Tigranes

Thesis, sleep, church, video games, Colbert Report, Obsidian. repeat ad nauseum with varying degrees and there you have the year 2008 for me. No idea about the dog Architect, but if the op could potentially kill him it strikes me as rather hasty that they would go ahead and do it tomorrow? And is the dog showing any signs of illness?

RUN, MAGICAL VOLO IS GOING TO KILL US.

Yep, the EULA has said that for a while, but of course, in a practical sense, it's reaching new 'heights' - just like (2), to reply to Moat. These aren't exactly new phenomena, but whether they are new or not is largely irrelevant; what is relevant is that in the practical sense they are becoming more and more demanding, and this gradual process makes it hard to put your foot down at any point

Nah, they're going to fire Patrick today. That filthy liar.

There are a lot of fat US people. I don't think that can be denied at all, based on both statistical evidence and personal observation. It is a big, big difference between US and even New Zealand (which worries about being fat, too) or Korea/Japan. Anyway, I wonder what standards the Wii-Fit uses for its designations of fat and thin.

Is that 140-150 for all your playthroughs? An average playthrough of KOTOR1 or 2 will take about 30-40 hours, I believe, maybe a bit less; each game is worth replaying at least once more, because of the clear Good/Evil paths. Since the first KOTOR1 is cheap now, you could probably get both for a similar price and get similar hours out of it, in total. You don't need to play the first one first, that's completely insubstantiated. The content extension thing most likely refers to the ongoing project to restore many things that were cut from KOTOR2, as LucasArts rushed Obsidian to a Christmas time release. Also, the ending is rather, uh, unfinished, and that's being worked on, as well. It is still a solid game by itself, though. No, it's pretty modern. Though if you are a shooter fan, then there may be differences between us about what characterises 'modern'. If you must have parallax mapping, dynamic lighting and so forth, you may experience 'aww's, but if you're not quite that bothered, no problem. I play and enjoy shooters sometimes but not to any great extent, so hard to say. The combat is very easy (but Mass Effect was easy, too): it is more abstract than Mass Effect, it won't feel anything like you are actually shooting at the enemy; you are switching characters giving commands to things like 'shoot'.

Regular authentification has numerous problems, both practical and ideological, that both offend and disgust me. It doesn't help that it's EA and they aren't going to give two poo-poos about any of these problems. 1. My ownership of the product is compromised. Ideologically, I have, in essence, paid to use rather than to own: for the same money with which I could previously buy a car, now I have bought the services of a taxi, and I have to flash my receipt and photo ID every time I want to use this taxi. Yet the prices just keep going up. Compromising my ownership is the same thing as taking content out from a product: it is no longer as valuable, and its exchange value remaining same is simply stupid - especially when the proliferation of piracy makes that exchange value farcical to begin with. Practically, it makes me work continually to assert my ownership and legitimacy. If I don't have internet access (i.e. my ISP screwed up, my modem broke, I am in Guam), I can't even play - and this is a more common occurrence than you might think. Many of us on these forums have the ability to fix internet-related problems relatively quickly or be on the ball about it, but a 14-year-old may not, a less comp-savvy person may not, someone living in a more remote or underdeveloped area may not, someone may be in financial trouble and unable to afford internet access, there are a huge number of possibilities and I see someone temporarily robbed of internet access very often. Even if the online access is there, every ten days I am bothered. Being bothered, taking my time away from me, is of exchange value. You are making me work, however little, to play the game that I have bought, every 10 days, until the end of time. I can't even lend it to a friend without worrying. I can't even uninstall and install freely, I have to worry about doing it properly. I have to worry about it when I get a new computer... Take a look at BG2. I've had it for 6 years, installed it in over ten computers, lent it to friends for short periods, installed and reinstalled an average of a handful times each year (sometimes more), had to reinstall dozens of times due to errors, copied someone else's CDs and backed them up because mine were going nuts, installed hundreds of mods. I can't imagine going to all that bother with this protection scheme. And yes, I did buy BG2! 2. My position as a consumer is changed. As I have pointed out already, this represents, in one level, a greater level of surveillance and prohibition than that against a sex offender, and the lines of farce have truly been crossed, now. Let us assume that, like CD-Keys, there comes a day that this practice is actually normalised and generally accepted (which, by the way, doesn't make it better - "don't be so worked up, the rest of us accept it" is one of the silliest arguments to permeate our society): the status of the consumer is now a criminal who is guilty until proven, not once, but proven again, and again, and again. The consumer is someone who must pay money, constantly verify himself, and put in all this work to be handed the privilege of playing their game. Would I do that to play Torment? Probably. To Mass Effect? Probably not. To Ultima IX: Ascension? Well, you'd have to pay me money to play that game, but really. It is the height of arrogance and narrowmindedness - on one hand they are searching for that lowest common denominator to satisfy, on the other they are making all of us bow down in worship. 3. The caveats are hidden; they are the catch of the deal. While most of us are thus made aware of the draconian copy protection, with games commanding more and more mass appeal, you will find many parents who buy it for their kids, only to be rewarded with headaches: many casual gamers who buy it, only to be rewarded with headaches. (I suppose for ME, kids doesn't really apply, but I'm talking more generally here.) I will gladly retract this point if the back of the box talks about the copy protection scheme in detail (as opposed to the small print saying Internet Connection Required), and the salespeople or nota bene of online sites make the scheme clear before one buys. So far this has not happened; you see casual gamers who play Bioshock not even aware that it has such protection schemes, and when they complaint o me their computers are acting wonky or slower, or the game won't work / won't reinstall / etc, you go there and voila! I guess you didn't know about it because nobody went out of their way to tell you. Again, arrogance, narrowmindedness, exploitative and offensive. 4. It harms the industry and fuels the piracy phenomenon. I like video games. In fact, in that I see a great potential for more than simple escapist entertainment, and I want video games to rise above settling for producing the cultural equivalent of Hollywood blockbusters, I want it to succeed more than most people. Which is exactly why supporting this idiocy will be a kind of discursive hara-kiri: this kind of thing fuels the piracy phenomenon. I won't get into this too much, because this part has been talked about a thousand times over. But it must be obvious to anybody that hundreds or thousands of people who might have bought the game will instead turn to, or at least be tempted by, piracy, these people who might never have pirated a game before. Certainly, observe the logic of an average joe at work: he wants to play Mass Effect. He realises that it will make him do ridiculous things. He realises it's too much of a bother to even borrow a friend's copy and try it out before he buys it. The demo? Perhaps, but why bother downloading a demo when you can download a bit more and get a pirated copy? I'm not saying such a cognitive route is logical, sensible or right: but that is what will happen in a practical sense.

Then I guess I'm not buying Spore, either. I'm sure there may come a moment of compromise or the breaking of the back of principle sometime in the future, but it's not going to be that easy to make me buy something that treats me with more paranoia than sex offenders.

I've read the thread but I haven't really got much to add.. so perhaps this will be fuel for the fire for some, but Mass Effect PC copy protection will require internet authentification EVERY 10 DAYS until eternity. Not buying that piece of crap, then. What, you guys are going to check up on me more often than the police checks up on sex offenders? Giving a sale to the PC version is out of the question, I'll just have to borrow the friend's Xbox360 again to finish it.

I forget what the collector's house is, but yes, neither Bioware nor Obsidian have ever done stealth properly at all since the Infinity Engine. The teleporting-PCs-just-so-the-guy-can-talk-to-him is insane, the enemies instantly respawning behind your back is even worse and I don't think there's enough visual signifiers to tell you when you have been detected; in IE you 'phased in' and you could see that in the avatar and hear the sound, or at least, the text on the bottom telling you you're being targeted. In the Aurora engine it's much harder. Aurora did a pretty good job of implementing traps, but with stealth so broken it's hard to do a real proper heist.

Definitely doesn't fall through the floor this time, the OC ending is pretty decent and what you'd expect from such a standard high fantasy campaign, MOTB's is very, very satisfying.

I'm using Tutu and yeah, the maximised spawns do become a problem.... when there are Tasloi or Gibberligns around. I just cleared the Firewine Bridge, too, in fact! Level 5 Party - Kagain, Minsc, Tiax (modded to be pure Cleric), Edwin, and myself an Assassin. After the first couple of kobols I decided enough was enough, hid in shadows and ran all the way to the Ogre Mage by myself.. poison-backstabbed him, then his mirror image/minor globe/etc flared up, but watched as he flinched and twitched at the poison while I drank myself a nice potion of invisibility. Unfortunately, with my mods they're smart enough to drink healing potions now, so he was still on a decent amount of health and I had no way of bringing my entire party there without fighting all the kobolds. In the end I had to bring Edwin over with a spell of invisibility, and have him let loose with the Wand of Lightning - brilliant thing if you aim properly, took out the two fleshies as well. I usually play through those random areas like this; I go down to Nashkel straight away so my party is complete asap (I hate playing without my party-in-mind done), go to the Gnoll Stronghold by necessity, Nashkel Mines, then I explore every one of those wilderness areas south of Beregost, on either side. My level 3 party had some real trouble with those Basilisks, the SCS mod made them harder in that they actively target whoever is not protected from their gaze, the Greater Basilisk seems to have a lot more hit dice and damage, and so on. I had a lot of reloads and bloody battles with just the first two before I realised Tiax' special ability (added in Tutu? Or not? First time using him) was to Summon Ghast. After that it wasn't so hard. I am really enjoying this playthrough with the small AI / difficulty modifications, so far nothing nonsense or cheesy (except that undead knight outside Ulcaster, autohit periodic call lightning?! ). At the Bandit Camp, my Hide in Shadows is still crap (damn you Assassins) so I was discovered on the far west side of the camp. I planned on staying near the forests and just picking off the two or three - but hey, what? Ardenor Crush (the hobgoblin) and the other human fellow come charging along bringing the entire camp to the alert! Of course, that didn't really work out to their favour, since Necklace of Missiles + Wand of Fireball = Crispy. Despite adding Kagain to my usual mix I still struggle with big tank enemies, though, and Crush + the Other Guy did give me a lot of trouble. I just can't seem to stand up to them toe to toe without having Kagain or Minsc snuff it. I can't remember party level, but everyone on around 43000xp as I reach the Cloakwood mines. That one isn't going to be easy.

Started a new game of the BG trilogy, with Tutu. With the GUI mod and a few other things such as restoring real summons, it really is that authentic BG1 experience, just on 1024x768. I got some mods to up the difficulty, implementing mage/cleric contingencies from BG2, making the final chapter battles harder and making calls for help smarter. I think they make sense, generally, nothing too flamboyant. I also have a pretty extensive quest mod that fires in the city of BG, so I'm eager to see how that might turn out. PC is Assassin, with a party of Kagain, Minsc, Tiax and Edwin (yeah, I chickened out there with mods/shadowkeeper). I usually only take 4, but with the added difficulty I thought it would be okay. Up to ch3 and nothign too challenging so far, though Greywolf and a few other big-hitters made me reach for resurrection, and the sirines' Dire Charms were pretty bad when Tiax didn't have Dispel Magic yet.

I believe there are very few, something like one or two, checks that are actually impossible. I have no idea what happened with the puppet mode there, puppet mode = they shouldn't be doing anything you don't tell them to. Either you had all characters selected by mistake (very easy) or.. yeah. The mechanics are actually fine now if you turn off the AI, the problem is the clunky controls that Obsidian was forced to add in for NWN2/MOTB, because they weren't present in the original Aurora.

Heh, I realised I never read the first page of this thread. "I heard Koreans eat rotten cabbage." It is quite very interesting, about food - food is one of the areas where a lot of cultural misunderstandings and discriminations come to the fore (not saying anyone is guilty, just general comment). I'm going to be shot for this (and posting right after Guard Dog, too!) but for example, some Koreans do eat dog food - I don't, mainly because it's not much nicer than normal meat, smells quite a bit more, and is overpriced. Anyway, yeah, it's interesting to see how many Westerners go "eww eating dogs, disgusting/cruel". It's just as 'disgusting' as eating chicken and just as 'cruel', especially if you consider the kind of living conditions some American cattle had/have, as we recently found out. It's just that we've been socially trained to think of some animals as nothing but walking sacks of meat, and others as, well, endowed with human qualities somewhat. It's quite interesting, though, because this is so hard to resist - when some Chinese restaurants serve pig ear I can't help but grimace. Sushi is an interesting subject as well. I know lot of Koreans used to feel quite buggered about this, since as far as I know Korean sushi (or Kimbob) is actually contemporaneous with sushi, or even predates it - certainly not coming along later. They are pretty similar, though, for example, salmon/sashimi are much more likely to come up in Japanese sushi, Korean ones don't really have anything raw. But the Japanese were smart (and faster to industrialise, remember) and marketed Sushi as the Asian miniature sandwich all around the world, so that Koreans now have no choice but to sell their stuff as, well, Korean sushi. Smart of them. Anyway, I buy some pre-crushed beans and just use brown sugar and milk. It would be nice to get real beans and actually make the coffee, but we don't have the equipment and I'm a poor student, so that's really a luxury. I want to move to North America to do my masters next year, so I don't even buy clothes, right now. Wellington has really, really good coffee though, I think Gorth can back me up (or prove me wrong) here. Obviously we've got very, very good quality milk, and I think it shows. Most cafes you can walk into and order a coffee, and at least some of their selection will be worth coming back for.

Yep, you shouldn't need to cheat. I don't remember if there are actually any console commands to deal with skill points directly, but here: 1. Hit ~ in game. 2. Type DebugMode 1, enter. 3. rs kr_influence That is the easiest way to modify companion influence, which is just as, if not more, important in opening up dialogue options and is harder to raise than just pumping points during levelup. I believe you can use dm_SetCHA or whatever to set your int/cha higher, if you want.

You've just been Popstalked . Good questions though, I hadn't thought of them. Welcome Matthew.

Yep, I didn't do that double-patchy-thing DR talks about and the game was fine for me. I think that is something to try if your computer just doesn't like the game though, you know how that can be.

I haven't played MoTB for a while so I don't know if a patch is available. I think it is, though, Arkan. You can check nwvault.ign.com for manual version fo patches, but they may or may not be available.

Wonderful thing, context. You know, Krookie, that I'm not arguing they're all the same. That would be very postmodernist of me. By which I mean, pointless.

You will never have a day better than this one. It's all downhill from here.

If the dispel power is changed during level up, then the affect would return every level up, I think, if you use rn's second workaround. The Near Infinity solution is a bit more technical if you are scared of code, but there shouldn't be a problem there. Dispel with every melee hit, huh? Certainly munch.

*shrug* who's to say when someone's ready to learn about anything? The real point at issue here is how to categorise sex - is it a type of social knowledge, like etiquette, that we all need a certain degree of knowledge about? Is it something like how we treat religion nowadays, a very private choice and something that one may not need to know? Is it something like maths, which is considered crucial in all social life?

Well, if someone wanted to buy Crysis, and they weren't sure if the system would run it to their satisfaction, and stores near them didn't have an easy refund policy (or they would want my money back, not exchange for another game), then I think they would definitely look at piracy. You can imagine the person saying: "I know a thing or two about games, so I know that just meeting the minimum, or even recommended, requirements doesn't always guarantee a good experience. I've also heard game [x] is a big resource hog, or has big troubles with bugs or compatibility issues. Obviously I'm goint do download this game and see before I cash out on a potential headache." In which case, what % of those people then pass on Crysis because it didn't run well? What % end up buyign it anyway, and what % end up just playing the pirated copy now they have it?

By 'optional', of course, meaning that there is often a big social pressure to get involved in at least some of those 'extra-curricular' activities, and some schools even focus more or as much on them as academics - certainly, this was the case with, say, Eton in the early 20th century, when you were in for a whole world of trouble, from teachers as much as other students, if you didn't play sports. The point stands that arguing schools are only for the 'accumulation of academic knowledge' is really not seeing the bigger picture. Even if schools were just for 'academics', the practice always involves bodily training of morality, and the institution as a whole has always been focused on teaching morality, social proficiency and such. Religion would still have its place if it didn't have such opposition. Anyway, limited to just sex ed - I'm sure it could be done by parents, but I wager many parents are quite glad the schools do it for them. Heh.