The RPG Thread

@JohnnyFriday:  Agreed, one can get a much better and cheaper rig by going the DIY route.  But then you’re stuck with having to fix it yourself, too, if something goes wrong.  A lot of us just don’t want to mess with all that.  For a casual gamer like me, the choice was obvious.  Your mileage may differ.

Besides, I’ve dreamed of owning an Alienware machine for years, but the price range was always way out of my reach.  Finally, they created an affordable line of gaming PCs with the X51 series.  The reviews at places like CDNet and PC Magazine have all been good, too – I haven’t seen any review yet with less than four out of five stars.

As long as you’re happy thats all that matters. I havent kept up with them, so I don’t know how expensive they are. They used to be insane.

About twice a year back in highschool my friends and I would make the most expensive system you could on their website.  It was easy to hit $7k.

I always thought they looked awesome too… but if you were in public with one of their laptops Im sure you’d look like a nerd.

Here’s my laptop I never use.  I seriously have used it less than 10 hours in 6 months.

Dell xps 17 3.2 ghz core i5 2520m, 4 gig ram, 17.3in FHD WLED AG (1920x1080), JBL 2.1 Speakers with Waves Maxx Audio 3 (it sounds awesome for a laptop), NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M. I was like 1,300 in June, now its like a grand.

@JohnnyFriday : Oh man, I love that shit.  WILL IT BLEND.  Crazy guy.  The lighters one was pretty funny lol

And by the way, nice laptop.  When I have some more money in the future I’m gonna look into getting one.  I got a pretty good desktop, but I’d love the portability.

Mine has like no portability.  It gets like 1 1/2 hour battery life unplugged.  I need a netbook or something.

Having gone the Alienware route in the past, I’m just going to build my own in the future.  If you don’t want to build your own, just grab a decent middle of the road desktop for $500-$700.  The Alienware premium (in my opinion) is nice for the first 6 months, before you see people getting comparable machines for half what you paid or less.  Of course, even the DIY route doesn’t offer the same sort of discounts it once did.  On the upside though, by putting it all together myself, I can avoid paying the Microsoft tax, and I can guarantee all my hardware will be linux compatible.  Nothing worse then spending $1200 or more on some machine, getting it, and realising it’s got a goofball sound card that has a broken driver in linux.  Or that there’s no functioning network driver for you NIC, and you’re left completely unable to connect to the internet with your shiny new $1200 door stop.

I prefer the DIY route as well :-P 

PC gaming is inherently expensive, and the only way to offset that cost compared to console gaming is to basically pirate a lot of games instead of paying for ROM media. I never had the money for a really good machine.  I suppose I could have gotten a pretty decent desktop as opposed to the laptop I got… but spilled milk you know.

The DIY route can be fun.  For laughs (well, I think I might be able to do it soon), I put together a desktop on Newegg, just to see what it’d cost.  Minus any random cables that I made need to buy, depending on who packs them in, it comes to a grand total of $1225.60, including 3 day shipping and before any mail-in rebates.  And I could easily get this down to about $700 if I wanted to, as I probably don’t really need that 120GB SSD for my OS partition, or a soundcard that can do 24-bit/192KHz audio and 7.1 surround out of my computer. But it’s a device that costs about $500 more than a middle of the road pre-fab machine, will last me for a good 5 years before it really starts showing its age, and it’ll serve multiple purposes.  I’ve got an HD monitor already, and a combo CD/DVD/HD-DVD/Bluray drive, so it becomes an automatic media center.  Over time, adding another 24GB of RAM until I max out the motherboard’s capability will mitigate some of the aging issues.  Still, even if you’re not terribly technically inclined, it’s not hard to go through newegg or some other site and put together a machine, and be certain all your components will work together.  When you pick a case, it’ll tell you in th technical details section “This case has X number of slots for drives, can support Y form factors for the motherboard,” and such.  You get to your motherboard, make sure it’s Y form factor.  It’ll tell you in the motherboard’s page “This board supports Z type of CPU sockets, and the following variety of connections for other hardware.”  Make sure to pick a CPU with that type of socket.  Make sure when you add your video card, it’s a variety of PCI card that’ll hook up to your motherboard.  

It can be just like any other sort of project if you think about it properly.    You pick your first component, and build up from there.  If you’re working on installing a new sink and you know that the pipes leading up to your taps have a certain dimesion, you look for something that’ll connect to, say 1/2" pipes rather than 3" ones.  The only difference is, instead of 1/2" or 3", you get terms like ATX motherboards, PCI Express 2.0 x16, or AMD FM1 CPUs.  Also, a good chunk of hardware comes with warranties by the manufacturor.  If you’ve built your own computer and your shiny, new 8 core monstrosity of a CPU craps out after 6 months, chances are pretty good you can call up AMD or Intel, and get a new one sent out.  If you’ve got a pre-built machine that you bring in to a computer shop, you’re paying for parts that you probably could have got for free under your warranty, plus $40/hr or more for someone to do something that you could learn how to do in all of a half hour, with the help of a couple quick youtube tutorials.  Whether or not you actually want to is a different matter entirely, but I think a lot of people over-estimate the difficulty of computer repair.  A lot of it is just googling, “Have a computer doing such and such,” or “Error message ‘Oymyakon is cold as hell, you broke something’” and following instructions.  Usually, smarter people than you or I have run into the same problem before, and have written up an explanation of what it means, as well as step by step instructions for how to fix it.

since this is the rpg thread, I would just like to say that I’m replaying FFVII and just got through Disk 1 in 26 hours and that’s getting both Yuffie and Vincent, no walkthroughs.

I’ve got FFVII and VIII, and have heard mixed reviews about FFIX. Has anyone played it? Is it worthwhile?

Quite an excellent post @shikitohno .  I love reading though that stuff, I speak the language :-P 

As for RPG’s, haven’t worked on mine in awhile, but I really want to get it Demo ready so I can upload to MegaUpload or something and post the link here for people to test :-P 

Xenogear from PS1 era is a must play~  For PS2, the first Xenosaga game is another good choice (Xenosaga II really sucks, the third game is better but not as great as the first Xenosaga game)

Recently, there have been a lot of great RPGs for PS3 as well. I just finished playing Dark Souls and Mass Effect 2. Both games are AWESOME!

I’d play that mike

Dark souls is great. Really old school in the way that you have to figure out what you are doing. I reccomend not looking up info online as it kills some of the specialness. though that guy that eats items makes me happy.

I have heard nothing but amazing things about Dark Souls. I’m starting to think I should give it a go if I can ever afford it o.<

That guy who eats items wouldnt talk to me. so I attacked him and he disappeared.  I looked it up online, and I was pissed.

You guys use ps3?

PSN ID: JohnnyFriday

Excellent!  Then I will make a working Demo this weekend when I have time and I will do the whole Upload thing.  I’d love to hear Criticizm and Feedback regarding my game.  The graphics are nothing special, something you’d see in Gameboy LOL .  If you have ever played Fable 1, then it’ll be a LOT easier for you to understand.  My games story is based around Jack of Blades, the villain from Fable 1 .  He is my favorite game villain of all time, and I thought I would make a game in tribute to the awesome character.  I am very pleased with it so far, and I would love to continue to work on it, if I had more time lol.

Yeah I’m running a PS3, also never got rid of the PS2. I’ve got the first Xenosaga, and another, don’t recall which. I’ll check out Dark Souls and ME2 sometime. My friend raves about Dragon Age 2, but is that more action-rpg’ish? I gotta get Skyrim and see what all the buzz is about. Also I’m wondering if games like the Elder Scrolls are better on a PC or PS3…

MikeMoose- I’d do some beta testing if I can learn how to download it and stuff (I’m kind of a PC/Windows newbie)

@Mr. O: I really enjoyed playing FFIX.  Most of the complaints I heard about it were people who didn’t like the return to the less than realistic roots of the series in terms of character design and such, after FFVII and FFVIII were becoming progressively more and more realistic in terms of character and world designs.  IX returned more to the fantasy origins of the series, and that pissed a fair few people off for some reason.  This may be a bit controversial amongst PS1 RPG afficianados, but IX was my favourite of the PS1 Final Fantasies.  Granted, I haven’t finished Tactics, but they’re different varieties of game anyway.

@MrO  If you have a top-spec pc then go for the pc version of Skyrim.  I personally prefer the ps3 version.  Only bad thing on pc is that the controls are geared more towards the consoles.

@FlippinBird  Does your ps3 have problems with large save files on skyrim? For me, all bethesda ps3 games have problems in the later stages of games when the save files are large it starts to get very slow and sometimes freeze.