flirno dale

Gamestop because it is minutes away from where I live and this particular one carries a huge number of used games for some reason. Failing that I'll check all the local (kansas city) chain stores through the phone or their web sites (they are usually willing to network with me regarding inventory they are out of so this is generally a pretty quick process.) If I am not interested in the game enough to check with local chain stores I'll just go online and start with the usual suspects that have already been listed many times. Failing that I check with auction sites.

Nothing upcoming presently strikes me as something that I am looking forwards to. Of mild note: Spore had my attention for a while but now it is only a mild interest. This is due to the hype wearing off, the inevitable aging of the underlying engine and the novelty of many of the ideas is no longer novel. I follow the Battlefront series of strategy and tactical games but I wouldn't say that I wait for their next big release. I no longer invest in RTS games as they are all basically the same with different graphic shells for things. I am paying some attention to the group (Mechwarrior Living Legends) trying to setup a MMORPG through a total conversion of Crysis. They appear to be using technical specs based off of what was available in the Mechwarrior 4 series of Desktop games. Additionally: + A Sequal to The Witcher might get me excited. + A new DND series or another core expansion to NWN2/MOTB would get me excited. + I would buy another Prince of Persia if one materializes -- I usually do not like this type of game but the PoP marginal Role driven storyline with the abundance of adventure puzzles is one that I find engaging usually. I'll admit that a well done flash module doing something similar in 2d gives me about the same level of entertainment at a much, much lower resource cost. I am not a big fan of small adventure add ons though I do buy them and enjoy them. Epic adventures are more along the lines of what I find entertaining. I'll pay large for something along the scale of the BG series. I paid maybe 50$ for the entire series and I was late to it -- something like that I'd shell out $300 for minimum and I would consider it a bargain for the level of entertainment it provided (and still provides every few years). The Witcher was good but hardly epic. Given the lack of any real competition on the Desktop side it couldn't help but stand out -- bugs and all. Call it a lack of real alternatives. I enjoyed it but part of that may stem from being starved for new material and ideas for the genre. At the least the game brought the originating writer to my attention and I will probably buy the novels when they have been translated into English and published (assuming that the tranlations are actually done reasonably well -- Polish does not translate easily into English). MMORPGS are great for what they do but scratch a completely different gaming itch; they also tend to offer poor environments for storylines or at the most those that do have outstanding storylines are not immersive/atmospheric enough to outshout the emergent metagaming atmosphere that is the possibly inevitable result of 'massive' player populations.