Cav's Place

I said I wanted to take a break from playing Perfect World International, but was curious enough to return, at least for a while. That curiosity faded away very quickly and now all my plans regarding that game consist of deleting my characters and uninstalling it. The only thing keeping me from doing just that right now is that I like to clean up the registry after uninstalling a program, as uninstallers never handle that part properly, but I’m feeling a bit too lazy for it at the moment.

To stick to the topic of MMOGs, at some point in the past I realized that the only reason I keep my Materia Magica character is that I want to give everything away before deleting and I can’t even be bothered to arrange that. Not to mention that the thought of needing to say goodbye to a few people who have been in that clan (SpiritWalk) for a very long time might make me reconsider once again, despite hardly having anything to do with them anymore. Happened twice already.
I haven’t been playing for two years, just logging in now and then so those in the clan I’m in will see I’m still alive, and also to pay my shop fees and collect the profits. For quite some time I managed to still restock my shop and stick around for about one hour each time I logged in, which was usually twice per week, killing various things to practice my skills. Lately I can’t even bring myself to do that anymore, so I just poke my head in briefly to pay the shop fees once per week. That makes me lose money, since there isn’t much left in my shop and therefore there can be no sales to cover the fees I have to pay to keep it open, making me have less to give away in the end.
I don’t want to just delete. I have a house, quite a lot of money and plenty of useful items on that character, so giving them away seems like the right thing to do before deleting, making sure they won’t simply get lost… But that will require some organization and I just can’t get myself to deal with such a game for long enough to take care of that anymore.

Otherwise, right now I’m playing Arx Fatalis. Or at least I would be if it wouldn’t keep crashing so often! It’s a pretty nice game which I’ve been meaning to play for a long time, and the magic system is particularly interesting, but the frequent crashes make the experience very frustrating and I don’t seem to be making much progress. I guess that’s to be expected from what is essentially a “player project”, even after all the patches.
Before this, I played and finished Diablo II (including the Lord of Destruction expansion). I thought I might as well try it at some point since so many are still praising it so many years after release and quickly regretted my decision. Kept playing it because it became a challenge, I just wanted to beat it, not give up. However, from my point of view it was a pretty poor game turned awful by the fact that you couldn’t save, or at least not really. I guess the fact that I played it after Divine Divinity didn’t help it either, as that game takes a lot of elements from Diablo II and actually uses them properly, creating a great RPG around those mechanics.

Last but not least, I’m still wondering what will happen with my video card. The initial plan was to get this cheap one when I got everything else, in April, and then replace it in autumn with the second best card from the next generation released by NVIDIA. Then dad once again, as expected, went back on his word about a month later and I had to say I’ll delay the purchase for the start of 2009.
Thinking about it right now, the delay didn’t really affect me. That “second best from the next generation” would be the GeForce GTX 260, but there are a few things that bother me when it comes to it, the most important being the power drain. The next option would now be the GeForce 9800 GTX+, but that isn’t significantly more appealing to me either. Which leaves me thinking that the “best buy” would still be the card I had my eyes on when I got all the other parts, ASUS GeForce 8800 GTS 512 TOP. Back then, when I decided to give up on it, it was partly because of my dad’s complaints about money but mainly because I thought something truly better would come along soon enough. That doesn’t seem to be the case, and it’d be extremely hard to find this one in stock anywhere now.
Considering the fact that I’d really like to play some newer games, which this card couldn’t handle properly, I find myself in an uncomfortable situation. Of course, even if something nice would appear on the market soon, which seems unlikely, it would still be quite surprising if dad would actually keep his word when it comes to money for once. And yes, I completely ignore ATI/AMD.