What games are you playing now?

Started Diablo2 last night. I really need to finish NWN2 first, but we'll see what happens.

I'm currently playing Drakensang. Nice game, I like it.

Begun Jade Empire today.

A neat game, I like it so far. (The protagonist is just out of the town.)

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Begun Jade Empire today.

A neat game, I like it so far. (The protagonist is just out of the town.)

Click to expand...

I'm also playing Jade Empire right now. I actually started a few weeks ago, but didn't really have a chance to play much the last couple of weeks. I just started back up again yesterday.

I'm still playing AoC , i also started playing jade empire, great games

Yesterday I realized a huge misunderstanding on my side - on words.

A single word.

Someone complained in the Drakensang forum for too much "blooming".

Me, as a Defender of the Colourful Kingdom, intervened - I tried to defend the blooms, because I believe there should be many blooms in a landscape ... I like colourful landscapes, as the Defender of the Kingdom of Colour I am.

Now, my mistake was a switching of German and English language.

I surely believed the complainer meant flowers and blossoms, which are called "Blumen" in German language ("bloem" in het Nederlande language).

So I thought he was complaining about too many flowers in the landscape. Me, the Defender of the Flower Kingdom, couldn't let this through.

I've utterly failed.

My fault was my frequent switching about German and English language. I thought that "bloom" was an English word for flowers which has been frifted into the German gaming language, together with words like "item", "loot" etc. .

Only yesterday I learned that this is a very special term about rendering - a topic about which I know absolutely nothing (it never interested me).

So why should I have known it ?

I read too much in English-language and German-language forums at the same time. *sigh*

Bloom and the similar technology HDR is a shine technology that many people simply hate. Sometimes I wonder if this isnt old grief due to an argument between ATI and NVidia. If i remember right, ATI was more sucessful in making HDR work with Anti-Aliasing. Sometimes I have agreed though that it can be too much. There's an old rule ofcourse that even if you have a new technology available you should not overuse it.

Take this Oblivion Screenshot for example. The shop looks more like an alien spaceship than a medieval shop.

I remember in Two Worlds... the desert in the far right. That game really overdo bloom. Sure, that desert really looks hot like hell, but it's so shiny at times that my eyes physically hurt.

I understand it now.

I've been putzing with... NWN. This time I built monks -- I've never played them before. I got through most of SoU but got bored with the hordes at the end; started an OC and am now in Blacklake with it, and I still think it sucks; I'm not sure I'll stick with that one, and I made yet another monk for HotU.

The latter feels a bit like a godmode cheat: the first thing I did when going down the stairs was administer a single-handed beatdown to a pretty big dragon (since Deekin and Sharwyn decided to hide in a corner), and it's all been downhill since. He just got his boots of speed, which makes him move like he's riding a jetbike. Certainly makes all that trekking less tiresome...

Although I didn't quite finish Hordes, I played SoU+HotU with a monk. I found the class to be pretty "uber" as well.

I finished act 1 of Diablo 2 last night.

Yep, I had a monk girl at some point in NWN. I think it was SoU. She sailed through the game sending bodies flying right and left.

Due to someone who shall remain nameless(hint: there's a muppet avatar involved) I also am playing Diablo 2. Act V normal--Nightmare soon, so I'll see if my Ranger build is the real deal or a total screwup soon.

Found a remark in the Drakensang forum today :

Someone wanted to have Antialiasing in it (Drakensang seems not to implement it on its own so it must be applied via the graphics driver it seems).

He wrote that his "PC is more than strong enough for this children's graphics".

He also wrote that 1 pixel is in this game as big as in other ones 10.

(Roughly translated).

He seemed to be quite arrogant in his tone, which is a thing I'm allergic to.

Alrik, how far into Jade Empire are you now?

Oh, not too far, I was at the first caves when I left In the swamps.

I was playing the Drakensang Demo meanwhile.

But I'll return to JE at any time.

@Alrik: I loved your flowers and blooms story. BTW,I tried loading your save game but it never appeared in my game selection--I may have stuck it in the wrong folder. Thanks for the effort on your part anyway.

I'm playing Drakensang right now. But I dont have too much time for it... damn... so I'm not far yet.

magerette said:

BTW,I tried loading your save game but it never appeared in my game selection--I may have stuck it in the wrong folder. Thanks for the effort on your part anyway.

Click to expand...

You're speaking of D2/LOD, aren't you ?

I can't say what's wrong with it, because i don't know anything about the mechanics of loading savegames there.

My order structure is this : D:\Spiele\D2\save
Hope this helps.

After hearing positive comments (and read it's enormously positive reviews) on Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem I decided to finally give the game a try. I have had it since I bought my GameCube about a year ago.

Having played half-through the fourth character though, I just couldn't handle the game anymore. I just cannot see what's supposed to be so special about it.

IGN put it "The game grabs hold of players and doesn't let go, captivating with its brilliantly crafted storyline, its mesmerizing visuals and scenery, its character development and more. These details are only equaled by the title's polished controls, combat system and beautifully conceived magick system, which will bait and hook gamers beyond anything else."

Well, half way through the fourth character the story so far is neither captivating nor intriguing. The levels are short of story and I seem to not be able to stay long enough with a character to start to like them. There's barely no introduction to them either. After a short cutscene you start trapped in a nameless dungeon somewhere and after that point there's just combat & puzzles.

The visuals looks like crap compared to Resident Evil Zero that was released the same year (they say it was developed for N64 and it shows). The controls are among the worst I experienced in a survival horror game (RE4 on PC doesn't count) and the aiming system doesnt really improve it. In fact, every time I got something else than a 1-handed sword, problems begun. The times I tried (or was forced to use) a two-edged sword, a blowgun or two swords, I started to take damage at a rapid pace since it's difficult to get in reach and chop off the head. Finally the "magick system" feels quite meaningless.

This is coming from someone who is a horror fan and just love H.P. Lovecraft and played the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game quite a bit.

Picked up a copy of Battlespire from someplace called digitalostrich.com, by way of Amazon's marketplace. Sure, it was $90, but I've been wanting to get my hands on the game for quite a while now. The package arrives, I open it up, and what to my wondering eyes does appear?



A shrinkwrapped Battlespire CD, no box, no manuals... And a label that basically says "Don't Install This". Hookay. And a homemade CD. Say what? Cautiously inserting it into one of my systems, I do a full virus/trogan scan. Comes up clean. The readme in question mentions that the game has already been set up to not need a CD. No CD? Whoa nelly! Definitely venturing outside my comfort zone here.

What's actually there is a pre-installed game image with DosBox 0.72, only DosBox has been helpfully renamed to "PLAY BATTLESPIRE.exe" for those not familiar with DosBox. Just copy the folder over to the local hard drive and go. That's nice. And great that I have an actual Battlespire install CD. Or so I assume... it's still in the shrinkwrap.

I'm used to manually installing stuff under DoxBox and working all of the jiggery myself. Buying a game that comes on a burned CD? Not what I expect.

But it does run, and rather nicely. Looks and feels like Daggerfall, only higher resolution (800x600), better frame rate, smoother graphics. And the first thing I notice? The names on the intro video: Julian LeFay, Ken Rolston... Ah, the good ol' days.

Sadly, this week marks the beginning of full-on crunch mode at work, so I'm not going to have much time to play this. <sigh>

To me, this is just scam or fraud.
This just isn't right.