User Information - Ratty

I just finished the Dark Brotherhood quest and, OK, I think rating that T was a bit of a stretch. But we all know this is about boobs, plain and simple. How sad. It's so silly too. It's just as easy to paint a couple of crude circle nipples on the lady skins as it is to remove the tops in the CS. I'm guessing if the topless parts of the models that shipped with the game had no nipples this never would have happened. M rated because of a few stray pixels. God, it's just so sad. What screwed up country we're living in.

10.

Spiders

May 1, 2006, 13:30

News Comments > The Secret of Da Vinci French Demo

I don't leave the spiderwebs in my house cause I care for spiders (they's meant for smashin!) but because I'm lazy. They do tend to congregate above the pillow area of my bed for some reason. Nothing's worse that having a spider drop down on your face while you're lying there awake.

No subject

Apr 28, 2006, 17:37

News Comments > Morning Previews

Thanks for the Wikipedia link. That does indeed take me back. I was surprised how pixelated everything looks because, of course, in my memory everything was perfectly crisp and clear in high resolution 32-bit color anti-aliased detail.

Re: BioShock

Apr 28, 2006, 15:51

News Comments > Morning Previews

You know, I've grown to dislike that term anymore Whatever you want to call it, a PC player knows consolized crap when he plays it. By the same token I imagine a console player knows a "bad PC port" when he plays it as well. I actually have no idea what your objection is. I can't believe you actually think the exact same interface, controls, resolution, fonts, textures, etc., are ideal for both platforms. And that's not even talking about "dumbing down," or "cartoonitis," both less tangible damage done by console development.

No subject

Apr 28, 2006, 13:59

News Comments > The Secret of Da Vinci French Demo

Nothing's a done deal nowdays. One would think that Irrational couldn't help but to give us a great game. But I thought that about Ion Storm and Deus Ex 2/Thief 3 as well. I've just become so bitterly pessimistic when it comes to PC games nowdays. Can a small independent studio afford to make a great PC game or will they have no choice but to churn out consolized crap?

No subject

Apr 28, 2006, 13:54

News Comments > Morning Tech Bits

Anyone remember the Journeyman Project? I loved that game. There was one part where you went back in time and visited Da Vinci's studio. It was evening with crickets and gardens, very peaceful, it was beautiful. I remember very little from those games except for that part. So I'm going to give the demo a try.

Early hi-def DVD players

Apr 27, 2006, 14:25

News Comments > Into the Black

The studios have turned off the rights management stuff for the first crop of HD DVD and Blu-ray releases. They'll put it back in in full force after about a year when more people have adopted it. Doesn't that strike people as completely dishonest and deceptive? If they have nothing to hide and don't feel it'll interfere with people's enjoyment of these formats in any way, why don't they put it in right from the start?

24.

TV Turnoff week

Apr 26, 2006, 12:55

Rats, it should have been last week. I haven't watched TV for the longest stretch in, ever, I think. At least two weeks I'd guess. I'm a big TV watcher too. Anybody care to hazard a guess why my perfectly good TV set has been off for so long?

11.

Boring OotB today

Apr 20, 2006, 16:10

But I still love the editorial comments! "With a lemony fresh smell" gave me a laugh. The one about the lamb chops too. That's why I read most of my news here. Even slow news days are good for something.

33.

Re: Blues format is all screwed up

Apr 3, 2006, 19:45

I had the same problem about a month ago. If you search the OOTB messages you should find it, along with the solution. I don't remember exactly what I had to do, but I think it involved removing a cookie. Check you're bluesnews cookies for something about stylesheets. You're a genius. A genius I tell you. Looked at my cookies, filtered by Bluesnews, saw one that said simply "style," deleted it, and now I have my beloved Blue Bluesnews back again! Thanks.

16.

Blues format is all screwed up

Apr 3, 2006, 14:35

I connect to Bluesnews this morning and WAAH! No stylesheets! The background is white, the font is all times roman. It's impossible to read. I'm using Firefox 1.5 and it's working fine with other sites. Javascript is enabled. I systematically went through and disabled my extensions. I can't figure it out. I'm thinking it could possibly be an entry in my hosts file. I haven't touched that in a long time, but maybe Blue made a minor tweak to the website. I have to use, gasp, MSIE! Okay, this time I explicitely turned Javascript OFF and now Bluesnews looks fine. Typing in "Javascript:" turned up a lot of error messages but they were surprisingly unhelpful (all pointed to line 0). So something about Javascript and styles was changed and now everything's screwed up. On a side note. I'm thinking about putting Oblivion aside for a few weeks or months. I've been playing it WAY too much and I think it would be good to just do other things and return to it fresh. Maybe I'm a game addict! Anyway, if I do that it'll stretch the enjoyability that much longer. This comment was edited on Apr 3, 14:43.

11.

New neighborhood dogs

Mar 28, 2006, 15:04

News Comments > The Early Show

So dogs really get into that? I mean, new dogs to play with? Mostly when I see dogs meet for the first time it is not pretty. I actually rarely see or hear about dogs that get together, know one another, play, etc. If fighting isn't involved it still seems very tense to me, tails all standing straight up, cautious sniffing. I see that sometimes when I walk to work (there are a lot of dogs in my neighborhood). Or one dog, usually the younger, will get over excited hopping around like crazy and scaring the other dog. I like dogs but I have to have a cat because of where I live and they definitely don't get into the meet a new cat for fun and play thing (stuck up bastards). This comment was edited on Mar 28, 15:04.

Crysis vs. Illumina

Mar 27, 2006, 15:39

I'm about as far from being a graphics whore as you can get. As long as the game is fun, that's about all I care about. But even I'm prepared to use the "looks like ass" phrase to describe Illumina right after seeing the Crysis clip.

70.

Re: Rated T for what?

Mar 22, 2006, 16:39

when you kill something in tall grass. NOT ONLY is their corpse hard enough to find, but just FORGET about finding where the weapon they had equipped ended up Heh, I can't wait. So far the only problems I've had are trying to find the crab I killed in the water to get some of my arrows back. It took me a LONG time realize they even dropped their weapons. I just figured if it wasn't in their inventory when I clicked their corpse it was gone. Otherwise, this game is a complete marvel. I'll never finish it Yeah. Us gamers do seem to find it easier to bitch about the bad things than to praise the good things--at least I do, your initial review was much more generous than mine. But it is an amazing game so far and any criticisms I've bitched about are just a tiny part among everything they did so spectacularly right.

64.

No subject

Mar 22, 2006, 14:42

And I found the solution to my 1 FPS slowdown bug. There are a few posts about it on the Bethesda boards. It's a bug with the X800 cards and AA. The chamelon effect and things like Oblivion gates will slow the game down to about 1 FPS when AA is enabled. Updated drivers etc. do not fix the problem. The only solution is to turn AA off. Some people have reported this doesn't fix the problem for them but for most it does. This is why I HATE HATE HATE ATI cards. This X800XT is my first ATI card and I swear never ATI ever again. I was hesitant when I bought it because of all ATIs past history being buggy and they have not cleaned up their act. It's always some problem with some game or another and their fucking screwed up drivers. I have NEVER in all the years I've used NVidia ever had a problem with any of their cards or any games.

62.

Re: No subject

Mar 22, 2006, 14:29

Its a radeon, bang on with 6.3 Thanks. My guess was that it was not a Radeon but the AIW. The All-In-Wonder is a video card with built-in TV tuner functionality. You'd have a remote control along with lots of extra cords and connectors if you had an AIW And I don't have that so I DON't want an AIW. Thank you very much. You saved me some hassle. And sorry about the links. I sure hate when websites do that for no reason.

59.

No subject

Mar 22, 2006, 14:21

Stupid stupid question: I have an ATI X800XT but I don't know which driver I'm supposed to download here: https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27 Is it a Radeon? An All-In-Wonder? My best guess is I want Catalyst 6.3 here: https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27 and in the table on that page the one I want is the Catalyst Control Center Package. Can anyone confirm?

46.

Re: *Minor* Graphics quibble

Mar 22, 2006, 13:02

Even in dungeons, you can get to the end and quick travel out. Thanks for that tip! I didn't realize that and that will definitely come in handy.

40.

Re: Interface Woes

Mar 22, 2006, 12:43

News Comments > Ships Ahoy - The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

This game easily has 100 hours of content I agree. Literally I see 100 hours of play time in this thing without getting bored. While level 1 I found a Vampire colony by accident and killed them, did a quest, explored. Then I wasn't happy with my character and I started over. I went back and killed those damn Vampires again (Vampire dust is $$$) but I'm still not happy with my character so tonight I'm starting all over agin. "Power leveling" isn't so attractive in Oblivion as it was in Morrowind. Mostly I think because there aren't any Misc skills anymore. But that's a good thing. This time around I'm giving my character the skills he truly uses most. I was trying to power level with my first two characters, the first much more than the second. But it became clear fairly early on that that wasn't a good idea. The interface SUCKS. I can't believe how much worse it is than Morrowind. Much of it screams console--the big huge fonts, the need to scroll everywhere. And why the goddamn hell doesn't ESC get you out of every menu? It's ludicrous. But other sucky things are puzzling since they would benefit both consoles and PCs. Where the hell are the tooltips? For god sakes give us some tooltips! Is the interface customizable in the CS? In Morrowind you left-clicked your mouse and it brought up EVERYTHING you needed. This F1 through F4 stuff is getting old fast. When people used to bring up how parallel Console/PC development invariably screws up a game, I'd agree with them but always mention Morrowind as the exception that proved the rule. Bethesda managed to do the interface right with Morrowind. So how they could fuck up Oblivion so bad is bizarre and puzzling and very sad. 3.6 GHZ, 2 MB RAM, ATI X800XT, performance is very very good. It crashes a LOT. I would say half the time I try and load a save game it CTDs. Sometimes, rarely, it will crash when loading a new zone, once it crashed during lockpicking. But I don't have the latest drivers installed--I'm guessing I'm almost a year out of date--so I have no right to complain about that ... yet. Weird weird slowdown when there are invisible characters in view. Remember in Morrowind when sometimes in a dungeon something would be visible--you never knew what--that caused you framerate to drop down to 1 or 2 FPS? This happens in Oblivion too. But again, not the latest drivers so I have no right to whine about it. I can find no way to read a a book or scroll in a container without first putting it in my inventory, then closing the container, going into my inventory, scrolling aaaaall the way down to find the damn thing, reading it, then dropping it. In Morrowind you had something like 30 or 40 items in your inventory in view at once. Thanks to consoles, you now have something like 8, and they're overly huge, take up way too much space. But oh, I guess they're ever so easy to read on a low res TV sitting on the other side of the room. Is it just me or does the water look WORSE than it did in Morrowind. I was blown away the first time I saw Morrowind's water. I'd never seen anything like it. As far as I can tell Oblivion's water doesn't look so good. The waves are all tiled or something. But combat is sweet. I'm actually using a bow and arrow and loving it. Now I know if I aim right I'll hit something! And the little "health" arc is a nice improvement. Very unobtrusive and definitely useful. Things are MUCH more balanced, you can tell already even at level 1. Creating an übercharacter will not be as easy as it was in Morrowind, if it's possible at all. Deers, horsies, and doggies! BAD doggy! I love them. So 90% good things, 10% shitty things. I can live with that. This comment was edited on Mar 22, 13:00.

46.

I gave in

Mar 21, 2006, 17:00