legion

I voted Requiem. Honestly though, I'd be just as happy if Obsidian developed their own in house vampire centric IP. As long as it's gothically delicious, I'm sold. Barring that, however, I'd rather see them work on a NWN2 expansion before starting in on an all new DnD based game. In fact, beyond extended NWN2 support / expansions, I'd rather they stay away from DnD altogether for a few games.

I lost patience with the face gen in Oblivion long before I ever had the chance to master the damn thing. I always just end up hitting the random gen button a bunch of times now until I get something that doesn't make me cringe, then make a few minor tweaks to it, all the while hoping I don't screw it up. I really liked the idea of the facegen at first too. I figured the added variety would be great (and it is, I suppose), but I was also convinced Beth would at the very least offer a range of nice looking presets for each race, so you could quickly choose a good pre-generated face and just jump into the game without the hassle of fighting with the facegen for way the hell too long. Apparently that was too much to ask for, though. That said, some of the PC heads in NWN2 do look terrible. Fiddling around in the toolset, though, I've found that for most races, there's at least one decent looking head available. NPC heads seem to have received a bit more care, in any case. Most of them look better than their PC counterparts.

Not giving those damn dirty bums even a single gold is worth of a few good points. I mean, you're not enabling them to continue being bums anymore, after all. And as we all know, bumming leads to a sense of entitlement, which leads to thieving, and then, bam, ye olde bum robs the wrong person and gets himself killed. So really, you're doing the bum a favour by not giving him anything when he asks, and spitting on him on the way by for his trouble. The added adversity can only build character and will result in the bum picking himself up by the bootstraps and putting his life back together. Kreia told me so! And Kreia logic surely holds as true in Faerun as it does in a galaxy far, far away

Grim Fandango being as high as it is on the list gets my seal of approval. Harkens back to a time when LucasArts didn't suck quite so hard, and adventure games were... well, they were still on the decline, but they weren't entirely dead yet, at least

Woo! Only two more weeks till I get to put my evil warlock face on :D Here's a question, though: Will the game simply start shipping to stores on the 31st, or is it expected to be available on the shelves by that date? I have the 31st off work, so I'm hoping there's a chance it'll actually be available, but either way, I'm just happy it's gold.

Fighting Fantasy? Check! Lone Wolf? Double check! And digging through boxes in my closet, I've unearthed yet more branching adventure books from my misspent youth. Back on topic though, I hope you can choose to side with some of NWN2's villains. I hate playing an evil character that's forced to play the saviour to one and all.

Reminds me of the Fighting Fantasy books I used to read years (and years... and years) back. They were a lot like a choose your own adventure style book (branching story) with basic stats and inventory thrown in for good measure. Neat system, from what I remember, coupled with some very generic fantasy writing.

10-15% must be a much lower performance hit than it sounds, since I've not noticed a visible framerate drop in any of the games I've reinstalled since throwing Vista on to my rig. I suppose if a game was already chugging along with framerate issues in XP, the extra hit would be painful, but as it is, I'm pretty happy with Vista's performance.

Party control is certainly going to be a step up from the henchman system in the original, but as I understand it, you still don't get absolute control of your companions. You do get to fully control their actions in battle and the like, but when it comes time to level, they'll choose which class to level themselves, albeit with some input from your character if you've built up enough trust / influence with that particular companion. Seems reasonable to me, as long as they tend to stick with their original class throughout the game (unless you nudge them along a different path intentionally), so I don't end up with some gimped multi-class abomination cluttering up the party slot where my healer should be.

It's from a Planescape trilogy of mods in the works by Rogue Dao Studios, and it looks amazing. A pair of interviews at Warcry (here and here) with them has a few embedded shots of Sigil and a few other things they've whipped up in the toolset. Looks to be an extremely ambitious set of mods, to say the least.

I've started playing Mage Knight Apocalypse, and while it seems to have a lot of potential (playing dress up with the vamp chick and her skimpy outfits, for example ), interface issues are really starting to piss me off. First, having to screw around with ini files (then never touching the option menu in game, lest my tweaks disappear) just to get an acceptable resolution (1360x768 is the only widescreen res by default, so I had to trick the game into displaying 1920x1080) was a pain. Then, realising that a large portion of the controls can't be remapped (camera control, in particular) made running around in the game more aggravating than it should be. Throw in a clunky interface and you end up with a game that really should have had more dev time put in before going gold. I'm hoping some of the issues get sorted out in upcoming patches, since I know there's fun to be had with the game. I can feeeeeel it. Until then, though, I see myself spending more time with the NWN2 toolset than I do playing MKA.

Just browse to the folder you installed the toolset to (by default, it's "C:\Program Files\Atari\Neverwinter Nights 2 Presale-Toolset\"), then open the "Documentation" folder. You'll find the tutorial docs in there.

Hmmm, there seems to be some spastic Vista compatibility issues going on with the toolset; or rather, Vista's aeroglass theme / toolset issues. With all of Vista's new ui visual effects enabled, the toolset goes into a confused loop whenever an expandable menu is selected, and a trio of new processes show up on the task bar. Hovering the mouse over the task bar entries for the new windows seems to indicate that they're separate tasks for the menu's shadow. Very strange. Thankfully, turning off Vista's ui visual effects fixes the problem. It's not an ideal solution, mind you, but I've been too busy screwing around with the toolset to pin down exactly which visual effect is to blame (although I suspect drop shadows are the main culprit). Once I figure it out though, I don't imagine I'll have to turn off aeroglass completely; just the offending visual effects. So, if any other Vista users are having similar compatibility problems, toggling between themes (Vista and Classic) is a decent temporary solution. Then once the problematic visual effects are pinned down, toggling just those effects on and off. Edit: It seems "enable desktop composition" is to blame, which is kind of a shame, since I'd rather just lose menu shadows than the grouping of features under the desktop composition umbrella. Oh well. It's still better to only have to toggle a single feature rather than losing the Vista theme entirely.

Neverwinter Nights 2 music, by whoever the hell composed this wonderfully orchestral soundtrack.

30 KB/s makes me sad. So very, very sad. Download faster, you damn, dirty toolset! Regardless of how long it takes, I'm pretty excited to see what the toolset's like. I haven't done any real modding since I cranked out a series of mods for Morrowind, and that was great fun, so I'm itching to get back into the modding groove with NWN2.

It was my understanding that the sun would go through a red giant phase first, engulfing Earth's orbit and roasting us all to tasty perfection, then finally peter out as a white dwarf.

Hmmm, that's an interesting point. I've had no ill effects so far, but the potential for screen damage from heat might be something worth looking into. The 7800 does produce a lot of heat, after all, but I'd think the laptop would overheat causing a lock-up / shutdown well before LCD damage would become an issue. So, all in all, I still feel safe saying you're unlikely to have any short term ill-effects, but when it comes to long term, cumulative damage... *shrugs* ...can't really say. I hope not though, since I still plan on using my laptop with the lid shut. Edit: And as a note, I don't actually have the laptop hooked up to my main LCD anymore, since I rarely use it for gaming. I simply set tasks up (start encoding or listening to music, burning a disc, etc), close the lid and let it do its thing. I can't remember if I've ever actually run an external display with the lid shut, in fact. I just assumed that since the laptop doesn't go into sleep mode and keeps working, the external display would keep working too, but now that I think about it, I'm not so sure. Testing must be done, says I.

As meta said, there shouldn't be a problem gaming with your laptop lid closed. And more specifically, since my XPS is the same M1710 model as yours (won via a Dell / Fox / X-Men contest, woo!), I can confirm that I've never had any issues using it with the lid closed (as long as you don't have windows set to power down or anything upon closure, of course ). The main heat vents are on the back / sides of the unit anyway, so while some heat bleeds through the keyboard (especially while gaming), having the lid shut doesn't really limit airflow that much.

My Antec case is pretty basic looking, but it gets the job done, and it's the nuts and bolts inside that count anyway (Athlon X2 3800+, 2 GB Ram, GeForce 7800 GT, and a glut of fans). Plus, now that I've cleaned the two intake fan grills, it gets the job done without being so damn dusty My Dell XPS laptop (sitting under the keyboard) has a lot more flash (blinking coloured lights and the like), but I always have them turned off to limit battery drain. Plus, I think the lights look retarded on a laptop anyway.

While I certainly miss the Masquerade, I really like the new Requiem setting too, so I'd love to see a new Vampire game based on the nWOD. The setting's hardly lacking, except when it comes to meta-plot, and that's not really a bad thing, in my view. It leaves the door wide open for a good dev to make the most of the setting, since there's plenty of interesting background info on covenants, clans, locations, etc to draw from without being bogged down with too much binding meta-plot. Plus, with how open to interpretation much of the background info is, a good dev would have a lot of leeway to craft their own unique version of the nWOD... at which point they might be better off just writing their own vampire centric setting rather than buying White Wolf's, mind you, but that's neither here nor there

Summoning - Land of the Dead Eerie, atmospheric metal at its best. And the fact that it's Tolkien inspired doesn't hurt either.

Toronto native, here. Not the nicest part of Canada, admittedly, but I like it. I've been here my whole life though, so I'm thinking it's time for a change of scenery. Now, if only I could find a way to smuggle myself over to some European country or other, I'd be set!

The last movie I saw was Serenity, after watching the entire run of Firefly, and both are still great after multiple viewings. It's a damn shame Serenity did so poorly at the box office, since I imagine that was the last nail in the Firefly coffin, and I'd dearly love to see more content set in that universe. Next up, I think I'll watch V for Vendetta. I missed it in the theatre, so I'm anxious to see it now that it's on DVD. Hopefully it's as good as I've heard it was.

Here's a semi-recent pic of me, terrible quality shot though it may be: Oh, and since I missed the tattoo thread before it went belly up, here's a shot of my rib tat.

Found it while digging around on deviantART. That place is a virtual treasure trove of cool artwork. I'm on a 37" Westinghouse monitor now, actually. The Dell 2407 was just too damn small for my poor old eyes