markussun

Troika just died?!? swaaye, yes the gaming industry has become disgusting... both for creative game designers with bright ideas, and for gamers who want to be entertained. Games should be entertaining. That's the very nature of what a game is. Nowadays, games have become acts of frustration and patience. The very opposite of what a game should provide. The industry totally fails its main goal by pushing out bug-ridden and unpolished games. I'm also playing older titles again like you, from the golden era when games were made by people who loved games. I'm currently playing the Thief Series from the beginning. That's fun! It's funny that you mention Full Throttle. I recently played Grim Fandango again, after 6 years! This game is of such perfection that it feels as fresh and epic as when I played it 6 years ago. It shows that great game design is timeless. And of course both games were the brainchild of Tim Schaffer, one of the most brilliant game designers the industry has... ... who was dumped by Lucasarts years ago. Go figure.

No, I don't think this is a PSU issue at all. Very rarely this happend to me, too, that a game crash (probably combined with an irrevocable DirectX API error and ensuing hardware conflict) has actually powered my whole system down. It's not a hard power-down (electrical), but rather a soft power-down initiated by the OS. It only happened in extremely buggy gamecode. Sloth, after viewing your screenshot, I am wondering if you have anything overclocked in your system. Is your gfx card running at default speeds? Is your system maybe overclocked? It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is causing these graphical errors. Overclocks can result in garbled gfx, as well as overheating. But of course, if you're very unlucky, you might just have gotten a faulty GPU on your gfx card, which can also cause these aberrations. Also, which Windows version are you using? It could be driver related, depending on the OS you're using.

Adraeus, yes, I agree with you. Lucasarts doesn't care about the quality of their games (and characters) anymore. It's all about profit now. Obsidian apparently created a beautiful story with complex character subplots, something which is definitely their biggest strength, given their RPG legacy. Lucasarts forced them to wrap up the development prematurely and push the product out of the door. The final product falls short of the vision and design that Obsidian had for it. This is regarding the XBox version. But what I blame Obsidian for is that for the PC version they had some extra months until release. They were given the luxury of time (!) to polish the game and add all those things (missing plots, quests, NPC subplots, proper ending) that they had to omit for the Xbox version's premature Xmas release. And they did nothing... nada! Gamespy has just released a very interesting article about this controversy. Check the link: KotOR II and the continuing tradition of rushing games out the door What does that tell you about Obsidian? If they truly cared about their game and if the writers really cared about their story and characters, they should have used that chance to release the PC version of KOTOR2 with the properly intact and full endgame as it was always planned (and buried within the game code). Instead we PC users get the same rushed endgame levels from the Xbox with half of the story threads not finished. Not only is their gamecode buggy and broken (crashes) but also their story is still broken! Now, do you think that if Obsidian really loved and stood behind their 1st game, a maiden project which builds their fledgling reputation, they would just waste those extra months and stand by idly? Even Bioware extended the original KOTOR's story for the PC with the extra stuff they had to omit due to time pressure. I really don't know what to think about Obsidian. Their action (or inaction) speaks so loud, I can only feel very disappointed about this developer. I'm certainly not keen on any other Obsidian games. I'll look elsewhere. Oh, and I almost forgot to add: Adraeus, it's not just Blizzard left that releases polished games. We shouldn't forget id-Software. You can always count on their games being polished. Look at RTCW: Enemy Territory, which they even released for free. These games from 'id' (and their co-partners) are so polished, they shine like bright stars. Unfortunately, except for those two, there aren't many more developers left in this industry that have the clout to tell the publisher: "No! We won't be bullied into abandoning our games. It's done when we say it's done!". Hats off to these old-timers, who have become legends in the gaming industry... Rightfully so!