Neverwinter Nights Available at GoG.com

A team of 4 players, from different parts of the world ranging from Florida to Sri Lanka, explores an ancient underground fortress in Faerun, the world of Neverwinter Nights.

Atari's Neverwinter Nights has just been made available as a DRM free download for $10 at Good Old Games.

A generation after it's original release NWN remains the most revolutionary cRPG ever made.

The adventure isn't that special. If you're a casual cRPG fan it's worth a play, but it won't rock your world. Baldurs's Gate 1 and 2 are both better cRPG experiences for the RP lightweight (and both are available on GoG). The official campaign is weak at best. The first expansion, Shadows of Undrentide, is MUCH better. In fact, just skip straight to "Shadows" (known in the NWN community as SoU). It's no Baldur's Gate, but at least it gives BG a run for it's money. The original campaign doesn't even try. The last full length module, Hoards of the Underdark (or HotU) is a sequel of SoU and is without doubt the best of the three modules, but it's also epic level. I wouldn't recommend making HotU your first NWN experience.

No. As far as the single player game goes it falls into the "meh" catagory. The graphics are dated, and in the OC the plot is lame, linear, and riddled with painfully 2 dimensional NPC's.

But it's still the best cRPG ever made.

What makes NWN stand apart from any game that came before it is the Aurora Toolset and it's multi-player features.
The toolset is easier to use and more powerful than anything ever released before or since. Dungeon Siege, Morrowind, even Oblivion have toolsets that pale in comparison to NWN. While the sequel, NWN 2, has a toolset that offers a building experience with much better graphics, it offers nothing in terms of improved game play and is much more complicated and time consuming. NWN is also highly modable. It's relatively easy to create and animate 3d models, so fans have fleshed out the game with custom clothing, models, buildings, monsters... you name it. The system is so flexible that it has been used to create d20 modern and even sci-fi modules. NWN is the perfect platform for the amateur game designer. As a result there are literally thousands of fan made modules, and literally hundreds that are actually superior to the official campaign.

Still not convinced? Let's talk multi-player. NWN can be played cooperatively or PvP. The official campaigns can be played co-op, but there are scores of fan made modules designed for MP co-op as well. Now there's nothing new about MP support. Baldur's Gate was an amazing MP experience for the few people who tried it, but compared to NWN it's downright primitive and without the toolset the MP experience in these games was intrinsically limited.

And this brings us to the one thing that sets NWN apart from every other cRPG ever made...

NWN has a Dungeon Master client.

NWN's DM client, in combination with the powerful toolset, relegates every other MP computer game on the market to the status of "Poser". This feature makes real tabletop Pen 'n Paper style role playing available in a thoroughly rendered 3-D environment for the very first time.

NWN still has a very active community. For a complete list of links and resources check out my dedicated Neverwinter Nights page. 

BUY NEVERWINTER NIGHTS RIGHT NOW! It's the best game value you will ever find.

Review: Cannon DC320 Camcorder

Utter fail. Discs don't initialize properly, can't be titled or finalized. "Playback Software" for PC isn't available in the download library.

If you're content to be able to playback your videos on the camera, and on the camera only, go for it. You can always buy an AV cable and preserve your memories on tape by VCR. But if you live in the 21st century you might want to find a camera that doesn't try to lock your files away in a proprietary format that your PC or DVD player can't read.

If you do buy this piece of garbage, or God help you, if you already have...

READ THE ENTIRE MANUAL BEFORE RECORDING ANYTHING THAT MATTERS TO YOU OR YOUR BABY VIDEOS WILL BE LOCKED UP IN THE STUPID CAMERA.

USE ONLY RECOMMENDED DISCS.

If it's too late, and you've already stored a years worth of baby pictures on discs that didn't initialize properly, well... it sucks to be you.

There's no excuse for storing data in this fashion. Data is a string of 1's and 0's. It SHOULD be recordable on any DVD-RW disc. But for some reason this isn't the case with this camera.

F. Do not buy.

Ink: Movie Review

A puff of air can change the world.

My sister has given me many wonderful things in her life. Of these things Hulu is not the greatest, but neither is this the least.

I'm not going to bore you with a detailed review of this movie beyond this...

Someone once said that fairy tales don't exist to teach children there are dragons, fairy tales exist to teach children that dragons can be slain. Ink is a fairy tale.

But that's all. Anything I say will only spoil the experience for you. It's free. You can watch it yourself. Do it or not as you choose, but life offers few easy joys. Take the opportunity to enjoy this one. This movie threatened to displace π as my favorite all time film. It stands head and shoulders above anything a major studio could or would create. Once again thoughtful writing and skillful film-making trumps a big budget.

I don't want to become an independent film snob, but one or two movies like this and the mainstream film studios can kiss my ass goodbye for good.

Take a couple hours, get a drink, sit back, click the full screen button and watch. It will be a better one hour and forty seven minutes than you ever payed for in the Cinema, and the popcorn's a LOT cheaper.

EDIT: Well, you missed your chance to see it for free, but Ink is still available for purchase at GoG.com.

BigPoint's "Dark Orbit" Review: My first try at one of the new "free" MMOs

If you don't want to pay, dont play.

Me and My Peanut

I really wanted to like this game. It's a good try. It even held my attention for about a week, but in the end it's just badly designed.

I'm not going to get into the difficulties I had signing up and the poorly designed and programmed BigPoint.com home site beyond saying, "don't bother trying". Just log in through SyFy.com's gaming center.

I will take a moment to say that they've recently "upgraded" the client. The game graphics are MUCH slicker and the client itself is much less prone to lag, but the "HUD" was designed by a baboon. It's not even a HUD. A hud is supposed to be transparent so I can see the information without obscuring my view of the road, right? I mean look at that mess! It's almost impossible to click on the screen without accidentally hitting a control.

Why do so many idiots get jobs redesigning perfectly good GUIs?

Anyway... Let's talk about game play.

Free players are not going to enjoy the game. If you want to have any fun at all you'll need to drop some bucks. You need to use real money to buy "Uridium" for good equipment or you're just cannon fodder for the PKers. All told for enough equipment for a good, survivable ship you'll need at least 150,000 uridium. In real money that's about $60.00 US.

It's theoretically possible to grind up enough uridium in-game to compete, but not practically (unless you have no life at all and are willing to be bored out of your wits for several months).

The game isn't really that interesting. You gather resources. Some appear as random pickups, but mostly you accumulate them by killing aliens and salvaging the materials from the wreckage. After 20 or so hours this gets a little dry.

The big problem you're going to run into are the PKers (Pkers, or Player Killers, are players who play the game mainly to kill other players). In most MMOs there are safe areas. Nearly all games allow newbies "haven" zones where they can learn the game basics and "grind" a few levels, and most allow for the simple reality that not everyone likes PVP (Player vs. Player). This game has no safe areas at all. It's very frustrating getting killed over and over and over. Be prepared to be PK'd 2 or 3 times a day. If that doesn't sound like fun... well... it's not. In all fairness the point of the game is to make money. Getting PK'd 2 or 3 times a day will either drive you away or get you to dig into your wallet. Frankly, the folks at BigPoint don't care which. The whole point of allowing free players into the game is to give easy kills to the premium players.

Cough up a hundred bucks, buy a goliath, fill it with the best drives, weapons, shields, and "boosters" and you may have some fun. Spend another hundred bucks and add a squadron or two of battle drones and you can run with the big dawgs. Lastly, be prepared to cough up 5 bucks every now and then when you run out of money. The problem, of course, is that the game isn't worth that much money.

NWN 1.69 is Out

Bioware has just released the last ever patch for Neverwinter Nights 1, and OH WHAT A PATCH! Ridable horses, amazing new tilesets, and outstanding new models. I especially like the new armor models... very western European.

The downside, of course, being that I now need to completely rebuild Rel Mord in the new system.

Sadly I must bid a fond (and hopefully temporary) adieu to the Community Creature Pack.

Picking the CCP creatures out has been a major headache, but it needed to be done anyway as the newer versions were not compatible with the version 4 I was using anyway. I will be re-adding it as soon as it's up to speed with 1.69.

I'll be running out my new mod for NWNCon4.

Alcohol Anonymous

The Event with Skunkeen last Saturday was a success, but a less than stellar one.

The module, Alcohol Anonymous, was a very clever one. The build was amateurish and entirely Dependant on DM participation, but the plot and NPCs were amusing and the whole game had a very survival-horror feel, which is... to say the least... right up my alley.

This event was intended for aspiring DMs. As PCs died (and oh how horribly they died) they were given DM passwords and we taught them tricks of the trade as the adventure progressed. After the adventure the survivors also logged on as DMs and we began a question and answer session on how to use the DM client.

Now as a rule I run Open events. No passwords or anything. I'm always happy to field new players, or shall I say, I USED TO BE happy to field new players.

One of our invited players was running X-Fire during the game, and while we were playing an X-Fire Griefer calling himself RagdollKnight piggybacked in.

I've been running events on Neverwinter Connections for about a year, and in all those games... say 20 or more... I've yet to run into a griefer.

So this guy starts wreaking all the havok that a DM can Wreak, and a DM can wreak a lott of havok. He basically ruined the question and answer session.

I wasn't running a dedicated server, so it forced a server reboot and password change to boot him off. Very frustrating.

What is is with Griefers? I simply do not understand the mindset that ruining other peoples experience is somehow intrinsically fun. It seems even more pitiful than it is aggravating. Is your life so empty? Are you so small and useless in RL that you can only assert yourself by being a bully in cyberspace? I shall ask my wife about it. She's a doctoral candidate working on her degree in Psychology.

Anyway... Many thanks to Skunkeen for the event. We'll do it again... but next time it will be a password protected application only event on a dedicated server.

Horror Update: Sweeney Todd

That's right... I said SWEENEY TODD. Truer to horror than the endless stream of prequels and sequels that Hollywood has been shoving down our throats for the past 5 years, Sweeney Todd is an elegant and terrifying return to what horror is supposed to be.

It's been so long since I've seen a truly GOOD horror movie that I had actually convinced myself that maybe Hostel 2 wasn't just a contrived, formulaic excuse to see some 2 seconds of inverted boobs. I was distressingly undisturbed by the image of a chick cutting off some jerks (ridiculously unrealistic latex) penis. I mean c'mon. What guy hasn't already lived through the same thing at least a half dozen times?

The feeling of relief I got when I watched Sweeney Todd is hard to describe. It feels like the end of a 5 year crap.

I saw Sweeny Todd in the 80's when it was on Broadway, so I was VERY skeptical when I saw it was being adapted to film.

I was wrong.

Tim Burton adhered elegantly to the original script, intent, and vision of what Sweeney Todd was meant to be. It was not a "re-imagining" or whatever the heck the Hollywood buzzword is these days for taking a classic and turning it into pop feces. They only changed a handful of lines, and only when it was appropriate to the change of medium. The changeover from stage to screen was done with astounding grace and skill.

The choice of stars, which had bile churning in my stomach as soon as I heard it, turned out to be extraordinary.

Let me explain... I LIKE Johnny Depp, but I still see 21 Jump Street any time he opens his mouth. The guy STILL looks like a kid, and the Benjamin Barker character is supposed to have just gotten out of prison after 14 years. Boyish good looks are just not gonna cut it. As for Helena Bonham Carter, she's hot. Every movie she's ever done has tried to ugly her up, and it never works. Mrs Lovette is NOT supposed to be hot! When I saw the stage version all those years ago the part of Mrs. Lovette was played (brilliantly) by ANGELA LANSBURY.

There's no way a pair of Hollywood Hotties were going to pull off Sweeney Todd.

Wrong again. I could go on for hours, and may yet when I have some more time... but the short version is...

What a fantastic freakin' movie!!! I mean nothing will ever touch the Broadway experience that, as a child, made me decide that I was going to dedicate my life to stage acting (yeah... well that's a different story). The stage version was much funnier. Stage happens from a distance which makes the whole serial killer thing a little less gruesome, but film is up-close and personal so it couldn't help but be a very different experience. Still... standing on it's own it's tons of stage blood n' latex fleshy fun!

Ummm... Don't bring a date, though, unless she's turned on by the sound of skulls being crushed on cobblestones.

The Witcher Burned at the Stake by Yahtzee

Well, I've decided not to buy "The Witcher", even if it is my beloved Aurora Engine. I won't get into all the people that have warned me off it. Yahtzee put it best...