Kools

And that's the one and only reason to have it, really. Crysis. Are there even any other games out there right now that'll run in 64-bit mode? I mean, I've got it, since it is eventually going to replace XP and I might as well start getting used to it now, but I also run XP on the same box, and there's honestly nothing Vista offers at the moment for me outside of that one single game that XP can't match. Slick interface, though. It's been mostly okay - no driver difficulties, no major bugs, though it does absolutely despise PunkBuster and I had to do a manual update of said softwhere in order to get COD4 to stop kicking me.

Why're you so hyped on 64-bit Vista, anyway? I've got it installed - in a dual boot config with good ol' XP SP2 - and yeah, it's a pretty damn nifty-looking OS, but I can't see it bringing you all that much benefit unless you really need that 4 gigs of RAM for multimedia work or whatever.

TIE Fighter Aces Over Europe Medieval: Total War I got bored with the Baldur's Gate series about halfway through each. I made the mistake of playing Fallout 2 before Fallout, and thus never finished - and barely even started, really - the original. A mistake I repeated with the KotOR series.

Yeah, Im kinda afraid Ill have to re-spec to Ice (currently fire spec) to have a fighting chance. Although I seemed to be kicking much butt so maybe the Ice spec would only be required for Arena's? Thats where you do the 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 right? It is. Also, don't overlook tailored gear - a good friend of mine plays a mage, and she was all excited about picking up the Tier 4 pants off of Gruul before realizing that the tailored ones she had were actually better in almost every situation. The Gladiator gear from arenas was also quite good at the time I quit, which was in mid-July, if memory serves. As far as raiding goes, it's one of those things I'd at least give a shot or two. Most guilds that do it are progression-oriented, which means they're going to be fairly strict about the actual mechanics - running a raid without Vent is a nightmare, while sign-ups are necessary for the raid leader(s) to make sure of a variety of things, ranging from raid composition up to fairness in terms of who gets to go. If it's something you like doing, taking it seriously doesn't end up seeming as wacky as it sounds; I led the raids and main tanked for my guild for a year and a half before finally having enough of it, but during that time I honestly enjoyed tearing my hair out trying to herd cats, staying up until 2AM going over data, and coming up with strategies prior to the raid knowing full well they'd probably have to be adjusted on the fly. There's a certain satisfaction to be had in getting 40 or 25 people to work as close to perfectly as possible. There's a hell of a lot to be said against it, too, so I definitely don't recommend leading. Go along for the ride now and then, though; most guilds, despite the serious approach, do manage to have fun with it. Especially in the 10-mans. We used to do Stories With Holes in Kara. Good times. Oh, and to stay on topic, I'm still doing COD4 and Crysis.

The nice thing about Shadowrun, to my mind, was that you could take from it what you wanted and leave the rest. I always see it described as a fantasy-cyberpunk hybrid, and I suppose it is, but the games we ran way back when I was 13, and the online MUSHing I did in the system, always focused much more on the cyberpunk aspect rather than the fantasy stuff - of which there's not really all that much. Yeah, there's elves and orks and dwarves and trolls, and yeah, there's magic, but it's not exactly like it's medieval-era fantasy archetypes wandering around 2070s Seattle. I really do wish someone else controlled the rights to that game, though. Always thought it's the most ideal system for an MMORPG ever created.

Yeah, those insignia don't do anything save prevent the guy from running back to his corpse to rez. Also, how long have you been playing? 'Cause the game's been out for years, the battleground system is officially ancient, and even arenas are getting on in age by now, so if you're a longtime player I'd wonder how the hell you managed to avoid PVP this long. If, on the other hand, you're relatively new, I suppose I can kind of see it. Either way, get used to it. It's the only thing to do at 70 if you're not a raider, and raiding will leave you a broken, bitter husk of a man that smokes too much and hates everything associated with WoW.

It's just amusing to consider what is and is not acceptable as far as that M-rated ceiling goes. Violence can get as gory as it wants, but as soon as a developer sticks in some pixelated boobs, the Puritan Police come zooming in on their tricycles. Case in point: I picked up one of the import versions of The Witcher, simply 'cause I didn't really do my research on the differences between the US and UK versions and was led to believe there was some content cut in the former. As I understand it - and I could be wrong - the only real difference is that the US version removes a lot of the pixelated nudity - which is all far from OMG PORN anyway, mostly because it's, you know, pixels. While it's a good-looking game, it's still more comic than hot. The storylines involving rape, torture, murder? All fine and dandy, apparently, and you can still lop a guy's head off with your sword. I don't have a problem with either of those aspects, myself. And I honestly would like to see what developers can do with storytelling when it comes to the AO rating; I think there are probably some game writers out there that actually could pull off an interesting, engaging story with mature themes that'd run over the bounds of M. It's not going to happen, though, because economically, that's a death sentence, and I don't get why. The average age of gamers keeps going up, I hear, and as much as a Mature rating might mean a game's intended for 17+ or whatever, it really is sort of the PG-13 of the gaming world. Either that, or there are a hell of a lot of guys playing shooters via the internet on various voice chats who haven't had their testicles drop by the age of 17. As far as a game being better if it were allowed to go to AO rather than M? I don't think there're any out there. The Witcher might've ended up less comic vis a vis the ridiculous number of times Geralt gets laid, but that's about it. But it could be done, I'm sure. I don't think Schindler's List would have been nearly as good of a film if it'd been PG-13, for example.

Why are you using the three piece blue? Isn't that one something kinda lame like Pain and Bleeding?

Now that I've finally put my new system together, spending equal time on Crysis, Call of Duty 4, and The Witcher. Haven't even started the SP campaign with COD, I'm having way too much fun playing the multiplayer. Crysis is jaw-dropping in terms of visuals, and has the gameplay to back it up. The Witcher seems pretty cool, but unless I'm drastically missing something, the combat is singularly uninspired. Wait for flaming sword to light up, left click, repeat until you want to choke yourself with your shoelaces. Also, I'm mildly confused as to how my pasty, white-haired, clearly far too Goth swordsman manages to lay every single female he comes across - often by giving them things like half a cat carcass. I've tried that. It doesn't work.

It's much more noticeably easier in Gigantic galaxies precisely because of what you mention, but even on Medium galaxies I've found it pretty easy to pull off. I think the key is that I focus primarily on research, but also drive my economy as hard as possible - which means when the inevitable "Give us 1000 BC or we'll kill you" demand comes up, I can afford it without any trouble. I also always make it a point to try and keep things balanced as long as possible - when the AI starts going to town on itself, in the form of, say, the Drengans attacking the Yor when I'm playing Terrans, I funnel cash and guns, basically, to the guy who looks like he's losing. I rarely have any military ships of my own until the late game, but I make the occasional export design, ram ten or twenty or so through production, and hand them over to whoever's getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Nine times out of ten, the war ends in stalemate; when it truly doesn't make a difference and whoever happens to get conquered, it takes an immense amount of time. But now you're making me wonder.

That would be a blistering fast computer. It'd be pretty decent, yeah. Good luck getting ahold of the GTs right now, though. And the new GTS is apparently just around the corner as well. I'm going with either a single GT or GTX, I've decided, and likely going to take advantage of EVGA's step-up program when the 9800 GTX comes out.

Nine races, usually on either the medium galaxy size or the gigantic one.

I got it a couple weeks ago, actually, but I just can't get into it. I'm not sure why. Probably part of it is the fact that I've played it on every difficulty level, starting at Normal and going up to the one just under Masochistic, and haven't lost so far. I'm not saying it's a ridiculously easy game or I'm just uber-leet, just that I can keep myself out of wars very easily until I'm at the top of the food chain tech-wise, and zipping around the galaxy in uber-ships with Black Hole Eruptors or whatever very quickly becomes boring.

Currently won't work with the new Penryn processors, though it's confidently expected they'll eventually stumble on a fix. And as I'd be getting a C2D now with an eye to picking up a quad core in a year or so, when hopefully more than just, say, Crysis supports it, that's an issue. And I dunno if the 780is around the corner will have the same issue or not. Which has got me thoroughly wishing ATI cards could stand a chance these days, since every other alternative mobo I'm looking at will handle Crossfire just fine and dandy.

$1500 will get you very close to top of the line buying components. Paying an extra $1500 to have it ready to go vs. two hours to unpack and assemble plus however long it takes you to partition drives and install an OS (you can have any number of live cd Linux OSs up in a minute )...I don't think I'd call that laziness. Yeah, I was actually pretty shocked when I checked out the comparative pricing of buying it direct and putting it together myself. I'd end up saving an easy thousand bucks, so that's the way I'm going. Only thing I'm really worried about is Vista. 32-bit apparently won't play nice with 4 gigs of memory, which is what I was shooting for, while drivers and the like for 64-bit seem to be abysmal based on the reviews I've read.

Huh. Just on a whim, I through together everything that'd be going into my manufacturer system as separate parts on Newegg, and it comes out to be about a thousand bucks less thus far. That is...nice. Only thing I'm missing is a motherboard, and I have absolutely no clue how to go about selecting one of those. The one you recommended, Withteeth, mentions that it's for ATI Crossfire technology...I'll be going with an nVidia GPU. Does that mean they'd be imcompatible? I fully admit to having no idea. What I'll most likely do is stick with a single nVidia card for the time being, and see what's out a year or so from now to upgrade to.

So I've got a little extra cash floating around, and I've decided to replace my current laptop and desktop. The laptop I've already got covered, but the desktop's giving me some qualms. I, unfortunately, am not one of those gents who can build a killer gaming rig for $3.97, so I'm going to buy it off one of the big boys; what I'm looking for is great performance now, DirectX 10 yada yada yada, with an eye towards future upgradeability. Spending cap is about $3000, but I'd like to keep it closer to $2500 if possible. What I'm currently looking at right now is an Alienware with: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz (though there's the option for the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz in my price-range, but I have no idea about the relative merits, since it seems like Crysis is the only thing around right now that "supports" quad core). Dual 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTs. I -could- go with dual 320MB GeForce 8800 GTSs for fifty bucks more, but my little non-techie brain sees what looks to it a fairly significant memory drop-off, and wonders how they compare performance-wise. I'd throw in 4GB of memory, and the motherboard this thing runs on is an nVidia nForce 680i - which if I understand it correctly basically locks me into nVidia cards. Not that I particularly mind; I had bad experience with ATI stuff on this machine early on. Throw in a 1,000 Watt power supply, liquid cooling - which I have no idea if I need - and a couple other things, and it comes out to just under three grand, sans monitor. I will be picking up a new monitor as well, so that factors into the price. Now, its competition is a Dell, same motherboard, and, handily enough, they throw in a free 20-inch monitor. Difference, though, is that their quad-core offering is the Q6600 rather than the Q6700. Also, the best SLI configuration they come with out of the gate is a pair of 256MB nVidia GeForce 8600 GTSs. The Dell ends up being about $400 less. Dell's cheaper, but also seems like it's going to perform like it right out of the box. I could stick a bare-bones GPU on it when I order it, and immediately upgrade to something better, but even with some spectacular Newegg pricing, I think I'll probably end up sitting at around 3K, anyway, if I go for a high-end dual nVidia card configuration. Thoughts? Edit: I could throw a single nVidia 8800 GTX in either of them, but dual cards seems so...alluring...even though I have no idea how either dual 8800 GTs or GTSs would stack up with a GTX, which, from what I've read, is a pretty heavy hitter.

I'm not necessarily trying to be a defeatist jackass, but as others in the thread have mentioned, the scope of the mod you're talking about is almost certainly beyond the realm of anybody that's not, say, Obsidian or Bioware. Hell, the TSL Restoration Project guys have been working on their mod since I think shortly before the Kennedy assassination, and last I heard it's not due out until sometime in the late 2020s. And they've got a team, the basic building blocks of what they're trying to do already embedded in the game, etc.

Remember when K2 was first announced about four years ago? Remember the reason BioWare gave for not wanting to develop it themselves? What's true at the time isn't necessary true four years down the line. Especially with a behemoth like WoW around. I have absolutely no evidence to back any of my conjecture up, of course, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that every design house out there that has even the theoretical capability to produce an MMO isn't wistfully eyeing Blizzard's profits and going, "You know, if we could do that..." Nevermind the fact that they can't. WoW's...well, WoW's like Titanic. I don't think anyone can reasonably claim to understand its popularity - and I say that having played it for two years. There's really only so many things that LucasArts' involvement with Bioware in a new title could herald, and it's pretty unlikely that they turned to Bioware for something Indiana Jones-related. Given that as of January 2008 Bioware's going to be owned by one of the most notoriously profit-hungry slash-and-burn developers/publishers out there, and one that notably does not have a competitive entry in the MMO market, I'd say there's a very good chance we're going to see some sort of Star Wars MMO. Galaxies loses the license in 2009ish, I think, anyway, and it'll probably be shut down long before then. As for setting, the KotOR era makes the most sense. If Galaxies proved one thing, it's that damn near everybody wants to play a Mary Sue/Gary Stu Jedi/Sith, and the craptacularity that comprises post-original trilogy Expanded Universe pretty much rules it out as a likely setting. I don't think anybody except the fanfic authors that somehow get their drivel through Lucas Licensing wants to touch all the, "Oh, the Emperor's been resurrected! Oh, ninety-eight different key characters cloned themselves and are back - AND EVIL NOW!" BS that the post-OT era is. KotOR-era settings are relatively untouched and let you throw around hundreds upon hundreds of Jedi, and the whole True-Sith-beyond-known-space McGuffin can keep it going indefinitely. So I'm not going to be terribly surprised when Obiwanzorz hits up Dantooine to visit Visas Marr, the Jedi Sentinel trainer in a few years.