Sunday, March 02, 2003

PC - Elder Scrolls III Morrowind review

Elder Scrolls 3 - Morrowind ( PC GAMER 2002 RPG of the Year)



Morrowind is a role playing game with vast environments in a 3d world that can ether first person or 3rd person. It looks like it takes place in the 14th century. I can tell why because the buildings are dated back to who knows when. It has the same group behind it that was on Elder Scrolls 2 in 1996.

Exploring

I have both Tribunal and Bloodmoon, so I have an extended version of the game. Your character comes equipped with a dagger in the beginning, and you go out exploring. What is unique about this game is when you steal something; you’ll be reported to the authorities immediately. Stealing is half the fun in this game because you can get away with it. Don’t think you can walk in with the same clothes as one of the guards and not get noticed. The other half is leveling up your character. The easiest way is to become an outlaw. Outlaws in this game are fine, but they don’t get along with people to well.

Weapons

There are 100s of weapons in this game. Some are downloadable in form of mods. The weapons look blocky though.

Graphics

This game isn’t state of the art, but you’ll need an 800 MHz machine to play decently. You’ll have to deal with some major slow downs though. The game has pretty backgrounds, unparallel to other PC RPGS like Diablo 2. There are visual packs on the Internet that’ll enhance backgrounds. This game was first meant to play on a 500 MHz machine, but that’ll just make the game run slowly. Everybody has 1 GHz of speed now-a-days. The sky is bitmapped and days come and go. You’ll see stars at night and white clouds in the day, and storm clouds both day and night. It needs at least a TNT 2 to play, but you’ll get a lot of lag, your pc will load new more areas slowly created a lot of lag during actual play. It wouldn’t be noticeable on a 1.5 GHz machine, Bethesda said.

On super computers, about 2.5 GHz, and a 256-MB Geforce 4, you’ll get some awesome graphical effects. The detail, already compressed, will look cinematic like it does on Xbox. The graphics still look really good with a 128 MB Geforce 4 on my PC. Who knows how this game will be affected on newer processors?

Faces

Faces are above average and there are many Morrowind mods that’ll change the faces and make them better. They won’t look simple after some of the mods update data files that control faces.

Atmosphere

Takes place in Renaissance period it seems like. There are super natural enemies in this game like skeletons and ghosts. But there are a lot of different races too. Races that hate each other are only apparent away from towns. But in towns, your race doesn’t mean a thing.

Drive Space

This game takes up less then a Gigabyte of hard drive space.

PC vs. XBOX

Microsoft Windows vs. Xbox. With a console having so much on board memory, the XBOX was an easy choice for Bethesda Softworks. The Xbox has particle shading that looks better then the PC game. But on high end PCs, there isn’t any difference.

Conclusion

Morrowind is a good game with plenty of quests. You can just about talk to anyone, and go on a new quest just like on Xbox. Xbox may be running smoothing, but the pc version can be modded. This game is great.

Review of Elder Scrolls III – Tibunal

Tibunal is suppose to be a good expansion, though, I won’t know until I get this far in the game. Review up soon.

Review of Elder Scolls III – Bloodmoon

Bloodmoon is the latest expansion that Benestha developed, probably the last. The expansion loads with Morrowind, and Morrowind installed with Tibunal. It has a lot to do with werewolves, and vampires. This is the first RPG since Vampires: The Masquerade that allows vampirism. Vampirism and WereWolfism are allowed outside Bloodmoon.

( Article posted on October 07, 2003 )

Never Winter Nights

March 21, 2003

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| GAME FEATURES |
A.) Very Stable, and very playable RPG. Latest patch is v1.29.

B.) 40 hours of adventuring.

C.) Battle system which improved over Baldur's Gate franchise and became a 3rd person prospective with a free rotating camera to boot.

D.) Dangerously addictive quests.

Never Winter Nights has been worked on for 5 years. One of the reasons that it's graphics has come outdated in the process. The game off cd is very buggy so I would advise getting patch update ver 1.20 off the Internet so you can run the game without it crashing. Bioware came up with Never Winter when they tried to create a real 3D version of Iceward Dale long ago, also made from Bioware. Except Neverwinter has an involving combat system. You have to constantly be aware of your characters statistics. I doubt that the Neverwinter Nights is trying to starve your character, the game is b focused on combat. This game is far beyond Diablo 2. In Diablo 2 : Lord of Destruction, you have 5 character classes including Sorcerer, Paladin, Barbarian, Amazon and Necromancer. However in this game, you can be Half Elf, Human, Half Orc, Elf, Dwarf or Half Dwarf and carry magic abilities. Which makes leveling low level characters an art in this game.

This game is ranked #1 for "Best Role Playing Game of 2002" by Gamespot and PC Magazine. Bioware shown me this how deep the story goes. The story is basically saving Neverwinter from the Plague. You can take several steps to level up in this game. Your character is saved to the game, so you can start your adventuring from the Academy through the city of Neverwinter, whether it be the Docks or Peninsula or Barracks, your character does a lot of quests for people. The game is definably rescuing people and knowing who your friends are. I know, from the first chapter, that being kind is how you get the rewards and being mean is just meaningless. I like to loot everything I get. I found some awesome armor by bashing locked chests. Try bashing doors inside towns and gain access to secret areas. Bioware has spent 5 years perfecting the battle system. The game has more in common with Dungeon Siege then Baldur's Gate II. This would be a plus for me because I was a Dungeon Siege fan most recently. Although that game was a favorite of mine for the past few months, I started playing this game instead, and will continue to play it for another few months. So far, I like the backgrounds in this title. They are really detailed. Don't let though's reviews tell you that they aren't, because they know they don't care as long as all graphics are in high resolution, which they are. I think people under-estimate how beautiful the game looks from a distance. We have running water, a lot of tiled stones and decent eye candy. Eye candy is special effects that comes with magic special effects. This game has the famous ice and fire rings appearing in battle. Found in all RPG games, first appearing in Final Fantasy, I think. This game looks a heck a lot better then Dink SmallWood! This game is bug free now with the latest patch Bioware handed out to the public. I give this game a perfect score of 5 for it's addictive gameplay.

Online Gameplay

First of all I like the online play because it's much less laggy then Dungeon Siege on a modem. Plus you get to talk to people. The game is free online and runs through the Gamespy network. You can do a lot of things in this game. Set and talk, drink beer and have sex. Really so, it's hilarious. People find the default female human character with long blue hair sexy. Anyone with the time should play online. I you have broadband, then the isn't affected unless you have someone using a modem within a 10 yard radius with in yours. Most people are either human barbarians for the fighter type. One skill that's worth having is the ability to weld your own armor together. You can sell it to someone and make money.

Cheats for NeverWinter Nights

Shame on you for clicking on this page, but nonetheless now that you're here in order to enable the cheats, you must first go to a file in your NWN folder named nwn.ini. Open it with notepad or any other text processor and add the line "Debug Mode=1" (without quotes). That the first part done, now when you're playing in the game you hit the ~ button (left of your 1 button at the top) and a > should appear near the top of your screen. Now your must type "DebugMode 1" (without quotes exactly like that) and press enter and you might see certain areas on the ground highlighted, they're just triggers and stuff. Now you follow the table below and REPLACE any # with the desired number.

Note:

· In order to turn debug mode off, type "DebugMode 0"

· > Pressing tab right after ~ will display a set of commands that can be used

· Note the effects with *s on them means that it has a chance of rendering your character invalid and illegal making it unable to be used when advancing to the next chapter or internet play

· The effects with + indicates that it will not render your character useless

· Sometimes after typing, a "enter target mode" will appear, just select the character your wish the effect to be placed on

Code - what you type before pressing enter

Effect - what happens

SetSTR #

*Changes your Strength to the #

SetCON #

*Changes your Constitution to the #

SetDEX #

*Changes your Dexterity to the #

SetINT #

*Changes your Intelligence to the #

SetWIS #

*Changes your Wisdom to the #

SetCHA #

*Changes your Charisma to the #

dm_givegold #

+gives gold

dm_god

+gives god mode status (invulnerablity)

dm_heal

+heals character

dm_givelevel #

+gives additional levels to character

dm_mylittlepony

makes your faster and gives you a horse head

dm_cowsfromhell

flying cows from hell

GiveXP #

+gives amount of experience points

GetLevel #

raises level by the indicated amount

SetAge #

changes the age of your character

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