Updated: 5/3/02; 2:11:23 PM.
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Saturday, April 6, 2002


Dungeon Siege first impressions
  • It plays very nicely at 800x600x32; however, the interface is a little too small at 1024x768x32.
  • There are a lot of controls for configuring how much your party acts on its own, versus controlled by you. Even though you can pause and issue orders, there's frankly no need to; instead, you set up a couple of different presets (one more offensive, one more defensive, etc.), and just react to the battle in real time.
  • The game design gets you right into the action; you don't spent forty-five minutes reading the character design portion of the manual first.
  • Your health regenerates automatically; means beginning of the game is dominated by managing gold and potions (which is nice since usually that management disappears anyway once you get powerful enough, so it's just irritating and breaks the flow). (In an interesting twist, as your characters start to get reasonably powerful, the potions finally become useful; that's because the regeneration rate stays the same but your mana/health pools are much larger. Thus, you're less likely to want to wait around for regeneration after a big battle.)
  • You get some useful spells right off the bat; in fact, fifteen hours later, I'm still using both of them :). Not sure if that's good or bad.
  • The "megamap" is totally useful and well integrated, you can issue orders from it and zoom in or out to a wide degree. I wish you could zoom out all the way to see everywhere you've been, though. I also wish you could scroll independently of your party.
  • The skill system is also nice. character generation == design the look of your character. there are four skill areas (melee, ranged, and two kinds of magic), and you basically level up in each depending on how much you use each. nice!
  • The inventory auto-arrange is not quite as smart as i might have hoped...
  • It's a little hard to tell on the megamap where you haven't explored, when you're in a dungeon filled with square rooms -- wish there was a little bit of the unexplored rooms indicated. That being said, I have found at least a few "secret passages" in maps that intentionally don't show up on the map (too dark) until you get into them and light some torches. Pretty cool!
  • The mouse control of camera is the best yet for this kind of game.
  • I finally realized that you can drop spells in a spellbook; i had thought the individual spells i had been gathering were all one-shots, but it turns out only some are...
  • It'd be nice to be able to assess the quality of an item before picking it up (my inventory is pretty full, but i haven't hit a store yet, so i have no idea of the relative gold value of items). (This becomes less important once you get a full party, and a pack mule. Also, there's a spell that turns items into gold, so you don't have to haul it all back to the trading post -- cool!)
  • If you have a party, and one of your characters loses all HP, it turns out they're only unconscious. They'll wake back up (as long as your other characters don't also lose all HP). This turned out to be important shortly after I got my second character, since i accidentally hit "quick save" instead of "quick load" right after my main character lost all HP. for a moment, i was convinced i'd just killed off my main character -- and then saved it. agh!

Overall -- this game rocks! Woowoo!  12:42:38 PM    



Here's a vCard exporter for Microsoft Outlook. Useful if you want to transfer your Outlook contacts to your iPod (if, like me, you were dumb enough to buy a Pocket PC).

Outlook really makes it difficult to export this data; the built in exporter will only export vCards one... contact... at... a... time. The "tab-delimited" export (one of the only ways you can export in bulk) is useless, because it makes no attempt to handle any carriage returns you may have put in the notes field of your contact. I was unable to find anything capable of turning the tab-delimited file into vCards (although I was almost driven to writing my own Perl script to handle the task).  12:45:05 AM    



 
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© Copyright 2002 Eric Tilton.
Last update: 5/3/02; 2:11:23 PM.