LadyCrimson

Yes, it upgrades your current installation and keeps your Favorites/they should not be lost. (Firefox upgrades do this as well) .... If you're paranoid, you can back up your IE Favorites. IIRC Favorites in XP should be located in Documents and Settings\(username)\Favorites (probably be a gold star next to it...) ... From all I've read you should probably try IE7+all it's possible security updates first and see if that's "good enough" vs. jumping directly to IE8, which is reputedly more bloated and other things. Re:Firefox: Downloading/installing Firefox does not interfere with or replace your current installation of or ability to use/upgrade IE & you can switch between either browser whenever you want (or run them both at the same time). So it's easy to just install and try it for comparison. If you decide you don't like it you can just go into Add/Remove programs and remove FF. FF may ask you, upon install, if you want to make it your 'default browser'. This means that anything that wants to open in a browser, FF will be the program that auto-opens/loads it (instead of IE). If you don't want this, you can say no, or change it later in the options menus. To get your IE Favorites into FF, you'd open FF, click File then choose Import, and wallah they're in FF. The basic settings/options menu stuff in Firefox is fairly straightforward. More complex preference configuration requires altering the About:config entries, which can seem intimidating at first glance...but it's also something you don't need to mess with just to use Firefox so if it's too scary don't worry about it.

Heh....it could be a little more, but yeah....if it's a general type suit (or whatever they call it) you don't usually get much from it because there are soooo many people involved. I get a lot of notices in the mail re:such mass suits...I always toss them in the trash. But maybe Calax's suit is something a bit different. Edit:$700+ isn't too bad. Usually it's more like $20-30. heheh

Ah, it's the Unreal engine. Yeah that explains it. A lot of those fixes I don't like mucking with - not important enough to me to be worth the trouble. If it doesn't work 'out of the box' or with a simple ini. file tweak I tend to leave it alone. Also, a lot of those solutions (on other site pages too) don't seem to apply in Win7/patched (eg the files they name aren't there...) I haven't played that many hours (just a few) but I'm already frustrated with Risen. I don't mind difficult games where I die a lot more than, say, the almost-never-die of Diablo style games, but my having to quick save every few minutes and reload fights almost constantly, because my apparently lame combat/clicking/timing skillz aren't adequate, is plain annoying. It does seem like a good game, I'm not knocking that...but too emotionally frustrating for me. I like to feel like I have at least a chance of success without having to rely on save/reloading at a constant pace. Ah well. Maybe if I try it again later it won't bug me as much then. Sometimes that happens.

Max Payne - zzzzzzzz. A Perfect Getaway - predictable & often dull thriller, but I didn't quite see the twist coming, so that made it memorable for me. Not enough for me to actually recommend it, but hey if you're super bored at 2am.... (TV series) The new Hawaii-5-0. - not impressed with either lead actor and the rest is zzzzz. It's pretty to look at, however. Detroit 1-8-7 - Good enough to keep me watching for a while. The main draw is Michael Imperioli as Finch. He & his character are fascinating. Sh*t My Dad Says - About what you'd expect. The lead young male is terrible. Shatner, however, is often amusing & only reason to watch. They picked a really good time slot for it, too. The Event - Definitely a Lost+24 combo. Too much rapid time-shifting with too many chrs/plots but that seems to be slowing down a bit now. Could settle into something decent, or just be a convoluted, irritating mess. Blue Bloods - one of the better of the new cop shows, imo. Feels a bit old school in production, vs. the fast pace/editing of recent shows. I hope it finds a good audience in it's terrible time slot.

Risen. Seems fun. Graphics question: even on 16AA there are clear hard jaggies on edges in the near distance. It's not even 'blurred jaggies' like I might expect from AA. Cliff rock face, palm tree frond, someone's sword, house plank edges. I noticed this in the Gothic4 demo too. It's not that it makes the game look terrible or anything, but the thing is, if I turn the AA to x2 it doesn't look much worse than on 16x. In other words, is the AA doing much of anything at all? heh Is this just a game engine thing ala Borderlands or one of those picky card issues? (I use nvidia)

It would definitely, imo, represent a "clear step up."

Watching the last Boston ballgame of the season, which always makes me a little sad. And...Go Giants!

I'm finding the combat in Risen kind of awkward, altho it didn't take me too long to become used to it enough to not die as much. But I don't like it when games have combat moves where the animation doesn't stop even when the creature dies, so my chr. is still flailing away for a few seconds over a corpse. Other than that, so far so good. Might be a little more rpg (talk talk talk talk) than I like these days but that's not a fault of the game, just me. Like the openness and that night lasts a really long time (dark! it's dark!) and can't wait to start mining ore!

Crystal Castles - Pap Smear ...someone linked to of some kid dancing in a Tokyo subway station to this song and the dancing was so 'music wants to make you dance' cool that I ended up liked the song by association. Sampling their other stuff via their MySpace page.

Is it just me, or does that look like actor Ed Harris? Too glow-shiny! Can you turn it off in Risen? I think I've tried every in-game setting, still there. Not even 50 paces from the beach edge where I began and....I is Fail.

Heh, I just bought Risen from BestBuy, for much the same reason. It's one I've looked at on the shelf for a while now, but couldn't decide. Why not.

I used to run across that bridge 20-30 times a day for crafting/AH selling reasons. lol You're supposed to be able to fly in the old areas with the new, right? That's admittedly a nice thing, if so. And the underwater stuff sounded cool.

That's a fun one to goof with either vampires or Horned Reapers. My faves in the campaign these days are 11, 17 & 18. The final level is pretty good too.

I played WoW obsessively for a long time and I always admit it. It's a good game if you like such games & have the time to devote to it. But for me at least, there's zero interest in it at this point. I respect that they keep trying to "freshen up" the game all these years, but nothing's bringing me back. Thrill is gone, baby. Will also probably try Old Republic. Undecided about it, but worth trying. The screenies look good, at least. heh

It's hard to find a good micro-bead pillow for sleeping use. I love them...next time I find one I like, I'm ordering 10. This week has been fairly busy during the daytimes but the evenings have been relaxing watching the new season tv shows & pleasant "Indian summer" weather. My sister-in-law finally found someone to rent their house here while they live up north a while. The interesting part is the renter is one of the people who lost their house in the San Bruno gas pipe explosion. Small world.

Yeah, no continuing storyline in DK1 at all, beyond in one's own head. What level are you on? There's a few in the campaign that have a lot of heroes/tunnelers vs enemy Keepers. The levels in Deeper Dungeons were more interesting/bit harder than the original campaign, imo. There's also a few DK1 campaigns made by ppl w/the editor but not sure how good they are. I only did the Ancient Keeper levels, which were more like elaborate & difficult puzzles than typical DK levels.

The readme says dual core 2.8ghz minimum so maybe that's part of the problem. I've seen posts of people using dual core 3.0ghz that say it runs ok. Yeah, I noticed that too.

See, I thought the Big Lebowski was the Big Bore. Different strokes and all that. Raising Arizona too...I never get why some think that one is so brilliant. I watched "The Invention of Lying." I found it very not-funny. Not in the 'this stinks" kind of way, but in a no-reaction at all kind of way. The very beginning was amusing & I loved that no-lying Coke commercial...and the general satire concepts re: religion made me giggle in spots. But mostly I sat and watched with no change of expression. The emotion it gave me was akin to the detached process of eating the same bag lunch at work for 20 years. 2 out of 5 stars.

It's not quite as good? DK2 is fun, but one of my big complaints was that the campaign was much more scripted. The feeling that I was carving out my dungeon each level & deciding for myself what to use and what not to use, was much less, except in Pet Dungeons. And even most of those tried to limit your building space in weird ways. The AI was even worse than in DK1, too, which I hardly thought possible. Oh yeah...also:no dragons. Salamanders...pffftt. I did like no lair enemies, wall 'furniture' aspect to room tiles, & all creatures taking up only 1 lair tile. You could make some wacky Pet Dungeons, especially after editing out certain annoyances like the very slow hatchery production.

I've read others complaining of higher non-US prices for some games (even before DD)...I thought some of that maybe had to do with international trading costs or other such considerations but that big a difference is a fair bit extreme...I'd be mad about that too. I understand they wouldn't like a price difference, since it means the boxed wouldn't sell since most would just go with cheaper. I still don't like it, because I think if it costs less to distribute, that savings should go to the consumer. I'm old fashioned that way. And of course if the entire industry does go entirely DD (no choice), where competing with itself in such a fashion wouldn't even be a factor, the pricing model should definitely change. At least in my "I'm no business expert" opinion.

I'm about to play a little of that right now! Was going to get that, but then realized/read that the patch that fixes scaling/adds clvls is independent of the DLC...so I think I'll wait for the patch before downloading the new stuff.

Blood Simple? Raising Arizona? Miller's Crossing? Barton Fink? Fargo? The Big Lebowski? Didn't like any of those? The thing about the Coen brothers, at least imo, is that they have these awesome settings/concepts with a warped/satirical sense of humor. They are kind of polarizing tho...many of their movies people either seem to love or hate (or at least dislike a lot) and I freely admit I'm not a huge fan of most of their movies. But there's always something in each movie that I absolutely love. So I respect them and am always curious about a new project. Fargo was their masterpiece, imo. No Country was entertaining/ok, mostly because of Javier Bardem. The rest had moments but weren't "whole successes".

For video games and perhaps movie rentals, I'd agree....as long as cable/network companies can/are willing to keep up (in a fairly timely & quality manner (severe throttling/compression isn't it) with the ever increasing bandwidth needs of a hugely growing download market, via expanding and also tearing down/rebuilding their infrastructures for everyone over time, as well as keeping their subscription prices low enough. I have my doubts on that, but as always, what do I know...we shall see. In terms of physical disc vs. digital...yup, pretty much what the others said. I obviously have little issue with GoG.com's DD model, but something like Steam I do have issues with. On the purely emotional side, while I understand not everyone has lots o' storage space, keeping/collecting boxes/discs/manuals/art for me was kind of like collecting old comics or books and emotionally, for people like myself, it's hard to let go of that. I imagine the day will come when comics are also all digital all the time, and (some) comic collectors may feel the same way. It's just not the same holding a memory stick in your hand.

I don't, and likely in my lifetime, can't, know the answer, so as far as that question goes, I have no belief. I need a decent amount of proof to believe in things like that, and there is none, so it's all sci-fi bedside stories or more scientific speculation, with nothing to believe in, yet. Also, similar to mrkreku, I don't feel a need/urge to have that question answered in order for life to have meaning or purpose or whatever, so I don't spend much time thinking about it in the first place. I leave it to the brainy scientists & forward thinkers (def. not me, har) to discover, predict & prove at some far future date, if they can. I believe in now, enjoying now, & doing what's required to have the means to enjoy the now in the ways that I wish - both the internal (personal survival/pleasures) and the external (helping others/surroundings). To me that's all there is, and that's all I need.

I'm a heathen. I bought Torment long ago - not when it 1st was released but a bit later. Unfortunately it was right during the period where I was getting burnt out on that style/appearance of RPG so I didn't get far before I decided I didn't like it. Still have my discs around somewhere tho, since it's one I keep thinking I'll try again "someday."