Games:
World of Warcraft (PC)
Role playing games, eh? Trying to subsume your entire personality beneath the visage of a character with apostrophes in their name? Trying to express yourself with three dialogue options? Patrick Stewart's voice? Spaceships and horses and magic crystals? They're mental.
Well, in the slightly-distant past Daniel Ness gave you some pointers for getting out of them alive and for not going mental. He got as far as Tip #4. He's picking up right where he left off:
Tip # 5 - Don’t play A Dance With Rogues
This is a difficult and personal one for me, I’ll admit it. A Dance With Rogues is a notorious fan-created module for the original Neverwinter Nights in which you play a princess who’s torn from her pampered lifestyle to work as a thief and assassin in the dirty city streets.
It also features horrible sex.
The problem with ADWR is that it’s a great mod. It’s got a good story, memorable characters, and it has the kind of diverse, open-ended intensely absorbing role-playing that would be lauded to the rafters if it had appeared in any other RPG.
It also has your character getting raped by a bull mastiff. It’s a bit wrong.
ADWR is a ‘rapey’ game. It also features prostitution, nude modeling, graphic gay/straight/lesbian/animal/God-knows-what sex, torrid erotic prose and a variety of items of lingerie for you to dress your pretty princess up in.
It’s terrible, and yet it’s brilliant. This is made evident at the start of the game when you need to disguise yourself as a street urchin by rubbing soot on your face and wearing filthy rags, but can only get the rags by giving a diseased tramp a blow-job... which you do by sticking his johnson between your lips and passing your Constitution Saving throw.
It’s insane that a game that contains such foetid subject matter can be this good. And when you try to justify being stuck in wooden stocks while a doggy mounts you by raving about the amazing stealth mechanics you become just as mad as it is.
Tip # 6 - Let someone else do your modding for you
If, like me, you have an appreciation for old school PC RPGs, you might be dismayed to find that a number of old favourites no longer run on modern hardware. Fear not! There are legions of fans out there who’ve slaved tirelessly to bring you new and improved versions of the classics that will run on modern PCs at modern resolutions. There are fan-created patches that fix bugs, restore lost content and expand your gaming experience beyond the original title’s horizons - there are even custom launchers that’ll install every mod and patch you need at the click of a button. Whether you want to revisit Morrowind or play through the entire Baldur’s Gate saga, there’s a mod out there to help you do it in style.
So, why would you want to go to the hassle of modding the game yourself? I know: you’re one of those ‘hands-on’ people, one of those inveterate tinkers who likes to fiddle with code and spend half your waking life messing with settings in the Windows registry. You think you’re au fait with this kind of thing. You think you’re smart.
Well then, smart guy, I dare you to take on BiG World. BiG World is a mega-mod for both Baldur’s Gate games and their expansion packs. It fuses them all into a single experience and then adds a wealth of custom content, widescreen mods, bug fixes, new races, new areas and adventures. It overhauls the entire game and makes it playable in 2011. It does it all automatically. Which is just as well, because downloading and installing each of the hundreds of files by hand would surely wreck your mental capabilities for the foreseeable future.
But you’re a smart guy, right? So go ahead, do it all by yourself. Go on. I dare you.
Tip #7 - If you’ve been killed three times by the same person, give up
Being killed once in World of Warcraft, well, that’s part of the game.
Being killed again is annoying. So, if you go back to your body soon after being killed, you’re offering your opponent an opportunity he or she is likely to take advantage of. We all make mistakes some times.
If you’re killed a third time then calmly exit the server. A third kill means your opponent knows you’re vulnerable, knows you’re persistent, and knows you’re an easy target. A third kill means there will be a fourth kill, and a fifth - that so long as you return to your body there will always be another kill. By now your opponent has your scent and will stop at nothing to ruin your game.
Well, in the slightly-distant past Daniel Ness gave you some pointers for getting out of them alive and for not going mental. He got as far as Tip #4. He's picking up right where he left off:
This is a difficult and personal one for me, I’ll admit it. A Dance With Rogues is a notorious fan-created module for the original Neverwinter Nights in which you play a princess who’s torn from her pampered lifestyle to work as a thief and assassin in the dirty city streets.
It also features horrible sex.
The problem with ADWR is that it’s a great mod. It’s got a good story, memorable characters, and it has the kind of diverse, open-ended intensely absorbing role-playing that would be lauded to the rafters if it had appeared in any other RPG.
It also has your character getting raped by a bull mastiff. It’s a bit wrong.
It’s terrible, and yet it’s brilliant. This is made evident at the start of the game when you need to disguise yourself as a street urchin by rubbing soot on your face and wearing filthy rags, but can only get the rags by giving a diseased tramp a blow-job... which you do by sticking his johnson between your lips and passing your Constitution Saving throw.
It’s insane that a game that contains such foetid subject matter can be this good. And when you try to justify being stuck in wooden stocks while a doggy mounts you by raving about the amazing stealth mechanics you become just as mad as it is.
If, like me, you have an appreciation for old school PC RPGs, you might be dismayed to find that a number of old favourites no longer run on modern hardware. Fear not! There are legions of fans out there who’ve slaved tirelessly to bring you new and improved versions of the classics that will run on modern PCs at modern resolutions. There are fan-created patches that fix bugs, restore lost content and expand your gaming experience beyond the original title’s horizons - there are even custom launchers that’ll install every mod and patch you need at the click of a button. Whether you want to revisit Morrowind or play through the entire Baldur’s Gate saga, there’s a mod out there to help you do it in style.
So, why would you want to go to the hassle of modding the game yourself? I know: you’re one of those ‘hands-on’ people, one of those inveterate tinkers who likes to fiddle with code and spend half your waking life messing with settings in the Windows registry. You think you’re au fait with this kind of thing. You think you’re smart.
But you’re a smart guy, right? So go ahead, do it all by yourself. Go on. I dare you.
Tip #7 - If you’ve been killed three times by the same person, give up
Being killed once in World of Warcraft, well, that’s part of the game.
Being killed again is annoying. So, if you go back to your body soon after being killed, you’re offering your opponent an opportunity he or she is likely to take advantage of. We all make mistakes some times.
WoW Christmas Specials 2007
Games:
World of Warcraft (PC)