Spider

The question is if the impatient people are actually getting the games or simply just don't play them instead. And in regards to StarForce, I know of several people who refuse to buy any game that uses that paticular protection because it messed up their computer. Not only made the game unplayable (which is more common) but actually stopped things from working.

I have no idea where you get your information, but clearly you and I occupy different internets. First, the availability of pirated music on the web has not lessened in any way shape or form. There are more people downloading (and thus usually also sharing) than there has ever been. Some sites and programs are shut down, but more pop up to take their place. The industry closed Napster and along came Kazaa. Kazaa is on the decline and along comes BitTorrent and so on and so forth. The efforts of the music industry hasn't really accomplished anything. Given how much they spend on copy protections and lawyers, it's entirely possible that it has actually cost them more than they lose on piracy in the first place. Second, the reason the music industry started getting paid for music downloaded from the web is because they started selling music on the web. A lot of people who download music do so because they like having their music in digitalized form. And when a legal alternative came along a lot of people started using it. The fact that more pirates are inclined to buy music online than nonpirates. Imo the main thing the music industry has done wrong was to not start something along the lines of iTunes when music downloading started to become popular. Had they done so the internet landscape could have been a very different place. Instead they chose to fight in order to preserve their archaic business model.

It is indeed called Fable. I was reading it when it first came out and it's very good.

Hasn't a complaint with Fallout been that it's on the short side though?

Although to be fair, if a game comes out at the same time on a console and the PC, the PC version is nine times out of ten a port of the console version. Games designed for a console control scheme usually feels awkward on the PC and vice versa. This is not a way to say either is superior, I have nothing against consoles, just pointing out tha games designed for a gamepad play better with a gamepad. (of course, if you have a gamepad for the PC this becomes moot)

For me the problem is much larger in sci fi RPGs (and to some defree contemporary ones). In fantasy it's non-existant for me and in sci fi stuff using some english phrases here and there makes a lot of sense given that people do that in everyday life at this age. However, I think the main problem is one of familiarity. To us English is a little more exotic, the words sound cooler. It has nothing to do with them actually being cooler, it's just that to our ears they sound that way. Much like the way Norwegians describe the Swedish language as being melodic in nature, something I don't think many Swedes will agree with.

I don't take slavery much either, mostly because it's just not worth the one turn of anarchy. I hate sacrificing population so the ability would hardly ever get used.

The problem isn't that, the problem is that Wizards of the Coast have discontinued the Planescape franchise and don't want anyone to use it anymore.

I haven't played Thief 3 so I wouldn't know. But I'm just not that impressed with the Malk-dialogue. It's fun at first (and the stop sign and anchorman dialogues are hilarious) but after a while the novelty wears off. Besides, it's hardly groundbreaking, it's very much the same as the stupid dialogues present in Fallout 1&2 and Arcanum. (The malk-dialogue was well written and great fun though, I'm not disputing that)

Favorite comic: Kabuki, check it out if you haven't it's truly amazing. Favorite writer: David Mack - Kabuki is amazing and his work on Daredevil (at least parts of a hole which is what I've read) was spectacular. Mark Millar gets honorary mentions though. Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis as well. Favorite artist: This is a tough one, there are so many good ones. But I fell in love with Bryan Hitch in his Authority days, so I'll go with him. Favorite painter: David Mack - although not everything he does is painted, his stuff is always visually fantastic. Favorite colorist (as Kaftan mentioned they get way too little credit): Pamela Rambo - look at the earlier issues of Preacher, then look at the later ones. That's how much a colorist means.

A dvd-image is a copy of a dvd made for burning purposes. I've seen images for Gun and Kong for the PS2 and X-box at 1.25 GB. If you burn those to a DVD they should be playable on any (modded) console. I'd provide links, but those would point to illegal material. The best I can do is this! That points to the NFO for a so called scene release. It doesn't point to where you can find such stuff nor does the site contain any links to illegal material. So I hope that's ok with the mdoerators, if not I apologize. Anyway, that states that the image for Gun (X-box version) was released in 26 rar files that were each 50 mb large. That totals 1300 mb. And no, the fact that they are compressed doesn't mean the file will be larger when uncompressed because files on the dvd use such a high compression to start with. I have no idea how much space Gun takes up on a PC harddrive though since I don't want to buy a game that takes 6-10 hours to complete. But I can give another example. Civ 4 has images that are 1.3 GB large. On my harddrive it takes up roughly 2.4GB. I'm guessing Gun would be similar. In my experience it's still fairly rare that games take up more than 3 GB on a harddrive, but they're definitely getting larger.

I was referring to the PC DVD, but PS2 and X-box DVD images are about the same size. With a little research I found versions spanning from 1.1GB to 2.9GB although the smaller versions are much more numerous. (that was for Gun, but a qucik check confirmes that Kong is about the same size) And yes, that means they only take up 1.5GB on the DVD.

Gun's or Kong's length is hardly due to space issues on the DVD though. DVD-images of those games are roughly 1.5 GB large, so there would be lot's of room on the DVD for more content.

I wish I could take credit, but that was all my friend's doing. In one of the books Pratchett writes about butterflies causing it to rain so we knew what we had to do, just not how to do it. But I would never have figured it out myself I don't think.

The short game thread reminded me of the most difficult game I ever played (because it got into adventure games, not because the game was short): The first Discworld. Some of the puzzles were so far out there it was almost impossible to get them straight. Like one where you had to go back in time, put a frog in your mouth (although the frog did jump out of your mouth at the start of the game) so a butterfly would change it's position. Said Butterfly would then flap it's wings causing it to rain in the future (or present depending on how you view things) in another part of town so a person's robes would get wet. He would then hang them to dry so you could steal them. And that's a puzzle we solved (I played it with a friend who at the time had read more Pratchett than I had, without his knowledge I think I'd have gotten stuck much, much sooner). I don't recall what it was that finally broke us down, but in the end we just couldn't finish it (I remember how far we got, just not what we had to do afterwards). I think we were 2/3s through. Some time (year/s) later I went back to the game with the help of a walkthrough and finished it, shaking my head at how extremely bizarre all the puzzles that came after were.

Thanks for the insight. I usually don't notice minor bugs either, if it doesn't crash the game or break a quest I'm not terribly observant. I experienced nothing like what you described in Bloodlines but instead had my share of bugs in ToEE (like the mosters spawning inside walls bug for instance). It just goes to show that your mileage may vary. And how hopeless it must be working in QA for PC RPGs.

Seriously, can someone give me some examples of all these bugs you keep mentioning. Because I really don't get it. It wasn't like FO2 that kept crashing for me so much it was unplayable without a patch. Or like Kotor1 that I had to some serious juggling with settings just to get it to start. Or the dreaded memory leak in Torment. And ToEE is in a league of it's own. I only had one bug that really affected gameplay and that was the crash I mentioned earlier (that was a real showstopper had it not been for the workaround with the console people posted on some forums).

Margaret Tang, he says so in the Q&A. Or, apparently, too soon. According to the Q&A development was cut short when WW announced they were ending the WoD. I guess that means funding was cut short as well putting Troika in a bad position, especially when they didn't get FO3. You haven't played ToEE, have you? Although I must say I feel kinda lucky when it comes to Bloodlines, I hardly encountered any bugs at all. I had the archeologist crash (and that was a pretty severe bug) and some minor bug with not getting money after a quest. That's it, at least as far as I could tell (there's the occasional spelling error as well of course). True, there were some performance issues with the game, but for me that was merely a matter of having a computer that wasn't up to specs. With my current one I haven't had those problems either. Edit: The game was only combat heavy during the end game. Up until that it had about the same as other RPGs (depending on your character build). And the end part of the game was, according to the Q&A, undeveloped due to the pushed release date. Up until that point the game is excellent, afterwards it's quite mediocre.

More importantly, he designed the Ocean House Hotel level, one of the best game levels I've ever played.

Can't you take it as an extra class? Maybe as distance studies (distansstudier). Mittuniversitetet has some options for that.

Wikipedia.org:

It's the main story that is about six hours. There are apparently plenty of sidemissions as well. If you're a completionist I guess it'll be more, but it looks like a rental to me.

I rather think it opens up a lot of fun roleplaying. But combat hasn't been a great focus for me when gaming for the last 10 years or so. The most interesting way to deal with the dragon though is to curse her or something so that she would be stuck in her human form. That would provide for interesting roleplaying (not to mention the foundation of an entire campaign).

Is there any proof to back this up? Bad finances can have many different reasons such as bad management or games that flop. The thing is people who pirate games are interested in the same type of games as the general public, so if a game is pirated a lot it's pretty likely that it'll sell a lot as well. Hardly reduced sales since sales are still on the rise in the gaming industry. Expenses increasing more rapidly than the sales is more likely.

The mian reason for the grade was the lack of content in the game. Somehow I doubt that'll be fixed for the 360.