Wistrik

Yuck, I prefer crisp, clear rendering. I get enough motion blur through my eyes, so I don't need the game doing it for me. As for textures, have you tried the Cinematic Mod? (Formerly the hi-res texture pack.) It ramps up texture quality on just about everything for folks with hi-res capabilities (2536x1600 and so on).

Odd, I don't remember those issues when it was a new series on TV back in the 80s. I think you had to be living in the 80s while watching it for it to make sense though. Lots of what goes on in those shows is outdated and soft compared to today's activities and violence.

True, but since few of the elected politicians bother to follow the book's guidelines (rather, they prefer to 'interpret' them in a way that's convenient for their own aims, like most people do), I figure they could eliminate the book altogether. They aren't fooling me when they swear on the Bible one day and then send troops to kill some of their neighbors the next day. The D&D book idea is funny. "Swear me in as Chaotic Neutral, please."

Diablo is not a free online game. You pay $50 for the product. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Diablo/2 runs in either singleplayer or multiplayer mode, with essentially the same content either way. When I said 'free', I was referring to the free Battle.net online game service one can play Diablo/2 on. Because it was free, anyone and their dog could play there, and pretty much behave however they wanted, which was usually bad. Not that troublemakers don't play paid online games, but in their case its costing them money every month.

My experience with 'free' online games (Diablo 1 & 2) is that they attract the dregs of society who prefer to ruin your fun much more than contribute to it. Greedy, self-serving people also make up the majority of the population. That said, it's possible to find a decent group to game with, but you're limited to passworded games if you don't want to be harrassed by idiots. Frankly, I'm totally burned out with the online experience and am in no rush to re-enter the fray. It's singleplayer all the way, for the forseeable future.

Diablo 2 (LoD) and Diablo - age old favorites, though now somewhat modified with things like infinite stashes, capped monster resistances, no experience at death, reasonable rune-drop odds, and much, much more. I get full ladder benefits while playing singleplayer, plus stuff you'll never find on B.net, like Tempered Items which have dark green descriptions and can only be created/upgraded in the Horadric Cube.

In typical male artist fashion, she's built more for pleasure than for combat, so I wouldn't give her very high combat stats in that form. Intelligence, wisdom, and charisma would probably be high (derived from other form), and perhaps her constitution would be decent too (resistant to poison, death magic, etc.) Other than that, I've no idea. It's been ages since I played SSI's Krynn series so I can't remember much, and my D&D library has been non-existant until recent years.

Wii is an interesting product, but not a new idea. I had a joystick controller in the 80s that used mercury switches to detect movement, and had no base so you had to hold it in the air. I got really good with it. It wasn't as advanced, but it was 20 years ahead of its time.

I'm glad Dreamfall made the list. It has a good story which is a continuation of events in The Longest Journey. I love both games. Adventure games are a refreshing vacation from the usual routine. There's nothing really original about NWN2's story. Sure, this time around it's about the KoS, but he's just another token bad guy. When I read the story intro on Obsidian's website prior to launch, it came across exactly like NWN's OC intro and IWD2's intro, so I was left thinking, "great, more of the same." Though I did enjoy the historical portions of the story, the final battle was very reminiscent of IWD's. As for best CRPG I've played this year, that remains the Baldur's Gate series.

Awesome, a developer (JS) feels the way I do about romances. And here I thought I was alone. My favorite romance was actually more of a friendship that ended on a romantic note: Nathyrra in HotU. Her final act was a profession of love, not the usual gratuitous sex so many seem to get off on. Very refreshing. I was really enjoying my character's relationship with Elanee until the night on the Keep wall; she never did actually profess her love for me in words. (Sex does not automatically imply love.) I think it's funny that you (GreasyDogMeat) could practically ignore her and still get that far; I had to climb mountains, walk on fiery coals, and swim across oceans to get her to open up about her failed druid test. In my first game I never got her to open up about that, but she happily jumped into bed with my character anyway. Rather inconsistent, but not unrealistic when compared to the real world. (Selfish sex, anyone?) I keep hoping developers will become more mature when it comes to writing relationships, but so far that seems limited to the developers of FPSs. Unreal2 and Half-Life2 both feature female characters that you can share a friendship with (professional friendship in U2), but no romance (yet, in Alyx's case) and certainly no gratuitous sex. (Fine with me.) The CRPG group could learn a few things from the FPS guys.

I think I can see pores in her nose! :D The teeth/smile still looks a bit unnatural...maybe because they're too perfectly straight/aligned or something. the lips themselves look great...just the teeth when she smiles. But yeah, I agree...best digitized human face I've seen, probably. I'd like to see the hands upclose/in motion. They always seem to be one of the hardest things to do - or at least an area where they cut the most corners in favor of other areas. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Hands: <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The form is about right, but she might as well be wearing gloves because there are no fingerprints or typical lines in the palm and fingers. A different texture would fix that easily enough.

The media always misses the point. It's the player, not the game. Just as guns don't kill people but the idiots wielding them do. Some people can't control themselves while playing. Look on YouTube for angry gamer videos and you'll see some good examples. No doubt this guy was in a similar rage when his daughter yanked the cord, and proceeded to pummel her without thought for interrupting his most important game, especially if he was in the heat of battle at the time. This sort of thing never just happens. There's always a pattern of behavior that can go back to a person's infancy. Of course, nobody pays any attention until someone dies.

No doubt, which is why I only play singleplayer or versus bots. I died countless times to my brother over the years in a lag-free LAN environment, so I won't even bother with internet play.

Unreal Anthology (for the singleplayer games only)

I have AVG free at home, and Trend Micro client/server at work. I hate trend micro because, on the average, my computer runs noticeably slower and has frequent pauses where the hard drive takes off randomly. It ran so much better before IT installed this crap. I don't get computer virii, and indeed have never had one, but I use AVG to make the folks I send emails and files to feel better.

Kingdom of Heaven Turned out better than I thought, and reminded me much of my experiences in Age of Kings (Age of Empires 2). Plus those siege towers were exactly like the ones in NWN2, though I didn't get the option of pulling them over on their sides.

Perhaps someone cast Enlarge on him, with a permanent duration.

That's okay; whether you talk her down or not has no effect on the end result (which is so often the case in NWN's OC), since Nasher proves to be just as unreasonable. I did everything I could to save her, but no dice. I enjoyed NWN's OC for the most part, but some of the contrivances, and the inability to reason with most of the important characters even with godly dialog skills, really annoyed me. SoU starts you out fresh with a new level 1 character and a different story. HotU was my favorite campaign of the three, by far.

I wrote a game in high school, on a VIC-20 computer, and it was fun to play but really hard; I never beat it. That was my first experience with game balance. I wouldn't mind writing another game someday but it won't be the technical workhorse most of today's games are, solely due to my limited resources and lack of omniscience. Toolsets are fun and all, but I'm still stuck with someone else's engine. I want to experience the joy (and headaches!) of writing my own.

To a point. A real person's thresholds vary according to how they're feeling from moment to moment. I'm more likely to share something of myself if I'm in a good mood than if I'm in a bad mood. Perhaps one threshold will rise while another falls. And so on. The game is on the right track, but it's still too rigid. Elanee always fully opens up at a threshold of 20, no matter what, and that's always based on my actions, never hers or someone else's. Games are becoming more and more advanced, so it won't be long before such things are standard fare. Something to look forward to.

Unless you're talking to Elanee and haven't been able to get her to open up about her test. That dialog thread requires 20 influence, so 19 will get you nowhere. Not sure about losing a point after talking to her, though it makes little point then. (I never lose influence with her.)

Finally got to look at the videos. The gameplay is very NWN-esque, though it seems the animation is smoother and more realistic. Odd that we'll be playing a half-orc, or something, and I hope his 'secret' doesn't turn out to be another episode of the child of Bhaal or something. That would feel too much like a 'been there done that' situation unless you never played the BG series. They advertise third-person view, so it looks like there's no first-person planned. That's disappointing, but I'll still check it out if reviews are positive enough.

Verizon can't do math - revisited Another customer calls in with a very similar complaint... By the way, I don't know if it's my screen resolution (1680x1050) or IE7 or both, but whatever YouTube did with their advertising is really annoying. Now this big garish AOL ad appears over the right third of the video, obscuring everything behind it. If I'm browsing video pages, the ad draws horizontally off the edge of the screen and causes a horizontal scrollbar to appear. I think their web designer needs to go back to school. Edit: the ad is fixed now; they must've read this post. (j/k)

This thread title reminds me of a Dr. Demento song I heard years ago... Star Trekkin' across the universe on the Starship Enterprise under Captain Kirk! There's much more but memory fails me (parity error most likely).

I deliberately look for long games because I hate paying for a game I can beat over the weekend, like most FPS games. CRPGs tend to be longer, but that's not a guarantee. Adventure games have slowly become more interesting to me because they can take several days to complete and are at least as much fun. They also provide more of an intellectual challenge than games based mostly on mindless combat.