Naso

Yeah, HW2 wasn't revolutionary, but in terms of gameplay I'm not sure how much you can follow up on something like HW with major changes. It's fairly stable now at least, just some lockup issues with the server browser though. If they would have had a good story instead of that bizarre holy trinity of hyperspace cores craziness it would have been great. The design and the coolness still transcended that in parts though, like when you first encounter the keeper. That was as cool as the garden of kadesh, though mostly for the music and that eyeball looking prow. Multiplayer seems better differentiated in factions, though I'm not very good. Apparently a Vagyr BC if used very carefully can destroy a Higgy pretty fast.

Apparently being the source of all the table-scraps that pass for culture here in the US isn't something, eh?

Man, this is nothing..... You ever seen the Homeworld 2 boards? Now *that* is off-topic at its finest.

An nVidia color etch-a-sketch

Well maybe I'll get to check out my friend's compy sometime, but my tech readout is in that bioware thread I linked to, and I have no stability issues. The only regular crash aside from KotOR is that browser bug in Homeworld 2 they never fixed because Sierra died. I think Far Cry crashed once. It also had an ocassional problem clearing objects in the River level when reloading, though nothing crash-worthy. Doom 3 maybe once or twice, and I fooled with it a lot. UT2k4, never had the slightest problem with, except for one mod that never really worked. Can't think of anything else that's had problems.

Oh come on, people go into business as a hobby sometimes. It's fun with a little money on the side "

The team commands are good, judging from the movies; just looks like everyone stands around shooting each other in the face though until something keels over, at least looking at the video with the battle droids and the droid dispenser... I suppose there's also the issue of how much that sort of context-sensitive command system ends up just playing the game for you.

I got my card like a year and a half ago or so, I think. I should have waited a couple months because the 9800 dropped in price, but can't really predict. My compy's majorly cpu limited now, since it's a p4 1.6, so upgrades are kinda out now unless I'm going to gut the whole thing, and not really qualified for that..... I'm a classics major looking at 6-7 years of grad school after this year, so not like I can take out a loan against my gigantic behemoth teaching salary either

HA!

You give a cut for the help?

Original was easy, and it's bad if this one's easier, but that's an exaggeration. I guess if you spam wave or something, then yeah, but otherwise definitely not for a consular, esp. light side.

Suprised anyone who did return it is here at all

Tyan 9600 Pro. Quite supported. I'm sorry I can't afford new hardware. This was the best I could get a while back, saving most of my money for grad school. Somehow, I don't think that means I shouldn't be able to play allegedly supported games...... http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/tyan_t...iew/default.asp My friend's got a laptop with some ATI mobile thing, also supported, I believe. It still doesn't work for him. Anyway, hopefully what Akari said will pan out and it'll be ok for ATI cards this time around at least.

I'm not exaggerating. My computer is fine, btw. I have no similar problems with other games. What do you mean by buggy copy? Perhaps you were just very lucky.

I have always said that their design for games was really good. That's not what we were talking about here. I enjoyed NWN, despite hacking through zillions of 2 xp goblins. I think it could have been better if they'd not used the very generic hub and spokes system for structuring their campaigns, but I like the games quite a lot nevertheless. Their bugginess is an entirely different matter. I bought KotOR partly thinking about the continued support NWN has received, but KotOR's being so broken has now wrecked that trust.

Ok, passing over the memory leak and other things, the ATI situation. It is not entirely credible to me that ATI simply had a flaw in their drivers which didn't cause other games to crash and perform that badly. We're not talking about simply crashes to desktops, or full lock-ups, but attrocious performance indicating at best under-optimized code, and the whole gammut of crashing problems. You can say it's all ATI's fault, but they regularly released drivers and responded with fixes to many other games much less popular than KotOR. They were very responsive with drivers and fixes in the timeframe I'm talking about. Other games had random problems here and there. They were fixed. ATI would not have waited, what was it, a year, to release a fix for something like that if the fault were wholly on their end.

Well, I already spent a long time digging through the forums trying to find a fix so my friend could run the damn thing, so if you want it all in triplicate, I'm too lazy, but here's a bit of it. This is a thread I started to see if I missed anything after ceasing to visit those forums for a while, and it has a link to *ONE* of the threads documenting the memory leak in the 1.03 patch. Note the bizarre defense of the catlyst 3.8 as if it were somehow god's gift to drivers.... That was pretty weird.. http://swforums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html...Acknowledgement

A whole tech support forum of people who tried to get help to play the game and gave up is more than 5.... I didn't get the game right away, but the bioware people were not exactly friendly and stopped saying anything about the time the 1.03 patch came out with a memory leak, which was clearly documented by multiple users. That's the part that sticks with me the most at the moment......

After the NWN OC, the promises of a real story kind of made me run hopefully to the store, despite skepticism, because there was a lot of good in the game design.

Whether you subscribe to the LA supressing patches or not, the reaction bioware gave to the problems with KotOR showed they didn't have much interest simply helping people play the damn game they bought. That shows us what to expect, especially from such a "great" dev on such projects as this. That's why I care.

I somehow doubt that KotOR was developed using the Catalyst 4.12 code...... What is this mystery function that they used that was pulled from the lineup? Why didn't they simply say what it was? Why did they deny well documented memory leaks? Why didn't they simply say something aside from "the game is perfect. get off my lawn"? I'm willing to make allowances for rule-set breaks in NWN, just the frequency of it, and how they repeatedly break the same things, ruin things that are working, etc, is a bit funny and indicative of their rather addled coding and bad qa.

They are still patching NWN because they are still trying to get money out of it. They WERE still patching it because they WERE still hoping to get money out of it as they worked on expansions. If it were an unexpandable game that didn't have the potential to sell more after the initial purchase, I think things would have been far different. I never said NWN killed my computer or that it didn't work. I've had some glitches, nothing game-stopping. I'm somewhat amazed to see all of the basic things fixe and re-broken throughout it's various patches though. KotOR does not work properly on many allegedly supported computers. My buddy got it for a gift and it's past the time he can return it, and it doesn't work at all for him. He can't play 10 minutes without it completely locking up his computer. Tech support doesn't care. The new drivers finally make it work for me, and you can say it was ATI's fault, but considering their past track-record with fixing things quickly, I cannot believe it is nearly so cut and dried and that they would ignore such a high-profile product. When we see the performance issues bioware has with engines, I'm guessing ATI had to do some funny stuff to work around it because bioware wouldn't. That's not proven, but that's my interpretation. NWN was my first bioware game, so I can't really say about before then, but judged on what they're doing now, it's quite buggy. [insert arbitrary statement here] and therefore your opinion is moot.

Man, return it quick while you still can. They won't recall it and they can't fix it.

Is MoO3 really fixable with a patch? It sounds like just an interface and spreadsheet with no actual game. Why was it allowed to be released? Having been released I'm not sure there's anything that can be done though... What's up with the Temple of Evil? Could it be that Atari gives too free a reign to devs so that, like with Epic, they do a good job, and with those,they don't, and Atari simply doesn't take enough control, unlike the opposite LA? I think NWN only gets support because they're trying to milk it to death with their little online module store. If you took that away, buggyware wouldn't give a ****.....

And that is why they can keep releasing piece of **** non-functional products. Of course the fanbase of 13 year olds who don't know any better and adults who'll drop 50 dollars to get the right arm of a luke skywalker action figure will buy it no matter what.