Sotha

-I've played DE1, and it was excellent. Good plot, your actions mattered to some extent on a long scale. The player was presented with interesting moral decisions. You could play the game the way you wanted. (I liked to sneak and avoid killing people.) I would recommend the game to almost anyone. I also player DE2, which was crap. They kinda improved the graphics and physics, but ruined everything else. I hardly bothered to wade through it. DE2 felt like a hollywood version of a good movie (DE1). Simplified, more predictable, more boring. I've lost my faith in the gaming industry, as sequels almost always turn out to be crappy attempts to haul cash with the name of the previous game. It would seem that all "big" games suffer from the simplification: oblivion dragged you by the nose through the plot, you couldn't figure things out yourself, the journal told what to do and pointed where to go. But I guess it is the demand: if they make a good and clever game, nobody buys it. Nowadays, most games are single-use entertainment (doom3), not classics that last for many years (UFO:Enemy Unknown, I still play it!). Augmented refers to cybernetically improved humans.

I'd like to inquire that when do we get DR to show the speaker radii in the map? It would make sound placement much more straightforward and faster. Actually I do not want to do sounds until that kind of feature exists. Thanks.

Respect and congratulations!

I must comment about jd_hand -font. I played with readables, and I noticed that the f-letter is also terribly displaced. In a title written in jd_hand, word "curfew" looked like "curf ew." It looked a bit unacceptable to me. Maybe, when selecting fonts, we should look at a sample text with the whole alphabet, so we can easily spot if the font contains badly displaced letters?

He looks fantastic. I can't wait to blackjack him and steal his treasures.

I think it might be good idea to confront your fears and conquer them that way. If your fear is of the level you describe, it's probably important that you do something about it as soon as possible. You might start with the fact that the poor spider is probably more frightened of you, and you present a more serious threat to the bug than it presents to you. Spiders are also nice, since they eat annoying buzzing insects. I understand it might be easy for me to say, as I do not have the quality you describe. In any case, you probably should try to overcome your weakness if not by yourself, maybe with professional aid. Personal improvement is always an excellent motivator.

In SS1 there was an electronic puzzle in which you had to connect two squares with an electric stream. Clicking on one spot turned X's into +'s. A + would pass a stream and X would not. The trick was that not only one point would change upon clicking, but a bunch of those next to the clicked one. When the hot points were connected with a constant stream, the circuit was complete and something neat happened, say a laser bridge activated. I played SS2, but if I recall correctly, there weren't this type of puzzles, although it had something else..

Well. That teaches you to eat your hair..

System shock and Deus Ex brought to the thief series: Steampunk hacking. Oh, wow!

Or you could drop gold coins from your loot to lure the greedy ones!

-You could prevent from being surprised in a room by placing a gas mine in front of the door. If someone comes and disturbs your thieving, the gas knocks out the guard. This idea reminds of a feature in No One Lives Forever shooter game (guess it was in NOLF2) in which you could place a banana wrapping on the floor on which a passing guard would slip and fall. Very entertaining to watch from a hidden corner, but not very useful. Still, always nice to hear new ideas.

Well, a mapper could use his/her favourite text-editor to find-replace all "atdm" entries with "" in their .map files. It's a small job, I think. (But still a job.) It would probably ease the mapper's pain if detailed info on the changes would be given, so the mappers know what to change to what. But still, I'd avoid it if it is not absolutely necessary..

-It is a shame though, that publishing good games doesen't make the producer necessarily succeed in the market. Think about the Looking Glass Studios. Everything they ever made was very good to excellent. Jagged Alliance games were very good and appreciated (they still are), but still every company that touched the title went bankcrupt (Sir-Tech, Talonsoft). Nowadays games are way too console-like and oversimplified. But I guess that's the thing that sells. And money is everyhing.

We usually play Carcassonne, which is a nice game. Fun alternatives are Citadels, Munchkin (maybe someone recognizes my avatar ), Kill Doctor Lucky and Dalmuti. Sometimes (the girls insist that) we play Alias or Trivial Pursuit, but I'm not a big fan of those. No sneaky backstabbing tactics to be done there..

Heh, thanks..

-Unless you join some kind of association or club of esperanto-speakers...

Everyone thinks their own native language is better that others, mainly due to subjective reasons: people are better at speaking their own language and it feels familiar. Other languages are complex, weird, full of inconsistencies and illogical. Finnish for instance is a very nice flexible language, which is pronounced as it is written. You don't need to bother to think about word order and you do not have to remember articles for nouns (der, das, die). However, it is difficult language to a non-native talker learn it fluently due to it's complex grammar. Maybe everyone should learn esperanto, since it is probably on of the most logical and easy-to-learn languages around....

Haha! Funny vid.

Could you comment the multiplayer? Is it any good?

No I haven't heard of this before, although I've seen the Uuno movie mentioned in the wiki article. Interesting concept, combining two gentlemen's games into one.

Steampunk laptop, looks like it came straight from the dark mod universe.. http://www.datamancer.net/steampunklaptop/...mpunklaptop.htm The winding key is especially fun.

I too use cell phone reminders a lot. Previously I used essentialPIM, but cell phone is much easier, as it is always with me and available. I guess even the simplest cell phone models have reasonable calendars these days. Highly recommended. EDIT: Oh, and with serious samurize you could probably write your own reminder system, it might even be a small box fixed on the side of the screen, showing notes and alarming if necessary.

-Thanks! I will wait to tuesday next week, then. I'm obtaining the mod at the moment and shivering about the daunting task of converting those vanilla textures on my work into TDM ones. Question barrage may ensue at a later time.

I don't mean to sound overenthusiastic, but what's the final verdict concerning the matter mentioned on the topic?

-Maybe it means that he has a dark monitor and couldn't see much in the darker images, except the last three. That's how I interpreted it, but maybe I failed my sense motive check...