Thursday, October 16, 2008

Why do I do it?

Why do I feel the need to scare myself? I started playing FEAR again today, though I decided that since it's been so long since I've played, I should make a new profile and start a whole new game. So that's what I did, and I remembered why I stopped playing it - it scares me. That's not to say I don't enjoy it, it's just a little more "exciting" than the other FPS games I usually play (Max Payne, Half Life, etc). So I spent a good number of hours playing it today, and I'm almost to the part where I stopped playing if I remember right.

As of this past weekend I finished the elastic scattering problem I was given over the summer, which is a good thing. Also, the solution (at least the major steps) is now written up in Latex on my Linux partition, this way, if I ever need to know how to do it, I'll have it. Next week I'll be meeting with my advisor and get the next thing to do.

And finally, after a few years, I've finally beaten Neverwinter Nights 2, now I need to get the first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer. Read on for my review

I love RPGs, I really do. When the first Neverwinter Nights came out, however, I was a little iffy on it since I had heard that it was really geared for multiplayer games. So I waited. A few years later, I finally got a copy and played it, then played through the following 2 expansions. I really did enjoy them, they were quite entertaining.

Neverwinter Nights 2 (NWN2) continues this entertainment, and builds on it. It has the expected improvements, graphics and sound, but also improves the gameplay and the camera. Even with the graphics improvements, it doesn't seem "pretty" enough to warrant the high system specs and poor performance, though this isn't too big of an issue as long as you have the minimum specs.

One thing that I can say is good even though I didn't care for it too much is the fact that you now control a party instead of just you and a henchman. It's usually you and 3 others (once you get that many companions) in the party, and while it does allow the devs to throw more enemies at you simultaneously, I feel that it would have been better with just you in the party, possibly a henchman. Then again, this is how I usually played the game anyways, leave my party somewhere and sneak off to assassinate anybody I came across.

The storyline is compelling, and even though it took me a while to get through it, it does hang on to you for the most part. The only reason it took me so long was that I put it on hiatus for a bit after coming to an encounter that I tried a couple times, failing each time. I think there was probably some other game that got in the way as well. And despite my feelings about the party, I feel they did a good job with the characters in the game, they seem relatively well thought out and their personalities are fun, even if they left out most of the romances they had planned.

The music is great, sound effects so so, and voice acting kinda varies, at some points it seemed good, but at others it sounded like they were rushing and just wanted to get it done (I'm looking at you end of game summary).

The effects were nice in general, as expected, and there were some spells that looked quite amazing. Naturally, since my computer isn't the greatest, these spells would usually slow the game down a bit, but this generally let me watch the pretties for longer, so I can forgive them.

All in all, NWN2 is a very fun game, highly recommended, and now I have to go out and get the expansion.

2 comments:

  1. Not sure if you've played this yet, but I recommend Bioshock as a good FPS for killing some time. It's not creepy like Halflife, but it's good a really interesting back story and environment.

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  2. Yeah, I've been kinda wanting to play it for a while. Most of the time I think about it, think my computer can't handle it, realize that it probably can, then promptly forget about the whole mess.

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