Diversions

Been playing other games again, lately.

Ran through Hordes of the Underdark again. Even after a dozen odd playthroughs I'm still amazed by how random and unreliable the story's back-end scripting is. Went to all the trouble of turning Aribeth evil, and she got tagged as the sleeping planetar's true love? Lovely wasted efforts there on my part. Still can't get it to reliably let Deekin into act three with me. It happened once, so I know it's possible... it's just figuring out how. One of these days I swear I'm going to tear those nwm files open and just read through the scripts myself.

Don't mention it much, but I was actually a modder for NWN back in "the day". Got fairly handy with its scripting engine, and was well into my own module consisting of a decently in-depth story with a dozen or so companions, a romance quest, and other such niceties.

(Are we seeing the recurring themes here? Big mod, hot wemmenz to help you out along the way, great ideas... abandoned because of boredom...)


Also picked up STALKER: Call of Pripyat a couple weeks ago. Managed to play for three, maybe four hours. It's so godawfully boring it isn't even funny. No character development, no companions. Just run and shoot and loot and run some more and OH GOD WHAT'S THAT IN THE DARKNESS?!

How this game series ever got to be so popular is beyond me. It's outdoor DOOM with bad Russian accents and mutants instead of demons.

I had brief inclinations towards modding myself in a fireteam... but the game not only has no women at all that I saw, but has no construction set in a form that someone used to dealing with the Gamebryo engine would recognize.


Bloodlines is still hanging around my hard drive. My last character was a Tremere, and I got bored with the game around Chinatown and effectively abandoned it. The new stuff added by the Clan Mod gets frustrating. Some bad scripting, and ridiculously high requirements for persuasion. Plus, whoever they got to voice the "new" lines for the Voermann sisters was terrible.


The real surprise has been Recettear, which I've linked before. It's not only so cute I'm pretty sure it could cause diabetes, but is an interesting look at economics on a small scale. After reading a fair bit of forum and imageboard traffic surrounding the game, I no longer wonder why the world economy is such pisspoor shape. I found it simple enough to deal with customers; save that I was undercutting myself by about ten percent according to the game makers.

'Course, that's because I actually have some training. Part of gunsmithing school was running a retail business; and I applied the margins we were taught to expect there to the game. The fantasy world customers seemed happy enough; and I made my loan payment on time.

While I haven't done it yet because of a stolen bank card number SNAFU, I do intend to eventually lay down the cash on this game.


Oblivion's also coming around, again. Was chatting with everyone's favorite little fairy earlier; going back and forth about our various favorite mods. Damn it all, she got me interested again, too. Oh, well; at least my disc drive still works so I don't have to do anything in the legally-gray area to play it (he says whilst whistling innocently...). May end up tinkering in the CS again; would still love to see that house on Lake Rumaro go up, someday.


But of course, this all isn't in exclusion to GECKing. With the basic structure of the Penthouse level done, I've been thinking on the tower - trying to decide how best to get those windows working worth a damn. I'd hate to have to board them up.

I'm also fully aware that I'm still slacking and not releasing the final version of the RR Companions Vault, or building up a plugin for my companions pack to use the Pip-Boy plugins I wrote up awhile back. Amongst the other things I'd like to do at some point.

I tell ya Kiddies, battling apathy sucks.