Erathoniel's Musings

So a couple days ago I picked up a used copy of Icewind Dale (with original manual and quick-reference flier). My first thoughts: "What am I doing?". The transition to AD&D, even having played Baldur's Gate for hours, from Neverwinter Nights? Painful, at best. However, after some graphics tweaks (on my XP rig, I needed to set up Open GL rendering mode to not get a ton of black boxes around text that go down maybe a few inches (or ~600 pixels? It's been a while, and I don't really have a ruler in by my computer).

Anyways, I'm a huge fan of the graphics of Icewind Dale. The artwork is spectacular, which you don't get with a lot of new 3d games (though, I guess that is less and less now, but NWN doesn't begin to match IWD), and the attention to detail is stunning. With a horribly cheating solo wizard, the difficulty isn't so bad (though, he does have vanilla spell levels, so that 1 spell/8 hours does kinda mean he winds up hitting stuff an awful lot). The main concern I have with the game is that I won't be able to pay attention all the way through (when IWD2 was on Gametap, I started it up and got about 5 minutes in before leaving for a break).

However, it's an enjoyable experience, and 8 dollars for a game and a nice heavy manual? I'll take it.

Recently, I went on a major blast from the past. I started up Knights of the Old Republic. Unfortunately, I couldn't find all the original's disks, so I skipped straight to the second. Despite having a quirky unwinnable situation (I've bypassed it once using a save editor long ago, but got sidetracked) on Onderon, I have played the entire game before, so I feel I can still honestly review it.

I had never really heard of D&D until after playing KOTOR, so I never knew what it was like. In retrospect, KOTOR's pretty much Neverwinter Nights in Space. It's a good game (if plagued by glitches, save often), and delivers hours of satisfaction (or, if you cheat immensely and happen to be a full completionist, about 20 hours per playthrough, up to three or four playthroughs if you wanna experiment, though two will really show you the majority of the content). You can go dark or light. I always go light for free healing, or dark for lightning. Because who doesn't want to turn their fingers into lightning guns?

Its music is nothing over the top spectacular. It's pretty good, though, good enough that I made it about ten hours in before putting on the metal in the background (Plea for Purging, a Critique of Mind and Thought, and Thousand Foot Krutch, Phenomenon, if you must ask, depending on which mood I was in).

Graphics are decent, though I had a couple weird glitches (and it wanted to go windowed on me, though the renderer really works best in full screen), and they are immersive, but it's strictly [sixth?] generation, or at least not this one. They're decent, though, if a mite poor in some circumstances.

I'd give it a must play (4/5), especially considering I've seen it in a pack with Jedi Outcast and Empire at War, two other Star Wars games that are pretty darn good.