metadigital

You are free to exercise your right to abstain from reading it and posting here.

Anyone posting anything that spoils NwN2 for me will be acted on with extreme prejudice ...

speaking of which, the Sandman special edition is out ... worth getting?

Won't be long until you crazy Swedes start making giant, meltable hotels ...

(w00t)

I wish I'd said that. * insert riposte from James McNeill Whistler to Oscar Wilde *

Sure, and kudos for the music score, but the whole effect was lost on me because I had no idea who the dorks were and why they were dressing as giant bees ...

That is a great idea. As this is another first impression topic, further observations and comments should go here.

This topic has outlived it's usefulness. For first impressions, let's go here. Please remember to use the [spoiler & /spoiler] tag pair. I may over-react and give you multiple warnings, if you spoil the game for me.

Um, I use that amount for dinner. For me. :D Then again, I eat large portions, like 200g dry weight of spaghetti boiled and added to cold olive oil impregnated with tabasco and with added capers (or olives, artichoke hearts, sun dried tomatoes, etc). For dinner. The dressing recipe ends up making about a cup (250ml): the largest part is the six tablespoons of oil.

* feels twinge of nostalgia for Civ 2 palace improvements *

For the record it didn't scare me either. (And Doom 2 was a much better game, to boot.) But Doom 3 was just Doom with a worse map and graphics on steroids. (The original Doom map map for Doom 3 should help with this analysis.)

Yeah, I think this point gets missed in a lot of the hand-wringing by ardent fans; the game that would have been MUST have spawned many of the ideas in subsequent games developed by the same people. This is why current reviews of NwN2 quote similarities to KotOR:TSL, for example, because some (novel) ideas have been thrashed out and tested on the earlier game and are now a mature asset in the later game. The good news is that this is not a zero-sum process, and is ongoing, so that other new ideas can spontaneously spring from within the minds of said developers, as well as build upon the mature concepts and their hard-earned development experiences.

Here's a good Italian dressing for a salad: crush some raw garlic (I use from two cloves upto an entire bulb, depending on prevailing health and dating prognosis); tablespoon of mustard (I use wholeseed); tablespoon of white wine vinegar (use any vinegar, even balsamic); lemon flesh and juice to taste (I use about a half lemon, all the juice and pith and some zest); salt and cracked black pepper to taste; and six tablespoons of virgin first-cold-press olive oil. Don't breathe on anyone (except tax collectors etc) for a couple of days. I wash this over a salad, like: leaves (lettuces and others, like rocquette, maybe even baby spinach); avocado; beetroot; celery; maybe some tomatoes, carrots, corn nibblets, walnuts, sultanas, etc, anything tasty. Also add warm grilled chicken (e.g. seasoned with soy) as well.

Um, really?

Releasing quasi buggy titles has been the status quo for as long as I can remember. Once in a while you get a polished bug free product, once in a long while. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That is true quite often, but whether that's attributed to the devs or the paper pushing publishers varies from case to case. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I mostly agree that it's the content in the box that should be reviewed. However, when a patch is out on release-day I definitely think that should be taken into consideration. ... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> As above; the problem with a(ny) large software project is that the Gold milestone is a top-down management decision, rather than a botom-up developer one. In other words, the management (Publishers in this case) mandate a temporal finish deadline. The actual messy real-life programming environment may not be able to make that demand. Is that the fault of the developers or the publishers? Depends. Good management should be hooked into the developer feedback loop; good developers should be able to hit a (reasonable) target. I do know that the projects that I have been associated with tend to change in appearance quite dramatically from day to day, including those days either side of the deadline. :D Also, remember the delay from "going gold" to Jo Gamer getting her copy is all about distribution: sending the master ISO image to be cut, cutting a bajillion CD/DVDs, printing the manual and other supporting media (creating figurines and coins) and physically transporting the goods. It is not difficult to have a patch released with the retail debut of the game. Also, instantaneous (electronic) distribution would allow a continuously improving product (like Steam and Half-Life).

I don't see you with a working copy of the game " For the next 24 hours, D2D users pwn the rest of us. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Faust!

I wasn't just referring to little ramza.

If Obsidian has no problem with me working on it as a unsupported personal project (basically like anyone's personal NWN/NWN2 project), I don't think anyone's rights are violated. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Just don't tell anyone that you are working on it: can you imagine the endless ramza-like threads of "Well, what's the status?" ?

Nope. Games adhering to the old DirectX standards will be playable using the DirectX9.L; in other words: DirectX9.L will allow DirectX10 cards to run previous DirectX9 effects (and not vice versa), because DirectX10 is a complete re-write of the specification (not done since the invention of DirectX back in Windows95).

Actually, that sounds pretty neat. The problem is that magic creates matter (and energy) out of nothing (from another plane, presumeably) ... there needs to be some sort of balance added: a "game economics balancer", to make magic and magic-users rare in inverse proportion to their power. * waits for more details, looking menacing *

Bards aren't going to benefit from more time designing their look ... "

Depends on ingredients, too ... might need some firefly gizzards or similar to cast it.