I find E3 to already be as hectic as I can imagine; I wouldn't want to have to deal with a bunch of ten-year-olds. Though I think it's nice to have a sister to E3, which is supposedly industry only.



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I think he meant "feverishly".

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Why would they? Console / PC wars aside, the fact remains that you'll be able to get any of those consoles and 2-3 good games for the price of one of these cards. Or maybe two consoles and a game apiece, knowing the launch prices for these things.

Splinter Cell looks better and runs faster than anything I can run on my GeForce4 anyway.

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How did this get written in the first place? Did the guy just make up a bunch of stuff?

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And I'm right near the end, too. Hopefully they got rid of that Improved Invisibility bug.

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In all fairness, a lot of these reviewers work for free, reviewing games they paid for with their own money. At least, that's what we do at our website, which I won't bother pimping. If they want to do an older game, no biggie.

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I actually haven't been this enthusiastic about a multiplayer game in quite a while. I played a fairly crowded game of Bombing Run last night, and had a great deal of fun. The weapons are a little blah, but it runs great on my system . To each his own.

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"Might've been just me, but it seemed a bit easier than the actual game... I picked a HUnewearl (personal favorite class) and played right through the forest. Only tech I picked up along the way was Foie Lv. 1, and after I beat the dragon I was at level 4 with one monomate left."

Really? I heard you could reach the chiamech with ten furbles in your sleenk. At the very least, I managed to actuagon the breemble with less than florx plombots.

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You can't return to a previous chapter from a later one. Any quests that are uncompleted are simply uncompleted. You'd have to restart the previous chapter to do them, and then you'd lose all progress in your current chapter.

As for the last question, the answer is that you don't have to complete every quest at all. You can go back to your previous save, if you like (you'd have to make sure it's a Chapter 1 save, though, not a Chapter 1 Ending or Epilogue or whatever save; you can't pass from the Epilogue back to Chapter 1 any more than you can from Chapter to Chapter). In any case, you should probably just keep on going where you are; there's not much motivation to do sidequests other than getting experience, which ramps anyway, and items, most of which you'll be replacing by the next chapter anyway, anyway. I found that by Chapter 3 I was just skipping all the side quests and doing whatever had to be done to get to the end of the game.

You have to think of each separate chapter as a separate game; there's no way to pass back and forth between them. You can always save your character, go back and do the quests in Chapter 1, then save your character again and restart chapter 2 if you like.

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Hegemonia looks pretty incredible. I remember how jaw-dropping the original screens were; these still look nice. Here's hoping it makes it through development without being run through the graphicrapifier.

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What, Vivendi universal? That's a drop in the bucket to them, and isn't going to affect their bottom line at all. The company as a whole is losing billions.... Besides, that's 50 million in revenues, not in profit.

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"I'd love to get my Orc Meal at McDonalds. My McThrall Burger."

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See? I was right. Ha, ha, ha.

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Well, I kind of agree with him (or whomever he was quoting). I didn't really find the storyline very gripping, especially with the "anonymous champion" motif and the constant denial of the player's desire to shape the plot. Granted, most RPGs are linear in this manner, but the best at least give the illusion that the player has a choice about his plan of attack. In NWN, you're just Aarin Gend's errand boy; he tells you what to do and where to go and prevents you from proceeding onward with the story until you fulfill a set of tasks. This is a pretty far cry from the massive side questing of Morrowind or BG2.

I also found the gameplay itself to be pretty bland; closer in spirit to the Dark Alliance console game than to any of the BG games on the PC. Since they had to design the single player game to be beatable by every single class (along with a sidekick), the combat rules supreme over the storytelling, and quests rarely drew my interest, since I knew there would be some kind of boss and something to fetch, and then I would warp back to base, and that would be that.

And I think it's odd that you say that "not having a party to control helped me to identify more with the main character". I hate to break it to you, but there was no main character, unless you consider a bunch of stats and a few choices on a dialogue tree a "character". There can be no identification where there is no substance. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; the hacker in System Shock 2 was a nameless avatar as well, and the game played around with that by never allowing him any dialogue (excepting the horribly betraying ending movie).

I think NWN would've worked better if its reach hadn't exceeded its grasp. A simple dungeon hack would've been nice. Why not throw the player into Waterdeep or something like that, and let us explore on our own terms? It would've been preferable to being Aarin Gend's lapdog for the bulk of the game.

All of which isn't to say that the game isn't good; I bought it and I don't think that I wasted my money. However, being a singleplayer kind of guy, I don't think the SP game is really as good as Bioware has proven they can deliver. None of the party NPCs are very memorable, since they never interject into your conversations the way the BG2 npcs did. Etc., etc., etc.; a litany of complaints. It's an all right game, but I was bored well before the (anticlimactic) ending, and I feel no urgent need to play any downloaded modules or go online. Unless someone wants to make a nice murder mystery module or something that involves a bit of an plot that at least feigns interactivity.

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All I'm saying is that it's stupid to swear off a game forever because of experiences based on an incomplete copy of the game. If they're really as screwed up and ass-backward as you say they are, then maybe they'll do the smart thing and push the game back, and it'll be better for it. If not, and it bombs, then mea culpa.

I gotta say I always get a good laugh when I see people swearing off games based on a beta or a test demo. And I'll point out that you have said exactly dick about the quality of the gameplay itself. If it's a shitty game, then say so! "I will never play this game because the developers poorly administrated a stress test!" is essentially what you're saying here. Sounds like a well-reasoned and thought out judgement...

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The word "made" implies that they actually completed the game. "Released" might be a better choice in this context.

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Christ, what a bunch of idiots. I'm sorry, but the whole point of a beta is to see how fucked up stuff can get. If something majorly wrong happens in beta, then that's a good thing! It makes it a lot less likely that something similar will happen once the game launches.

You guys make me think there should be I.Q. tests before people can sign up for betas. It's not like you guys are paying to play, so what are you complaining for?

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Well, hopefully Sonya gets to get a happy ending in this game.

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Apparently Driver 2 was pretty bad compared to Driver 1. At least, I heard the graphics somehow managed to become even slower and choppier than in the first one. That's kind of the achilles heel of GTA3, as well, though. Hopefully they'll be able to fix some of the graphical slowdowns and pop-in for Vice City.

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And, again, a preorder is a different beast from a sale. If every single person who preordered came to buy their game on the first day it was available, they sold 4.5 million the first day. Otherwise, they didn't. (Edit: And yeah, what #5 said.) I doubt they sold more than a couple hundred thousand copies the first day.

Look at the numbers, in this very article, for Diablo II: 1 million copies sold in 14 days. Do you really think it's likely that WC3 sold 4.5 times the number of games D2 managed to sell in two weeks on its first day of availability? I'm probably using the wrong formulation, but 14 x 4.5 = WC3 would have had to have been selling at 63 times the rate D2 did to do so.

I'm not saying its not a successful game; I love Blizzard as much as anyone else, but there's no way in hell it sold 4.5 million copies in one day.




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This comment was edited on Jul 17, 17:38.