Broken bridge.

Forest entrance.

(More about this later)

You read that right. This pathetic company must be wiped from the face of the galaxy, along with Apple and way, way before Microsoft.

Because vendor lock-in is the one thing I don't tolerate.

Now, the Sony DRM scandal was sufficient for me to say my "nyah" to their corporate politics, so when it came to choosing a cellphone, I picked Nokia 6233 instead of a Sony Ericsson model. (Although I admit, that phone is not without its flaws — it has DRM, can't play Vorbis audio, MPEG-4 video — I don't even mention Theora here, and its USB connector sometimes hangs my Ubuntu system. And it doesn't come with a USB cable. But who could have predicted that? At least it plays MP3s, comes with earpieces, and I can copy them to its memory card from my PC. Sometimes. When the system doesn't hang. Sigh.)

But if Nokia's USB support is bad (by the way, did I mention that it only supports USB 1.1 so the transfer is slow as heck?), Sony's is nonexistent.

I'm not even talking about Linux here. Windows bloody XP kriffin' Professional frellin' x64 Edition. My Sony DSC-V1 camera, which is "responsible" for half the photos posted here (and which works in Ubuntu out of the box), only works in PTP mode under that system — meaning it's slow, not treated like a disk, and the access is read-only. And in XP i386 edition, known as simply "XP" to those who don't know x64 Edition exists (which includes Sony), they require installation of custom USB drivers. By comparison, my parents' Panasonic camera, which they bought as a replacement, works under both "flavors" of Windows XP out of the box. Granted, it's a newer model; but Sony could at least release the x64 drivers on their website, which they didn't. I only found the needed drivers on planetamd64.com recently, after the situation became really pressing — they're unofficial, made by some hacker from the 32-bit ones.

But for the Sony DCR-TRV345E camcorder, the situation is essentially hopeless.

First, Digital8 cassettes seem to be extremely hard to find now. Why? Open standards, baby, yeah! It appears that Sony phased out their proprietary Digital8 standard (which is just one entry in a long list of Sony's attempts to establish their own hardware standards, which includes Betamax and Blu-Ray in opposition to VHS and HD-DVD) and switched to MiniDV. Good for Sony that it learned its lesson the hard way, but now we're stuck with a legacy cassette format. Really, I think I'll try buying a regular Video8 cassette and recording on that. If it doesn't work, so be it.

Second, there's the USB support issue as well. In the olden days™, when I thought Linux was an extremely complex, server-only system without a GUI, I had no problem with that — I just plugged it in, set Movie Maker to video capture mode, and captured — getting a WMV with horrendous quality and lots of dropped frames in the end. Not like I cared back then, though.

Now, having to deal with Ubuntu on one machine and XP x64 on another, I plugged the USB cable in and run Kino. Obviously, nothing worked. Having trudged through several Ubuntu support forums, I read that Linux has no support for Sony USB video capture, but not before trying the IEEE1394/FireWire guides involving manual creation of /dev nodes, which, obviously, didn't work. On the other computer, Windows didn't find the drivers, and remembering my DSC-V1 struggles, I gave up.

I went to one of the local computer shops (there are, like, seven — all of them along the same street or not far from it...) and bought a FireWire controller and cable for the Russian ruble equivalent of $12. The other, newer PC has a FireWire socket on the motherboard but mine doesn't, so I installed the one I bought... but what I needed was the cable anyway, since the camcorder obviously didn't come with one — despite having a FireWire socket (labeled "DV" for reasons that aren't quite clear to me).

When I installed the card and turned on the computer, I noticed that Ubuntu was booting extremely slowly. A recovery mode boot made it clear that the source of the problem was my old CNet PRO200 Ethernet card — I plugged the FireWire card right next to it. Okay. I disassembled the entire thing again and uninstalled the Ethernet card, since I have an RJ-45 socket on the motherboard anyway. Granted, now I can't NAT to the other computer using two Ethernet cards, but I don't need this for the time being anyway.

Voila — the FireWire interface worked out of the box, and I finally managed to capture the video in Kino. But it cost me a trip to the computer shop and back and lots of nerves.

I hate you, Sony. I'm never using your products again, except for those I already own.

My IM service of choice is Google Talk, and my Gmail account is inetperson. Should hypothetically work with any Jabber client, with gmail.com being the part that goes after the @, but I didn't test it.

My email is sikon at this domain, it means lucidfox.org. It's a redirect to my Gmail account.

I also have an ICQ number for "legacy contacts", but I'm not giving it away. It's Jabber or bust.

I'm also usually open for voice chat; lucidfox is my Wengo ID for WengoPhone users, and you can append @voip.wengo.fr for a SIP ID to use in any other SIP client, such as Ekiga.

My OpenID URL is sikon.livejournal.com, any other OpenIDs posing as me are impostors.

I am LucidFox or sometimes Sikon on Freenode, both names are registered and linked. Usually found on #uncyclopedia, #wikia, #wikifur and #wookieepedia. You can login with Wikia's IRC web gateway.

I'm also not using "LucidFox" as a wiki account anywhere, except my test wiki on lucidfox.org. "Sikon" is the only username I use on any wiki, anywhere. Here's the complete list of wikis I'm currently registered on:

• Wikia (http://wikia.com)
• English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org)
• Russian Wikipedia (http://ru.wikipedia.org)
• English Uncyclopedia (http://uncyclopedia.org)
• TV Tropes Wiki (http://tvtropes.org)
• Encyclop*dia Dramatica (no link given)
• WoWWiki (http://www.wowwiki.com)
• Wikimoon (http://wikimoon.org)
• WikiWrit (http://blogphilo.com/wikiwrit)

If you see someone posing as me on another wiki, it's probably an impostor.

#6

This segment is brought to you by Mozilla Firefox, pretty guardian of compatibility.

(Respect open standards!)

It's fun to be a Wookiee-Cast narrator. It's like being paid to make stuff up, except you don't get paid. It's fun to be a wiki admin. This may explain why certain individuals start their own wikis due to creative differences, you're probably guessing who is meant to be ashamed by this, don't you. A message to all contributors of these spinoff wikis: If you're not ashamed, be ashamed. Copying articles that are the hard work of poor Wookieepedians is stealing. Every time you copy an article, it disappears on Wookieepedia, and we have to spend precious bytes on making more. Do you know how much these things cost? I don't know, maybe in America, or more specifically North America, or even more specifically the United States, traffic is unlimited, but here in Siberia, it's either five cents per megabyte or one megabyte per day. This means each Wookiee-Cast episode makes me a dollar poorer, and that not to mention all the traffic that goes down the drain after I screw up the site layout again and reload the cache, and then reload it once again after reverting! So, you wiki pirates are stealing my money! I'd sue you, but I think it would be better to put copy protection on all Wookieepedia articles. How we'll be supposed to actually read them is another question.

Just kidding, of course, I'm not the Recording Industry Ass. of America, but you should still respect our license. Which is your license as well, by the way. Just copy our Wikipedia template and edit it to say the article is taken from Wookieepedia, then slap it on the talk page. That's all we need - attribution. And that's the most we can legally require. That concerns you too, TFN with your Force-Casts, just acknowledge you're copying from us, and that will be enough. I know some Wookieepedians would like full control over what they submit, but you did see the fine print, right? "If you don't want your submissions to be mercilessly edited by others, then leave". If you post something on Wookieepedia, or Wikipedia for that matter, it is presumed you fully acknowledge that a random man in Africa could potentially profit from your efforts and receive the millions of dollars you never did, while all you get is a feeling of satisfaction and some handy light side points.

So, TFN and the spin-offers, feel free to rob us if you like, but don't try to pass our stuff as yours. Because you have to give us attribution. And remember - anything you take from us, we or anyone else can legally take from you in turn. I hope you find spare time to read the license, for your sake. Wikia's four lawyers are not so forgiving as I am...

[transition]

Anyway. Damn you Fourdot for releasing Episode Seven ahead of schedule! It's Sunday. I would have had it ready by Monday, I swear. Next time, please warn me beforehand. So I guess I'll have double-sized Komedy Stylings to account for the lost last week, or maybe not, we'll see.

As I said, it's fun to be a wiki admin. Imperialles summed it best: "There's a misconception among users that adminsip means a ton of responisbility and work. It's actually just a set of new buttons."

That's how I view adminship, anyway. I screw things up, people complain, I revert, and we discuss the changes. That's how it works in theory anyway, usually I don't revert and the site stays forever screwed up. I know nothing bad will happen to me, so I always ask people to blame me for everything. Maybe that unlimited supply of support, so to speak, is because I almost never block anyone. Quinlanfan doesn't count, it's not my fault, blame Ataru for that idea. He's like totally guilty, I'm telling you, never mind that he regreted it.

And it's even funnier to be an IRC operator because we don't have any democracy there at all, or even attempts to pretend there is a democracy. After all, Chancellor Palpatine loved democracy, so it should be evil by definition. There is no best way to demonstrate your POWAH than when a 10-year-old enters the channel and starts speaking AOLer and leet, and then I have every moral right to scream: "POWAH! Unlimited powah!!!" and it's all like...

[s1_transform]

And I guess we'll stop here. All this magic is brought to us by Servolomie Channing, better known as ChanServ - if you still haven't noticed, I like personifications, especially of things nobody would ever think of personifying in the first place. It all initially began as a parody on all these Jedi Exile whiners, so we now go: "ChanServ is female! Get over it!"

One could say that we kick people too often, but it's complete rubbish. “Kick” is such an ugly word, and also politically incorrect. What if the operator has no legs, or the intruder has no body part that can be relatively painlessly kicked? So we don’t kick people any more, we request removal. That’s it, they leave voluntarily. Almost. With the software’s help. Like the Imperial officer who saw Kyle and died.

Back to the site... s. Fellow Wookieepedians, you have one thing to remember: if you don't know how it's done, don't do it. We already have so many crappy search icons rejected, and you're probably guessing why. Because they're crappy. We have standards to uphold. Don't use templates if you don't know how they work. Don't pretend you know HTML. If you don't know the difference between HTML and XHTML, you don't know HTML, period. Same applies if you don't know the difference between proper HTML and the horrible mess of tags that vain MySpace kids call HTML. Don't blindly copy our CSS and JavaScript to other wikis if you don't know how they work. And finally, don't submit quotes to the QDB if you don't know how tagging works. Because if you type "jaina solo", with a space, in the tags field, it won't become one tag called "jaina solo". It will become two tags, one called "jaina", the other called "solo". And don't add redundant tags. By redundancy, I mean the unnecessary use of either needless, tautological, pleonastic or superfluous text, by which one repeats, in duplication, the same, identical, aforesaid things over and over again, beyond what would be needed or required to explain, or make comprehensible, the intended or signified meaning of that which one wishes to convey. As Oscar Wilde once said on Uncyclopedia, "I simply hate, detest, loathe, despise, and abhor redundancy".

While we're at it, here's some news flash about the QDB. If you still haven't noticed, I've added Google ads to it, and sometimes they're truly amusing to read. "Buy or sell SWG accounts". Is this even allowed? Don't click that one, it will probably get your account banned. Or how about this, on the supersecret admin-only forbidden quote approval page: "Don't approve or disapprove this ad, it's for testing adsense". Oh really? And why the heck should I care about Hurricane Katrina victims, won't you bother to tell me, Google? Other than that, I heavily endorse their products and services, I use Gmail and Google Talk and recommend others to do the same. Google totally didn't pay me for this completely voluntary promotion of its services.

As it was said in the beginning: respect open standards. Part of my self-imposed responsibility on Wookieepedia is maintaining uniform look in all major browsers and systems, with or without JavaScript, because if a webmaster assumes that all visitors use Windows and Internet Explorer and have JavaScript and Flash enabled, said webmaster must be disintegrated on the grounds that they're too stupid to live.

[sad BGM]

And now, to the Expanded Universe! Coming soon: Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice! Tonight Mara Jade dyes... her hair!

[sad BGM cut]

Seriously, what's with all this talk about who dies in Sacrifice? Who the frell cares? The TFN forums had more fun when most threads were about Jacen being the most talented Jedi ever. Now it's all about: "Who dies in Sacrifice? How do we call whoever dies in Sacrifice? Who is Darth Krayt? I have proof that Jacen Solo is not Darth Krayt! Look, here's another Darth Krayt theory!" I, for one, don't care who Darth Krayt is. As V said, "who is but the form, following the function of what. And what I am, is a man in a mask." We don't need to know Darth Krayt's identity to enjoy Legacy. Why should he even be one of the established characters, especially given Dark Horse's tendency to replace established characters with their own look-alikes. Case in point: the male Exile rip-off in KOTOR. I believe his initials are Z. C.

I also wanted to talk about Saxton, I will try and filter my speech to remain PG-13. ............................................ So here's what I have to say. Others already said most of it on IRC. It's sufficient to say that I won't take any of Saxton's theories seriously until he recognizes the big yellow letters in the beginning of every movie as absolute canon. Otherwise, it's all double-standards. It doesn't mean Star Wars is fantasy, it may have been fantasy back in 1977, but not in 2007, thanks to people like Zahn, Stover, and the Dark Horse writers. Lucas, on the other hand, is a senile old man who must be banned from any Star Wars decision making to avoid further ruining his own creation.

Thank you for suffering with me, because believe me, I have suffered. See you next week.

For those of you wondering what the heck I was talking about there.

Read...

This Anderson Tape is brought to you by Jaymach File Sharing Services.

The topic I'll be ranting about is KOTOR fanboys. You know the pattern: "Revan wuz liek the most talented Jedi evar!" or "Omg revan would pwn Vader!"

To quote Kwenn, from his Un-Wookieepedia userpage: "Damn you, Obsidian! Damn you all to hell!" He actually ascribes this quote to me, and why, I think they can live, especially since Neverwinter Nights 2 totally redeemed them after the TSL screwup... but what's with all the Revan gushing?

You see, Revan is supposedly "the heart of the Force". Now if you've seen the TV tropes wiki, or Captain Planet and the Planeteers, you're probably questioning: What kind of lame power is heart anyway? Not nearly as powerful as fire, wind or earth.

And Revan did fall to the dark side. It's as true as the fact that your blue embodiement of Twi'lek hotness is dead, and I'm not talking about Mission Vao here. Deal with it. You see, if you believe Revan didn't fall based on what Kreia says, you should also believe the Exile was more powerful, also based on what Kreia says. But that is unacceptable, because Revan is DA ROXORZ! I mean, what kind of a senile old hag Kreia must have been to call the Exile her greatest student, when she also trained the great Revan? So if you're a Revan fanboy, don't believe everything she says. Unless you want to end up on the dark side. Or the double standards side. A very unpleasant side that is.

As for the genders, sometimes I wish Obsidian inserted something like this into TSL, during the first conversation with Atton: Atton: What do you know about Revan? Exile: Well, Revan was the woman who... Atton: WRONG!

Or someone else can redeem for what Obsidian has done with this "Revan customization" thing. You see, in your personal continuity, they're probably both male, unless you're a fan fiction writer, in which case they're probably both female. And in that case, there's good chance you're female too and we've met on the Freenode IRC where you mocked my strict adherence to canon, so there.

Dear Lucasfilm and Dark Horse, if you're listening to this, please slap a canonical name on the Exile in the KOTOR comics. It's getting boring on Wookieepedia now that the vandalism of her article nearly stopped, and we need more. Optionally, you can include Mount Sorrow in Legacy instead - I can guarantee an outcry even greater than with the "Pants" article and all these superb Star Trek articles that are or will be written by our glorious hosting provider. After all, you have already crossed the line with Darth Crate and Darth Cruel, so John can just as well stick to his "it's just a myth" belief to counter the efforts of Abel and Dan to keep canon from going boom.

With that, I depart - thank you for suffering!

No, I won't install Skype, and don't ask. They do have a Linux client, that's true, but it's proprietary. Worse yet, it uses a deliberately obfuscated proprietary protocol for which no free implementations exist. If anything, this is at the very least an expression of disrespect for their users.

Also, see the "Criticisms" section of the Wikipedia article.

If you desperately need to contact me via voice, you can use either the SIP protocol or Google Talk's Jingle protocol. Both are open standards. WengoPhone is a free software SIP client (with contact list support), and Jabbin is a Jabber client with Jingle support (if Google Talk isn't available for your OS). Just tell me your preferred method of communication on IRC. That's it.

Viva la Revolution! That's all I can really say.

Even with ideological fervor aside, the impact of free software on computing in general cannot be denied; and for most people, the true significance of the Prophet will perhaps remain unnoticed for years to come.

Here we go.

Written from scratch… sort of. I used the CakePHP MVC framework modeled after Ruby on Rails, and despite my complete inexperience with MVC frameworks, I found it very clean, easy to learn and intuitive. Actually allowed me to write the entire thing in two days.

And if we have such awesomeness for the good old PHP, why do we need Ruby to begin with?

The source code is available in SVN at the SourceForge page (CakePHP should be downloaded separately – it requires no installation and works with both PHP4 and PHP5). New features compared to Chirpy (the old QDB engine) include OpenID integration, the bioreactor, and new formatting, done with TFN in mind.

Yes, I am obsessed with OpenID integration.

It was actually quite a pain importing data from the old QDB. They’re kept in separate MySQL databases (lucidfox.org has two of them), and for some reason, both the mysql and mysqli APIs plain old refused to connect to either of them, and I’m certain I wrote the calls correctly. PDO worked, though.

Also, if a line begins with "Re: ", it is bolded (actually formatted as a header), like this:

RE: Is jecen teh most pwoerful Jedi evar?

And blockquotes are displayed in the WordPress-style:

[quote]Quote text[/quote]

becomes

Quote text

Also, if a line begins with "Re: ", it is bolded (actually formatted as a header), like this:

RE: Is jecen teh most pwoerful Jedi evar?

And blockquotes are displayed in the WordPress-style:

[quote]Quote text[/quote]

becomes

Quote text

"I like to play with things. I'm a convinced believer of the "BOLD, revert, discuss" principle, which usually goes this way for me: I screw things up, people complain, I revert the changes, and we discuss them — and what would have been better."

Read more...

I've been on Wookieepedia almost since its launch — I say "almost" because I was initially skeptical about it, I just started editing Wikipedia's Star Wars articles and I didn't understand the point of copying articles from Wikipedia. Eventually, though, frustrated with Wikipedia's "Lists of minor anything", I moved.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Star Wars fan — I just like the way it all fits. Continuity. However, my involvement with Wookieepedia so far was 5% Star Wars and 95% technical issues. The Consensus Track, the new Community Portal, the first FA system, Main Page v2, Main Page v3, meta-templates, infoboxes, infoboxes v2, the Senate Hall, CSS, JavaScript, the first droid, QOTD... I start things, but rarely maintain them - rather, I create the necessary structure that allows others to do that. Like I did when handing QOTD over to Sentry in August, the result being the automated QOTD rotation.

I like to play with things. I'm a convinced believer of the "BOLD, revert, discuss" principle, which usually goes this way for me: I screw things up, people complain, I revert the changes, and we discuss them — and what would have been better.

Of course, while being bold, I'm usually not being reckless. Almost everything is discussed on IRC. If I feel there are enough people backing me up, I go and implement it. I'm always the one who volunteers to do the most crazy stuff, which nobody else will dare to do. I piss people off and get away with it, and frankly, I like to study their reactions.

So, in essence, one can say that there is a cabal, from a certain point of view, like Obi-Wan said. Most of the brainstorming and decision-making occurs on IRC, and I'm quite happy with this approach — I'll explain why. However, our little IRC gang is not so secret after all, and thus not a "cabal" in the traditional sense. The process is not transparent for the average Wookieepedian, but most of them know who is responsible, and that is enough.

One problem with today's Wookieepedia is its obsession with bureaucracy and instruction creep. This is what Wikipedia is not, but apparently on Wookieepedia it's okay to have a detailed policy on everything and then enforce it to the letter. In the Olden Days™, I got frowned upon for enforcing the 3RR for the sake of it. Nowadays, such behavior is considered the norm.

I'm also concerned about "literalists", people who think our policies are to be followed strictly and to the letter, and who argue about the intended meaning of text. The fact that the Wikipedia-imported "ignore all rules" policy was outvoted so quickly is rather troubling.

The CT is slow and unresponsive — it has always been, but while it was okay when we didn't have many contributors, now it's simply unacceptable. Hence my obsession with avoiding votes whenever necessary and with the "finding consensus, not voting" stuff. Generally, I close discussions as soon as it makes sense — as soon as either it becomes evident that it's going somewhere, or it becomes evident that it's not going anywhere. Really pressing issues like sourcing get closed rather quickly. For VFDs, on the other paw, there is no deadline, and some stay there for weeks.

Sometimes I close discussions rather abruptly, inventing some lame cop-outs for what are really "cabal decisions" or my own meddling. This is all a case of "the ends justify the means" — in my opinion, at least. You know, I envy Sailor Pluto and other characters with an "omniscient morality license", who can do all kinds of crazy things because they just know it will turn out okay.

The CT is by no means just a "rubber stamp" whose sole purpose is to approve pre-discussed things — sometimes these pre-discussed things get rejected instead. But as it stands now, most of our CT-ers are rather inert and won't propose anythign radical. Fresh ideas, initial brainstorming and experimentation — all these things require operativity and constant feedback, and so far, IRC (whose promotion on Wookieepedia remains one of my primary goals) has been rather successful in this respect.

Excerpts from my old conversations with Jabberwacky, still preserved on their website.

06:10, 26 February 2007 JSarek deleted "Cracken's Rebel Operatives (Adventure Journal" (Deleting all evidence of my incompetence. content was: '#REDIRECT Cracken's Rebel Operatives (Adventure Journal)' (and the only contributor was 'JSarek'))

That's it: I was born exactly 20 years ago.

To celebrate the double holiday (February 23 also happens to be a holiday by itself in Russia), I deleted Windows and copied the complete Ubuntu repository to my computer, so any programs are installed almost instantly.

Farewell, Microsoft. I hardly knew ye.

NWN2 review... sort of

Having enjoyed both KOTOR games, I finally decided to take a look at Obsidian Entertainment's second project: Neverwinter Nights 2. Another sequel to an award-winning BioWare game. Obviously, before I actually installed the game, I was sort of worried.

KOTOR II: The Sith Lords was by no means a bad game. Obsidian, and Chris Avellone in particular, enriched the Star Wars canon with such prominent characters as the Jedi Exile, Kreia, Visas Marr, G0-T0, and, of course, Darth Sion and Nihilus, as well as expanding Canderous' role in the Mandalorian Wars and their aftermath. All of these were referenced in later Star Wars materials, and have firmly taken their appropriate places in the Star Wars setting.

Yet the game itself was obviously unfinished — and it took a whole another game from the same developer just to realize how unfinished it was. Never mind the Restoration Project. They will obviously improve the game, and greatly so, but not to its intended glory.

Because NWN2 is everything TSL could be, had Obsidian more time. Blame LucasArts. Obsidian is innocent, and completely redeemed themselves with the second, finished game. It was the greed of the publisher that nearly ruined TSL, and a team as professional as Obsidian was the only thing that saved it from becoming a total flop.

That being said, I should probably put a disclaimer of some sorts. I'm not an RPG fan, I haven't played any "true" RPGs besides both KOTORs, and only because they're Star Wars. Well, I also played a bit of the first Neverwinter Nights (to see what was borrowed into KOTOR) and a bit of Planescape: Torment (to see what was borrowed into TSL). I found the dialogues in the second game too incomprehensible, however, and the graphics too horrible.

I've never played any pen-and-paper RPGs, don't know how they work, and I don't have a slightest idea how the Dungeons & Dragons system works. Even after playing through two of the three NWN2 acts, I still don't understand what an "attack of opportunity" is.

I remember the opening of NWN1: a pre-rendered epic cinematic, telling about Neverwinter City and the Wailing Death... It was dark and scary. Then it cut to my character in a ridiculously small area with a single NPC, and I spent a minute moving around, getting used to the camera, which reminded me of old isometric games like Diablo and Nox. After KOTOR, it was seen as a drawback.

The opening of NWN2 is anything but epic. Of course, I created a female character, and, after a KOTOR-style cutscene with Daeghun the foster father, was left to explore the controls. I spend several minutes bumping into things, cursing, wondering where the heck the keyboard sensitivity setting is, how to get a KOTOR-style camera, and, after I finally customized the camera to my preferences, how to exit this damn building. I clicked on the door to open it, then, being used to KOTOR, tried to run through the doorway... to no effect. I finally realized that I had to click on the already opened door to exit the area.

The village of West Harbor reminded me of the Half-Life 2 mod Eclipse: the same fairy-tale-ish, beautiful scenery and an overabundance of bloom. The performance, however, was awful. Only after I disabled shadows and adjusted a few other parameters to minimum could I call the framerate "okay".

Of course, KOTOR's Odyssey engine never exhibited superior performance, and, as it turned out, neither did its "younger brother" Electron, both of them derived from NWN1's Aurora engine. Still, I had to install the 1.03 patch just to find the game playable, with the "camera always behind" setting.

After the cutscene with Amie and Bevil (think Bastila and Carth in a medieval peasant village) warning me about the attack on West Harbor, I was like "meh... how unoriginal". I gathered the militia, and here came the first shock: Amie died. My reaction was "Wha...?" and, if I could, I would slaughter all those NPCs telling me she was dead for real. Only after I looted her body did I realize that she isn't going to get up, and this made me greatly upset. The second surprise came when Bevil left the party. Not only did I lose one companion, I didn't even get a chance to travel with the other one!

...But let me continue my rambling. The party members are stupid. The enemies no longer suffer from the Sith Trooper Indifference Syndrome, meaning that if you attack a group of them, be sure that the nearby enemies will actually run to help them, not stand still and wait for their turn. In the Bandit Camp, they gave me, Khelgar (who boldly ran to the next group immediately after offing the previous one) and Neeshka (who couldn't last a couple of seconds if a bandit got to her) such a serious beating that I considered stopping playing altogether, fearing that the game was too difficult. Fortunately, the difficulty seemed to lower in Highcliff and further lower in Neverwinter, almost reminding me of KOTOR, where you could survive massive fights with barely a scratch.

Almost. I found it next to impossible in this game. Lightsabers were obvious game breakers, and without such uber-weapons, I found most of the enemies quite tough. You can't get a Terminator-class Jedi Tank to Force-push a dozen of enemies at once and then finish each one off in one strike, one by one, while the others are stunned. Fights are actually challenging and thus interesting.

Also, skill points didn't come cheap. I multiclassed into Paladin to get a melee fighter with Diplomacy (NWN-ish for Persuade) as a class skill, and, being lawful good, this class obviously suited me. I don't really like the fragile spellcaster classes. My typical party consisted of Khelgar (replaced with Casavir once I got him), Elanee (who could switch between spellcasting and melee fighting while shapeshifted — the NWN2 druids sure resemple the WoW ones in this respect), and Neeshka — the only ranged attacker I ever used, except for that sequence with Bishop as a mandatory party member — for her ability to open locks, disable traps and tumble. Unfortunately, Neeshka keeps running out of arrows at the worst possible moment, like during boss fights... I have never used Qara and Grobnar so far, and only used Sand and Bishop when they were mandatory party members.

Now, where was I? The party members are stupid. A typical fight in a house often went like this: I stand in front of everyone and try to tank away hits, Neeshka is shooting while standing in a doorway (and still getting hit), not allowing Elanee (standing behind the door) to join the fray, and Casavir and Shandra are nearby but... don't care, unless I manually select them and command them to join the fight. Sometimes they will run from target to target, delivering one blow to each, and sometimes they'll run far ahead after killing everyone in the immediate vicinity. Needless to say, it's irritating.

Luckily, party members with 0 HP don't die for real, only lie on the floor moaning, like they did in KOTOR, and rise after the battle is over. If I ever do a webcomic about NWN2, I'm sooo turning Neeshka's constant deaths into a running gag.

The plot is interesting and somewhat convoluted, but linear. And I mean linear linear. You don't get to choose between planets or something like this. Perhaps the only place where you actually get to choose something is the choice between working for the City Watch or criminals (much resembling the Ithorian vs Czerka choice on Telos), branching the story into two different paths (which soon converge, however, and you become a member of the Neverwinter nobility no matter what). At other times, aside from occasional sidequests, including companion sidequests (this game actually has companion sidequests, unlike TSL), you're rather limited in what you can do.

The most prominent points in the game were, in my opinion, the trial and the Crossroad Keep mini-strategy. Although the trial was actually somewhat of a disappointment. I thought it would be long, and I would have a chance to elaborate on every bit of evidence I gathered with Sand's help. Instead, it jumped straight to questioning witnesses, although this part was entertaining. I'd say the trial, and the preceding evidence-gathering, outshines the Sunry trial from KOTOR by far.

Only later did I read that the trial, despite all the hype, didn't matter that much after all, and the story will continue the same way (resolving the issue in a fight) regardless of whether you're found guilty or innocent. The man behind the man, "you have failed me"... blah blah. Then, I spoiled the surprise by reading the walkthrough and discovering that you're awarded Crossroad Keep after defeating Garius, but there were still three surprises for me: first of all, his death (so anticlimactic! I like it this way!), then the fact that you could make Torio your advisor in the Keep, and the fact that Luskan denied any affiliation. Although, Luskan being Luskan, the latter should have probably been expected.

Managing the keep and searching the world for the right people was perhaps the most exciting part of the game so far. I ran around from location to location... "My very own keep! Woohooo!" Then a couple more surprises: the destruction of the final statue, which I totally didn't see coming, and the way the knighting ceremony was interrupted. I was actually prepared to screenshot everything, anticipating approaching Lord Nasher and kneeling before him... Not in this life.

I haven't played through the rest of Act III yet.

Anyway, some aspects of the game just scream of the good old KOTOR. The inn (Ebon Hawk) and the KOTOR-like dialogues (although most of the dialogues are still NWN1-like) are among the most prominent ones, as well as the influence system from TSL. The dialogues are well-written and the story is promising, despite the occasional cliches (actually, the developers play with them often, twisting the audience's expectations; there are very, very few predictable plot points). The controls I found rather clumsy compared to KOTOR, but nothing I can't live with. After the patch, the only annoyance is the fact that the keyboard keys still rotate the character too quickly. The graphics have much improved, and if KOTOR III were to be made with the NWN2 engine, I'd totally support it. The outdoor areas and the streets of Neverwinter look simply gorgeous at times, prompting me to press PrintScreen every five seconds or so.

I'm running out of time, so I'll just jump to a speedy conclusion: it's worth playing. If you want a KOTOR set in a medieval fantasy land, it's exactly what to look for. The TSL bashers are welcome to see what Obsidian Entertainment is really capable of while not facing ridiculous time constraints; many an unfinished idea from that game found its way into the other one, becoming fleshed-out. This includes influence, Crossroad Keep itself (known as Khoonda in Star Wars), and, from what I heard, the final battle, where mistreated party members will actually defect to the villain — something that was planned for Malachor V, but cut mercilessly.

NWN2 is what TSL could have been, but never became due to executive meddling. It's fun, polished, and challenging.