Tigranes

Right. Installing Win7 on Christmas, of all things - we'll see how it goes and if I can come back online.

Does not include the third xpack released last week, but is still a damn good game. Best simulation/strategy game of 14th-18th century Europe, period (unless one prefers EU2). Buggy and unfinished, but very fun. Extensive fanmade patches now available to eradicate nearly all bugs and performance issues. Worth a try. Is great, go play. I forgot about this, gonna see if it's anywhere else than Steam so I can buy it.

The sequel is absolutely amazing, though I'm not sure how you'd feel if you already played the first one. The gameplay was obviously nothing interesting, but at leasdt it didn't get in the way of the game, which was beautiful, had a great story and all. The ending was rubbish, of course, but that's really a different problem, i.e. Tornquist won't finish the bloody trilogy and would rather make a MMO. Good to see I got the right one, I'm downloading Sanitarium first but TLJ should be glorious.

Not sure how helpful my perspective would be given the age gap GD, but on the back of Hurlshot I'd say it does seem a bit too fancy. If you think she might be the sort to get the wrong message (i.e. 80% of all women), maybe hold on to it.

Yeah, I bought them all just now. Although I *think* TLJ is the one that I've already played? Is TLJ the sequel or the original? Ah. Pity, I hate Steam. I'll just have to wait.

I want some really old stuff, like a grand old Lucasarts / Sierra adventure games pack from the 80's.

Considering Sanitarium, The Longest Journey and Psychonauts, all for peanuts. Sanitarium definitely, not sure about the others.

No, I particularly enjoyed TrueNeutral's verdict on the movie and, having had low expectations for the movie before, hope to enjoy it a fair bit. 90%, obviously, refers to a ratio of obnoxiousness rather than a quantitative count?

It comes out in the ending, or it should, but the ending slides are quite bugged.

I might be in a situation to go see with the girlfriend sometime soon, so I just read this thread to see how it was. of course, 90% of it turned out to be stupid, cliche trolling from a predictable cast, so if the movie is any better I'll be happy.

Crap. With the amount of Korean things I use, that's a dealbreaker. Aren't 'Enterprise' or whatever higher up versions much more expensive? mkreku scared me

Aha, so this time Vince keeps his schedule, before the year's end. I still think releasing a combat demo, as opposed to a 'taste-it-all' demo, is going to result in a lot of misunderstanding, but I suppose he has his reasons, production-wise. It'll be something to get my teeth into over my annual leave, excellent.

"Wow, they put sex in here too"?

Yep. Just get something cheap, you wont' be able to tell much of a difference for your needs.

Dragon Age is built so that being forewarned and knowing how to take measures against threats really, significantly, greatly, makes things easier. The can be the difference between having half the party die in 5 seconds and getting it done with no sweat. Morrigan was alright up to the part where she starts going Fre-ends? Why, I've never had friends. 'tis a most curious thing! Won't you be my friend? *Smile* Gag.

Oh, I'm well aware that the process of dual-booting itself is not complicated. It's more of a general attitude thing for me, with computers. I know my way around and can fix most problems myself, but get lost when things get serious - so the best way to have a stress-free computer life, I've found, is to keep things simple. I might try dual-booting with XP if my Win7 setup seems to fail with older games, I guess. I'll do the upgrade around the 26th and let you guys know, I'm sure I'll break something or other.

Yes. Money, XP and area jumps are usually fine (though area jumps should be used with care when you're in the middle of a questline) - any scripting changes are bad. Party-based console commands are known to break the game very easily, even bringing up the party selection screen.

The combat summary posted in page 1 makes me think it's worth a play-through if I can snatch someone's PS3 at some point. I've been less interested with the series as time went by and the story and characters became more and more juvenile, but they're still very well made games from a gameplay perspective, and graphics / sound is fantastic, even if you want them to cut down on the anime.

Gorgon: yes, you'll need to dot hat every time to enter Orzammar. On the bright side, you can enter straight to the area you like without breaking the game most of the time, so it actually cuts down on loading. Yes, I think there is a general bug where dwarf origins can't enter Orzammar, and even if they cheat in, most of the dwarf-specific dialogue is gone. The final word will have to wait until Bio's had a chance to get another patch out the door, but so far their work in fixing game-breaking bugs is nonexistent.

Make sure 'open console' is still set to tilde or whwatever it was by default, and nothing else has been set to tilde.

Gorgon, I had the same problem. Enable the cheat console (I think its just -enabledeveloperconsole in the shortcut, check google), then use: ~ to open console "runscript zz_orz_debug" then enter a dialogue menu will open. use Area Jump to get into Orzammar Entrance -> Hall of Heroes, things will be fine from there and the quests will update properly. As for mods: "Circles_Be_Gone" removes the big fat circles beneath everyone, it can be confusing at first but you get used to it quickly. Purely personal preference. "ReduceStealCooldown" reducces cooldown on Steal to 1.5 seconds, which is useful if you just want to get it over with. I mean, it's not like there are penalties for multiple tries, except getting up a reputation as a thief. "No_Helmet_Hack" makes helmets invisible in the world, which is great for mages with their idiotic condom hat designs. "Bombs_Range_Extension" makes bombs throw longer; maybe a bit unbalanced, but I never understood why you could only throw something 0.5m ahead of you. Uploaded them here as one zip, as they're all tiny. Some of these may or may not be so happy with patches, though? These should be relatively innocuous, however. Dragon_Age.zip

I'm quite happy to fiddle with mods since 'official DLCs' are buggier than most mods out there anyway, and are liable to break the game. If you're not too fussed with some trial and error and looking under the hood to tweak bits, installing mods can really make each playthrough new. Of course, some games like NWN series struggled much more compared to, say, Morrowind / Oblivion.

Old news, isn't it? I don't see anything new, but I could be wrong. Been pulled away from DA by EU3, but I do want to go on with that solo game. I'm going to look around and see if there's anybody working on a mod to get rid of forced companions. I don't think there are too many places that force you to take a companion, though, after the Origins? I'll just leave them at the start of the area and ignore them, and

I'm not a fan of dual booting. I put down the cash for a pretty good laptop a year ago, but it's not going to be state-of-the-art and I like to maximise performance, HDD space, etc. and not make things needlessly complicated. In general it sounds like I won't see any noticeable performance decrease, and if my setup goes like deathdealer's I'll be able to play all the old games as well. Those are pretty important conditions for me, I don't mind having to turn off bells and whistles on the newest games but lag when accessing My Computer or running multiple tabs is a real pain... and of course the number of good games in the last decade is much higher than this decade. The main reason I was thinking of upgrading was because well, I'll be reformatting anyway, and while XP is still being supported you have to think it will now start fading away, and in general I think I'll start experiencing more issues with it being outdated in the years to come. You have to make the jump sometime, I'm just glad XP served so well past the pit of goat dung that was Vista.

Based on reading bits and pieces of this thread and other articles the last few months, I'm thinking of going Win7. I've stuck with XP on my laptop for obvious reasons, but 7 seems pretty nice. Questions: 1) How is older game compatibility? Have any people tried out SNES emulators, DOSBOX, and 90's games like Thief 2, Infinity Engine games and Fallout? I can't get an OS that can't deal with Fallout or Torment. 2) Compared to XP (not Vista) is there a noticeable performance boost or drop, on the whole for you personally?