Some might wonder why I'm not posting that much anymore. Well, probably no-one does but just in any case someone remembers me I had been quite an active poster in the past few years.

I never would've expected it but... The truth is, gaming has just been getting slowly but steadily boring for me. There's rarely any innovation and I just don't seem to be that interested in new games anymore. It's just more of the same old stuff we've seen before. Sure, there's innovation out there but it seems to be focused mainly on freeware and casual (real casual - not LOL CASUALZ) games. Gaming just isn't going in the direction I'd like it to go. The PC I have now might just be the last one I will buy for dedicated gaming usage. Or it will be for long, until we get virtual reality or something. This does not mean I'm saying PC gaming is dying, PC gaming and gaming in general is going to get bigger and bigger - but it's just expanding in the wrong direction.

This is not a goodbye post or anything, I'll probably still be around sometimes. I'm going focus more on my studies and personal life from now on. Sure, I'll game occasionally but I doubt I'll ever be as hardcore as I once was.

Heh, looking back at all this, I sure have a friggin' huge collection - over 600 PC games. I wonder what I'll do with them. I don't have the heart to give them away since games have been a large part of my life and I have nothing but fond memories of them. They do take tons of space though. Those damn lovable big cardboard boxes! :oops: We'll see.

To all of you who still take interest in gaming, good for you! Enjoy it as long as possible! :)

C:

cd games

del *.*

cd..

rd games

Goodnight sweet prince ;_;

...

Ps. I will make my oath as a gamer, I *WILL* someday finish Planescape: Torment. This I promise you. And maybe the bit above was slighty overexaggerated, I wanted something epic so there you go.

Ok, I wanna talk about three things. First off, the new X-Com game. I honestly don't see the point in it. If they want to make a generic console shooter with aliens, why won't they just make a new franchise? Why drag X-Com into it? Nobody who knows of X-Com wants a sequel like this. What the hell. I guess you could say the same about Fallout 3 though.

Second, The Whispered World. The game looks absolutely gorgeous. If you don't know about it, just check out some of the screenshots or trailers. I LOVE 2D handdrawn graphics, and I still believe adventure games should be done this way unless the 3D actually benefits the gameplay (and in the case of adventure games, it rarely does.) I've been following this game for... I dunno, a year or so? I had played the German demo but with my skills in German being near zero I didn't manage to progress very far. The English demo is out now, and I suggest that you guys check it out if you haven't already done so. The game is gonna be released next week I think, and I don't know about you but it's a must buy for me.

Third, King's Bounty Armored Princess. As some of you might know, one of my favorite genres is turn-based strategy/tactics. Personally, I've never been much into RTS's for some reason. I find them to be kinda boring and not require as much strategy (I'm gonna get hate messages for this aren't I?) I dunno, I just don't find them that fun to play. Anyway, as far as TBS goes, King's Bounty: The Legend got me seriously addicted when it was released. If you check out my Xfire hours you'll see that it's my most played game with over 70 hours. So, I finally saw a copy of Armored Princess in a local store and I had to get it. It was 30€ instead of the regular 50€ too! Kudos to 1C, since it probably will offer more content than 90% of the 50€ games. Addiction awaits! :)

Finally, my copy of STALKER Call of Pripyat has arrived! Here's a pic;

Hmm, Special Edition huh? Click here for a pic I took of what's inside the box < - CLICK THIS NOW

Wow. And to my knowledge this is the standard edition of the game, since I couldn't find any other edition elsewhere, aside from the German and Russian versions. And considering how I only paid 18£ for this including shipping, I'd say it's probably the best deal in a long while. Now to hope that the, you know, actual game is good - but I've heard only good things so far. I'll probably play it tomorrow since it's already 11PM here, but eh - should be fun.

Edit: Just tried out the game for a while and I'm not usually a graphics whore but MAN this looks terrible. It looks worse than SoC. Heck, it looks worse than the first Far Cry. What am I missing here? I have everything maxed out. Is this game really so dependant on DX10/DX11? I don't expect amazing graphics but I expect graphics that are at least on par with the first game in the series. What the hell. Also the gun sounds are really muffled for some reason. *sigh* Ah well, at least the gameplay looks decent so far.

Ah, after Christmas. The wonderful time of the year when game stores lower their game prices and put some not-so-popular games in bargain bins. So, I did my usual bargain bin hunt - with successful results I must say!

In case you can't see the picture for some reason, I got 5 games for 30€ total. It was a pretty sweet deal, considering how 1 game is normally 50€. :D

Let's see the games shall we?

First is Elven Legacy. I've been wanting to buy this game for a while but something else has always been released and I ended up spending my money elsewhere. It says 14,95 on the cover, but it actually only cost 4,95.

Second is The Last Remnant. This will be interesting since I've pretty much never played a J-RPG before.

Third is Ceville. I'm a relatively big fan of adventure games so I will probably have fun with this one. I find it odd though that this game has fallen in price so quickly, considering how it was only released a couple of months ago.

Well this game is probably familiar to everyone. Better late than never eh? ;)

And lastly, Sin Episodes: Emergency Episode 1... or something like that. I liked the original Sin game. Looking at the back of the box, it says that this also includes the original game. I wonder if it also includes the expansion, since I've never played it.

--

Did I mention that I love bargain bins? :)

Yesterday DA:O was released over here in Europe. While I would've preferred the Collector's Edition, they were completely sold out. Oh well. I got the regular edition which is more than enough.

I played the game for 17 hours straight, taking only a couple of food and bathroom breaks. The game is AMAZING, easily the best game released this year. I don't remember the last time when I did this kind of gaming marathon. It was probably back when Thief 3 was released. I already feel like I've got my money's worth, since I know I'll be replaying it several times.

Also on a related note, Xfire is crap. It doesn't download the 'game updates' since there's apparently something wrong with my router settings, even though I've port forwarded 25777 and allowed UPnP. I have no idea what I could do, I mean it's not a big deal but it means that Xfire won't log how long I've played Dragon Age, until they release a new major update. *sigh* If anyone knows anything that could fix this, it would be appreciated.

Anyway, I'm off to play some more Dragon Age. If you haven't got this game already then what the hell are you doing, go buy it now!

So yeah, it arrived today along with a new motherboard and RAM. Me and my brother spent hours trying to install it (had to replace the motherboard, switch the CPU, Windows had to reinstall all drivers etc.) and everything seems to be fine so far. Hopefully I won't run into problems anymore, at least for a while :D

Here's a picture of it:

Geforce GTX 260. Seems to be a good card, and from my tests I can run games with considerably better settings than before with higher framerates. Yay!

Also I can finally play Risen (also pictured), which I bought over a week ago. So... seeya, I'm off to do some gaming!

Farewell, 8800 GTS 640 MB, you have served me well.

Sigh. I probably won't be posting here for a while, until I get a new graphics card so eh.

It's not like anyone is ever gonna read this, but whatever. I decided that only one game from one series can be on the list.

1.Thief: The Dark Project (1998, Looking Glass Studios)
2.Deus Ex (2000, Ion Storm)
3.UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka X-Com: Ufo Defense) (1994, Microprose)
4.Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991, Lucasfilm Games)
5.Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (2004, Troika Games)
6.The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002, Bethesda Softworks)
7.STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007, GSC Game World)
8.Doom (1993, iD Software)
9.System Shock 2 (1999, Irrational Games)
10.Sid Meier's Civilization (1991, Microprose)
11.Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic (2003, BioWare)
11.Quake (1996, iD Software)
13.Max Payne (2001, Remedy Entertainment)
14.Wizardry 8 (2001, Sir-tech Software)
15.Half-Life (1998, Valve)