Spider

13th gen aren't thin bloods if I recall correctly. A character created by the VtM rules that doesn't spend points in the Generation background is gen 13 by default and they still suffer the curse (and gets the powers) fully. Thin Bloods are generation 14 and higher. I think there are rules to play one in the book Time of Thin Bloods (or something like that). Thin Bloods didn't really appear in the VtM mythos (at least not in a prominent fashion) until that book was released. Also, while Thin Bloods can't generally embrace (their blood isn't strong enough) it has been known to happen. There have been mentions of gen 15 and even 16 Thin Bloods. As for the effect of lower generation, what it does is give you a larger blood pool and the ability to raise your powers higher. A normal vampire (generation 13 through can only have 5 points in a discipline or skill while a third generation can go as far as 10 points.

Changeling, despite is coat of sparkling colors, is the second darkest of all the WoD games. At least in the others, there is hope. The darkest, of course, is Wraith: The Oblivion.

First instinct is WoD since I'm a fan of the setting and an even bigger fan of the ruleset. But since we already have a few of those, I think I'd go with Shadowrun. Although I definitely second Hades Cyperpunk 2020 suggestion. Hell, make it Cyperpunk 2020 with the Night's Edge add-ons and both Hades and Gabs will be happy. (for those who don't know, Night's Edge is a CP 2020 setting that is sort of mixes the original setting with WoD. Made by a third party but I think with official sanction, at least they have the CP2020 logo on the books)

Also, 1 gb of ram improves performance a lot. But I've played it on a coumputer that is worse than the one you have, so it is possible. Load times and stutter is going to be a pain though.

Or, if you want a game similar to JA2 but more recent, you could try Silent Storm and it's expansion SS: Sentinels. Especially the expansion campaign is one of the best squad based games I've played. In the same series is also Hammer & Sickle, but I haven't played that yet. Other than that I can just agree with everyone suggesting Civ4. It's a true masterpiece.

Of course, Dragon Age most likely won't be released in 2006.

How can a culture be overrated anyway? Appreciation of culture is purely based on taste. If I find the japanese culture utterly fascinating, then that's because something in it clicks with who I am. If lots of people in the west feel the same way, then it becomes popular. So if japanese culture gets a lot of exposure in the west, it's because a lot of people in the west find it interesting. How is that overrating? Just because you may not like it, doesn't mean others don't have the right to. Oh, and this: What this statement is implying is that artistic geniuses can only come from the west. Again, just because japanese art is not something you like, why can't there be artists that are equally brilliant in their own way. Not everyone think that Picasso is a genius for instance. And finally, about their views on women. I agree a lot is left to be desired here, but we aren't that much better in the west. We also have a certain reverence for older men. How many female presidents have USA had? Hell, how many members of it's senate are females? 15. (I may have missed one or two if some names I felt were male actually weren't, but no more than that) Here is the list. Or even better, how many Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO? I actually can't answer for the top 500, but I got this from fortune.com: "Even with Carly's departure from Hewlett-Packard, there are more female FORTUNE 500 CEOs this year than there were last year. A total of 19 FORTUNE 1000 corporations have women in the top job, including Anne Mulcahy at Xerox. " 19! Out of one thousand. That is 1.9%. We can also do a comparison of wages between men and women, but unfortunately I don't know where to get access for that data. I have a strong suspicion what the answer will be, but no way to confirm it. The point is, before we start criticizing how other cultures view women, we should clean up our own act first. We have come a long way, but we're nowhere near where we should be. Stones and glass houses and all that.

I think you give Gygax too much credit. His modules didn't have stories because that'd get in the wat of the monster-killing. That's only half in jest. I have a book written by Gygax called Role-Playing Mastery and it's scary reading indeed.

Isn't Transformers: Armada an American production though? I haven't seen the cartoon so I'm not sure about that one, but the comic (which I believe came first) was made by Dreamwave Comics. The cartoon could be made by a Japanese studio though I guess.

Unfortunately it didn't sell to anyone.

Azureus itself doesn't use that much resources. Java, that is required for it to run, do however. I still use Azureus and love it though, it has features no other client has (and some of those I really don't want to do without). Current numbers on my comp (memory usage): Azureus - 1,8k; Java - 60k Azureus is great if the memory usage is a non issue, if it is utorrent is probably the best option. I can't see a reason to use anything other than those two though.

I think they use the same regional coding as DVDs, which would mean no. I'm not sure though.

There are some performance issues, but they really shouldn't be so bad with your setup. Was it a permanent freeze or just a temporary stutter? According to Activision the game requiers a page file that is 1.5 gb large so if you've got it manually set to anything smaller, that could have some effect (this is something they said when they released the first patch, I have no idea if it has any effect at all). As for being unfinished, this is what I gather: During the development of Bloodlines, White Wolf announced that they were bringing their World of Darkness to an end. It's been about doomsday prophecies all along and they simply felt it was time to deliver on those. When Activision learned of this they were ready to scrap the game, after all why release a game that uses a dead liscence? Troika (I think) managed to convince them to not scrap the game, but instead development time got cut back (I'm not sure with how much, but I think something like 6 months). This of course means a lot of stuff had to get cut, something that is especially noticeable in the later part of the game where it becomes much more combat oriented. So at least when I say it wasn't completely done, I refer to the lack of roleplaying in the end game and the lack of quality control prior to release (although I personally only suffered one major bug, the game's performance should have been better). The parts of the game that are good are still fantastic though.

It's certainly a valid way to design a website. But doing so within the constraints of a portal is very difficult. To be honest I'm not even sure it's possible with the popular existing portals. It's all about how they're programmed though, so it can theoretically be done. Just like these forums could theoretically have different layouts for each section. Either way, it requires programming knowledge that goes way beyond me. (for those who don't know, a portal is a website software that's used to layout a page and communicate with a database. In many ways they work just like forums do)

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. A portal is a modular layout system. Edit: Or do you mean that the site switches layouts for different sections of the site? That is definitely possible, but usually not wanted since coherency tends to be prefered. (unless the section is more of a subsite, but let's not go there)

Like I said, nwn2wiki definitely uses a better technical solution (technical in this case means the code that renders the page, not the wiki functionality). The problem for nwn2news is that it uses a portal to render it's site. It's a good tool for a site such as that since it makes it easier for a large number of people to add updates, but it leads to clunky code and suboptimal layouts. So naturally, a site that is only a wiki will have code more ideally suited to being a wiki, but I still think they should cut article text off.

FEAR has regenerating health. Only when you go below 25% and only up to that point, but it still has it. Doesn't prevent it from being a good game though.

Not in all ways. While they may be using a better technical solution, there is one thing that makes it inferior from a layout one. Text that runs all the way over a computer screen from the far left to the far right is significantly harder to read than text that only runs through (say) 50% of it. There is a reason why books are in the format they are and why newspapers uses columns. So it'd be a lot easier to read a wiki entry on nwn2news than on nwn2wiki.

Silent Storm is Sci Fi.

One of the writers, John Rogers, does plenty of interacting on his blog. Not so much on the Transformers movie though, although he has mentioned the re-writes sucking up a lot of time. It's very good for anyone interested in screenwriting. Oh, and this post is a must read, it's totally hilarious: Lunch Discussions #145: The Crazification Factor

By the way, I've been meaning to thank you for helping me to avoid a crash in the game. Not that you'd know you helped, but still..

Fair enough. I mentioned the Cradle because in another thread about Bloodlines someone said that the Hotel had nothing on the Cradle in terms of scariness and since I hadn't played Thief 3 at that time I couldn't answer on it. Now that opporunity kinda presented itself I was ready to jump.

Exactly, being so scripted it's just not the same again. It was definitely cool the first time around, although it's not on the level of the scary maps from the Thief games. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Here I definitely disagree. I've only played Thief 3 but the levels that were supposed to be scary were everything but. In fact, the Cradle was one of my least favorite levels of the game. I'll admit it's very atmospheric and I can understand why people would like it (it's just that I didn't). It does stand out in the game. But to me there was nothing scary about it.

It wasn't to me. It is of course not the same thing as the first time, but the ambience is still so good that I truly enjoy it every time.

For me, it was just those things that made it interesting. It's a shame Midway didn't see things the same way you did.