Komag

Do you have a girlfriend? Sometimes it's hard to say what you'll do

I thoughly enjoyed my 250 Oblivion hours, then I sold it and got back 80% of my money so I'm happy! I'll probably buy it again, used, in like a year or two, to play with all the new mods and try the other quest lines.

That is some super-professional work!!! I really liked the "Bug's Life" rock concert. You're hired!

You could buy a little dorm fridge and just set the temp very high Also, Shadowspawn should know a lot about it - I'm not sure if he does it, but his D&D friend (who lives a couple miles from me) has a custom built wine cellar and I've heard them talking about it from time to time.

I've seen those long ago (I'm pretty sure at least) but they are cool

Prey is one of my few "buy it in 6 months or a year or so, when it's $30 or hopefully even $20!". VERY rarely is a game "buy it now for $50!". Oblivion was, and Gothic 3 is going to be.

Maybe, but a lot of people don't upgrade their PCs very often, so many will still have what they have right now. A good target is probably something like a GeForce 6800, since those will cost around $40 in two years.

I had no problems with load times. Saves were instant, loading saves only took a few seconds, and quitting was very fast too. The thing is, load times were also just fine on my lamo laptop, no difference. Both are 7200 drives (with nice caches I think), so maybe you have a 5400 or slower and it makes a huge difference. Otherwise, dunno what's up with that.

Tried it at home. Turned up everything to maximum (except AA and AF), and it still ran butter smooth. (Wish I had a better laptop since I spend most of my time on it and not the desktop, even at home) However, the smooth framerate actually seemed to accentuate some of the negatives. It still feels like horrible ice skating slash mud wading the whole time, much worse than TDS. The camera jerks and bobs way too much. When you land from a jump, the view tilts down some, then back. When you throw a crate, the view tips sideways some, then down some, then back. It's jarring and annoying, and I don't like it. The demo is very short, basically if you watched the released preview vids (from E3 I think?) you've seen it all, except for a short (but cool) crypt crawl in the beginning which serves as the tutorial. It seems kind of crazy that this little bit of gameplay takes 1.4 gigs! Still, I had fun battling the bad guys, mostly by throwing barrels and crates at them or kicking them off ledges or into spike traps. There were also a lot of preset traps to take advantage of. But again, it all feels very artificial and "set up". I suppose that's the whole point, since it IS a demo, so maybe the full game feels more natural. PS - I didn't have any sound or graphics glitches on my desktop, so it must be a drivers issue. Oh yeah, to top it off, I had to give firewall permission to a file during UNinstalling - what the heck!?

I played through a good chunk of the demo (eventually fell in some odd "light" pit and couldn't do anything but die) My first impression is to be very disappointed! But let me amend that by saying I don't know how much blame to place on my laptop. Certainly with ALL the options turned down as low as possible and still getting a nasty <10 framerate doesn't help make things fun. But here is my list of negatives: 1. Sidestepping. It causes you to lean a bit. I suppose this is all fine in the "in real life you have to lean the direction you step" mode of thinking, but I don't like the effect on the screen at all! Maybe if it was toned down to about 1/3 or 1/4 as much tilt. 2. Sliding. Whenever I stop moving, it's like the world is made of semi-ice, because I slide a little bit. This gets extremely unnerving and frustrating when navigating narrow legdes, walkways, etc, having to tap tap tap and play it way too safe to avoid sliding off the side. I had a heck of a time trying to "line myself up" with a higher nook to see if I could mantle up into it. I gave up trying! 3. Special motions. There are a lot of special attacks and other things that to me felt like the game takes over my guy and does this thing then I get control back to play some more. It bugged me every time it happened. Even mantling doesn't allow you to look around until the mantling is done. 4. Leaning. It sucks (as usual), but not as bad as Far Cry leaning sucked 5. Crouching. No toggle (why???) 6. Jumping. Feels too bouncy (might be better on desktop) 7. Fatigue meter. It's huge and obnoxious in the lower middle of the screen. 8. Visibility meter. Big and in center of screen (doubles as aiming aid). Still not sure how it works or if I had a bug, mine seemed to flip on and off without good reason. 9. Traps. They're all set up so very specifically. I really wanted to lure an orc (or whatever it was) under a certain area and break the very flimsy looking support to have it crash on him, but THAT one wasn't set up by the game designers for that. So I was out of luck. I can kick and super-sword-attack that little support and I get nothing. 10. Bugs, Incompatibility. This maybe is just my fault, but I got a lot of graphical and sound glitches. The sound was especially choppy and fragmented, in a very wrong/buggy way, even when I set the sound quality to low. I'm not sure if I can upgrade my laptop sound drivers (but I don't care anyway, the game's not really playable on my laptop anyway). I got odd graphics problems, squares and blocks and stuff where there should be smoke or magic effects or flying bats, buggy things like that. Again, my laptop video drivers are picky and I can't just use the latest NVidia drivers, so I might be stuck here as well. Positives: 1. Looks Great. Even with lowest settings, the level design and world graphics were cool and atmospheric. 2. Gameplay Potential. I struggled with an unplayable framerate and bugs, the skating on ice issue, and other stuff, but I might be able to get used to some of it, and there does seem to be a lot of cool options and potential. The game must have been a nightmare to playtest and balance! 3. I want to play more. That's never a bad thing. I'll report back tonight after trying again on my desktop

Okay, I tried it on my laptop and paid closer attention. The permission twice asked was for "Dark_Messiah_Demo_FP.exe" (I'm pretty sure). But this time during that loading screen my firewall popped up asking permission for "mm.exe" (this didn't pop up on my Desktop, but I'm sure it was the issue, so I'll just give it permission ahead of time and try again when I get home). But on my laptop all the videos didn't work, I instead heard the sound and got a weird rectangle box with a diagonal slash, weird. I didn't start the game yet, just messed with options. The menu music was choppy and having trouble, so I turned everything down. Now I'll see how it goes...

I think that's the biggest demo download ever, almost 1.5 gig! I installed it at home on my desktop, but the installer was being a prick and was doing odd things with the directory that I wanted to install it into. I finally wrestled to install. Twice my firewall asked me permission to let something have access to online, both times I consented. Then I started it up, watched the corporate movie clips (like NVIDIA!), then watched a brief but cool intro movie, then got a loading screen that never finished. The progress bar got about 2/3 done, didn't budge after that. I couldn't Alt-Tab out to see if it was asking another permission. I couldn't Esc out or anything. I had to hard reset my whole PC. I started up again, deciding to just let it load "forever". I let it sit on that screen for about 20 minutes, no change, had to hard reset again. I might try uninstalling it completely and then re-installing it wherever the freak it wants in the first place, and maybe it will work then. I'll also try it on my laptop.

Because of the post 4 posts up that you must have missed

That's crazy cool! I immediately had the thought ..."SOURCE CODE!!!" and then read your quick question about it as well. Looks like we're out of luck on that one. But I still wonder if there will be any other stuff coming our way...

You're right, weird as heck!

I don't want to cause any problem or rift between forums or anything. But for my full story and point of view on this whole deal, anyone can now read it all at Metal and Gold

I think that these T2G missions won't suck when completed, but I think they may not ever get done. That'll be the sticking point I think, whether these guys will have the heart to continue to work on these missions in a year or two from now. When they just LEAPED at the chance litterally 6 hours from the thread being posted, it doesn't instill confidence of long term staying power. But I hope I'm wrong - I'd love to play a Thief 2 Gold

I've gotten quite a few emials and pms from friendly "concerned citizens" recently wondering what's going on, and some recent forum discussion going on (as this thread evidences). I'm not a vengeful or hateful person or anything, so I don't hate TTLG or the admins there, but I think the community does deserve a longer more fleshed out explanation of the whole situation and history. I'll put it on the Keep soon (like maybe today). And I'll try to be as honest and fair as possible, freely admitting any negatives on my part. As I've thought about it and tried to remember things and also tried to see how stuff might look from their perspective, I can understand that it's not just one sided. In other words, I think I'm "innocent" for all serious intents and purposes, but I can understand partially how it would look otherwise. But just a quite note - as far as I know, it's a permanent ban.

Rule of thumb - if you like to tell people something, it's probably bullcrap. In other words, if it's fun to tell, especially if it has that "oooooo, ohhhhhh" factor, be suspicious. RESIST THE URGE!

This is cool, but I'm surprised/disappointed that they seem so very small and unfinished (in fact they look like they were barely started!). Still, great news, might eventually turn into something good and playable and inspiring

Well, the idea lately is to make it easier for people to just start playing, instead of confusing them with a myriad of detailed settings, opting to control most of that "under the hood". I'm a tinkerer like most hardcore gamers, so I always do at least some "advanced" configuring like you're talking about, but most poeple don't. And you certainly can't on consoles. I think it's just the way the industry is leaning right now.

Sounds like you got a couple good parents there, that are listening and willing to learn, apologize, etc. Wow.

I have played female characters by choice in various games once in a while, sometimes not by choice (such as Tomb Raider and others), and it's fine by me. I'm very straight and a pretty religious Christian, so I can definitely say there is NOTHING essentially gender-bending about playing a female character. If you ONLY insisted on always playing as girls, that would be another issue, but that's clearly not the case here. Ask your parents to try to believe you and to do some research online about it, or even to read this thread! Good luck with that, I remember having sometimes overprotective or non-understanding parents at times (though it was mostly okay with mine)

I don't mind widescreen stretched 4/3 games at all anymore, I've just gotten so used to it on my laptop widescreen. It's to the point that if I play a game in 4/3 on my desktop it almost looks squished to me now! Like even large circles look like normal circles on the widescreen and look squished on the proper 4/3, just because my brain has compensated to the stretching.

I look through a prisim and have a spasim!