Gorth

Who needs technological help?... Octopus Paul gets SWC trophy Looks like he is going into retirement now though.

Something aboust the stars, gravity and Hollywood. Expect real estate prices to plummet Nah, I think he is trying to say that people with a lot of media exposure are an endangered species as far as mental quirks go.

Thread pruned a bit. Just a reminder that, while the subject is the legalisation of marijuana (and related substances), it is still illegal in most parts of the world. As such, posting links, recommendations, recipes etc. is considered bad form. If anybody has a problem with that, feel free to PM me.

I can't believe none of you jumped on this like comedy gold. Let's start with intense dumplings. As I have explained elsewhere my keyboard has NO ****ING LETTERS ON IT. I'm doing bloody well, considering. You could just replace them with the letters from your old keyboard, or are they a mismatch? Whats wrong with a qwrty keyboard? Reminds me of the guy who had a keyboard that kept putting the letter 'i' in various places. Made for a strange, yet amusing English dialect.

These numbers have to include Chinese software companies as well as outsourced Indian software support developers in the average?

"This is not what my imagination tells me I was promised!" I thought Bioware missed a great opportunity in ME2... those combat stilettos that the girls were wearing were just begging for a martial arts/close quarter combat option. Upgradable with armour piercing or hollow point tips too. Sadly, chainmail bikinis seems out of fashion in these politically correct days

You can thank the year long delay after the game was FINISHED for killing any future adventure pack series. Part of the reason I'm not too happy about publishers recently. They seem to be doing their best to hurt gaming. Yeah, that was really a case of DRM killed the game/franchise, wasn't it? Besides SoZ, playing a game of BG2 and a bit of Master of Orion 2 every now and then. Mostly just fiddling around with outrageous custom races (and checking that my archaic P4 computer can still run the old games).

Nope It was awfully expensive. Actually, so was most of the original Cinemaware games. The gfx and music just blew me a away though. Strategy game, throwing rocks at your opponent, romances, swashbuckling, jousting (which I sucked at too) and epic battles (simple number crunching iirc)

I think Funcroc is a psychic octopus.

Playing my second game of Storm of Zehir. Now that the platform has gotten rather decent, no more games appear on it I wonder how well Onyx can emulate IE type games.

Does that mean there's no installing any software beyond the game file itself, or is it like GOG.com? Either way, I could handle that...a lot better than Steam. It just means that the distributor (in this case gamersgate) doesn't add anything other then what the publisher already included in the package (i.e. securom, tages, ubisoft online slavery, etc.). You download a small download manager (a 64k exe file iirc) which downloads your files into a temp folder on your desktop or whatever, then runs the autorun/setup/start whatever installs the program. You can delete the download manager after the download. You can keep the dowloaded files too if you intend to reinstall later. The only funny thing it does is, it scrambles a few bytes at the start and end of the installer, but I usually copy the temp folder to my external hdd before running the installer. If not, you have to download that little 64k file and run again. It seems to check for missing files (redownloading damaged/missing ones) when I put it to the test. While I prefer physical media, I can see the attraction of having links to downloads, updates, keys, serial no. etc. in one list. Edit to add: I still have my Planescape box... *(And Baldur's Gate 2, and even the original sideways, flip open Fallout box). Got some of the original "large" Black Isle boxes (PS:T, IWD, BG2, Fallout 1+2), original Defender of the Crown for the Amiga (which cost me the equivalent of $130 back in 1986), Zork for the C64 plus a bunch of other old boxes...

Also one of the hardest problems to address. Find out why people want to willingly lobotomise themselves and convince them that getting all "recreational" is not the best answer. Entirely anecdotal, but I've never met a susbstance user (short of tea and coffee) face to face that struck me as particularly sympathetic.

Thanks Gromnir So "brief emotes"... just like the adventure games of old, where you would pick context sensitive keywords from a menu. Not exactly a novelty (except the concept is probably older than most gamers, so they would have no memory of it).

I don't know how they made the video, but that was bloody awesome

Some day, somebody is going to be able to explain to me exactly what is new in the "dialogue wheel". Is it just that it is round instead of linear (probably easier for a controller than hitting the number keys on a keyboard) or is it just that it presents a topical answer (like a bunch of old 8bit games did 20 years ago)? It feels a bit like arguing who invented fire.

I don't buy anything that requires Steam, but I've sort of fallen in love with gamersgate. Probably because the downloads don't require installing any proprietary software. Not to mention that they have a boat load of games, I've never heard of, much less seen in retail stores. Went on a spending spree yesterday as 1C (a publisher) games were at a 75% discount. They warn you too, in big bold letters when looking at the new Ubisoft titles, requires permanent online connection to play, so at least you get a warning before you buy, no nasty surprises after a completed transaction

I believe the common way is "milestone billing"? The developer get paid pro-rata of a pre agreed amount for each milestone reached, plus bonuses, minus penalties. Probably a bit of initial funding too to get the project started up.

I have a facebook account. Stripped of everything except my name and an email address (one of the 'expendable' email addresses, in case it gets compromised). Mostly for old friends in other parts of the world to have a portal to get hold of me. I visit the place about once every second month. On special occasions maybe several times within a day (when a few messages get exchange). I made the mistake in the beginning of putting up two email addresses, which of course, despite being marked as "not visible" got spammed right away by scammers. So I knew from day 1 that facebooks "privacy" was an outright lie.

As if anybody could possibly doubt the words of a psychic octopus

It was strong winds, 6-7 degrees and a constant drizzle when riding home from a client yesterday night. I lament the fact that I don't have waterproof pants and never got around to buy some decent gloves. I'm probably never going to feel warm again

Moved to Kotor related forum.

I don't know what the PC version looked like, but the Amiga version had big, blocky "tiles" that offered less of an overview. I was more of a "wargamer" at the time than a roleplayer, so I liked having as much minute detail on the screen as possible. What I loved about Ultima IV was, that the world felt consistent, with its own laws of magic and physics. Probably the only time in a game that I enjoyed trying to figure out new spell compositions based on the available raw materials. I hadn't played party based crpgs before, so I didn't miss that either. Its one of those things you can't explain to people who haven't experienced it, but the story was the one I wrote through my actions, completely non-linear exploration of islands, oceans, balloon flying, dungeon crawling, investigating towns etc. A kind of freedom in a game I hadn't experienced since Lords of Midnight & Doomdarks Revenge. By comparison, my first impression of Ultima VI was "cluttered", and I traded it away shortly after. I probably didn't appriciate that kind of radical change at the time, which was 20 years ago now?

Is this the point where I have to break down and admit that I've probably never played Ultima V? Checking its release date, I see it was about the time I retired my c64 and focused on my Commodore Amiga. I missed the game altogether (it was Ultima VI I had in mind). I blame Quicksilva for starting that 3D Isometric fad with Ant Attack (1984). Suddenly all games needed to join the band wagon and if it wasn't isometric 3D, it wasn't good enough for the publishers. They completely ruined perfectly good 2D top-down gaming >_

Pauls Cooking...

We should make a top ten... most popular fraud attempts From top of my head, what regularly ends up in my mailboxes is the treasurer who needs help to move an ex-presidents money, the hbsc bank that needs me to verify my account, I won the big prize in the UK lottery, I have a job offer collecting money from debtors and I get to keep 10% of the money, plus a handful of others who are variants of the first one (aka '419' or 'Nigerian' scams). I used to trace most of them back to their true origins by investigating the headers, but these days I'm getting old and lazy, so I just dump them into spamcop who does the hard work and generates reports for abuse contact information.