Stephen Amber

At least he has a job.

Ozric Tentacles: Sultana Detrii

It's no BG2 but the first IWD was a great game. The sequel had good parts and other parts that weren't so good... I think we would be more likely to see a BG3 at this point than an IWD3, just because of past sales and name recognition.

Ninja Scroll Ghost in the Shell Princess Mononoke Spirited Away

Hopefully they axe the sorcerer... or at least alter it so it doesn't use the same spell lists as wizards. Something doesn't jive with that: in the one case the wizard uses intellect to decipher the formulae, or whatever the writing on scrolls contains, while the sorcerer gets an identical effect through charisma, force of will, spirit, or something intangible even if he/she is dumb as a box of rocks. Sorc should probably use some sort of mana system in a more narrow category of magic... an elementalist or something.

Maybe D&D Tactics for PSP if I can get the money and justify the purchase. There needs to be a few more decent games for the PSP before I buy it... that and d&d tactics better be pretty frickin good.

That would have been a boxing game for game boy advance. Don't even remember what it was called, but it stunk... it was really cheap too, which was fair warning I guess.

Now you can be a munchkin! Yea!

Oh, and long distance travels were shortened a bit if you went by horseback, I believe. If dismounted, the thing could fight for you with a neigh and hooves in the air. But, using monster manual stats, of course there is little advantage in that, as even the tough horse (heavy war horse) has pretty lousy stats compared to the opposition past lvl 5 or so. And you couldn't bring them into dungeons... not in that particular mod anyways. Edit: oh, and you could equip them with saddlebags. Not a bad total package for what was a negligible cost.

Incredibly, OE took the time to re-record the sounds for blunt-hits-chainmail, etc. Unfortunately, as mentioned the spell chants and music are re-used. Don't get me wrong -- there is all-new music, and it's fine. It's simply so sparse that it only shows up in main plot areas. I really, really hope OE builds up a full soundtrack in the expansion, so that we can replace the NWN1 music. I would also love to see the spell chants from IWD/BG2. Atari spends like 70,000$ to put a big banner up at E3, or whatever it was, yet they can't shell out a few bucks to some composer for a full score... jesus.

Wyvern crown basically gave a mounted rider "haste" speed, which in itself was sorta nice. And there were some nice aesthetics. In a big battle close to the finale a couple nightmares make appearances with flaming hooves and all, I assume they can be mounted, but don't think it happened in that game. Regardless, the promise of horses was made upon the announcement of NWN2... a promise which, due to truancy, remains unfulfilled.

Maybe they can finally get horses into the game...

Just out of curiosity, how much new music, new sound effects, new voices are there? I had heard that some of the old stuff had been re-used, but it's news to me that even the spell chants are. One would think they could have come up with something new for those, at least. Just trying to gain feedback before deciding whether or not to buy this game. NWN1 still rocks... Waiting on the final patch and, hopefully, huge DLA downloads.

John Keegan's A History of Warfare. I'm nearly done... Up next? Most likely Lord Dunsany's Jorkens stories.

I read the TSR endless quest books back in elementary when I was a kid, and was able to find alot of them at a used book store a few years back for like a buck a pop. I bought them for nostalgia's sake.

The Gollop brothers released a game called Rebelstar Tactical Command for gameboy advance in 2005. It is turn based, very similar to x-com, and great fun. And Freedom Force played like superhero Baldur's Gate to me. Not sure why he'd say x-com was the primary influence behind that game. And if you're going to do turn based these days you should do it on the GBA, DS, or sony psp... as they are doing with d&d tactics.

Star Wars Legos on Game Boy Advance and Wyvern's Crown for NWN.

The Illusionist starring Ed Norton. A decent quasi-murder mystery in which Ed Norton pulls off all these amazing illusions and in the process damns an Austro-Hungarian prince. It does a good job of capturing the spirit of late 19th century Europe, when mysticism of all sorts was in vogue.

There has to be a point of culmination eventually. Aside from maybe sorcerers and magic(I'd make it mana based for them), can't think of how you could make the game much better than it is right now. The miniatures line is great, and they will soon be releasing card stock dungeon tiles, not unlike a poor man's dwarven forge... lots of cool props for the game. Don't understand why they did'nt do this years ago...

20 hours maybe a barely acceptable figure. The original Freedom Force was, I think, around that amount or slightly less, though it seemed longer for some reason(maybe it was the monotonous droning on of the costumed crusaders with their cheesy one liners). In terms of brevity, JE and company have a history of that, if you remember the embarrassingly short Heart of Winter with it's 10 hours.

Over on the official boards, someone came up with the statistic of less than 5% of NWN purchasers ever even logging onto a PW, so it's not surprising your typical NWN patron might have an aversion to mmos. And, yea, when any punk kid or pom pom teanie bopper bimbo can set up a server and host a mod of course most of them will suck.

The new dark horse Conan comic rocks.

I've come to the conclusion that I need to marry into some money.

I agree. Leave it to the wacky mormons to survive... Shooting up mormons might not have been the most politically correct thing to have in a game, though.

Tron 2.0, Warcraft3, and NWN are the only games I've played lately.