300-400 bucks and I could easily build a 2.5ghz+ P4 rig using bits scavenged from all over, that'd easily be upgradeable and usable for the next 2-3 years at least. I should of said building from scratch.

Aye upgrading can only go so far before you wind up building a whole new one, but depending on what he's running now he could easily save another 100+$ scrounging parts off the current one to make the new ones (sound card, speakers, case, mobo depending on slot config, etc)


And I'll pretend you didn say Fable, I just got done playing that(TLC version) and it was the biggest dissapointment I've ever played save for Black and White, Peter M. just talks game he can never deliever on =(

 

It didn't deliver the ultimate RPG, but I'm a big fan of any game where you can choose to be good or evil. That feature alone could get me to play just about anything...

I hadn't intended to buy 360 whilst it was still that high in price, personally. I figure I'll be waiting until the PS3 launch price drop at the earliest for getting one (assuming PS3 doesn't become too tempting). I really wouldn't know how to built my own computer, perhaps I should look into it.

Speaking of B&W, I only played that (my PC could actually run that, slowly) up until your first 'world' starts getting sucked into some hole, and then I was like 'huh? fuck that' and quit... was there any point in playing farther?

 

None it pretty much happens at the end of each map and you've seen pretty much how smart the pet is going to be.

I have a major problem with P.M because he hyped his games up so much then fails to deliver anywhere near what he promised. He also has this fun habit of leaving stuff disabled, but coded already, into the game, then sells you a 30$ expansion pack that does nothing but change some "disabled" to "enabled" Black and White had like 50% of the content enabled when it launched, the expansion simply enabled a few things and added the textures for the smaller pet.

You don't really choose good or evil in Fable though, I tried my hardest to be evil, got the massive horns and glowing eyes, did one quest where I had to change my armor, and I was back at a halo (good) after all the murdering I did to be evil it got wiped to good. Its linear as shit and I'd consider it a Action game instead of a RPG. I'm still bitter about hours of world slaughtering towns and I turn good from killing bandits that kept attacking me =( I did like slaughtering the town, and then buying their homes and renting them out though... too bad the new inhabitants were the exact same 4 character models. It's like walking through attack of the clones!

If he'd delivered on the world aging (or at LEAST the characters who go through the game with you!), planting seeds and growing huge trees you could cut down for arrows later on, marriage with kids, etc. then maybe I'd not be so disapointed. I kept myself from leveling till I hit witchwood almost, went back, and leveled all at once and went from teenager to 65 year old man, rofl. I gave up trying to get my guy to show the magical tatoos he promises are possible (like Maze has), I was up to like 80K uses of magic and had nothing but a bright glow on my hands and light blue eyes)

I'm one of those that prefer the real PC RPG concepts of evil, where you can be a subtle backstabbing theif I guess.


Building a PC isn't as hard as you'd think, you could even get a barebones kit (minus the case), with the BIOS already flashed, and then just add in old HD, soundcard, old vid card, old PS into the old case and you're only down around 200 bucks for a good processor. Snag a ebay vid card maybe a week after some new insane model comes out for dirt cheap and you'll wind up with the most important bits of the PC like new, for a fraction of a new one. One good thing about Windows, they'd idiot-o-fied the building process so as long as you can read instructions you can build one for the most part.

 

On PM: Yes, he himself with his promises and shit are the undoing of his games. I didn't know that about locked things, that kinda sucks...

On Fable: I have to disagree... SPOILER ALERT....

I think killing Whisper, stealing that dudes (thunder?) morbid murderous girlfriend (the mayoress), sacrificing people to the chapel of whatever and in the end, killing your own sister to keep a powerful sword is pretty damn evil. Now I admit, you can up and change the otherway easily (with gold at the other chapel or through good deeds) but that's only if you chose to. I thought the horns/halo thing was kinda dumb, and I'm not saying I like this better than KOTOR in this egard, but I thought it was acceptable as a action game with RPG elements. If only they let you kill kids... I agree on the other cut features too, I wanted those, but I hope and pray they will be in Fable 2... at least, the having kids part. I think PM claimed the trees thing didnt end up being feasible or some shite.

On PC building: what's a good mb/kit, and is there anything I need to know about the bios thing, or is that standard practice to preflash it? I have a 200gb hdd that I can't use all of due to, according to the instructions at least, the bios doesn't allow it (something to do with bits if I recall). How can I be sure I get the right bios?

 

yeah I did all that, and it was sweet. Then went on the expansion pack quests (whee an extra 1-2 hours of content that'd already been hardcoded into the xbox, but they left most of the textures out so you could get to there!) and as soon as I finished the first quest my uber evilness went away =( They nerfed the sword of aeons too btw, so now it sucks more then most of the legendary stuff. I wound up using the sword you can buy in Bowerstone North.

The chapel of skorm pissed me off, you can go the cheap way, and sacrifice mercenaries.. who respawn within 5 minutes, or drag villagers who fall in love with you there through werewolves.. ug was frustrating, but that's how I stayed evil through most of it.

I think I'd be happy with a game that had Fables graphics, but with zones about 10 times larger, that constant loading shit made me want to punch the PC, even if it was only 15 seconds... 15 seconds of loading every 1-2 minutes tops is frustrating when you're running. You can't even teleport to cut down on it really, since the teles are spaced so damned weird.

And they'd have to make the game HARD, sheesh I never died once in it, all I did was keep physical shield up, and I played all but a few sections of the game naked. Wound up covered in scars so bad you couldn't see the tatoos, replayed again, beat it in around 10 hours halfassedly trying, this time in full armor the entire time + physical shield and got the same result =/ (I played around also with force push, slow time and multi arrows and utterly owned any and everything.)

Overall it wasn't a bad console game, but for a PC game, and when you know of all the broken promises, it sucks. The dragon at the end of the brief exp pack looks sweet though.

KOTOR 1 was and is for me, the hallmark of what PC RPGS should be. It broke out of the stupid fantasy mold and showed it was possible to make a good SW RPG game. Too bad they screwed up KOTOR2 so badly with the constant repetivness and all the cut stuff =(

Can't think of what that could be other then your hard drive may be needing RAID/SATA and your bios may only allow normalATA *shrug* I'm not 100% clear on what to do in that sort of situation, other then buying a RAID controller card, I'd have to let Raven or someone take that one.

Maybe check out ( http://www.xpcgear.com/ide2sata.html or http://www.xpcgear.com/idetosataconv.html if that is the problem, which it sounds like it's not but I know huge hard drives have alot of issues when they're larger then 137gigs on older PCs)

Check out stores like Tigerdirect, they usually have good specials for mb/cpu combos that take the guesswork out of it.

 

I'll check those sites.

KOTOR1 was pretty much tied with Morrowind as my fav game this gen, my only problem was after Morrowind, the worlds in KOTOR seemed tiny (which I agree about Fable too), and my problem with Morrowind is it intentionally didn't measure good vs evil, and I like knowing just how big a dick I am in a game.

I (obviously) have yet to play TLC, so I don't know what that does. The stuff was all hardcoded in? I just assumed they didn't have time to finish those pats, but that's pretty gay...oh wells, I only pirated it anyway.

 

I tried to get into Morrowind, but I just couldn't get interested in it very much, and the wide open space inbetween towns just felt abandoned. (I forget the name but i remember dozens and dozens of abandonded vaults or something) I'm re D/ling it atm with a buncha plug ins that are supposed to add tons of wildlife and monster encounters, so maybe that'll be sweeter.

TLC has been available for about a month and a half now, it got leaked early it officialy goes on sale in several days to anyone foolish enough, lol. Like I mentioned the only stuff *added* was like 2 new swords, one new spell that they pallete shifted to come up with 2 spells, a handful of sidequests they also had hard coded, and the "new" zones they enabled. Totally new stuff is limited to a few monsters, and I believe the chicken kicking game, can't remember if that was in xbox or not.

They claim all of that is 1/3 additional content.. unless they somehow count the whore house they added where you can screw several ugly girls 1/3... rofl.

Who's the whore houses owner you ask? Mr. Grope.


Funny enough heres a quote from one the game's creative director:

Ah I understand now that I read that, they wanted to do most of the stuff totally differently then what we're all used to, lol. Great idea, but they didn't catch the implementation very well

 

Heres my review for it I posted to one of the clan boards I post reviews on.

Official biased as usual preview: http://pc.gamezone.com/gzreviews/p27278.htm

My review:
-Lionhead studios once again fails to live up to it's promises by truckloads. They claimed such huge freedom to do what you want, that every action would have consequences, that even small things would make huge changes. That the game would be THE RPG all others would be measured against.

In other words Molyneux ran off his mouth yet again, hyped the game way higher then it would of been possible to make in the first place, and the end result is hes left looking like a retarded liar, again,

He made the exact claims pretty much for Black & White, and that turned out the same way: Very scripted; limited freedom in the form of choice A or choice B; and things don't really care what you pick, b/c it'll come down to the same things in the end. The end result in both is it doesn't matter what you do, you can undo it in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds depending on how much cash you have.

-The game itself is pretty, but a very clunky interface, along with piss poor documentation makes the control scheme horrible. Holding space down in order to keep combat lock going, while moving the mouse to switch targets, while holding left-shift to access your magic menu, while left mouse clicking to use the magic.... I think you get the point. What makes it so fun is if you look towards your allys why using the piss poor targetting system... you attack them!!! And since your merc allys are usually 1/10 as strong as you are and utterly useless, you wind up wiping out a small meat shield in a matter of seconds.

-Various tutorial style log entires help alot, but they are often buried under 3 or 4 submenus of crap, that are hard to get to/find.

The menus you get when you are able to choose what skill to level up in aren't much better, it takes 2-4 menus to get to the skill you want. What makes these menus awesome however for the skills: You are treated to a small video clip of the spell in action, and a detailed example of what it can do. I was impressed with the menus.. until I realized they're what makes the menus so slow. I'd rather opt for the option to not see the animation for the 210th time, in order to make menu loading instant.

-The voice acting is decent, far better then I'd expected from Lionhead. There is one scene in particular at the start of the game. I choose to take a bribe to keep quiet about a man cheating on his wife behind a tavern. I then took the gold, went to his wife, and told her, getting more gold, lol. I followed her back to the tavern and they were having a incredible full voice argument that was very, very funny. "...How bout if I chop em both off aye?"

-Like playing as an evil bastard, so you can eventually grow horns and glowing red eyes? Go for it. Just do a few good deeds right before the end, and you'll wind up lightsided in no time. Seen the light ending? Go kill a handful of random people, and you'll be swayed dark just like that *snap* There is no middle ground really. Hell your choices of clothing can sway you up to 50% one way or the other instantly.

-As I said before, the game itself looks incredible. A Diablo 2 style skill system and online playability, with a Baldur's Gate, or Morrowind storyline coupled with this graphics engine would make game of the year without even trying.

Who wouldn't love a Dungeon Seige 2, or Morrowind with these graphics? http://media.pc.ign.com/media/734/7...mg_3001113.html
http://media.pc.ign.com/media/734/7...mg_2759073.html

Unfortunatly, the story sucks, it's almost impossible to die, the controls are horrible, the skill system is pathetically annoying *having to return to home base everytime you want to raise any of the expensive skills) additionally the areas you can run around in are pathetically small., and they require you to visit them dozens of times as the teleporters are often 3-4 zones away from where you'll have to go. This means fighting annoying enemies constantly, that respawn the second you reload the zone.

Molyneux has very talented graphics designers working for him @ Lionhead. It's just too bad he hasn't got a damned clue what to do with the pretty shiny stuff they build for him. I'd almost guarentee if they took a engine this pretty to anyone who puts out RPGs consistantly, we'd be overwhelmed by incredible RPG games, instead of this bullsnot isometric view crap they've all been stuck on for years now.


Pros: Graphics, interesting concept of showing what each skill is with a videoclip embedded in the skill page, music, voice talents.

Cons: Clunky interface that will make you toss the keyboard out the window, small areas to explore, constantly loading inbetween areas (small load times though, but you'd think they'd get rid of the damned things by now) game is over fast, leaving you feeling like you wasted your time.

 

This game was fantastic and deserves a new entry.

The fanfic being written on this site is epic.

 

Midnight. Now there's a name I haven't heard in ages.

Fable:TLC was and is a fun game to break. Playing it legitimately is quite boring though. Trying to game the system is the best part of the game. There's a part where you can have infinite enemies spawn, that plus barrier spell plus mana potions (oh sorry, will) makes the rest of the game hilariously easy.

I have the PC version. I went into the boxing ring and set up a program to click the punch button. In case you didn't know, those guys are invulnerable (in terms of hp) but you still get combo counter for hitting them. I boxed him into a corner, set the program to fire, and left for 12 hours. I came back to a combo counter in the hundreds, and popped a dex, strength, and will potion instantly maxed out all my stats then steamrolled the game.

 

Did somebody say Fable???

Also which boxing ring has a corner? I thought they were all rope circle on the ground deals.

 

They are all circle, but you're not fighting as part of the fight event, but rather picking someone standing around the circle clapping. You can punch them and they're not able to die (or at least not the quest giver, the one with the tattoos), so just keep punching them until they wind up on a corner of the map then let it rip. There's some small timing involved, but once you get it all set up you can walk away and then come back. Since you can do this exploit essentially as soon as you've gotten (or stolen) the first exp potion for one of the three main areas, it's relatively easy to just power through the game.

 

for crazy run through i just download a trainer...

 

I've never used a trainer. What's the point? Like, does it do the stuff for you or what?

At least I had to put a little work into figuring which guys I could beat up infinitely and how to program and infinite punching program, plus collect the potions beforehand. You can also abuse the system less by abusing the will shield and stocking up on will potions and get your exp legit that way.

Or, you know, just hack the game I guess...

 

Trainer is basically you hit a hot key and get 99999 strength points or whatever. It's essentially a hack.

 

I thought I had skillz, doing the Arena again and again and using the Hero Save exploit.