Wistrik

Ultima IV will always be my favorite. Whether you became the hero or not was up to you (though you had to in order to 'complete' the game), and you could take your time getting there while exploring the whole of the continent. Try doing that in most of today's games.

Interesting, especially if they create a good english version. I'd also like to have a first-person view because I'm getting tired of these newer 3D games that don't offer it. What's the point of 3D if you can't enjoy a real 3D view? Might as well be isometric if all you're going to provide is overhead cameras. Despite its flaws, Ultima IX provided a toggleable first-person view, and I used it quite a lot, both for up-close examination and for enjoying the 3D world, which still looks nice despite its age. I think modern developers must have a brain tumor or something since they keep leaving this obvious camera mode out. Or maybe they don't want us getting a very close look at their mediocre textures. At any rate, I'll have to look at the trailers tonight when I have more free time. If that innkeeper (or whatever) is any indication, this game might have something different to offer in the way of flora and fauna, which would be refreshing.

I haven't played a Trek game since the first Elite Force, which was a lot of fun, especially in deathmatch with bots. I did play the older adventure games, though the NextGen one had a bug that kept me from completing the game. Companies weren't that big on patching back then so you were pretty much stuck with what you bought unless you had the ability to hack the game and fix the bugs yourself. I have some ability in that regard, but I won't waste my time on anything except my favorite games, and none of the Trek games made that category.

The BG series used your current terrain to determine which map to display in a random encounter, so you got mountains if you were in a mountainous region, forest if in or near a forest, city if you were in a city, etc. The encounters themselves are largely script-driven, and I agree they tend to lack true randomness, though this can easily be changed with user-contributed editors such as DLTCEP, Near Infinity, and even WeiDU. Plus if you write mods you'll collect a bunch of drooling fans who don't realize that modding is rather easy. (I've been doing it since 1983.) The folks who write tools get slightly more respect from me, though their inexperience shows somewhat.

7. Not very replayable (I feel about the same as Spider on this point), forced party configuration, can't solo without hacking the campaign somehow, yet another Monty Haul treasure system. Thankfully I still have the BG series, HL/HL2, and various adventure games (Dreamfall, etc.) to keep me going. I'm going shopping this weekend to see what other games there are that might be fun to play through more than twice.

Definitely 'sick', since you went for painted-on textures.

Looks like I'm done with NWN2's OC. I just can't bring myself to replay it when I have better looking, older games with fewer annoyances. I may break out the toolset and make a module someday, but I think I'll wait for another patch or two. Or I'll go shopping and pick up a few other PC games to play. Probably look for some CRPG type games since they tend to be my favorites.

Looks like female characters had at least double, if not triple, the poly budget of male characters in that game.

Pretenders - I'll Stand By You The video sucks (the guy practically ignores Chrissie and has style issues) but the song is a favorite of mine, and I'm fortunate to have a friend who applies the words of this song without knowing it.

Looks like most of the detail has gone into the mutation. Even NWN2 looks better as far as backdrop scenery goes. The mutation thing is an old idea, though it works in a good story.

It looks good in HD 720p, though the character shadowing flickers unrealistically, just as it does in NWN2 when enabled. They talk about customizing weapons and all that, which sounds nice, but in Bioware fashion you can safely bet there will be bosses that are immune to just about everything you work hard to gain. That's fun to some, annoying to me. The videos make it look incredibly easy, but these guys get to play while developing so they're used to it. Still, if troop coordination works as well as discussed and is capable of bringing down the big boys, that'll be fine with me. Looks like forced parties are the way of future games, so I'll have to hang up my solo hat. No more Space Rogue/Elite style adventures. It'll be interesting to see if it's as fun as the two Starflight games or Space Rogue. I had a blast running around the galaxy exploring random, fractal-generated planets with realistic ecosystems, battling the evil Spemin, and even traveling through time (Starflight 2). They are old games now, but I've yet to find a space-based game that's been as fun. One of the things I liked was that it was about 70% exploration and 30% combat. When I wasn't fighting, I was mining, collecting samples, turning a profit, and upgrading my ship. I could also explore the galaxy and map wormholes that allowed rapid travel across lightyears of space. Most games today focus more on combat and less on other things, which has been a turn-off for me. The gal in white armor did have a grating voice, but that's much like real life where there's always someone who looks funny, has an annoying voice, or has some weird mannerism that bugs you. I like how your dialog responses determine a resulting action, so your characters don't just stand there looking dead while interacting. I also didn't see any ridiculous self-clipping that mars so many 3D games, but that would have been edited out of promo shots so I'll wait and see. Assuming, of course, I bother to pick up a copy of the game after it comes out. I think I'll wait and read several reviews first. Hopefully someone who's played the older games from the 80s will weigh in with some real experience.

Wow. (w00t) They are thinking in terms of financial math but applying the wrong unit of measure. The cost is indeed $0.002/kilobyte, but they're hung up on cents for some mystifying reason. The only thing I can think of, outside of rather obtuse learned behavior patterns, is they are confusing THEIR cost for the service with what they're charging their customers.

I edit BASEITEMS.2DA to eliminate such annoyances. I also made a lot of unstackable stuff stackable, and jacked stack sizes up. It's not legit, but I hate inventory management, especially in Monty Haul games. You can edit the 2DA with the toolset, though before I knew I could do that, I extracted the 2DA from the game's ZIP archive and loaded it into Excel, which also works great, if not better since I have full control over columns and rows.

Bioware also produced "premium modules' like Kingmaker and Witch's Wake, and the newer Infinite Dungeons (based on a so-called new idea that's really as old as computer games). They're shorter than your typical expansion, but provide refreshing breaks from the longer campaigns.

Korn - Freak on a Leash Korn - Here to Stay

My name is taken from an evil necromancer boss in an old 1980s game I played on a Commodore 64: Realm of Impossibility Ah, the good old days.

I'm playing the violin for Darque. (Dang, can't find the violin smiley.) Edit: not playing any games atm. I need Real Life to have save points so I can reload from before an earlier goof, oh, around 30 years ago. That or a Quit button.

I have a few YouTube music vids bookmarked for when I need a fix. Most of these are a few years old now, but I still enjoy them. (Scorpion King) In some face shots, Sully Erna has a resemblance to Nicholas Cage. I like his voice, especially when he's not screaming. I've been hooked on "Voodoo" since I first heard it years ago. Drowning Pool - Let the Bodies Hit the Floor I get a kick out of Ryan McCombs' facial expressions while he's singing/screaming. The "patient" in this video is an odd character. Rob Zombie - Dragula Rob's a colorful character. His car, "Dragula", is modeled/named after Herman Munster's car. I like that he features his beautiful wife, Sheri Moon, in his videos and stage presentations. (There's a live performance of Dragula on YouTube where she's in a cheerleader outfit dancing next to Rob.) I like the drummer guy between the two robots. I have no idea who he is, but his appearance and the way be beats the drums cracks me up. I would have had a hard time keeping a straight face if I'd been doing that bit.

I suppose my annoyance comes from playing for hours, intent on getting to a certain point before I stop, only to be faced with yet another cutscene. Under more relaxed conditions I'm happy to sit back and watch. From the standpoint that much of the situation with Jon in BG2 was a bit contrived, yes, those cutscenes could be annoying, but I liked how they were done from a technical standpoint. I had another look at that town screenshot from DA, and it looks like a combination of NWN and Dreamfall, with perhaps some Ultima thrown in. I guess everyone's going to look a bit generic when it comes to towns. They may not include a toolset on initial shipment of the game, but if the OC proves to be a lot of fun, I'm going to be hankering for a toolset so I can make my own modules. Hopefully the maps will be bigger. I had an idea to implement Ultima IV with NWN2, but the maps are too dinky to properly portray the Britannian continent. This game needs a MMORPG style world renderer that can handle huge continents many miles across. Ultima IX did something close to that with its heightmap, so I was a bit disappointed that NWN2, a much newer and more advanced game, was relegated to console style mini-maps. I have to wonder if DA will be any better.

It depends on what I'm reading. PS:T was tedious reading for me, so I quickly grew weary of it and moved on. Plus I'd rather read from a page than from a glowing screen. I have mixed feelings on dialogs. If they're spoken, I'd rather not see text because almost always there's an error in the text. There is no dialog text in Half-Life 2 (in my install) and I love it. Characters say their part and things move on. Games are becoming more and more like interactive movies, and I never watch a movie with subtitles enabled. I agree about NWN2's cutscenes. Not only are they long-winded, but they're chained together in some places. You can't leave the computer to do something else because the game requires input once in awhile. So there I sit waiting to be able to do something again. Clicking through the dialog works, but that's a lot of clicking. In future expansions I hope they shorten the cutscenes to something more like Baldur's Gate 2, which I feel were appropriate length. They conveyed what was happening and didn't require all day to do it. Part of me hopes Dragon Age will have the option to disable text so that we listen to what's being said, but can offer text responses. This was possible in Diablo 2, a relatively old game.

The way the market moves, you'll be waiting forever if you want to hold out for the "next big thing". As some have pointed out, a good strategy can be to wait until a new thing is out, then buy the previous "new" thing for less money. You'll still be good to go for new games for a year or three (provided the developers have decent coding skills), more if you enjoy the games you have well enough to play them for four or five years. By then you'll be ready to upgrade and completely new hardware will be available. I was tempted to upgrade when I first got NWN2, but patch 1.03 proves the code needed more optimization, so I'll let future patches continue to help NWN2's performance. That way I'm free to plan for HL2:Episode 2, Dragon Age, and possibly Vista (only if I have to). As I listed above, I was thinking about an AMD64 FX-62. Well, now AMD has the quad-core chips available and some of them have each core running faster than an FX-62, so I'm happy to wait another month or two to give supporting hardware a chance to catch up.

I interpret government regulations for a living, and occasionally write software in my spare time, so to me the D&D rules aren't that complicated. I agree they are numerous, and I know it would be a big undertaking. I doubt it'll happen though, but that doesn't stop me from wishing it would come true someday. It isn't going to happen in NWN2, so I'll keep my eyes on other games. Dragon Age looks good so far, but we'll see what actually ships. I may have to get serious about writing my own game if none of these 'paid professionals' can get it right. It's been 21 years since I last wrote a game, and computers are certainly more powerful.

Modding is the Big Thing

No problems with getting the patch installed. Whew. Upgraded from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 with slightly better performance. Not too shabby. I did tweak a few settings though and found a good combo to get an average of 30 FPS zoomed all the way out and spinning 360 degrees over West Harbor's fair. (This is double the FPS I had previously at 1024x768. Major difference.) - Bloom: disabled (made everything look overexposed anyway, especially on a LCD monitor with 300:1 contrast) - Soft Shadows: disabled (unrealistic unless you cover the sun with plastic) - All Filters: Linear (Linear looks just as good as Anisotropic with these medium-res textures and performs much faster) - Antialiasing: x2 (better than nothing, x4 isn't enough of a difference to warrant the additional performance loss) - Point Shadows: disabled (shadows are more expensive than lights) - Shadows: None (character/environment shadows are expensive and ugly, even with high shadow resolution; drop shadows are non-descript circles. Still too expensive.) All else is enabled, set to max (texture quality), or ignored (shadow resolutions). Found a bug in the config already: the game swaps the values of the Tooltip Delay and Context Menu delay when it reads/writes NWPLAYER.INI. No biggie, but you'll see them shown in the wrong sliders in Options. So for now adjust Tooltip to modify your Context delay, and adjust Context to modify your Tooltip delay. That's about it. Played just long enough to tweak my video settings for best FPS. Also helps that I OCed my CPU from 2Ghz to 2.22Ghz.

I'll post my planned upgrade here too. Maybe it and any responses will give you additional ideas. AMD has released a true quad-core Opteron cpu that has the same thermal and power characteristics as their dual-core Opterons, and fits into the same socket. It's "true" quad-core in that it's not just two dual-core processors mounted onto a single die; there are four distinct processors wired for the best possible performance with each other. For my upgrade I'm considering: - AMD64 FX-62 or X2 (dual-core) CPU; fastest available. - Artic CPU cooler or other affordable cooler for CPU (for potential CPU OC) - NForce 570 or 590 motherboard (AM2 socket; 590 has two x16 PCIE slots) - 2 Gb Corsair memory (fastest the mobo will allow) - GeForce 8800GTX (could run two SLI as an option) - Creative sound card (whatever's best for gaming; Audigy comes to mind) - Decent power supply (as required by the 8800GTX) - USB Keyboard (still using old PS2 keyboard; don't care for wireless) - Possibly different case, both to ventilate and to fit the 8800GTX. Not planning on upgrading the monitor, a Samsung Syncmaster 215TW with 1680x1050 native resolution. Looks great, has good performance. My list isn't carved in stone, so I'm open to suggestions from experienced do-it-yourselfers. Money is an object, as I'm also trying to save up for a car upgrade. If I OC at all it will only be the CPU, thus the planned cooler. My current system is: - AMD64 3200+ (2Ghz) - Generic variable-speed fan & heatsink cooler; keeps the temp at 40C when OC to 2.22Ghz - NForce 4 SLI mobo (939 socket, 1 x16 PCIE slot, 200Mhz FSB, etc.) - Generic memory - GeForce 6800GT (runs better than the CPU in many cases, but showing its age) - Onboard Soundblaster 24-bit sound; sounds good but I suspect it's hurting performance - 500 watt power supply; insufficient for 8800GTX video card It's a very so-so system, and that shows in NWN2 (have to play at 1024x768) and HL2 with the hi-res texture mod (barely playable at 1280x1024), and HL1:Episode 1 with HDR enabled (barely playable at 1280x1024). I'm playing HL2 (original) at 1680x1024 and it bogs down in some of the outdoor areas but is still playable.