Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Arcanum’s a delectable little RPG gem. It was developed by Troika Games before they made the awesome Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and then had to drop dead because they didn’t get any funds.

It’s probably the last major D&D-style 2D RPG in the vein of Fallout, Planescape or Baldur’s Gate, and I personally think it plays out better than any of these (it could be the age, and besides, I’m playing a patched version, I hear the original is very buggy). The interface is slick, gameplay is stylish and while I’m no fan of combat of this very genre, Arcanum handles it suitably.

What I like best about the game is its Steampunk art style, despite being set in a fantasy world populated by elves, dwarves etc., we see the marvels of the Victorian age – blimps, lanterns, flintlock guns and dapper suits. The UI has a very Victorian aesthetic, wood and polished metal, the dialogue is lovely with its 19th Century trappings.

I think this is largely the handiwork of Leonard Boyarsky, who also worked on creating the story, setting, aesthetic and dialogue of Fallout (the story, setting, aesthetic and dialogue happen to be Fallout’s shining points, the rest of the game was fairly passable).

The character-creation is reminiscent of D&D, but fairly different. Using character points and such, I’ve created a spiffy Half-Orc, skilled in Charm and Stun and Spike Traps as well as some prowess in prowling and pickpocketing.

Wikipedia

Die Resident Shield Die

Disabling AVG’s Resident Shield made my PC so much faster, I almost want to cry. I was fiddling around in AVG settings today after getting a License error and reinstalling AVG to eliminate it.

Something strange crawled up to the back of my skull as I read that Resident Shield was checking every file I used. Every single file, that’s must be like 20 files per second or something, assuming standard usage. Could this be what was crippling my system?

I disabled it, but Windows gave me a nasty message telling me that my Anti-Virus has been turned off. Despite my best efforts to convince it otherwise, it didn’t budge. I disabled its monitoring instead, which is good riddance as it sometimes lied that AVG wasn’t running when the AVG icon was right next to the goddamn Security Alert in the System Tray.

So things feel very fast now, it’s great! Not sure if this is temporary or what, repeated usage speeds things up as always, but really, things are much faster with the resident shield off. And while checking every file I use is a nice offer, I think I’ll rely on the old-fashioned firewall-and-scan approach, in addition to the classic internet-common-sense technique.

Epic Opening Sentence

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

must… get… out… of… bed…

‘Runway’ Poster Rips Off ‘xXx’ Poster

Found the trailer in a Marathi paper. I don't even know what the movie is or about (it doesn't even have an IMDB listing, which is very weird), but all I could think of when I saw the poster was xXx. Jeez, if you have to plagiarise a poster, you could at least steal it off of a movie that doesn't play on HBO every other month.

Edit: Saw this in the papers a couple days after posting this. Pretty sweet if whoever wrote that up saw this post, I’m doing pretty good at coming up on top in Google these days. >_>