Monte Carlo

^ I want to play Baldur's Gate but I can't get BGTuTu to work So I'm playing BG2, Medieval TW2 and a helluva lot of NWN2 instead.

Clearly, my 'Let's Make the Worst Fantasy Setting EVAR' thread was an enormous success and attracted the cream of the forum to contribute. I am still crafting a campaign setting from the wealth of raw material, I shall make it available by the totally non-negotiable October release date. Now it's time to create the Best Fantasy Setting Ever. Seriously. Please post a precis of what its about and what the setting is like, who the player characters would be and maybe who the bad guys are (if, indeed, you choose to have bad guys in the normal meaning of the word). You can be completely revolutionary or cleverly traditional - classic tailoring with a sartorial twist. But it should be compelling, playable and fun. Post ideas for game mechanics, classes, deities, anything. Ladies and Gentlemen, the floor is yours. Cheers MC

Looked at the screenies on the German 'focus-on-making-expressionless-elf-chick-characters' DA article. I rather like the character sheet, I even like streamlined skill trees. But even the character sheet has freaking blood spattering on it. I'm calling my character Dexter, for chirssakes.

Jaheria's fate in about 75% of my games, unless I need a moody druid with crap stats.

^ I remember the bucket! Nostalgia ain't what it used to be - the BIS boards were groovy but also a haven of relentless spamming and O/T dross. And I thought my postcount there was in the low 2000's...

Hey Germans are gamers too. And there's lots of them. Is it just me or are the elves a bit too 'Humans with pointy ears' a la Spock? I really liked the NWN / NWN2 art direction whereby you could make some really freaky non-human looking elves.

It's such a small yet completely important thing.... I hate the font they've used for the text in this game.

So far we have the following DLC announced - * A new NPC with associated quests. $15 for an NPC? Hahahahaha. On a a game where you get the toolset? Double hahahahahahaha. * A new mini-expansion (The Keep) * Magic items, including the stat / exp boost Put them all together and I suppose you've enough material for a very small expansion yet the net cost for all of the above is almost the same as a full one. I call greed on this one, they are going for a two tier revenue stream model. I'd rather see all the above, plus some new quests bundled into the XP at a normal XP price. Maybe someone can explain the MMO style buying-loot system they are implementing here, even I can see why the Bioboard regulars are hacked off. Bio are the Starbucks of the computer gaming, they really are. That's $5 dollars for a muffin, six if you want choc chips, seven if you want us to light a scented candle while you eat it! Cheers MC

Hello GM, I faintly remember you. I was on the BIS boards from 2000-2004. I'm nice as long as you agree with virutally everything I say. Although the forums haven't been the same since Karzak The Friendly Half-Orc retired. Cheerio, MC

^ Checked it out again, my bad I got confused with the FO3 article I read - he did the father's voice at the prologue of FO3. I am a complete dunce, forgive me

No kidding? He has a fantastic speaking voice when he drops the Transatlantic drawl he's picked up, resonant and rich. Planescape navel gazing = meh.

Mentioned it in the other DA:O thread but King of Dragon Pass (1999) is a very odd but completely charming little game. I suspect many of you here would enjoy it, check it out. Cheers MC

^ Never solo'd BG1 or BG2, but completed both (vanilla, mind you, no mods) with only a PC Ftr/Thf and Imoen in my party. Never did that with ToB. In BG1 missile weapons were sick. Completely broken. Not that I minded, as I usually took Coran along (Broken DEX, broken weapon profs in longbow), he was basically a machinegun. Cheers MC

OTOH, Liam Neeson does VO in Dragon Age, which whichever way you split it is pretty impressive.

What was that politics game set in a former Eastern European country... Revolution or Republic or something. It isn't exactly what Maria was talking about, but it was fundamentally a roleplaying game where you set up a political party and took a certain route to achieve your political objectives, i.e. government. It didn't really work 100%, but outcomes were non-combat based, there were no stats, there was a story... Conversely, Maria should check out King of Dragon Pass which I suspect might be right up her street. A totally non-traditional, story-based quasi adventure / fantasy RPG set in a lovingly crafted and original setting (RuneQuest's Glorantha). Even a polyhedral dice-orientated wargaming gorgnard like me fell totally in love with it. Would it shift units in EB or Game? No. Guys, were in cultural territory here, and games like this are in Ingmar Bergman territory, which ain't showing next to Transformers 2 in any mulitplex I konw of Cheers MC

Obviously I don't care for romances in CRPGs. OTOH, I'm cool with people enjoying romances of any description (and if we are having romance options then it's definitely about time there was a gay romance in a CRPG). I'm also cool about more female gamers playing CRPGs but I don't buy that it it axiomatic that this must mean romances - that's just another stereotype. Lots of male gamers loved the BG2 romances - let's not polarise this issue. What does bug me is the squeakiest wheel getting the oil - the romance lobby is very loud over on the Bioboards, there is a cosy groupthink there on this issue. As long as romances are entirely optional and don't detract from the overall game I just get on with it, but for some yes, they would appear to want a romance game with some easy combat between cutscenes. There's nothing wrong with adding a counterbalance to that POV. Cheers MC

I will clarify the bit I don't get about this argument, taking on board what people mean by Hitler's brilliance. Generally major historical figures are considered in the round, as in are they more than the sum of parts? Whilst we are on WW2, Churchill is a good example. A deeply flawed man (Gallipoli springs to mind) he was nonetheless brilliant by any objective measure of the term. Why? His doggedness, ability to build alliances, courage (both political, moral and physical). One looks back over a life and sees something special - achievements that mean something. Ghengis Khan might be described as 'brilliant' by this argument. Undoubtedly a butcher and a tyrant, he nonethless showed nothing less than genius as a general and king with the world at his feet - there are achievements there in politics and logistics and even a legacy of sorts. This is the man who had clerics tied into sacks and trampled by horses. Who razed cities by the thousand. I'm sure you get the picture. Hitler? Nope. Misanthropic weirdo and failure joins bully-boy political party full of cranks. Uses it to take over country already on it's knees and ripe for revolution. Uses age-old turnip ghost of anti-semitism to provide scapegoat. Exploits exisiting corporatist economic framework but adds rallies, flags and Leni Reifenstahl movies to make it seem groovier. Equally odd friends develop almost comical Gothic death cult to pander to their depraved sensibilities (ironically, almost all of them are deviants who bear no resemblance to the aryan ubermensch they venerate). They then declare war on THE REST OF THE WORLD and suffer entirely predictable crushing defeat. There's nothing 'brilliant' here, my friends, just a bizarre tragedy. Hitler's legacy is to be a bogeyman, a Charlie Chaplin villain, a be-medalled lunatic ranting in his bunker and confiding in his dog. It's like saying that The Manson Family were brilliant because they evaded justice for as long as they did. Cheers MC

I was asking for the opinion of people who played it, duh. I didn't realise this was your thread. Don't bleed spats over from other parts of the forum, it's not done.

The VO ain't great, strange because Claudia Black has a nice voice. As for the romance stuff, phasers to obliterate (etc), the Mills & Boon crowd over on the Bio boards must be wetting themselves. Maybe my party will be the meat-shield with the Foreign Accent and two wardogs. Cheers MC

^ The theory is (and it's not mine, although I like it) that Hitler would have rolled across Turkey / The Crimea and into Persia. He'd have secured oil pipelines there, denying the Russians of the same resource and exposing the Soviets to the South. After all, Turkey was NATOs prized 'Southern Flank' against the WP in the Cold War.

It looks like an early version of Commandos.

:: sigh :: There is a fairly credible school of thought that argues that Weimar was going in the right direction. Listen, in the 1920's I'm sure you're aware that THE WHOLE FREAKING WORLD was in the grip of the economic equivalent of bubonic plague. Interestingly, the two powers that fell to extreme totalitarianism were Russia and Germany... which is interesting because they are chalk and cheese. Your argument, unless I've misunderstood, is that a country on it's knees will immediately turn to the nearest wannabe dictator... and that the dictator's ability to get a country back on it's feet by planning imminent world war is some sort of brilliant move (whichever thesauras we are using today to define brilliant). I don't agree. And I detect a move away from the acceptance of the unique evil of Nazism in some of the language used here which for me feels like inadvertent revisionism. As for the democracy thing, I don't think it's in dispute that democracies were less likely in the first half of the twentieth century to kick off wars than the autocracies. We are discussing a big subject, we are going to argue. Cheers MC

^ Who p*ssed in your cornflakes?

Warriors of the Eternal Sun for the Sega Mega-Drive was Storm of Zehir in 1992. You had an overland map, obligatory old-skool first person dungeoneering view and extremely cool cod-medieval synthesizer muzak. Wikipedia link to gamebox art here. Mobygames link to art detail here. Loved this game, spent hours playing it. I didn't have a PC in 1992, I think I bought my Sega console in 1993/4 when I played this - by which time I hadn't played PnP D&D for about three or four years. This got me all hyped up about D&D again and the possibilities for the game on the computer.... then, for me, came Baldur's Gate...