Slowtrain

Barring some sort of miracle revival of PC-only gaming over the next year or two, my current plan is to stick with my trusty XP system until it is no longer viable. WHen that day comes, I will switch all my gaming to consoles and purchase a mac for my computing needs. If there is no longer PC only gaming, then there is no reason really to take a pc over a mac. AT least for me, anyway.

STALKER: Clear Sky Waiting for a while to buy this game was a good idea. I was able to immediately install the fifth patch (or sixth or whatever) and start playing with so far no problems. The game is lots of fun. Its cool revisiting some of the areas from the first game and seeing how different they are now (or were before). No real complaints at this point. A lot of problems with the first game have been fixed. NPCs now use grenades, artifacts now have value that is meaningful, the whole upgrade/repair system adds a lot of reason for exploration. The AI is still solid. WHen I first started playing I was getting my butt kicked in combat a lot, due to all the bad habits I acquired playing that creampuff of a shooter Farcry 2, but after spending a few hours at STALKER, the difficulty has dropped somewhat as have my bad shooter habits. So very good game so far.

Even though I am not particulary interested in the game at this point (based solely on what I have read) and most likely won't buy it unless it gets a heck of a lot of praise from people (like Fallout 3 did), I very much hope it does extremely well in sales simply to keep the notion of the financial viability of the cropg alive.

I dunno. In computer/video games story and characters are rarely of high enough quality to much differentiate one game from another. Its really the mechanics of the gameplay and the world building that give games of this sort personality. When an original IP just hacks up old AD&D and other been there/done that crpg cliches like a bit of old lung, it is not doing much to establish its own identity. I guess one can commend them for being financially conservative and trying to maximize sales potential by releasing a vanilla product, but I'm a gamer not a stockholder so that really isn't a positive to me, personally.

I miss the CGW of the old days, with its 17% score reviews, like crazy, but really is it better to live on as a whored out PR rag with 0 credibility or to go out as something that was once worthwhile. All those guys at CGW were far too talented not to have moved onto something else worthwhile.

I don't really think a player choice of player character sex has much to do with rpg vs fps. Mostly it has to do with a balance between allowing the player to feel more attached to their pc vs how much the devs want the player to assume a specific role for the course of the game. Assuming the devs don't feel strongly about defining the gender of the player character for the purposes of the game story, then allowing a choice of player character sex is pretty much a good and basic thing to do. Otoh, if the devs very much want to build the game around a sex-specific pc, then I have no problems with the devs removing that choice from me. I choose NOLF as an example not because it was an fps or rpg or whatever, but it was a game that would not have been the same game had the player had a choice of playing a male pc.

Just bought FO3 and STALKER:CS. Clear Sky was only 30 USD. Not quite the bargain bin I was hoping for, but close enough. It's supposed to snow all a lot this weekend so maybe I can get some gaming in. Unless the power goes out of course. WHich would suck.

dbl pst. bleah

Memories. That little run of M&M 6, 7, 8 was pretty fun. A definite decline as it went but still, good times.

MY TV isn't even 30 inches.

Its because according to the High Fantasy Bible fighters and thieves can't use magic. Unless they are some sort of mage hybrid. What happens if a mage steals something? Or bashes somebody from behind in a dark alley and lifts their wallet? Isn't he then a thief that uses magic? bleah.

I read this a few months ago. I really enjoyed it. I haven't picked up the next book in the series yet but I definitely will. The Name of the Wind The Amazon text mentions Harry Potter. Is that an accurate comparison, do you think? Assuming you have read any HP, that is. heh. On my lighter note I am reading a Hellboy collection. I guess there is a lighter note and then a really really lighter note. lol

Just finished Lord of the Silent Kingdom by Glen Cook. 2nd book of The Instrumentalities of Night. I'm not much of a fan of high fantasy anymore, but Glen Cook has come a long way since his Black Company days. His current stuff is pretty good. Having my enjoyment of High Fantasy reawakened, I'm trying for the fourth or fifth time to read GRRM A Game of Thrones. As usual I am having a horrible time getting into it. I am up to around page 100 again and have totally stalled. Again. I may reread Moor****'s Swords Trilogy instead. If anyone has any high fantasy recommendations that aren't Mercedes Lackey, RA Salvatore, Weis/Hickman, Raymond Feist, David Eddings, Robert Jordan or Terry Brooks, I wouldn't mind hearing them.

Perhaps nuclear-powered robot horses in an upcoming DLC? Think of the win!

Its really a moot point, the 100+ hr CRPG, for the the most part, is dead. At least according to many devs I have spoken to. Will always be a 'rebel' outfit who makes such from time to time (like oblivion) but as a whole most publishers don't feel they will have the mass market appeal they did 10 yrs ago. Especially when publishers see the sales numbers of many recent CRPGs that failed on a sales level (bloodlines for example). Thus won't fund such a project, at least how the situation was described to me. I hope the situation changes but not holding my breath. Given the massive success of Oblivion and Fallout 3 though, perhaps there might be a new appeciation for the potential revenue of a large open world crpg? Especially when considering how DLC can simply be added right into the gameworld, generating an ongoing revenue-stream. Based on the sucess of Bethesda's last 2 games, apparently large open world games are enjoyed just as much by console gamers as by old school pc gamers.

Yes. Most, if not all, of the old console commands from Oblivion will work in Fallout 3. That's a good thing! Why the ?

Not if you went to the testing hall first, before you started the main quest or even talked to your fellow prisoner, and then warped back. If you only changed your char face, it usually wasn't much of a problem. I did have one time where a bunch of my stats were reset, but that was the only time out of quite a few where using SHOW RACE MENU caused problems. Does Fallout 3 allow the use of SHOW RACE MENU?

Beh. It was, to say the most, ok - I think the graphics are/were overrated for the most part. I dunno. If you had the system to really turn up the detail, it did look amazing. (I thought). But as far as amazing graphics making a game good, yes, highly overrated. ALthough I thought the suit and weapons made the first half of Crysis pretty fun. The entire tank battle sequence was my favorite part. I ended up getting my tank killed and having to fight through it on foot. It was pretty crazy. edit: speeling

Robert Jordan, perhaps?

Could you please explain to me what this means? Does it mean you only have time for one more game in your life and your life is not expected to last 100 more hours? Does it mean you only have time for one more game before hanging up your gamer skates for good and 100 hours is too long because you're in a hurry to retire? Does it mean that you have a limited amount of hours left to play in your life and you'd rather spend them on ten ten hour long games instead of one 100 hour long game? Does it mean your wallet explodes unless you get to fork out 10x$50 (for 100 hours of playtime) instead of 1x$50 (for that 100 hour game)? Does it mean you have to play it from beginning to end in one sitting and 100 hours would most probably kill you? Seriously? You don't have time for a 100 hour game? Do you have time for ten shorter games (8-10 hours each)? Don't you expect to play 100 more hours of games in the remainder of your life? Do you expect to be buying any more games in the future? Don't you think they'll all add up to more than 100 hours sooner or later? Please enlighten me. Yes. You asked the question better than me, so thank you. I simply fail to understand what "I don't have time for a 100 hour game" means. Unless in some way quantity of games played must be achieved in fixed length of time, such as if you are a reviewer or something and have to finish a certain number of games in a certain amount of time

To be fair though, one couldn't play NOLF as a guy. Although I personally think allowing a player character to be of either sex is a pretty good thing to do, simply because it allows gamers to feel more attached to said character, if a developer has a strong sense of who they want the main character to be (as in NOLF), then I think it's OK to remove some of the player options for customizing a character. edit: As an example in the other direction, I don't think allowing Alex Denton to be either male or female in Invisible War added anything whatsoever to that game, so in that case I would say why bother. Of course, I woudl also wonder why anybody bothered makign INvisible War in the first place, so perhaps the question is moot. :/

No argument there. Liking a game simply because it is 100 hours plus is just as silly as disliking it because its 100 hours plus. This.

For starters, I'm not sure it takes 100 hours to read a 500 page book. Depending on the writing style, I think it might take me 20 hours, and I'm a fairly slow reader. Plus, books that I finish usually have an engaging central plot that propel the story forward. There just aren't a lot of games that have that. And I agree with Morgoth that books are a much easier form of entertainment to doll out in small increments. I can read in my car, or lunch break, or wherever and feel comfortable with that. Getting into a game requires a good deal more for me. I have to remember exactly how to play. I don't have to spend a couple moments remembering how to read every time I open a book. It's not completely intuitive. It's definitely not something I do before bed to wind down. And what makes you think I have a single hour every day to play? I don't, most nights I'm lucky if I get my daughter into bed and have twenty minutes to myself before I have to get to sleep myself. For a lot of games, that just doesn't cut it. So I go a full week between a game session quite often, and sometimes after a full week away I feel like I've lost touch with the game story and gameplay. And at that point, it's easy to just stop playing altogether. The only time I have to play a game is right before I go to bed. Maybe thirty minutes to a couple hours most nights. It took me well over a month to get through Far Cry 2 (the most recent game I've played). I didn't seem to have any problem keeping the continuity going over that time; games aren't exactly complex narrative texts. Oblivion took me 4 or 5 months to finish. Unless you have to meet a minum quantity of games finished within a limited number of hours, there's no good reason why you can't spend 100 gaming hours on one game rather than on 5. And its cheaper as well. As far as the 500 page book goes, I wasn't trying to equate 500 pages directly to 100 hours of time. My point was that not liking a game because it has too many hours of gameplay is like not liking a book because it has too many pages. It's a silly way to judge either. If you have 100 hours of fun gameplay, is that bad thing? Whether it's in one game or five?

VO is a waste of time. A lot of people turn subtltles on anyway. I know I always do. Plus most VO sucks.