Bartimaeus

XFX has kinda not great customer service anyways. It took them about a month and a half to check my video card for basic artifacting problems...and they no longer do the lifetime/double lifetime warranties anyways, so what's the point?

My sister died around half a year ago, but in some ways, this is harder than a sudden death - even one as awful as hers. It's...very unsettling. He's terrified, he's in pain, and feels totally incapable...he can't even walk or hardly talk anymore - and those are literally two of the things he loved most, moving around constantly and he's always been so very talkative - loved to talk to anyone about anything. Now, his lungs barely work and all he could do is just whisper a little...and silently cry. And then you look at him...and it's like he doesn't even look anything like himself. It's so different than a sudden death, which is just shocking and awful in a very different way, where there's nothing that can be said or done about it - it's over and done with, and that's that. For this, it's like...they're still here, they're still alive, they're still thinking about things, and they can still appreciate your presence - can love it, actually...but they're dying, and can't even communicate - certainly nothing like they're accustomed to. No memories or stories they want to tell to make sure are remembered, no real last words of insight...just a simple appreciation that you're here with them at that moment, because who knows when the next time you'll see them is, or what complications the next day will hold - if they even make it that far. Just stuck in a bed, locked there by their own physical incapability, and in pain... Makes it hard to leave - you want to be with them the entire time...but you can't. It's ghastly stuff, death. Truly ghastly. (e): And yeah, chemotherapy is truly awful in of itself. He nearly died from trying it - they didn't really think it would help due to his cancer's advanced state, but they figured, eh, what the heck, might as well try. He went from having an expected lifespan of 1-2 years, they said, to almost just a few weeks instead, and that one may still come true. Really awful. Thank you both for the well-wishes...as well as to anyone else sending positive thoughts my way. Cherish the people important to you - life's too short and ends much too suddenly to do anything else.

I drove many hours to see my terminally ill grandfather. It was difficult to see him in his state (rounds of chemo that quite literally nearly killed him, and may still do so in the next couple of days as he tries to recover from it so that he can live at least, you know, a few months more, at the very least), but I feel I would've regretted it for the rest of my life if I hadn't.

looks too easy for me [/s]

In regards to the "there are Steam games that don't require Steam except for the initial installation" - yeah, those have been around for years and years now, but it's up to the dev/publisher, and is not really any kindness of Steam/Valve (except for allowing them to do it, I guess).

We actually had a Steam thread already, it's just that it was a few pages down since nobody had posted it in a while.

I think it's a little harsh. I'm no fan of his, and I get the point, but while he's prone to being a raving lunatic, he often brings up subjects that others aren't willing to help get the ball rolling, which I appreciate. And other times, he just takes the most ridiculous and inane stances that really make you wonder what the heck was going through his head. The issue of playing a character, I suppose...

I seriously doubt any lawyer would ADVISE that. This almost certainly didn't happen anyways, and it's all just coincidence, but you could ask something like, "What's the best way that I can protect my family...what do I have to do, I'll do anything at all, because they're the only ones that matter to me right now?", and, well, if you were in that state of mind, I could see the possibility being indirectly mentioned (i.e. saying "well, if your crimes were vacated, your family would have a much better chance at escaping a civil case", which the obvious question would be, "well, how do I vacate them", to which the reply would be, "...well...")

So from that, is the implication that either he knew that fact on his own or someone close to him or his lawyers advised him to commit suicide?? Yes, seems a little contrived, doesn't it? But I suppose it's possible that it's something he learned and it just sorta became a goal in the back of his head as soon as...well, actually, as soon as both cases were on appeal, because if it works for one of the murders, it works for two, right? ...Yeah, seems contrived.

Interestingly, because he died during his appeal for the other murder, his crimes are now considered legally void. https://twitter.com/deancoyne/status/854651898930110464 Apparently, a murderer, but not a convicted murderer. From what I'm hearing, in specifically MA (where the murders took place), civil cases are much harder to win if the criminal trial does not succeed (so not like the OJ Simpson case that took place in California is what I'm saying). He may have done this to shield his family from having their assets taken away as a result of the murders.

Would anyone happen to have the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance soundtrack free MP3s from the old Interplay website, circa 2002-2003? It's something that I've been looking for for years now, with no luck. I doubt anyone has it, but if you do...you're probably one out of like maybe ten people who do. The Internet Archive never was able to archive them, either, as a result of the Interplay website hosting them off-site on some ftp server. The only thing that seems to exist of it is some fan-made game rip, which isn't quite the same...

You can work around auto-updates, but it sure is tedious. You'd just set the game to not auto-update, edit the game's appmanifest (a plain text file in your steamapps folder) to say it's the latest version, and then restart Steam, and then it'd think it's updated. Since you can obviously get around it, I am not even sure what the point of forcing this crap on you really even is - seems like it's just there to annoy the rest of us who really do not like auto-updates.

...not only that, what if you're not even slightly interested in those two games to begin with? I certainly am not...

If that doesn't work, you can just talk very loudly about jury nullification and either get disqualified or cause a mistrial. Either way, it ends your obligation!

Dialogue and choice and consequence around it is definitely lacking, for sure. What's your line in the sand for what is an RPG and what is not an RPG here? I, for example, don't see why explicitly choosing a "character archetype" is necessary, though - is not enough to just simply PLAY and hold true to a certain type of character? If I play D&D, it's not like I'm explicitly laying out 100% what kind of character I will be before I even start playing - yeah, there's the required stuff like what your class and alignment is (necessary for the purposes of the game system), but there are all sorts of little sub-details and variances within that that aren't clear except through your actual actions. If D&D had a sort of "classless" variant where you just build your character as you go along with no strictly defined class or character types, I would hardly think of it as being less of an RPG - it would just be a different kind. Why is that necessary here?

But I didn't say the combat system had anything to do with it being an RPG or not to begin with (probably where we're getting confused here, and probably what I should've replied with to begin with - my bad!). My entire argument was more trying to establish why it's still an RPG even with an un-RPG-ish combat system (in reply Zoraptor and Azdeus saying it's not an RPG at all, which is where I thought you were arguing from, but I see that you were not).

You pick the role you want to play. If you want to be a heavily armored mercenary who only trusts his AK and will take any job - including murdering others for no other reason besides that you'll get paid - that's the role you can play. If you want to be an ideologue that values personal freedom and the sanctity of human life over anything else, maybe you'll align with the Freedom faction and avoid trying to kill anybody and instead just try to sneak through or around combat encounters...and you probably won't be taking very many assassination contracts, that's for sure. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. didn't implement these things perfectly, of course not...but there is absolutely more to roleplaying than just ridiculous abstracted stats in my mind, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. allows for it more than most other so-called "RPG"s that railroad you into completing certain objectives or doing certain kinds of tasks. Yeah, there's still some of that due to the main narrative of the games and stuff, but you have much more relative freedom than a whole lot of other games. You choose your jobs, you choose your equipment and playstyle, and your actions affect your relations with other people and factions. That's about as much of an RPG as you can get in my mind. Yeah, again, all these things could've been done better than they were in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, but that's true for literally every game ever. And on the plus side, you don't have what I'd consider a terrible/wonky combat system either (...unlike the Fallouts), especially if you're okay with quickly adding a mod somebody else already worked on and complete to increase the damage/accuracy of weapons to make combat more deadly - for both yourself and enemies. Shadow of Chernobyl will quite possibly be my favorite shooter for the rest of my life for just these reasons - a very unique and extremely visceral blend of FPS and RPG elements with a pretty darned cool setting that I just cannot really find anywhere else in gaming.

Not counting Fallout 4 here necessarily, but isn't listing pretty widely poorly received games like Andromeda kinda besides the point here? Thought the idea was games that were well-received but that you just can't find yourself bothering with for specific (perceived or actual) reasons.

A relatively recent example of a game in a series that I like that I won't touch is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I shy away from all explicitly "open world" games because they tend to offer a repetitive and flawed/disappointing experience after about 10-20 hours of gameplay for me (the exact mark seems to be different for everyone...some people start feeling it after a pretty short while, such as myself, while others can play it significantly longer before games like this and, for example, the Elder Scrolls series, start to really feel that way). Sure, those first 10-20 hours might seem incredible, but games like this always eventually leave a poor impression by the time you finish with them, and I just don't really want to bother with that - it's not what I want out of Zelda. Throw in absolutely terrible voice-acting and copy+paste content throughout the entire game, and I really just can't be bothered. So it's too bad that Nintendo has announced that BotW will be their blueprint for future installments. Guess that means no more Zelda for me for the foreseeable future.

Hey, if you guys want to make your definition of RPG more or less strictly about character stats, that's your business. For me, equipment instead being that factor and something that you'll definitely be changing and messing around with throughout the entire game while otherwise meeting the definition is pretty much good enough for me (and many others) to call it an RPG.

Something I love about Stalker is tying all your combat stats purely to equipment. Anything else that cannot be handled by your equipment is left purely up to your own skills as a player. This is something that I wish other RPGs would at least try out and experiment in combination with real time action combat systems. I really wish there was a mod for the 3D Fallouts that did something like this for the combat abilities, and removed silly damage and accuracy scaling completely as a result. That would increase my interest in those games tenfold...as opposed to now, where my interest in them is roughly nil. It's so stupid and frustrating for me to have first person shooting mechanics tied to stats: a gun is a gun, and it should handle how YOU handle it in combination with its physical form factor (and consequent physical limitations)...and the projectiles should shoot at the same velocity and with roughly the same force and accuracy every time. It'd be nice to play a 3D Fallout like that...and where the combat system is much more brutal for yourself and enemies alike. Instead, these games have a "this is somewhat/fairly challenging" stage that happens at the beginning of the game, and a "I am a god of death for no real apparent reason" in the mid to late game. I just can't really be bothered with such silliness. Stalker, consequently, is much more my jam.

The developer more or less dissolved a few years back (owner of the company laid off virtually everybody, as I remember it), and only recently sorta reformed, with nothing about Stalker since then.

Total conversion projects almost never pan out (...and I think basically none for Stalker ever have), so hard for me to look at it objectively while knowing that.

I thought we were in "random video game news" and was having a serious brain problem situation trying to decipher what you were on about. Backdoor dealings involving Obsidian and Honda, what?

I think you can just change the file extension to something "less suspicious" (i.e. a txt) and it will be accepted. Sorry to hear that, Calax.