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Question about Skyrim, I'm doing just fine, but for some odd reason when I try to enter the College of Winterhold it doesn't let me in. I take the woman's test and cast the correct spell and whatnot yet, I still can't get in. I even try using my shout and it does no effect. Is there any other option?

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Hmmmm, did you go to the two smaller apartment areas that are sort of to the left and right as you walk into the main college courtyard? I feel like I had to do something in there first, or maybe in town....

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I'll give that a go. Thanks

Question about Diablo 3.

Is Diablo an MMO like WOW, will there be other players and such roaming around in areas with you etc. Or is it a single player RPG?

I never played any Diablo Games before so have no clue.

Cheers.

You have the option of playing online via Battlenet but you can play a single player campaign but still you need to be connected to the internet otherwise it won't work

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I'm in movie heaven

Nooooooooooo not Funcom, they give me nightmares now after AoC (Age of Conan), played it for 3 years and saw the slow decay...... they implement 1 patch for lets say 3 fixes then introduce 5 more usually worse. My personal experience of their customer service is woeful to say the least, they'll piss in your pocket and tell you it's raining. Maybe i'm just a little bitter for AoC being the test monkey for TSW, but I wouldn't recommend a Funcom game to anyone and know a lot who wouldn't.

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You're tearing me apart, Lisa!

Yep - well aware of the track record of FunCom, but TSW is brilliant ina lot of ways. I played a lot more this weekend, and Lisa and I are both having a TON of fun with the investigations etc. Kingsmouth Town is REALLY well done - one of the more impressive gaming play spaces I have seen. The combat definitely needs some polish, though, so this will probably be another rough launch. The game is good, though.

Anyone playing Max Payne 3 then? Loved the ole MP2 demo. Sounds like they've dumped the comic-book interludes and it's mainly more of the same, but the online looks intriguing. Can't really fathom how they're getting the bullet time to work (even tho it's only in your line of sight by the sound of it). Does it genuinely involve slow-mo for one protagonist while others continue as normal? That must take a helluva lot of 'buffering'.

The 'paranoia' ability they're talking about sounds like a fun spin too. Could be worth a rent at any rate

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

So I finally obtained Skyrim.

And I have ...complaints, strangely enough.

I dont know why, but I think I liked Oblivion better. Here's a short list why:

1. You cant fight underwater. Why I cannot draw my weapon while swimming is beyond me. I did not have these issues in Oblivion. FAIL.

2. The HUD is entirely too futuristic and clean looking to gel with a hunter/gatherer game. I hate it, and I want the old rustic looking HUD back, because it has the look of antiquity and fits with the era. Plus, its easier to get a grasp on what's what.

3. The map sucks, and I hate it. You would think they would at least have had a toggle option for those of us who DONT want a 2D? 3D? map, so that we could view a flattened version without having to download a mod. FAIL.

4. What up wit da haggling/speechcraft? Why did they reverse the ability to haggle the trader in each session, and to max out your sales ability? I guess that was a feature they decided to automate for us? Now we've no need to go around having a speechcraft menu with NPC's because......well, because they removed it. I guess they felt we were too dumb to figure that part out?

5. Why didnt the single item trade ability make into this so-called "advancement" of TES universe? In Oblivion I downloaded a mod that allowed me to sell 1 item at a time by depressing "CTRL" or "SHIFT" - since we all know that speech is increased by each transaction, rather than the number of items in a transaction. It irritates me to have to move the slider in every sale. FAIL.

6. Why do I get the impression that they made this game off the same chassis (if you will) as Dragon Age? Honestly - it is conceptually now the same game. Race war? Check. Need to chose a side? Check. Oh, look - dragons!! Check. And dwarves!! Check. And dwarven ruins!! Check. That are strikingly familiar to the ones in dragon age! Check. I am literally fatigued with the level of political intrigue in these games - they are starting to push it to max to where its not even fun to play anymore. I get that real life is complex, and there are myriad gray areas, but cmon man - do our games have to rigidly mirror real life? Whatever happened to good old escapism, when it was plain good vs. evil, and your bad guys were bad, and everyone banded together to advance the good.

The elves are snobs, the Nords are racist pricks who would be the elves to everyone else if the elves didnt have them cowed, and Im constantly scratching my head thinking that whoever wrote this game is clearly a person that feels no need to tolerate other cultures. At all. I cringe every time one of my housecarls shouts something narrowminded and racist like "Skyrim is for the Nords!" REALLY? I'm all for patriotism, but in this game I'm starting to think its mere xenophobia masquerading as patriotism.

Im not a Nord in the game, but I realize the game has the Nordic storyline as the protagonist line, since "Skyrim" is a Nordic country, and its antagonist is the Thalmor. And I really, really do not want to be a Nordic hero. The elves are bunch of douchebags, but the Nords are real tools - if I could get away with it, I'd help the Thalmor break all the Nords even more, and then I'd dice up the Thalmor.

See what I mean? This is a GAME. Its supposed to be fun, not annoying.

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something witty goes here......

I never really played videogames, though I remember playing street fighter...where you have to stand up and you could have 2 playing. It was in a snooker hall, I mainly played snooker but 1 mate was great at it. He would beat the Chinese young guys...and they were great.

It really is the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, innit? At least on PC, anyway. Glad you're enjoying it.

Finally.

At the moment I'm playing The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition. CD Projekt are such a great company - Just like they did with the first Witcher game, anyone who bought the original edition of The Witcher 2 gets a free upgrade to the enhanced edition but unlike W1's 2GB patch (plus extras like the soundtrack etc) you get the entire game (plus extras) as a GOG download.

I'd highly recommend the game to all rpg-ers, especially now as it's also out on Xbox. It won't look quite so pretty but there's a challenging, well-written game there.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

You've got it on PC, no?

Nothing changes it completely, but I recommend:

iHUD

A Thinner Compass

I agree, hate the map. A Quality Map With Roads has an option for a paper-style map but it's bugged - some of the paper textures can be seen in the game world. It's a much better map experience when the standard version is installed though, and does away with the awful swishy cloud cover.

It's funny, but one of my essential Oblivion mods is a commerce one which removes the haggling bit completely so I'm fine with Skyrim's. Maybe as an old salesman I'm immune to suckers trying to bid me for my own stuff.

Is the trade system not the same as Oblivion's? I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that your Speech gets increased by the volume of items you trade rather than value - 10 potions sold separately for 10 gold each rather than 10 sold in a lump for 100.

I'm probably wrong though, because Oblivion's was a silly system. Although, this *is* Bethesda here...

I think I subscribe to 'at least the world isn't as generic as Cyrodiil' here.

The whole Dragonborn thing is enshrined in TES lore - Uriel Septim/Jean-Luc Picard in Oblivion was one, after all.

I'm having fun at the minute playing as a Nord who's siding with the Empire because, as you say, Ulfric is a big racisty racist.

Diablo III then...

As an isometric Hack n Slasher I can't really fault it so far. I've player 3 or 4 hours with 3 different classes so am only at Lv 10 with my favourite one but already I can see the complexity (and, therefore, satisfaction when all goes to plan) in the Skills and Runes selection.

There's tons of loot and even the occasional rare item at my lowly level. Battles are as much fun as clicking mouse buttons can possibly be and the interface is logical and slick.

Within the confines of the genre it looks lovely too, and I suspect you'll not need a mega PC to get it running well...

However, at the end of the day all you're doing is clicking, changing clothes, levelling and clicking some more. I've got the same frustrations with hack and Slashers as I always had - they bore the mammary glands off me after a while. The only one I've really liked long term is Dungeon Siege, and they stuffed the franchise up with number 3.

If you're a fan of that sort of thing, Diablo III is approaching nirvana. I was never a Grunge fan though. It's great fun in short bursts for the rest of us and Monks are ace!

Heads up. First DLC for Skyrim, coming this summer.

I've signed up for the Xbox Dawnguard Beta but I tried playing Skyrim on console the other day and just couldn't deal with the awful interface.

Am running the 1.6 Beta PC Skyrim patch, which has horse combat finally. It's great in isolation but, because the patch is still in Beta, none of the mod authors are supporting it yet. 90% of my existing mods work fine but any that change the HUD clash with the horse combat - As soon as you draw your weapon the compass and crosshair disappear, and the crosshair in particular is kinda essential when aiming in 3rd person from horseback.

The only way around it is to go back to the vanilla HUD.

Bought a couple of cheapies recently - Alice: Madness Returns and the latest Humble Bundle, mainly for Amnesia: The Dark Descent. From what little I've played, Amnesia looks ace but Alice is maddeningly inconsistent. Looks lovely (in a Fable-ish way) but plays terribly with awful controls and camera. Good job it was only £2.99.

Uninstalled.

Rar, you lot love your RPG's.

I remember when my boyfriend first tried to play his bought Skyrim PC game and it was so laggy it took him at least 2 hours to fix.


Did you buy Alice on Steam?

If he revisits it now he'll probably find it a lot easier - It's on patch 1.5 now with 1.6 on the way and a lot of the improvements are on the performance side. Saying that, I found an awful lot more stuttering in the game with my old ATI graphics card compared to the new Nvidia one (which is only slightly more powerful). Seems like the ATI drivers need work.

Yep, I got Alice on Steam last week when it was on offer. I'm a sucker for newish releases when they drop to £2 or £3 and usually buy them without even thinking. The downside to that is that the list of Steam games that I own and don't have installed/will never install again is much larger than my list of 'regulars'.

Summer sale is coming up soon as well. I think I'll need a bigger hard drive.

Yeah he's only played it a few times although he says he loves it lol. He's been addicted to Ghost Recon, Max Payne and Diablo. And he got me really into Diablo also. And on that note, I totally agree with you on Monks, my absolute favorite!

He was real upset with me about Alice cuz we bought it a while back and I haven't played it yet so when he saw what a deal it was last week, I thought he was gonna strangle me, lol.

It's always the same with Steam, isn't it? Buy something which you think is a decent price and they're practically giving it away the next week.

Don't think I've ever paid full price for a Steam game though, even Skyrim had a fiver off and I paid for it before release day. I think Skyrim's now the game it was intended to be, once the horse combat patch goes live anyway.

I'd say the company were hamstrung by the rigid but memorable 11/11/11 release date for such a complex title which was bound to run into last minute problems. If the SkyUI mod were incorporated into all versions (and it works great with a controller so the consoles could have it too) it'd be pretty near perfect for the genre.

Alice: Madness Returns, on the other hand, is a bit of a mess. A really pretty mess though ... it's kinda like Lyndsey Lohan: The Game.