special weapons etc. should be optional. And if they are optional, and one doesn't like it, well, don't do it. Yeah, same here. For me it really just depends on the game. I remember in Morrowind (and in Might & Magic rpg's) I was all about the alchemy. For some reason I loved it - the way it was done and - also important - a feeling of being fairly clear what the results of such crafting efforts were going to be. But in Diablo2 (both in single-player & online since it was mostly the same) I didn't like crafting very much until they had all the recipes on a website so I could see what I liked and had to look for/do. I'm not personally into games telling you "here's a cube, put stuff in it & figure out what you can do with it" by months of random testing. I need a little more clear instructions than that to keep it from becoming insanely tedious/pointless. In New Vegas, the cooking stuff...I never felt any incentive to even bother with it. The stuff you could make had nothing to do with how I personally like to play the game, thus didn't seem worth the trouble. I was already a "powerhouse" without crafting & didn't care about poisons or extra food or explosives etc. so it gave me no personally desired advantage to pick it over something else. But I can see if you did like those things, it could be an interesting way to add a different dimension to a playthrough. But I certainly don't think a rpg has to have crafting in order to be a rpg/a fun rpg.

Usually most games I'd be interested in on GoG are ones that still work for me on the XP machine. But saw DK2 was on GoG & became almost excited, since my old CD of that game seems to be busted (or Xp-sp3 doesn't like it, or something, dunno). Then I read all the reviews/gog's forum about how broken their DK2 port to Win7 was. Guess I'll wait a bit. Maybe I can get the CD to work again... In the meantime, I occasionally feed my virtual cat. But going through a box of all the nice paper book game manuals I have in storage (remember those?) made me install a few oldies tho, so think tonight I'm going to fire up some Darkstone. I don't know why I liked that terrible-graphics Diablo-clone so much, but I did (the Monk & Wizard were such an awesome duo).

So? Did anyone get into the beta? Impressions? I've been watching some of the gameplay vids of people who have, and it looks .... boring. I don't mean that in a sour grapes way, I know watching is nothing like playing. But I was hoping it'd be a bit more interesting to watch. Many of the outdoor environments look flat and dull for some reason, like muddy watercolors. Anyway, nothing special visually at least. Hope/expect the skills & combat are fun for all the fans who'll be buying it. ...I was highly amused, however, to hear DS3's Lucas' voice coming out of the male wizard's "mouth." (Crispin Freeman, who voiced Lucas, voices D3's m/Wizard, & he seems to still be in Lucas-mode ).

They admitted it was a hoax/experiment or whatever already. But for a short moment people did think Joaquin Phoenix was retiring/going off the deep end. I remember reading about it etc.