Tigranes

Ok, I managed to borrow from a friend, & played through the cell and creature stages so far. Cute and interesting with lots of nice animations, and the creature stage was quite fun, but I don't see much replyability value yet. But pretty eager to see the latter stages.

TO THE MODMOBILE I vote for a game where you play a coffee bean

I pre-ordered Oblivion, but kept an eye on previews and reviews as well. The "small flaws but overall supar best game EVAR EVAR LULZ" reviews differed vastly from my own playing experience, where I recognised a lot of really good stuff, but also absolutely idiotic level scaling and AI, as well as a horrible main story. I mean, sure, TES aren't about main stories, for instance, but the point is Hurlshot's idea that you can rely on game 'journalism' alone and spend your money wisely doesn't apply to everyone. Not at all.

The thing is that the game would be very balanced in normal or hard if the AI was halfway decent. As it stands right now, most solutions to difficulty means that your own empire is a logistical nightmare and the challenge is more in organising everything and pooling your funds against ridiculous odds. Which is a fun challenge, but it gets too much, and even then the horrible AI lets you down. I don't know. I'm told that RTW/MTW2's plague of idiotic army compositions/movements in campaign map and its total retardation on the battlefield has been somewhat improved by mods the last year. But throughout the entire lifespan of RTW and for the first ~6 months of MTW2, it was sure gamebreaking.

Healthy, cheap and delicious sausages?

I think the most compelling reason commonly cited is to check that the game actually runs well on your computer. Some games are so buggy, and there are so many things about even well-maintained and above-spec PCs that can screw it up. Anyway, firstly, theft is theft. Not much room to wiggle there. But don't stop there. Ideas of 'theft', just like those of 'intellectual property', are manmade concepts developed through a combination of social expectation and legal action. You can sit on top of traditional, outdated copyright laws all day and cry theft all day long, but if at some point in time the social understanding of theft and IP diverges radically from those laws, then ultimately the law becomes the one that's wrong. I don't think we're there yet, not by a long shot, and without a proper economic and moral system in place it's a good thing we're not - because lots (not all) of piracy, right now, does hurt honest, hard-working people in the industry. Finally, I complete my defences with the caveat that I hate DRM and passed on Mass Effect.

I've got to agree with the OP that in general, the game industry can be pretty damn opaque about this stuff, and many don't really try to make you feel that you are being listened to (because, well, you aren't, really). Can't say much more than that at the moment though, since I'm still not sure what exactly the nature of his problem was and so I can't relate it to the situation. I wonder just how much backlash in economic terms there was/is from KOTOR2's unfinished ending. How many recognise OE as having a 'buggy' reputation? I mean, are they even 'buggy' in comparison to other companies? Hrm.

Yay for starting the great big game of incorrect analogies!

I think what Hurlshot does is admirable and it's something I would really consider doing myself. I came across Christianity during my teens and to date I still don't have an in-depth knowledge of other religions (it's on my to-do list, hah). Unlike some Christians I believe that all religions and some of the various branches of atheist attitudes are all just different ways of trying to get to the same place, and it really pisses me off when pastors or whatever starts talking about those 'poor misguided souls' who believe in the 'wrong religion'. Which is the same reason, really, I think that practice of baptising infants is horrible. My mother kept her religious views to herself until I wanted to know more about them. Anyway, I'm not sure how we got here, but I guess it's OT.

Yes, Obsidian's NWN2 forums are hosted on the bioware website. Unfortunately, that means I can't whisk this topic to the right place; please go to the right forum at http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/ and post there. Or, as it sounds like an issue on a specific server, it might be much more successful for you to find the forums of the server itself (I assume it's fan-made).

I've watched very few intros which made me 100% sure that I was going to love it. Fallout 2, and Diablo 2. FO2 needs no explanation; D2 simply knew what it was, a series of in-game FMVs, and performed that role to a level of perfection I have seen hardly matched. It has its own story so you want to keep watching, it has amazing voice acting, it had great graphics and animation for the time and it was well paced and never too long. Blizzard sure knows how to do things right for what they are.

I mean fill out with stuff to do. There's really no point making a creature and then playing with it if you're severely limited in what you can do with them or how they can develop, and with 5 stages that was alwyas going to be a problem. I do agree that it's silly to expect 5 full games in the mix, but I'm waiting for opinions on whether its too gimmicky and limited.

So um... has anybody else played Spore? I'm seeing enough "its shallow and theres not much to each stage" argument crop up from individual players all over the place - in that case I'm pretty sure that's not just something a potential buyer (i.e. me) can ignore. After all, I didn't get a huge amount of playing time out of B&W or the Sims (although, now Sim City, that was a different cookie). I mean, wasn't it always the big main worry about Spore - whether they'd be able to fill out each of those 5 stages?

Heard about this recently - the thing is, theres not enough to make me bother to change from the relatively solid FF3 yet. I think after a while when it's fully implemented, and its claims of increased stability through sandboxing are proven, I'll make the jump. Personally, the two biggest problems with FF are stability/crashing and its inability to support flash/java/etc consistently and quickly. So waiting to see how Chrome does on that. 20-30 tabs? My brain would hate it anyway.

slug, everyone would walk in a buy a house right away if they could, yes, but it's very, very impractical for most of us. I think the state of our society is that up to university age, it makes sense to keep to a very simple adage - if you dont have money in your wallet, then don't spend it - but ironically that can really hamstring you and make your situation untenable after that.

So women are playing Diablo II. All the time. Man. I 'shop' for a really really long time when I'm shopping for stuff I care about (games, electronics, books, music, uh, stationery...), so I can empathise with "OMG SHOES" even if I have zero fashion sense. It's not a big stretch to understand that for different people (and in general, different genders) understand and use the same thing (clothing) in a different way... the only trouble is how much bloody cash goes down those things. Wish that worked for everyone, but there will be people who take that as a refusal to open up, blah, blah.

I pay an exorbitant amount for 20GB, and that's more than 90% of the country. (New Zealand)

And thus begins the mudslinging about personal life that will distract us even more from policy! Woo!

Your anecdotal evidence has bowled me over clean. So I assume that if by a crueler twist of chance, irritating, game-crashing bugs happened on five or six games you've enjoyed in the past, you'd be holding that same view about the inconsequential minority? :roll: Come on - if you can't summon up enough wax to care about the issue that's no skin off your back, but there's no need to go around basically arguing "its fine for me, you must be doing something wrong, not that you matter anyway lulz". Anyway, some RPS comments seem to latch on how 'self-congratulatory' the bill seems. Well, maybe it is, but how couldn't it be? I mean, they did things that they did because they believed in them, which is the same reason the stuff is on the 'bill'. I think (2) is quite a tall order to realistically expect, but certainly there should be a healthy level of 'demanding' it that shouldn't give way to cynical acceptance. That would be nice, but it probably won't happen. We'll instead see a trend towards the population at large understanding that 'minimum requirements' is as much an illusion as the battery life of mp3 players or all those ads with 'actual product may differ' caveats.... it'll just become common sense (as it has already for many) to look at 'recommended' as 'minimum' and look online for the real recommended.

Of course not, and it will continue to be no-problemo for you until you are in a situation where one such thing DOES bother you. It's easy to see it as overreacting if you aren't personally inconvenienced by it...

Ugh, the "Stand still and stare blankly at the camera please" dialogue cam is still there! Not a big deal in terms of judging the game but annoys me to no end. Anyway, it's now confirmed - dialogue is better than Oblivion, but is very, very rarely going to provide an high in its own right. It's indeed going to be about exploration and C&C rather than combat and dialogue... and the atmosphere could be pretty good too if one avoids some glaring sillies. Some bad voice acting again, notably on the part of Burke and the Monotone-Ghoul/Zombie Identity Crisis (VAers just dont seem to know how to handle non-human voices).

Annie Carlson's speeches continue to disturb the back of my brain.

True. I guess taking my time trying out +20 mods is the reason I take so long now.

Moatilla you're conflating various people's different positions into one thing, which means all the separate points roll up in to one big WE HATE DA LULZ... in which context your post last page makes sense. But since that's not true, it seems rather overreaching. Basically, my particular annoyance was that: DA is stated to be such-and-such. Then it comes up looking all like a bad LOTR clone; quite apart from not fitting what its supposed to be, I just don't even want to look at it. Carry that into the orc debate: I don't like 'generic baddies' but I can live with it, they're pretty hard to dispose of. I like that they have a different backstory and hope there will be more there. But it doesn't explain at all why they have to look and smell like orcs. They could look completely different and still be 'darkspawn'; hell, that'd make a lot more sense. And that's a criticism you can't answer with placard mantras. (not saying you personally have Moat) Oh, and about combat? I said it looks pretty 'go up whack' in the video... but the point of the video seemed to be to rush past the combat. I'm saying "looks meh here, lets wait for proper info". I doubt anyone here's actually saying OMGCOMBAT IS SO CRAP THEY LIED ABOUT BG SIMILARITIES. Keyworld: Conflate

Already? Man, you really dug in, didn't you?