Back again, maybe more?

So its been awhile....
Basically, I had stopped updating cause CS season was over for me, and I was annoyed that we didn't make im. But enough about that.

I have since gotten Oblivion working about 90% (best yet) and it runs mods smoothly. Quite a bit of fun, but just as I started to get into it, my friend started playing Baldur's Gate II again. And he just HAD to tell me about it. Its not long after some one mentions BGII that I get the urge to play it again.
See, when I first played it, I spent most of a week at the beach on a laptop eating sour cream and onion pringles and drinking mountain dew while I pounded through the game. In retrospect, I was a poor RPG player, and I really had no feel for fully understanding what was going on and appreciating it. To compound matters, I had played until the final part of the final battle with the final boss of the expansion to the game, and was completely and utterly stuck. Now, with BGII urges stirring in me once again, I would have gone and dug up those saves (which I have kept for YEARS, across 2-3 computers!) but I lost my HD over spring break, and that entire part of my life is gone.

So here I am, pushing aside Oblivion (which finally works), ignoring CSS, playing a little Starcraft and Dystopia, but mainly I'm back to Baldur's Gate.

It really is one of the best, if not THE best game I have ever played. Nothing like it. You want character interaction- I've seen my party erupt into sides and actually fight after issues got bad enough. You want combat- AD&D epic, by the rules. Now graphics, its years old, I give it that.
But anyway, I now have a thief I am running through named Edofix Gen. (damn I love that name)

As for other games, I actually started playing starcraft again about a month ago at the urgings of my old team. We hang out and SC these days. Turns out I blow. Enormously. Terran, which is the race I study to play well, is even worse than my Protoss. But still, great game. Which made me all the more excited when SC2 was announced, not that I hadn't called that weeks ago. If you haven't read up on it, go do so, and watch the 22min gameplay video, its really worth it. Over here.

Anyway, I hope to keep putting updates on here in some fashion resembling regularity.

Catching up...

So I haven't been updating.
Just too much to be doing these days.
Here is the quick version:
I found out how to make Oblivion stable, so I have started playing it again (post on it later)
Vista is... not happy with games like DMC3, so those have kinda been put to the side.
I am playing CounterStrike Source CAL-o Season 7. This will be taking large amounts of my time as I am the weakest member of the team (free money watches | f$w) by far. Should be a blast though. To help with that I have bought my first monthly cost gaming related thing. ESEA. $6 a month for access to their CS servers, and worth every penny.

Another high point was the updates to PCSX2 (a PS2 emu) It seems it can now run commercial FMVs with no trouble, sadly, framerates are still unacceptable on most games for actual play. MAJOR advances though, they deserve praise for this release.

PS: Go watch ALL videos of Crysis you can find, looks to be a real winner for DX10.

Almost forgot, GS2 is nearing an end... gotta love power leveling.

Saturday, December 9th

Well, I again (rather foolishly) tried to play Oblivion...
For whatever reason (looking at you, Vista drivers) the screen will regularly stop rendering. I can still see HUD, I can still move and do stuff, I can still see inventory. But I can't see the world or my character. I hope this is some simple DirectX issue or a NVIDIA driver issue... but we will see.
I also a tried to play X3 again. Good game, but incredibly complex and slow. It works, but even though they are on version 2.0.02 (2.0?? dear god thats a lot of patches) the storyline mode is completely broken. I will try to play it on a non-story mode at some point... when I have 10 hours to spare making trade runs.

Wednesday, December 7th

I finally played some more of Oblivion. I got in about an hour, and had some great dungeon delving, but also discovered an interesting bug between Vista and Oblivion. After about 45 min, the screen goes black and refuses to render the world anymore. One can still see their inventory and such, but nothing else. Upon quitting I noticed that an error message had come up, saying it was out of video memory.... Really puts a cramp on marathon sessions :P

Oh, and I spent 30min trying to get another spirit ring in GS2.... the forging system is REALLY aggravating.

Tuesday, December 5th

So I forgot to post for a few days... mainly because I didn't actually play anything besides a few rounds of a WC3 TD. (tough one too...)

Today however, I gave in and installed Oblivion on my Vista install. And then proceeded to take more than an hour getting mods. The last time I tried to play Oblivion, I spent 3-4x as much time on GETTING MODS as playing the game. This game is so heavily improved by mods, that its actually BAD, simply because you spend too much time imagining the game, and too little playing.
To be fair, I did play some. My current set (I'll list next time I play) looks great, and plays great. As usual with Vista, some graphical problems (though not unplayebly bad)

GS2 includes one feature (that many RPGs do) that annoys me greatly. Random item forging. You give some guy an ore, and he forges one of a few random items out of it. Why is this annoying? Because I have to spend 30 minutes loading my save game before I give him the ore, and repeatedly forging it until I get the item I want. Seriously, if the item is not dictated by earlier events, just let the player choose, and save time. Otherwise they 'break' the system, and get bored doing it.