View From the Bushes

I was planning on posting something to the blog yesterday, but then I thought, "Hey, it's Labor Day, and the last thing anybody does on Labor day is actually labor." Plus I thought of holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Was I going to post an entry to my blog on those days? The answer would be "no," unless I want to be accused of even more severe familial neglect by my long-suffering wife. Plus, I had already set a precendent for skipping holidays back on the 4th of July. And then of course there was the demon of game playing... I may have become hooked on Neverwinter Nights...

When I first started DireKobold, I swore off all game playing. My theory was that I spent enough time playing computer games and that if I just devoted that time to DireKobold there would be plenty of time. So the idea was I would just trade one for the other, but in any case I was sure that I couldn't do both. As it turns out, a certain amount of recreation would seem to be necessary to my continued sanity (or maybe I'm already insane and thinking that I need to recreate is just one symptom of that insanity). Since then, I have played a couple of games here and there, but since I had sworn off games, it was always furtive and not for very long. Which is one reason, even though I had been looking forward to Neverwinter Nights, I didn't pick it up when it came out. Then I heard some less-than-stellar review of it and my mind was made up.

As it turns out, NWN has one big feature which makes it very attractive to me. In many CRPG's, I get bogged down by inventory management. I mean, you've got six characters, you're picking up a ton of stuff -- most of it enormously useful and you're trying to make sure that it all gets used, that you remember you even have the item, plus then you run out of space and you've got to decide which equipment to leave and which equipment to keep and sell. In NWN you only have one character; as such the choice of what sort of things to keep is much easier, plus they don't throw nearly as much crap at you. Overall, I think it could be a more enjoyable experience. In some cases it's similar to Planescape: Torment. Mostly because all the items were very much restricted as to which character could use them so if you didn't have a particular character it was an easy call. In any case, anyone who doesn't play many computer games will probably find this a mind-numbingly boring entry (but then again aren't they all?) So if you made it this far here's a cool link that demonstrates the miracles you can perform with photoshop.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross