~Di

Never!!! *raises lethal tea bag* Prepare to die, fool... I shall steep you to death!

Sweet tea? Gag, yuck, pootooie!!! UNSWEET tea, dammit. UNSWEET!!! *wanders off, mumbling*

Truth be told, I drink about one soda every two months. The rest of the time I have a glass of pure well water in my hand. *sigh* It's true. When I'm in the mood for a cola, only Coke will do. But 90% of my liquid refreshment needs (er... the non-alcoholic kind, anyway) is pure water. And I recommend that for the rest of y'all as well. Seriously!

Indeed! Coke is heaven in a glass with bubbles! BTW, whoever heard that coke will dissolve bone was having his leg pulled. However... :D ... put a small amount of raw meat in a glass of coke and it WILL be cooked within a few hours. Honest to God! I try not to think about that whilst enjoying my favorite cola drink.

Heh, I actually enjoyed using magic in NWN because of the cheap rest system that took the drudgery out of refilling the spell well. Normally I'm too impatient to play spellcasters in D&D. I prefer fighters, thieves, and the like. BUT in party-based play I do love to have my potent spellcasters at the ready for buffing, enemy de-buffing, and the occasional well-placed nuke that blows away a dozen grunting zombies in a single blast of color. I'll confess that I tend to be a very visceral, yet tactical player (God, JA2 is my favorite game on earth; of COURSE I love tactics!)... but I bloody well hate the damned find-a-place-to-rest-NO-can't-rest-here crap after every damned D&D battle. It bores me to tears. Make spellcasters useful; make battles exciting. Let me get back into the game quickly, refreshed and ready to go, and don't force me to run all over Sigil... er, Amn... er... anywhere looking for a freaking Inn! At least let my group crash on a park bench.

Coke, definitely! Coke has a bite, a kick, a thirst-quenching "ahhhh" about it. Pepsi is sicky sweet, bland and... well... not coke. 'Nuff said.

I hope they do use the mana system, which makes using spellcasters considerably more fun/viable than the dull, annoying "shoot two magic missles, then rest for 16 hours" D&D stuff. I am seriously looking forward to Dragon Age. I'll rip it off the shelf the day it arrives,

So is this "Fable" ever going to come out on PC so the rest of us can try it out? Just wondering...

I'll confess, any game that forces me to play a specific character has one strike against it... and if that specific character is male, it has two strikes against it. That said, Planescape:Torment is in my top-five favorites of all time. And the Gothic series is in my top-ten. Yes, the Gothic controls are bumbling; but unless one has the IQ of boiled cabbage, they can be mastered within five minutes. Then you have a huge, seamless world to explore, people to meet, quests to do... immersion? I found myself totally immersed in the Gothic world, even if I was forced to "be" a specific male character with a specific history. Like most games, it took a certain amount of playing time before I began to understand the world I found myself in, and the people that shared it. Once I did, I was hooked. I supposed Gothic is one of those kind of games that either you love or hate... and even those who love it are not blind to its flaws (I've met damned few people who love the annoying and time-consuming lock-picking process! Grrrrr! ) But I must say that I totally, completely and utterly adore the Gothic series. Perhaps one had to play Gothic I and then Gothic II in order (Gothic II being a true sequel) in order to get the fullest enjoyment from the games. I dunno. I do know that Gothic started with two strikes against it, and ended up in my top ten. That's gotta count for something.

I voted for BG2/TOB. It's a masterpiece, one that I've played nearly 3 dozen times and continue to love. Close second, PS:T and Fallout2... PS:T doesn't have the replayability, but it too is a masterpiece in an entirely different way. So is Fallout2. I love Fallout2 and have played it many times. However, the frustration of the lousy companion AI and clunky, annoying combat keeps it out of first place on my personal list.

Jump for Joy? Dragon Age is the only "jump for joy" game on my personal horizon. There are a few that I may buy if the feedback is good, or am vaguely interested in... KoTOR 2, NWN 2, The Fall (except the German version, out now, is apparently so buggy it's unplayable... shades of Troika, *sigh*). I'd add games like Fallout 3 and Jagged Alliance 3D to my "jump for joy" list except they are at this point merely rumors, and to my knowledge haven't even been started. For all I know, they'll never be started so I'm sure not going to get excited about them at this point.

I thought I had found most of the severed hand sidequests... although maybe not. I'll confess that being whisked into the final battle without warning... not to mention without a chance to buff my party and rest to prepare spells... was a real shock, and contributed to my first defeat. After reloading and studying my memory of what happened and why, I realized what I had to do to survive. The second time, with my party rested and buffed against the mass dominate and stun spells that had decimated me, I was able to muster up an adequate victory without losing any party members. The point was that by the time I got to Severed Hand I was so bored and frustrated by the game I just wanted to get through it. And once I did, I tossed it in a corner, never enticed to play it again. Considering the dozen or more times I've played IWD/HOW/ToTL, that is truly unique for me. IWD2 could have been the best dungeon crawl ever made, because it began so brilliantly! For me, it failed that because as the game continued it became so very erratic in content and quality that it made me lose interest toward the end. So IWD/HOW/ToTL remains the dungeon crawl Champ IMHO!

Ahhhh, but Arundel's demise took place in the first quarter of the game (even less if you include HOW/ToTL in the mix!). I actually don't mind the opening segments, because I'm still enamored of the hauntingly beautiful music (the best of any RPG ever made, in my opinion!)... and besides, things get exciting as soon as one finishes the first major area, the haunted dale. IWD2 had so very much promise... yet I find myself yawning shortly after the fell wood marshes. I perked up slightly during the new Kuldahar experience, and found the Guardian stimulating and challenging! But the new Dragon Eye just annoyed me to the marrow, and severed hand was incredibly boring, followed by an end fight that was obviously designed NOT to be possible on the first try. After one discovers all the various secrets, it can be taken care of rather efficiently... but I really didn't care at that point, because the game had annoyed me too much. A crying shame, frankly, since its predecessor, IWD/HOW/ToTL, was the best dungeon crawl I have ever had the pleasure of playing.

The first half of the game, including making my party, was the most fun I've had in any RPG! The last half of the game was a rollercoaster slide straight downhill, in my opinion. Many areas of the last half of the game were poorly designed, alternately frustrating or boring players to tears. I found it worth playing... once. But frankly I've never been moved to play it again, while I've played IWD/HOW/TotL over a dozen times, and still love every minute of it. IWD2 was a disappointment overall for me.

Eh, no problem. I'm angry with my own government at the moment as well, but we don't need to rewrite history just to make the Bush administration look worse. They have done that quite nicely without our help. Unfortunately. Plus I'm a stickler for accuracy. Unless, of course, the inaccuries are my own!

Indeed, a lot of western nations aided Saddam. France was one of his most ardent supporters in the 80's, along with the USA and the UK. No doubt about it. But there's a big difference between being allies and supporters of a country a decade or two back, and supporting a political party some 40 years ago and "putting Saddam into power." The USA put the Shah of Iran into power... unfortunately; they did not put Saddam into power, any more than the rest of the western nations who supported him did. As for his visit with Ronald Reagan, That was in the 80's, after Saddam had already taken over presidency of Iraq. Don't forget that during the late 70's/early 80's (during Jimmy Carter's presidency), Iran had basically declared war on America by invading our Tehran embassy and taking our diplomats hostage. So of course, we were more than amenable to strengthen ties with the enemy of our enemy... which was Saddam. I do not know if your parents "lived through it" by being in Iraq during the time Saddam rose to power... in which case they must clearly know that he took over the presidency before Ronald Reagan came into office... or if they simply "lived through it" by being adults elsewhere in the world throughout the 70's and 80's... in which case I can basically make the same claim! My point, and I do have one, is that your statement was misleading and inaccurate, in that it implied that the USA and only the USA supported Saddam from the 60's on, and personally plopped him into the presidency in 1979. That is incorrect. Hence, my clarification. FWIW, I am utterly against the Iraq war, and think Saddam was a pig. I had hoped that despite the horror of an unjust invasion that something good might come out of it for the Iraqi people. Clearly that has not happened, and will not happen, IMHO. Truly a disaster all the way around. But exaggerating the past does not help either.

Care to offer proof of this allegation? Because unless you consider the USA, the UK, and several other western nations supporting the Baathist party over the pro-communist party supported by the Soviet union during the cold war 1950's through 1970's, Saddam put himself in power, moving from vice president to take power from the feeble president all on his own. Saddam's biography might relieve you of your misconceptions.

Troika has proven only that they can talk the talk, but every time they try to walk the walk they fall on their face as far as I'm concerned. So I certainly would not want to see Fallout 3 land in their incompetent laps. Bethesda, OTOH, has made one game that I found to be exceptionally ambitious and well-done. I can't quite envision Fallout as a first-person, real-time shooter, though. My initial presumption is that Fallout as we all know and love it is dead... may it RIP. I hope Fallout 3 proves me wrong. Time will tell. BTW, welcome back, Draconis.

I'm really looking forward to Dragon Age, moreso than NWN2, because it's my hope that DA returns to BioWare's party-based, party-controlled, BGII roots. NWN is a fine, fun game... well, by the time HoTU came out it was a fine, fun game. I expect NWN2 to be even finer and, er, funner! But right now I'm looking at DA to be THE big RPG in my future... if I live that long. Nobody at BioWare is talking about release dates, but the rumor is that it won't hit the shelves before late 2006 or 2007. Plenty of time to rachet up my expectations so they cannot possibly be met by mere mortals!

I've wondered about this myself. Judging by the type of arrogant, jerkish behavior I've seen online from some folks... well, quite a few actually... I really do hope they are more aggressive in cyberspace than they are in real life. I guess there's a kind of smug safety in being cruel to anonymous nicks on the internet when they cannot reach through the monitor to shove one's teeth down one's throat. :D

Well, I also agree with much of Grandpa's post. See how agreeable I am? Now it's true that when Langsky says something to the effect of "most non-American people don't really like you guys", he is speaking only of his own experience. There are about 6 billion non-American people in the world. I doubt the majority of them spend much time even thinking about Americans, let alone waste effort not liking them. The majority of Europeans, maybe... judging by the myriad America-sux posts I've read from Europeans over the past few years ... but not the majority of non-American people. What struck me about Langsky's post is that despite his apparent youth, despite the fact that he is quite clearly surrounded by a majority of people who propagandize America in very unpleasant terms, he is willing to look beyond the hate-hype to see if there may be a larger truth. Too few folks do that nowadays, and I wanted to encourage it. However, Grandpa is right when he says: I've been repeatedly criticized for saying the same kind of thing. It seems to be not only okay to insult America/Americans, it's downright faddish! And if any American takes umbrage, he/she is too often shrugged off as fanatical, brain-washed, defensive and ignorant. That is why I found Langsky's willingness to search deeper than the superficial hate-mongering which apparently surrounds him. The world cannot have too many folks who are willing to search for a deeper truth, IMHO.

Langsky, your post is a sobering eye-opener, and shows more real wisom than I've seen in far too long. Don't let the paranoid hatred of all things American dim your dream, though. There are lots of countries in the world that offer freedom, democracy, and the opportunity to make whatever you want out of your life. America is still one of those countries, despite currently having a Whitehouse resident that is... certainly not my personal favorite. I'm glad you have escaped your previous environment, and wish you good fortune in the future.

I don't think disagreeing with a person's politics should give license to ridicule or insult them.

Well, you can always run out to some fool idiot's personal website, grab his personal opinion of a piece of legislation, then post it on another website proclaiming it to be parts of the legislation itself and screaming, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" That will help a lot!

Hey, don't discourage him from leaving! Personally I dispise Bush, think his cronies represent all that is evil in the world, and would give up any one of my limbs if the fanatical fool had lost the election. However, I love my country and have no intention of running away sobbing, "if I can't win every game then I'm not gonna play, waa-waa-waa". People that aren't willing to stick around and work to make this a better place to live will not be missed when then go somewhere else. (Somewhere that will also fail to live up to their utopian ideals, and cause even more "waa-waa-waa" down the line... but that will be some other country's problem!) America needs grown-ups with vision who are willing to work hard, and recognize that compromise is the glue of society, not a bunch of narcissistic fools so horrified that their every want is not showered upon them on demand that they stomp their feet, slam their bedroom doors and scream at mommy and daddy, "you'll be sorry when I'm gone!" Guess what. We won't be sorry at all! :D