Eh?

I play herbivores, and will stay around long enough to accumulate all the DNA points I desire in the Creature stage.  Cell phase pushes you through, I'll agree with that, but really pointless to stay any longer than you have to.

Space, when I first played the game, was quite annoying.  I downloaded a mod to slow down events, and it made it considerably more tolerable.  But then the patch rendered it unnecessary anyways, as they slowed events down for Easy and Normal difficulties - Hard can still be hectic from what I hear though.

I agree that its kind of annoying that Creature attributes don't carry over from Creature stage into Tribal and Civilization.  But, I've noticed with some of the cooler creators on my buddy list, that they'll generally strip down their "final" version of the Creature from Creature stage in order to more highly decorate them in Tribal, Civ and Space stages, making for some very very interesting results.  I'll be trying that myself in the future, I think.

Obviously I accept your opinion, you didn't like it, and that's fine.  Can't convince people to enjoy things they do not.

I, however, am enjoying it and simply am looking for folks to add to my Buddy list so I can minimize the amount of default/Maxis creations I encounter.

I don't keep much abreast of hype myself, and generally go in with low expectations to movies and games, and find that I'm more often than not, pleasantly surprised.  Reality can never be as good as expectations, so why set them high, ya know?

I heard some of ya'll have been playing Spore lately.  Post in-game names, so we can add each other to our Buddy lists for new fodder to eat... I mean, befriend.

Spore name: LastWordz

Tip: Find interesting creators in the Featured Downloads and/or Popular Creations via the spore.com pages and add them to your buddy list.  As soon as I did this, plus added some interesting Sporecasts, the amount of cute Maxis stuff has diminished greatly - and now my universe is populated with very nice looking things.

I got MotB a couple weeks ago.  All-in-all a pretty solid RPG.

There's some major performance improvements that have been added to NWN2 now, things run considerably "smoother." - at least in single-player.  When playing the campaign at a buddy's on his LAN, there were still the typical multiplayer glitches, such as rubber-banding and the like.  I'm sure hosted PWs have these issues even heavier than we were experiencing with a 2-person LAN game through the MotB campaign.  So, in other words, not alot of MP love at this point.

I think my only real complaint regarding the game/story-line is that although it is an "epic" level campaign, it doesn't really feel as such.  There's many points where it takes a fair amount of suspension of disbelief in order to swallow (for example, so-called mage "students" who are casting high level spells? why in the world are they even in school then, they are, by all rights, "experts" if they are casting at such a level.  Another example: scaled up "normal" monsters are hard to swallow as well - by all rights these should be unique beings, and not just fodder).  I'm getting the impression that the story-line was originally written for a lower level range, maybe 8-20th level or so, and was adapted/converted to become an epic 18-30 campaign without any major element changes aside from a "scaling up" of things.  I also get the impression it was originally intended to be a stand-alone campaign, and not connected with the first.

That said, it is a solid story.  Area design is much better looking than in the OC and there's a fair amount of moral-choices that do have major effects on the rest of the game/story, depending on how you answer or react to various situations.  The overall mood is much darker, and the NPCs are much more "serious" - and most of them are pretty well written.  Depending on class, alignment, and skills chosen, there's a fair amount of dialogue points where these things come into play.  In fact, I find if you neglect some of the social skills you simply just cannot access certain bits of story or information, which might make elements of the game/story very confusing.

There's 4 different endings I believe, and your ability to access them depend on a number of factors that happen throughout the game - and not just end-game decisions.

I've played the campaign through once as a Favored Soul/Paladin (the good route), and I'm replaying right now with an evil Necromancer.  Very different experiences to be had between them.  Almost feels like a different story at some points.  Incidently, playing "a real bastard evil" has some fairly heavy consequences to the gameplay at some points - and being a goodie-goodie locks out certain things/possibilities as well.

So, all in all, its a very good expansion pack - well worth the $30 in my opinion.

On that note, there's going to be a digital download module from Ossian Studios (the same guys who made Darkness Over Daggerford which was intended to be a NWN Premium Module, but it was pulled from that process and released to NWN Vault as a free download) available in the near future.  Not sure of cost yet, but should be about $10 - $15 to download.  Not sure on date either, but within the next month or so it should be available.  Its boasting about 10 - 15 hours of gameplay through a fairly "open" story-line.  Might be an interesting purchase.

Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Animated)- scheduled for release in theaters sometime in 2007 - probably in the Fall?

Voice actors for the movie include: Lucy Lawless (Goldmoon), Michael Rosenbaum (Tanis Half-Elven), Kiefer Sutherland (Raistlin Majere), among others.  

Unfortunately, details regarding the movie and its production are quite lacking.  There's a few little tidbits here and there that can be found on the web that indicate that the movie is moving forward (there was a recent interview with Lucy Lawless where she discussed her experience in doing the voice of Goldmoon) - but other than that, details and visuals are very scarce.

Could be great - could be really bad.  Guess we'll know more when they start the media blitz - probably next Summer.

I personally found it to be one of the best cRPG's I've played in years.  I'd actually place it within my top 10 list of cRPGs.  But then again, I loved KoToR 1 & 2 (yes, I even liked 2's story and ending!) as well - and this is much like them.

I loved the story, I love the look of things, and I love the UI.

It runs beautifully on my computer (except for the swamp areas, they run pretty crappy) - and I'm able to have most of the eye-candy turned on, and stylisticly I enjoy it.

Does it have bugs?  Yes.  Does it have bugs that I find gameplay breaking? No.  Was NWN even buggier when it first came out? Gods yes!

But hey - whatever.

Played and completed all of them, except SoU.  At the time, my computer just couldn't handle some of the special effects going on and I found it to be a frustrating experience - so never did complete that one.

Did the NWN OC and HoU several times though.  Several times both singleplayer and multiplayer with the OC.

I tend to enjoy a good singleplayer and small LAN-style game, so I've tried (and completed) numerous modules over the years as well - by myself and with friends.

Doesn't work on interior tiles, but you can select and delete them.  Also you can copy over blank spots too for erasing.

If you didn't see them, there's a documents folder that has details on alot of commonly asked questions people have.  Make sure to read them.

There's also a number of tutorials out on the Vault that are worth looking at.  I've got a collection of tutorials and stuff already at another forum where I'm working on a project with some friends - if there's any interest, I'll cross-post the info here.