LadyCrimson

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.

Oh goody, a DLC with what seems to be a fair amount of content (for a DLC). I'm happy now.

Been sick a while, on the road to better. It's been 3+ years since we moved into this house I'm in another period of tossing old stuff away. Reams and reams of stuff. Even the old NES. Never play the thing, but I just haven't been able to toss it until now.

Rubber - a very very strange movie about a tire that gains sentience & rolls around exploding ppl's heads via "mind power." I liked it for about 60 minutes & the cinematography was actually pretty cool, but it gets old by the end. True Grit - never saw the original film. Kinda slow, kinda lyrical, some nice moments. Didn't really grip me much, but beautiful scenery. Plus I got to say "Is that Barry Pepper?" Wrecked - Adrian Brody really knows how to pick bad movies to be in, lately. Arctic Blast - lowish budget 'end of the world' movie...cross between ID4 & Day After Tomorrow, only instead of advancing alien spaceship shadows you have ... a deadly creeping ice fog via a hole in the ozone. Acting tolerable and at least at 2am, mildly entertaining in that bad-movie kind of way. Michael Shanks from SG-1 is the male lead. Collapse - documentary consisting of Michael Ruppert yakking for 80 minutes about how farked up the world will be when oil runs out. Stuff like that. Interesting topic imo but the guy's a serious doomsayer nut. I liked his line about crop seeds becoming a new currency in the face of starvation & economic collapse, tho. The New Daughter - Horror/thriller movie about a father who's daughter starts acting weird. Kevin Coster needed a paycheck I guess. I'm Still Here - I couldn't sit through more than 15-20 minutes.

I do that all the time. I walked around the BG1 maps from side to side, one screen width at a time until all the shroud was gone. It's worse in RTS games where you usually have a minimap staring at your the whole time making it harder to ignore. I did that too. Couldn't stand seeing any of that 'black fog' left on my screen.

Oh ok, lol. There were plenty of fake trailers for The Thing-prequel too, so...

I'm going to agree with this. They change minor things of course, like skill & loot systems, but as much as I have loved hack n slash games in the past, anything gets old when it's basically the same game over & over again. I liked Torchlight well enough, but I didn't play it very long because...well...I'd done it before. Obviously if the maps and combat and all of that are still awesome, it'd still be fun to play for a while, but....I'd rather they have created a hack slash game that was at least set in a new "world" rather than that of Diablo again. Guess that's why, even tho a part of me was looking forward to D3, another part was thinking "meh don't care." It's a strange feeling.

Yeah...you have to try one of those at least once in your life. I have to stay away from those just because I'd eat too many...

This is the trailer I saw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg9laXAH-lk It's on imdb too.

I don't think I'd say D3 looks the same or better as TQ, but it does constantly remind me of TQ graphically. That is, when I watched all those early vids they kept releasing, my mind kept thinking "TQ." I'm not sure exactly why. It's not just the shared 'top down" 3D viewpoint thingie either - many games that remind me nothing of each other have that...but something about TQ & D3 specifically reminds me a lot of each other. At least in the videos.

Hikaru no Go. Can't believe an anime about the board game of Go could be somehow so enthralling. And then eps. 60/61 had me bawling like a baby. Also, I saw a long trailer for the prequel film to The Thing. I wasn't impressed. The notion of making a film based around the team that actually digs up the "thing" in the ice isn't bad, but eh, I have doubts they pulled it off. Plus I'd personally be annoyed if they ignore certain continuity aspects related to the Carpenter film.

Silly as in exhibiting the traits of He-Man type trash fantasy? Yes. But agreed they're definitely a huge improvement over Oblivion.

Samurai Champloo (anime series) - so awesome. ....still tons of anime I don't like or don't "get", or at best give me 'take it or leave it' feelings, but the few series I discover that I do like, I like a lot.