Monte Carlo

Yes, if you download GateKeeper and go to the Bioware forums some kind soul will happily walk through altering the global variables for you. This will basically tell the game that you've completed that quest and will allow you to carry on. Couldn't you use your last autosave, or did you delete that too? I think it's very cool that people are still playing and enjoying BG1. Don't give up. When you've finished go find BGTutu and start all over again! Cheers MC

"Pointless combat" is the very stuff of war. The Somme. Pork Chop Hill. The Retreat from Moscow. The Imjin River. Dunkirk. Almost every major engagement on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945. Pointless. Large groups of heavily armed men killing each other to dominate a topographical detail decided by men hundreds of miles away. Usually totally pointless. I suggest your "political student" reads some military history if you intend to capture the "essence" of war. If your module starts with a totally unexplained and brutal, relentless assault by enemy troops for a half hour then it would be a pretty decent introduction. Think of the opening sequence of the otherwise execrable Saving Private Ryan. War (i.e. the physical act) involves groups of (usually) men killing each other to sieze and dominate terrain. Period. Turning that into a gripping adventure for a computer game is your challenge. Cheers MC

In the UK you can get IWD/HoW bundled for about UK

There are the Space Marines, Eldar (who are sort of strange space elves I guess; I'm not a Warhammer mentat), Orks (who are orcs) and Chaos Marines (demonic space marines and can summon demons and stuff). I thought it all rather hokey, but actually it's a rather enjoyable blend of camp, over-the-top science fantasy that reminds me of 2000AD's Nemesis The Warlock. The graphics, BTW, are very good. The unit models and (especially) vehicles are really well done. Cheers MC

To answer your questions: 1. There is only one race (Space Marines) in the official campaign. You can play any of the races in single-player skirmish mode, which is pretty good fun. 2. Full MP support with customizable armies. I have a Chapter of bright pink space marines. Cheers MC

True. So I'll bite. Platoon with swords, huh? Actually, that was trite but thinking about it now, it sort of makes sense. A war story with as little combat as possible? You're losing me dude.... seriously. Band of Brothers had freakin' stacks of combat. It was one of the reasons it was so cool. Oh well. Ah, Full Metal Jacket with swords. Me like. Don't forget to have the fat guy impale himself with his longsword in the latrines, OK? Right. There are loads of issues here, aren't there? Firstly, in D&D a "simple soldier" is a zero level grunt with six hit points, a leather jerkin and a spear. Even first level fighters, it is suggested, are sort of NCO level, what with their nifty feats and high hit dice (compare and contrast with the NPC "Warrior" class). So how do we get around that? It would be very cool if you could code it so that your PC is actually a zero level warrior and has to "ascend" to level one fighter in the tutorial.... Secondly, simple soldiers are unlikely to "adapt martial philosophies on the battlefield", even today that stuff is reserved for officer training. Grunts are taught how to march to point "A", kill everybody there then defend that point until relieved. Thirdly, what is your game world's culture like? Military organisations provide mirrors of them...from the regular post-Marian Roman legions to the tribal warriors of ancient Europe to the professional Fyrd of dark ages Britain. Look at our own times.... in parts of the Third World you might find militias who are nothing more than heavily armed bandits. In Scandinavian countries you still have citizen-conscript armies. In Britain and America you find professional regular armies with high levels of technology. Are your soldiers conscripted against their will, are they specially selected or what? Something to think about. I'd definitely play a mod like this. A proper military-themed adventure would rock if done properly. I agree that you can find much to admire in old war movies, and the boot camp scenario is an old favourite (i.e. Band of Brother's "Curahee" sequence). My own favourite opening to a war movie is that of The Dirty Dozen. Lee Marvin (looking extremely cool in his jump boots and ice-cold squint) rocks up in his jeep at a military prison in England and offers twelve convicts a suicide mission in occupied France in return for commutation of their death sentences. Most of them are scum with nothing to lose. The whole thing exudes old-fashioned machismo and grit. Why not have your grunts start out in a penal battalion? They are urchins, debtors, the poor and petty criminals. Brutal "recruiting" sergeants scoop them up from the streets and throw them into ersatz military units to feed into the ever-hungry jaws of the front line. Some of these grunts develop enough skill to progress, even win their liberty back and join the regular army. Military history is littered with these sorts of stories, from the Napoleonic press gang to the Nazi and Soviet punishment battalions of WW2. When you think about it, weren't Roman gladiators also prisoner-warriors? It also gives you a nice, neat way to start your module: a disparate mixture of people (from a guy who was simply drunk and captured by a press gang through to convicted thieves or addicts) in a stockade. They meet their sergeant-instructor, a "Trusty" veteran of the penal battalions. And off we go. Does the PC choose to try to escape after a while or carve out a career in this brutal new world? Do his squad-mates bond or fight like cats in a sack? And so on. There's my tuppence. Cheers MC

There are some really, really good fanmade NWN modules. Unfotunately, they all suffer from the blocky, cartoony, generic and downright boring NWN graphics so they all look pretty much the same. I'm on dialup so I can't be doing with the increasingly massive hak paks and so on, so that's another consideration. Cheers MC

The last RTS I played was Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. I thought it was great fun...plays a little like a cross between Total Annihilation and Starcraft. There are no harvested resources, just extra resource points for taking tactically important areas of the map. you do get to build neat-o bases though. I've only played the single-player campaign as the Space Marines, but I imagine MP is a blast. It isn't technically a RTS, but Rome: Total War might hit the spot for you and is for me the best PC game released in the past three years. Cheers MC

Wow! The future is here. I was getting so jaded about the CRPG scene when I found this!. Courtesy of the excellent gaming blog Wonderland. Beat that, Shadowpaladin! Cheers MC

The press release actually made me angry. So, a spot of Fisking methinks: Yes, they have. Every time the Atari suits foists a hackneyed, don't-scare-Joe-Gamer cookie-cutter plot onto a developer. Again? AGAIN? AGAIN? I'm sorry, but there must be so many banners of legendary evil being rallied in the FR that I'm surprised that there's room for anything else. No doubt in the "School for Adventurers" tutorial, right? :: sigh :: I'm sorry, but why does anything to do with the Nevewinter franchise have to be so deeply studded with cliche? Nothing in this stirred my interest, just made me very, very weary. Why can't the opening pitch be different? There are so many other ways you might SAVE TEH WURLD, are there not? Cheers MC

Sorry Feargus, but comparisons between computer games and CDs or even DVDs are facile. Example: Imagine that in, say, 1996 I bought X-Com 2 for my PSX1 and Forty Licks by the Rolling Stones on CD. Guess what? I'm still listening to Forty Licks whilst X-Com and, indeed, the console I played it on are long gone and forgotten. Ditto my Lawrence of Arabia special edition DVD versus, oooh, Fallout: Tactics? You can't compare the two because one has longevity and the other manifestly does not. A CD can be a cultural investment whereas a computer game is a mere indulgence. Yst's point about the music industry is well-made, but my ancient CD from '96 was still easily and legally transferred onto my iPod. The vast majority of computer games are disposable, electonic Big Macs. Only a select, elite few have genuine longevity. So I'm sorry that production costs are booming and that the industry's business model is so broken, with second-rate and derivative products the overwhelming norm. But you are all big boys and I'm sure you'll be OK.

Like I've said, I'll be waiting for some feedback and a patch before I touch it with the proverbial bargepole. The Doohickey of Ultimate Greatness or whatever isn't in four separate parts located across the Sword Coast by any chance?

I haven't touched my XBox in over four months. This might have something to do with the release of Rome: Total War, which only highlights the restrictions on consoles for a gamer such as myself. Cheers MC

I've stopped buying games and DVDs from shops. I buy online and save a ridiculous amount of money instead. It's almost like there are two prices for electronic entertainment products: one for people with a bit of patience and/ or savvy and another for the sheep/ non-IT savvy civilians. :: shrugs :: You pays your money and you takes your pick. if I was the bloke working in Game being asked why the new Gran Turismo or whatever was five quid cheaper online I'd say "why aren't you buying it online, brainiac?" After all everything is cheaper online; just check out the difference between UK budget airline tickets for example. Financial services products are actually cheaper online. Etc. Cheers MC

@ Rhomal: Having read your replies to the feedback I've come to the conclusion that you are after attention, not any sort of critical dialogue. Your dismissive attitude to criticism is interesting. Your work is derivative and not wildly original. However, despite the feedback you've received you still seem very pleased with it and, indeed, yourself. Why did you ask for feedback? Cheers MC

My main problem is the format you've used; there's no executive summary of what the setting is about. I ploughed through it and came away with no real sense of a theme, or of what you are actually trying to say. Given the long history of D&D it is very difficult to come up with a genuinely new and original campaign setting. Even Ebberon, the new D&D 3.5 setting isn't exactly mind-shatteringly original in my humble (I can spot a half dozen influences straight off the bat from sources as diverse as Elric's Young Kingdoms to Pratchett's Discworld). So that you have created something generic is quite unsurprising. Fear not. Generic doesn't mean boring, does it? Thousands of people enjoy the FR, which is cookie-cutter pap most of the time. It's the game. It's the fancy icing on the cake; if the cake is stale nobody cares about the cherry on top. A well-written and executed adventure can take place anywhere. I think top-down world building (which is what you seem to have done) is wrong. You need to go the other way perhaps; create a small town and have fun figuring out who everybody is and what they do. Then work outwards from that; why does the priest of 'X' forbid the use of even the humblest cantrip? Why does everybody heed his advice on the issue? Is this a parochial thing? Why do the militia excel at the crossbow but eschew polearms? Is iit because of a particular foe? where do they come from? Why? From this mixed bag of seemingly small issues you can begin to create the building blocks of your campaign. And it will feel organic, not forced. My two pence. Cheers MC

The original hellgate in London can be found here. The robot-warrior-dude covered in crosses looks like something out of Warhammer 40K to me. I'm predicting demonic sci-fantasy with a gothic setting. In London. Wow, what a savant I am. Blizzard might not make CRPGs but they make stable, fun, well-supported games. Which is good enough for me. Cheers MC

If the game were set in a US high school there would, presumably, be no shortage of high velocity assault weapons for that "real world" feel.

I'm still pimping my D20 version if Frasier to developers. It would rock.

Ten bonus points for anybody who can dub a cogent explanation of the Schleswig-Holstein question into Serbo-Croat. Cheers MC

I'm getting rather radical about "American English" versus English (I had an argument once with an American who insisted on calling it "English English" as if we were upstarts using a bizarre variant of their mother-tongue. Of course, all of these arguments usually end with the red-faced yank reminding you that if it wasn't for them then we'd be speaking German. Yawn. If it wasn't for the Normans You'd Be Celts, as the French sing at football matches to Brits). Mind you, German is a tortuous language and not much fun so I concede the point, although when I suggest that the Russians also had something to do with it you usually get an even huffier response. I digress. People assume that we either (A) don't mind or (B) won't notice the difference. Well I do. I'm going to mod all the IE games into The Queen's English. No more +3 armor. Oh no. Our era of political correctness has completely bypassed those of us who speak English...this cultural insensitivity has to stop. Especially when you remember that Webster (IIRC) deliberately changed the spellings of English words in a snotty fit of pique after the War of Independence. Bah. Sox. Sox? Think about it. While I'm warming to the theme, do you know how many Britons don't even bother to re-jig their versions of MS Word to English? The amount of written reports and submissions I see with "Microsoft English" spellings (the letter 'Z' is everywhere) is startling. When I show them that lovely drop-down box and select "English (UK)" they are genuinely surprised. And, I like to think, delighted. Anyway, it's time for my pills and a mug of warm milk. Cheers MC

It's not just CRPGs that can let you down with their hasty endings. Rome: Total War gives you a ten-second cutscene of your faction marching through the Senate. Wow. I wanted a five-minute Spartacus style ending, a proper swords & sandals epic. Now, I grant you, R:TW isn't story-driven as it's simple premise is that you conquer the ancient world. Let's also remember that a big, all-action cutscene is quite expensive and resource intensive, so it's normally put at the beginning of the game (Joe Gamer seldom completes a CRPG).... look at Diablo 2 or ToEE which both had great opening sequences. RPGs that did ENDINGS well: Baldur's Gate 1: That big spinning chamber of avatars where Sarevok crumbles into dust really inrigues you and is mysterious enough to whet your appetite while still providing an element of closure. Fallout 2: As has already been posted, it has a dynamic ending that slots directly into your characters actions/ skillz. Cool. Icewind Dale: Because of the groovy plot-twist at the end, although it does hark back to a horror standard used in everything from Carrie to The Thing. Baldur's Gate 2: I like the cutscene with the mysterious robed dudes and Irenicus getting rugby-tackled into hell by demons. Shame ToB didn't really run with the ball, although the NPC stories at the end were a nice touch. Cheers MC

Yes, I reckon you've just about played 'em all. If you enjoyed BG2, why not install a load of mods? Use a reputable site like Pocket Plane and you'll seriously have a totally different game on your hands (especially if you like NPCs). Also, BG1 with BG TuTu is a lot of fun. Most recent CRPGs have been hack & slash. You are going to have to go back in time. I've not played Gothic I or II but some people seem to like them. And Fallout 1 & 2 are worth a look (I prefer FO2 but thats just me). Cheers MC

Yes, Obs want to be very careful about their predictions for the single-player campaign. The veracity of Bioware devs after NWN OC is, to be polite, diminished. Now, I'm not going over the whole sorry "we were had over by Bioware over the nature of NwN" argument...AGAIN. No. We've done that. What I am saying is that if Obs just say "we are gonna make a kickass sequel to NwN for the core fans...the builders, the multiplayers, the modders" then OK, fair enough. Big respect because they'll probably achieve that. However, Ferret is clearly pushing a company line that the SP market (remember us?) is also where NwN2 is at. Now, I have a lot of respect for MCA et.al over at Obs and have no doubt that they will be able to create a story better that the NwN OC. Then again, as I have declared before, my six year old nephew could. What I do doubt is that the short-ish dev cycle and other issues that Visceris (totally reasonably) points out makes us understandably sceptical. Who gives a rat's arse if I buy the game? Nobody. Nonetheless, Obs does have to deal with the lamentable legacy of the dreadful NwN OC. Period. It is my considered opinion that decent CRPGs are going down the crapper. I'd love NwN2 to prove me wrong, Ditto Dragon Age. However, I've been a disappointed fan too many times. I no longer "early adopt" games...I'll wait until NWN2 is released and patched before I even think about buying it. Cheers MC