Tigranes

There's one guy who had a series of pretty good, if short, modules - Adam something, was it? One of them was Dark Waters. Also there's Lute Hero, I don't know if it ever got released, but it was hilarious: There were a few other decent ones. But I don't know, I think the sheer size of the modding community was a major achievement, there were a few accomplished mods, but I think for the most part the NWN mods were great at gameplay additions, new models, textures, extending engine capabilities, etc. Mods with good writing, plot and well-constructed experiences? No, not much at all, you're much better off looking at the BG2 scene for that. Seems to be the same with Morrowind & Oblivion, actually, this trend.

Never played the HoMMs but KB might make me check this oneo ut. Game looks very post-WoW, but meh, that's not a big deal.

Finally finished the BG1-2-TOB megarun a few days ago, the Longer Road mod (Irenicus redemption) made the last part a bit more interesting... sadly, BG mods are cursed by one of two things when it comes to writing: either it's utterly, utterly bollocks, or it's not bad but the writer becomes self-indulgent and every bloody conversation is a medieval treatise. This one's the latter, if you watched the characters spout their lines in real time it would have looked like a series of shakespearean monologues. Bought & Playing Victoria 2 now, it's great. There're some kinks as usual - self-destructive factories that make for endless cycles of bankrupt capitalists, for instance - but it is very fun and I think Paradox did a good job again. Nearly done with a full 100 year game of the Netherlands where I took them up as one of the powers, maybe I'll try Korea or something next.

We'll see how that goes. The media about the game gives me a very 'we like cinematic set pieces' kind of vibe, which might mean levels broken up into little chunks mediated through 'cool badass' cutscenes..

You know, everything I see about DX3's gameplay screams the cooler, slicker brother of Alpha Protocol. I mean, yeah, yeah, AP was inspired by original DX, etc, etc, but I'm just thinking it's interesting how they're doing similar things in a lot of places, but the presentation will probably help DX3's one feel more 'cooler' and 'better'. I mean, look, he basically has Shadow Operative, and then a bunch of magical nano abilities more wacky than anything in AP. But it's ok because (a) there's the technology explanation, but more importantly, (b) they worked hard to make him look badass. Anyway, looking pretty good so far, I like the stuff they're doing with the lighting.

Gah, I'm trying to UNINSTALL empire total war and Steam is taking 20 minutes to open itself (why does it need to open in the first place?!). I'm seriously wondering whether Civ 5 and F:NV are worth putting up with this bull****. come on Obsidian, non-Steam won't kill you. Anyway, I'm sure the game will be about as buggy as FO3 was - which, to me and I think most people, was not very.

Fast Food is a weird one. America had some terrible fast food, I think chic fil a was the only barely-tolerable, yet in New Zealand even McDonalds tastes alright. Korean fast food is great as well, possibly because of the massive competition between domestic and foreign brands. You get all kinds of totally weird items that sound like nightmares but are somehow popular. Anyway, I'm still looking up UK universities and think Sussex sounds quite nice. How it is to live, I don't know? I'm going to end up making at least a dozen applications so here's hoping there's at least one. The bloody scholarship office in my own university gave me a helpful "try Google" when I asked about funding myself. Seriously. You'd think bureaucracy wouldn't be that stupid in such a small country. You folks in UK, do you travel to Europe often? Is it still a hassle money/logistics wise or is it really quite easy by now?

I can't believe the amount of attention we keep giving Irrational. I couldn't be less interested in their milking a single shooter model for years. (+XCOM)... ah well. Good on them for getting themselves set up strongly, though. Trying the Victoria 2 demo and it looks quite good, though I imagine it'll take me a good while longer until I 'get' the game. The UI is the best I have seen in any Paradox game, finally one that looks nice, feels nice, shows all the info, and cross-indexes everything. The trade screen and a few others could be better, but well done. Also seems to run well and I like the abundance of pop-up events. I think I will end up getting this.

Hero's definitely been Americanised, I don't care too much though. This is definitely on my list, though I'll probably wait for the mkreku seal of approval.

Storytelling will make and break, it sounds like. They're putting a lot of effort on it and changing a lot of things, if the C&C, plot and character development holds up it could be a very enjoyable experience despite the apparent butchering of gameplay. We'll see. This certainly sounds nice, hope D3 makes this a staple.

Depends on what kind of fix you want. You have some awesome adventure games there, start with BG&E if you want some action gameplay with the story, or TLJ if you want a more puzzly kind. That should set you right up for Sanitarium and Grim Fandango, which are a bit less user friendly but awesome nonetheless. I couldn't see the big deal for Okami myself due to the platform gameplay, but it is beautiful. If you want an RPG, well, Mask of the Betrayer is awesome, but gameplay isn't so great, just decent. If you haven't played Gothic or Risen difficult curve will be high, but put time into Gothic and it will reward you. Thief:DS is good. If you liked Thief 1 & 2, you will like it, even if it suffers from smaller levels and such. Don't know about the rest. If you want simple picks, well, adventure - start with TLJ, RPG - MOTB, otherwise Thief.

Paradox's Victoria 2 Demo Out, game also out 13th I'm wondering whether to get the game, I love EU but never tried HOI due to the scary UI (I have pretty high tolerance for games that look like accountants' workbooks, but that stuff is for wargamers) and the fact that I hate the time period. But I love the Victoria period! I just never got around to the first one. Gorth? Anybody who can sell me this one? I'm short on bandwidth but I might get the demo.

That's... exactly what people care about when they like/don't like gameplay changes.

The return of Marcus - awesome. I think it's canon, as well, i.e. he is expected to live that long? I'm sure it wont' be as.. weird... as Harold the Tree. Got to say, though, the original Marcus talking head looks far better than anything they could do with 3D.

Got Nameless One after 20, Arsene Wenger very quickly, Michel Foucault fairly quickly. When it does poorly it's probably because of a lack of information on that person or similar people.

It's not fixing, it's the fact that they feel it's more cost effective to make the game look good from KOTOR camera and then, as an afterthought, put in camera options as far as that policy allows. It's a repriotisation where they say people who play close up are more important - I suppose because research would have shown that the majority of their audience (console, obviously) did it that way.

If it's the retail version it doesn't have to use Steam. You say the game was okay a couple of weeks ago, though, and the error you get is a generic crash rather than a game-specific error... hard to pin it down in that case, my best guess is some kind of issue with shared .dlls or MS runtime libraries/etc, as I mentioned above. Maybe wait for the patch which is in development, a reformat or replace discs, but none of those are very fast solutions...

No idea why it would suddenly change... do you have Steam version, by the way, and if so, have you tried reinstalling steam and/or doing the steam file integrity check? It might also be related to the runtime error, for which there have been some solutions, though you're getting a generic error...

I've been really looking forward to this and pre-ordering at some point, but from what I hear, they're launching with a full, bloated series of exclusive DLCs, which is really putting me off. There seems to be something like 3 or 4, if not more, 'special content' packages (maps / civs?) that are each exclusive to certain retailers, and there also seems to be a Day One DLC that is free with some packages, if not others. So what does this mean? We're getting further fragmentation of the product into various packages and bonuses and specials and deals, but the problem is, there seems to be no one package available - not even the massive special collector's edition - that has it all. And if your region offers package A, will you be able to get the stuff on package B without buying the game a bloody second time? I'm not clear on all details yet so wait and see, but screw that - right now my thinking is I'll get the regular edition. I'm sure I might enjoy some of the bonuses that are offered, but that's the thing. The whole business model is about roping you in to a market where rules of exclusivity and distribution ensure that you don't have the intiative in what you buy, you sit there and wait for whatever packaged offerings emerge. It's a system that disadvantages the customer and pretty much seduces them into being hooked on micro-payment packets. No thanks - I'll be much happier not giving a crap about the whole menagerie and buy, you know, a bloody game, which I buy, then play. Shopping for micropayment crap is not my idea of fun. And people weren't worried about DLCs or DRM a couple of years ago, yeah? It's amazing how "it's not that bad" leads into a slippery slope and the market transforms so quickly to extract money from you. (Sure someone will say "dont like it dont buy it", but I prefer to think that at least some of us can grasp the concept of market contexts and commodity situations...) As long as the regular game by itself hasn't been crippled, it's still a good buy. We'll see how it turns out, but they're definitely upping the ante here with money money money.

Races look fine, pity Bio had to reach with the stupid slogan - come on, no one's to blame but themselves with any ridicule they get from this. On top-down: Maybe that's the reason they're making everything Mass Effect? Pity.

Just saw it. I'm pretty walled off from movie critiques, amateur or professional, at the moment so I've only read responses here, but I can definitely say it's a very very good movie that I don't mind giving thumbs up to. That's because I liked how it knew what it was and what it wanted to do, and did it with confidence, polish and style. It was an exciting action thriller of a movie that also, on multiple levels, wanted to provoke thinking about a single concept, and it did it well. It didn't end up taking itself too seriously and going over the top like the Matrix series did, and it blended the two halves of its being seamlessly. I think Hildegard's explanation is quite good, actually - while watching I didn't really consider the meta-aspect and focused on the narrative, but Nolan/DiCaprio's comments that he cites are persuasive. I think there's an inherent danger in the method of examining the movie's elements for evidence of the reality of the verisimilitude as a whole, though: Deraldin's point about the ledges is the most blatant. If you are going to examine the movie in that 'meta' sense, and look at the meaning of a text as a film as well as the text as a verisimilitude, then you have to accept the practical imperatives of film production as well. This applies more to the OP's thoughts, but things like the fact that the movie's cuts never show Cobb & co. get from place to place - well if it did, it would be a very boring film (unless you happen to be used to the pacing of early century cinema). Possibly there are junctures at which the logic of the film as a produced text and the logic of the text as an exploration of reality did intersect, i.e. the converging walls in Mombassa. It's difficult to figure out: Saito's comment about buying the airline could either be an Ocean's 13 tribute moment of flair, a proof of the tendrils of dreamlogic in action, or both. In the end, I'm not sure about the fact that the entire movie is meant to be seen as a dream: what I think is most likely is that first, there is a movie narrative where there is a reality and then there is dreams; and then, Nolan continues to manipulate his text for the purposes of his message and theme by creating a set of moments that provoke the verisimilitude of the movie's reality (the most obvious being the ending, in case someone missed all the other ones). Simply put, the distinction between reality and dream within the movie-world is very distinct: the distinction between reality and dream of the text as a whole is not. What does this mean? I think it makes it even more interesting, actually. This is I think the key difference between the suggestion of the original Matrix, which was, basically, "the world you live in NOW could be fake". DiCaprio's emphatic and virtually unwavering belief in the reality of his own world, and the symbolic victory of that belief over Mal's doubts, establishes very clearly that the limbo simply cannot be reality, that in the movie-world there is a reality and there are dreams. It's nowhere as clear cut whether the movie as a whole is a dream. And that's because in the world we live in, there will always be ambiguity and doubt. To me this fact that reality/dream is clear cut within the movie, but doubtful outside, points to a somewhat different interpretation. To me, the film is a provocation about the power of ideas, and the subjective power they can exert over our minds on the very base levels of our (sub)consciousness. The film's central message is what DiCaprio repeats twice - ideas are like a virus. The film is saying that though the technology of inception is not real, our mind is subject to control and influence through ideas and thoughts: that we can be governed by prejudices, schemes of perception and regimes of truth that are so deeply ingrained in our consciousness it is almost impossible to determine their origins or distinguish whether they are 'ours'. We can see this in the way planted thoughts and experiences drive Fischer to an cathartic emotional experience, and the result of it is that his entire subjectivity has changed - different motivations, perceptions, plans, everything. One of the key things that grounded his entire person had been shifted, and that had changed his entire being - showing the degree of influence ideas can have on us. Certainly this is compatible with the 'cinematic experience / comment about cinema' interpretation, as well. This is too rambly, but it's late...

There was no problem with the fact that you could play a mage-fighter, the problem was that it could become hideously overpowered. Anyway, sure you could play vanilla BG on normal/core rules and just select all & click on enemy then watch them bump against each other. But the engine & general system it provides is far better suited to tactical play (which potential was then recognised & maximised by, what, 10 years of dedicated modding?)

I'm playing again now and I decided to try and shoot my pistol in bursts at low levels instead of going for critical hits like I normally do, and yeah - I can see what people mean, you do have a fair share of misses, enough to notice and get you in trouble. Obviously, the key point is that it's pretty dumb to go rat-tat-tat with your pistol at low levels under this kind of system, but yeah. Take out the hyperbole and I can understand the complaint - if not agree with it. That said, for me this is an awesome game. The only new CRPGs I've really enjoyed the last few years were Risen, TW and DAO, this is just as fun but more replayable - and I'd actually have bought DLC for once.

It's not. Eschalon's not meant to be anything innovative, it's meant to be a throwback to old school RPGs for people who wish there were games like that still being made. Which I thought was the point.