Gromnir

am thinking that you is gonna get a call from one of our crazy neighbors real soon. she gots a dozen or so cats and looks like her hair ain't never met a brush or comb... ever. seems to be a tad paranoid 'cause she insists that "They" is out to get her. anywho, she wants her drapes back. HA! Good Fun!

that is why Gromnir initially passed on the raptor. heck, most of the games we play is single-player crpgs and strategy games. saving milliseconds on loads is not as important to us as is relative silence and reliability. ... 'course what we were thinking were a reliable drive is now getting some bad, bad feedback/reviews from the locals. taks suggested checking out the following site when we were asking 'bout heatsinks. http://hardforum.com/ zalman didn't have a single good heatsink that they were saying would be compliant with our msi mb. we went to hardforum and within a day we gets 10 responses... and the responses were a consensus kinda thing too. "go with the thermalright xp-90 and a quiet 92mm fan." so far the thing is working better than we coulda' hoped... and we had never even heard of thermalright before. each sub-fora has usually got a stickyed thread or two where they is comparing typical hardware. is some good feedback on hard drives and some included links to other review sites that is helpful. HA! Good Fun!

i have a relatively new computer amd athlon 64x2 3800+ msi k8n neo 4 sli seagate 7200.8 200gb evga geforce 6800gs pci 1gb crucial ballistix 3200 ddr plextor 716 al soundbalaster live on-board new drivers and dx9c dxdiag looks good for the first time i attempted to load/instal kotor 2... but i get to the load/new game screen and scion is doing the robot... frame rate of less than 1 can't start a new game. no other game seems problematic... other than kotor. haven't tried nwn though. dawn of war works fine and that ios probably one of my newer games. any notions? thanks HA! Good Fun! ps the mods can delete this post/thread if they wish. it turns out that the gosh darned nvidia drivers are twitchy when it comes to dual core processors. kotor and kotor2 are both screwed. there are some work arounds, but i am not sure if they are worth the effort.

if Gromnir 'members right, they is using the same animation technique as were used in polar express. ... sorry, but all the people in polar express looked creepy rather than kewl. no doubt the animation has been improved, but we is gonna have to see a trailer 'fore we get intrigued. am also not sure how angelina jollie figures into the mix. romance were not much in evidence with beowulf story. woulda' been more fun to have her play grendel's mother... sorta like when george clooney played the gay dog in the south park episode. oh well. HA! Good Fun!

our perfect girlfriend would hunt down and kill the sorta people that make these threads... 'course we would probably stop calling her after a week or so... HA! Good Fun!

see what we mean? talk to three different folks... storagereview.com and hardocp.com is sites worth checking out. taks actually referred us to hardocp and we has gotten some useful help from the hard folks on more than a few occasions since then. neither aforementioned site is a retail or magazine site so they is maybe less likely to be owned by the man... though the man gots long arms and a firm grip so who really knows. HA! Good Fun!

the power supply on the original sonata would not be sufficient for our needs. the ps on the sonata ii is more than capable for now... as long as we not add in another hd & a second video card. have never actually spoken with anybody that uses the duct. is really awkward and it screws with case airflow. can't think of many heatsinks we woulda' used that coulda' coexisted with the duct anyways... forget some zalman, and not a chance in hell with our thermalright. the duct were a nifty notion and maybe they perfect for the eventual sonata iii, but not really is useful as of today. is kinda funny. you is the first person we seen to complain 'bout the antec ii power supply, and before we built our rig we had few experiences with people complaining 'bout seagate. maybe that tells us something. over at storage review.com and hardocp, seagate is considered the MOST relaible hd available. is not the performance leader, but the 200gb is actually almost as quiet as the samsung spinpoint hd... and samsung not got no warranty. talk to josh and some folks here and a couple of geeks pals we know and they seems to think seagate is crap. 'course the geek friends that helped us settle on this build thought seagate were swell... 'specially as far as being quiet and reliable. we looks at the newegg customer reviews and every single hd and mb has at least a couple peoples who claims that they is crap... heck, is more than a few anti-raptor folks. the more folks we hears from, the more we is likely to hear that every piece o' hardware we got is doomed. *shrug* will get a modular +600w ps at some point, but not today. HA! Good Fun! ps we were warned away from the 36gb raptors in a big way. seen it tested in three different builds and we were amazed at just how poorly it fared. turns out that their performance is actually on par with most quality 7200 hds available. not all raptors is created equal. go figure.

figures. we did research and we checked out hardforums.com and we did all the right things... and then 3 weeks after we build the rig we has everbody and their grandmother telling us what crap the seagates is. well, maybe we picks up a raptor... just in case. HA! Good Fun!

*grumble* got cheap and passed on the 74 gig wd raptor and instead got the seagate 200 gig. got the seagate for under $100. the wd woulda' cost us $175. damn. oh well. HA! Good Fun!

Gromnir don't go top shelf when he builds no more... 'cause it just ain't cost effective and our needs is modest. always we target $1000, with room to upgrade later. case: antec sonata ii cpu: amd athlon 64 x2 3800+ (dual core) mb: msi k8n neo4 sli (integrated soundblaster live) memory: 2x512mb crucial ballistix pc3200 ddr dimm(s) hd: seagate barracuda 200g 7200.8 graphics card: evega geforce 6800gs pci optical: plextor 716 al (slot-load) floppy: black teac os: windows xp pro all for just under $1000 took the duct out of the case so we could add in a thermalright xp-90 heatsink with a quiet 92mm fan for cpu cooling... is still damn quiet. the whole rig is an eye pleasing shiny black box that runs everything we can throw at it. at some point we will upgrade graphics by getting a second geforce 6800gs, but for now we don't seem to need it. and yeah, we will have to upgrade the ps if we wanna go with a full sli confi, but power supplies is not all that expensive... relatively speaking. *shrug* btw, is our first msi mb, and so far we likes. have always been an asus guy in the past, but we almost never oc, so we went with all the nifty features that the msi board gots for us average user kinda guys... have not been disappointed. however, after we gots the seagate hd, sudden-like all our geek friends were mocking our stoopidness. "everybody" knows that the seagates burn out after 20 minutes, right? shucks. ain't had no issues yet, but is like a big cloud looming on the horizon, threatening rain... always. any experienced folks got feedback on the seagates? HA! Good Fun!

from personal experience we can attest to fact that the vast majority of college and pro atheletes we has met has played considerable hours of sports games.you know what the typical college football player does instead of going to class? he plays madden football. keep in mind that sports games offer atheletes more opportunities for competition and trash talk... two things which the average athelete can never get enough of. HA! Good Fun!

yeah. what kinda stoopid gaijin would come up with ridiculous caricatures of asian martial artists that were looking like the ones in je? http://www.angelfire.com/stars2/templeofbruce/ huh. wanna have us link some japanese anime stuff that makes je looks pretty damned tame? HA! Good Fun!

bio needs to believe that je were a success... which may prevent them from learning from the mistakes they made with that game. je success compared to other console titles is seriously in doubt, but there is a group of folks at bio who not seem to wanna even consider the possibility that je were less profitable than they had hoped for. 'course this kinda self-delusion on the part of developers is not a disease suffered solely by kanadians. troika developers post arcanum and bis developers post ps:t had similar difficulty accepting that their games failed to create adequate revenues. bio has gotta learn some hard lessons real fast if they really wants to stick to their plans for making original ips, 'cause a succession of "successes" comparable to je will make it damned hard for them to gets a publisher to partner up with them in the future... and like it or not, we ain't quite at the point where self-publishing and commercially viable downloadable titles is a viable alternative. HA! Good Fun!

typically Gromnir would discount ign predictions as nothing more than their oh so typical insipid ramblings. http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/686/686673p1.html typical ign fare... neither useful nor amusing. however, they did recently tour the obsidian office and do interviews with obsidian employees n' such... http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/685/685126p1.html we see three likely possibilities to explain the rumor being spread by ign: 1) the ign folks is retarded 2) the ign folks is naive 3) obsidian is working on kotor3 ign folks could simply be too dumb to live. they add 2 + 2 and they gets pi. is possible. 'course, fergie knows that false rumors can generate as much or more hype than real ones, so maybe he were intentionally dropping hints to ign in hopes of creating false rumors... 'cause obsidian ain't generating all that much interest with the real games they is working on completing. seems very unlikely... but is not the kinda thing we would put past fergie. maybe obsidian is really working on kotor3. *shrug* option 1 seems most likely. HA! Good Fun!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7521044027821122670 actually, Gromnir saw this at codex... but we cannot link to the codex thread 'cause of their inability to string together 3 posts in a row w/o somebody dropping an fbomb. HA! Good Fun!

the only reason why we even thought of killing him were 'cause we recalled the Submerge The Will ac bug. could only seem to fix that with death. *shrug* thanks for the responses... helped us recall a possible/actual solution. HA! Good Fun!

never claimed that early film were entirely free of the burden of the past... but folks were more willing to experiment. sure, their avenues and means were limited, but there were folks trying new stuff, and audiences were experimenting too. films today is 1.5 to 2.5 hours long and tell stories using some relatively established narative styles. weren't so cut & dry in film's infancy. HA! Good Fun!

killing dak'kon seemed to have cured the problem. ... like so many problems in life, a well-timed assassination fixed everything. am still not sure what caused. HA! Good Fun!

just attempted an earlier save. all early saves is fine. even modron cube saves is ok. after defeating evil wizard construct... fubar. am not sure where/when actual problem occured though. were after nordom joins party though. am trying to thiink what spells dak'kon might recently have cast that he had not cast earlier. resting don't help neither. (we thought this might have been like the Submerge the Will bug, but no dice.) will try killing dak'kon and raising. HA! Good Fun!

no cheats HA! Good Fun!

dak'kon cannot hit anything... ever. to hit rolls is looking like the following... attack roll: 17-96= -79 ... am in modron cube. any ideas? HA! Good Fun!

two observations: 1) the "what is art?" crowd angers Gromnir to no end. 2) the fact that games development is in its infancy is hardly a valid excuse for lack of artistic merit. Gromnir don't care what the hell you think is art, but if you cannot recognize art, and if you is not sure that such 'n such piece, movie, book is art, then we does not envy the paucity of your existence. we ain't saying that there is some objective standard of art, but if you not got some standard of your own... if you lacks the capacity to be moved by tragedy or beauty as rendered on canvas or on celluloid, then you might as well be dead. if you lacks the convictions to declare what is and ain't art to you, then you is a coward... and might as well be dead. as to the second point... film, in its infancy, were probably MORE likely to approach beings art than what we sees today. in its infancy film were unbounded by expectations and preconceptions. audiences were willing to pay to see 45 seconds of film showing a a middle-aged okie woman washing her child. try that today and see what happens... no matter how sublime is the moment you captures on film. as josh were pointing out in another thread, there is an accepted crpg narrative style... and in spite of the suggested youth of the medium, there has developed many such norms that has become so widely accepted as to be like unto rules. HA! Good Fun!

sophocles: a view of humanity we wish were true euripides: a view of humanity we wish were false "It is unlikely to change until it can be proven that you don't need to follow past successes formula to be a success... or, someone is brave enough to fund a project that doesn't follow a "winning" formula and is a success. " is the rub of the problem. it costs millions of dollars to make a game that can prove to developers & publishers that a marketable game with an alternative narrative style is possible... millions of dollars which will not be forthcoming until somebody proves that such a game can be made. HA! Good Fun!

if josh wants Gromnir to write a paper/proposal on the viability of alternative narrative styles in popular entertainments, we would be more than happy to do so... present at next game developer conference if you wish... not even have to credit Gromnir. HA! the notion that crpg fans want nothing more than the simple morality tales w/ a traditional heroic protagonist is a firmly entrenched preconception that is understandable in spite of the fact that there has been absolutely 0 attempts at offering anything else. when millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours is at stake, most publishers and developers is predictably less than adventuresome, especially in light of the gaming industry's quarterly report culture. nevertheless, whether it comes as the result of subversive action or open revolution, we expect that change will come, as it always does. HA! Good Fun!

dc went through the killing of superman silliness for a reason... *shrug* is kinda a sad commentary that comic book fans is more discriminating than is forgotten realms fans, but the Death of Superman story arc were adopted by dc 'cause the big blue woner's popularity had waned considerably... were pretty low in point of fact. kill superman were an act of desperation, an attempt to save superman. go figure. eventually the fr fans who likes their drow superhero is gonna get bored just as superman fans did. salvatore maybe give dizzle a drinking or drug problem for a book or two in a lame attempt to give false depth and stave off the slide to dullsville, but eventually it is gonna happen. am actually surprised that fr fans has been willing to swallow salvatore's mindless pap for so long... but we is not surprised that salvatore and wotc has continued to crank out their ridiculous pablum. as long as folks keep paying for it, wotc will keep making it. HA! Good Fun!