neriana

Thank you so much for this. I was having the same problem as Alias, and the Omega driver I installed for my 9600 seems to have corrected the problem. I can actually run around a smokey room without ending up frozen halfway across the station now.

All Catholics are Christian, but all Christians are not Catholic. The guy's 78. Any bets on how long a reprieve we get before another media circus about another pope kicking the bucket?

And we have a winner. Fox News is very methodical. Once they get what they want out of Florida (all the judges replaced with arch-conservatives), they'll move on to the next thing on their agenda.

Well, I am a feminist, and call myself one proudly. But I still don't really buy the Gaider sexist thing. I think Bastila fell because she was the main Jedi character in the story. Jedis fall. I don't have an excuse for Aribeth, really, except that Bioware probably thinks betrayal is neat and dramatic and stuff. I don't have an excuse for any part of the NWN OC's plot though. Fenthick is brain-damaged and disloyal to his lover from the very beginning. In SoU, the female NPC is far more intelligent and pleasant than the male ones. (Deekin annoys me.) In HotU, the nicest, most loyal NPC is a drow female, and if she's LE and not NG I'll eat my computer, I don't care what her character sheet says. Valen, otoh, is ugly, obnoxious, rude, violent, and generally terrible. There is some blatant sexism in the way Bioware has handled romances in the past. In NWN, the PC can romance Linu if he's male. No joinable romanceable NPCs for female PCs, and that really sucks. In HotU, female PCs get Valen. Male NPCs can persuade Aribeth and Nathyrra to share a menage a trois. And let's not forget BG2, with three romances for male PCs, and one for females. I hate Anomen, but even if I didn't, I could still count and hear. Not only is his romance the shortest, but in ToB his is the only wraith dialogue that's not voiced. KotOR improved in these areas. KotOR2 appears to have some of the same "slap female gamers in the face" romance issues as older games, which is hugely disappointing. Two steps forward, one step back. It gets very tiresome, to say the least.

Well, Carth isn't exactly a shining example of what a man can be either. I hate Aribeth. But I hate Fenthick too, and he has got to be one of the stupidest characters ever created. (Hello, your lover is a PALADIN and she doesn't trust this guy!) And I despise Valen from HotU. Of course, some of that is the expectation of what a woman is apparently "supposed" to like, but I really don't know if that's sexism or just the fact that Bioware can't write good romances. Carth was the closest to good, but where the heck was a kiss?! And there's no getting around the fact that the reason he doesn't trust people is lame. I was expecting him to have been abandoned as a baby, brought up by abusive people, and cheated on with a Dark Jedi by his wife. But no, his reason for not trusting anyone ever is -- well, it's lame. Really, really lame. In other words, I think Bioware is an equal-opportunity writer of irritating, unbelievable characters. I've also noticed that all the characters I like best were not written by David Gaider.

I'm not sure PC game reviewers really encounter bugs much. All sorts of reviews for The Sims 2: University expansion pack talk about how it introduced bugs into a non-buggy game. Well, Sims 2 had and still has huge, game-stopping bugs that took forever for Maxis and EA to acknowledge or patch, and most of the other bugs they didn't even touch, even if they claimed they did. The community has had to fix them and find work-arounds. Temple of Elemental Evil got almost across the board very good reviews, and it was an unplayable mess. I've heard atrocious things about Vampire from every standpoint, from the technical aspects to the story to the gameplay. I wouldn't know personally, since I wouldn't touch anything by Troika with a 10-foot pole. Not that that matters any longer . And what was the big deal about Fable? You could be good or evil. Ooh, what a huge innovation. Anyway, most reviewers don't finish games before handing in their reviews. They simply don't have the time. I think Mr. Urquhuart's reply was quite civil and honest. I can see why most developers don't keep in such close touch with their communities if they get flamed for it so much. Neither insults nor adoration are real communication. I'm still waiting for the patch to get further into TSL myself .

Whilw paragraphs would be nice, I think the substance of Sierra19's post is good.

I could not agree more with you, markussun. Too bad that link is just taking me to LucasArts tech support. I don't know whose fault the horrible musical quality is. I don't particularly care. I see LucasArts and Obsidian on the box. You release a product with your name on it, you take responsibility for its content. I can make excuses for bugs that are patched promptly. I don't particularly care about graphics, so long as the visual design and framerate are good. Music is far more important to me. Music connects directly with one's emotions; the auditory experience is more important for drawing one into something than the visual experience. And this auditory experience... well, the last time I heard mono sound regularly was on a television my parents bought the same year I was born. To anyone who listens to music regularly and has any "ear" at all, it's shocking. The sound quality is an insult. It is an insult to the composer, to the performers, and to the consumers. They might as well have made the game in CGA, which would harken back to the days when people actually still listened to mono. That at least would have been obvious before purchase. I usually try to be more fair to developers and even publishers, but in this case I am too angry at the shoddy quality being passed off on people here. MONO SOUND. Absolutely insane.

This is very minor compared to all the technical problems, especially since I installed the game without a hitch once I realized it didn't like my DVD drive. But who manufactured this darn case so I can go complain? It took me at least 5 minutes each to get discs 2 and 3 out of the thing. I pressed down and squeezed on the middle thing, and did all sorts of strange combinations thereof, but brute force is finally what got the CDs out. Very poorly designed.

Yeah, and you would know . Let me check - hm, not finding any code here. Sorry, we have brains, not computer circuits. I'm sure you'll learn some day. Your wannabe feminist activism and assumptions about what i know of women is, quite frankly, wasted on me. If you can't be bothered to accept lighthearted comments such as these, i suggest you don't even try. If you can't accept teasing about jokes that you know are going to be offensive to someone, then I suggest you stop making them. People who can dish it out but can't take it are lost on me, I admit . Oh, and I'm not a "wannabe feminist", whatever the hell that is. I am a feminist . Diablo 2 is an RPG inasmuch as you can shape your character's statistical development. However, I think we need a different name for this kind of game. Action-RPG isn't really cutting it.

Ditto. <_< Well, in both cases, success with them all depends on how you push their buttons... >_> Yeah, and you would know . Let me check - hm, not finding any code here. Sorry, we have brains, not computer circuits. I'm sure you'll learn some day. Diablo and Fallout are both billed as "RPGs". Each has character development and fighting. But I think Diablo's "action RPG" genre appeals to a very different type of gamer, or at least a different part of the gamer's psyche, than Fallout. I feel the same way about Diablo as I do about Dungeon Siege: it's a repetitive clicking exercise with rewards. It can actually be quite a bit of fun for a while. But feeling like a rat in the maze doesn't do much for me.

Ditto. <_<

They could call it "Star Wars: The Sims of the Old Republic". ROFL Tidus and Yuna are very realistic teenagers. It's no wonder they're a bit irritating sometimes, especially when one takes translation into consideration . The Aeris scene in FF7 broke my heart. It was also soooo cool. I'm waiting for someone to top Sephiroth in the "video game villain" department, but it hasn't happened yet.

If rules cause problems in the story, or problems with game balance, or if they make the game less fun, they should be thrown out. They're a template for creating something, not holy writ.

Yep. And the most important rule is RULE ZERO.