Neverwinter Nights 2

Neverwinter Nights 2
$29.99
Great game. Older but still very fun. Great story line and good graphics. If you like role playing games I highly recomend this one.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Gold
$29.99
It might be enough to just sum up what many others have said -- it's buggy, unstable, and often feels incomplete. It takes many unnecessary creative liberties with 3.5 D&D mechanics. It seems to run more slowly than it should, even with graphics turned down.

I've tried to play this game many times and like it. I love 3.5 D&D, I loved NWN1 and loved one of its expansions (sorry, Shadows of Undrentide), and I thought I was in for another good experience. Instead, the game features a boring storyline, frustratingly bad character models, a very counterintuitive modding system, and a serious lack of forethought in regards to balancing game mechanics. Playing through the first 5 levels or so of a Warlock is an achievement worthy of a medal. Or god forbid you decide to make a character in the original campaign with one of the two new base classes from MotB -- you get no starting equipment! To boot, half the Cleric buff spells just don't do what they say they do (let alone what they're supposed to do in 3.5), lots of spells are in the wrong school or have saving throws added for no reason, and plenty of fun, old-fashioned core spells just aren't there. On top of that, even if you find one or two spells that you really like and want to just fill your prepared slots with them, you can't! They still haven't implemented the simple ability to fill a slot with a lower-leveled spell. For the non-spellcasting types, staple feats like Power Attack still function like NWN1, where they have a fixed cost and return. Some of the fun PrCs, like Pale Master, were hit so bad that they're useless.

Let's say that you want to download one of the many high-quality mods that can fix some of these issues. If more than one of them modifies the dialog.tlk file, then guess what? You can only have one of them at a time! If you want to use mods that are easy, drag-and-drop affairs, then you have to make sure that no two mods are modifying the same .2da file, or else you'll have to find another program to merge them -- and I couldn't find any that worked. If you want to use mods that are in hakpaks, which don't have the .2da problem, then you'll have to open them individually with the toolkit and assign them to modules a la carte. And you're still out of luck if more than one of them want to make changes to dialog.tlk. AND you have to manually back up your old dialog.tlk in case they patch the game again, although I doubt that it would happen at this point or even make a difference in the long run.

I know a lot of the mechanical complaints are just as pertinent to NWN1; however, NWN1 was the company's first 3e D&D game, and NWN1 had a more engaging story and overall a much better gaming experience. If nothing else, the in-game cutscenes were vastly superior in the first game. Remember Mephistopheles walking through the vast expanse of corpses as they were reanimated in his wake? Nothing nearly as awesome to be had here. Now, I'll admit that Mask of the Betrayer is marginally more fun than the original campaign, but it's still not as good as the first game. Right as soon as it starts to get really fun, they introduce a new meter for you to keep track of, with scaling debuffs and everything. It's like I bought a new D&D game and they forgot to mention that I would have to play through the entire campaign as a spiritual vampire. If the rest of the campaign wasn't so linear I might not have minded so much, but I really hate being railroaded, just like the quests to gain entry into Neverwinter railroad your alignment in Act II of the original campaign.

Overall, I'd have to give it 2.5 stars for fun, but it's really not worth the time or money. NWN1 and the expansions are much more fun, more forgiving of older computers (which is sad, as my desktop is just ahead of what was cutting-edge when NWN2 was released), and these days they're probably a lot cheaper too.

Neverwinter Nights 2 (Limited Edition)
$59.95
The game is decent. I have just completed the single player campaign. The plot, graphics, playability are all just fine. There are plenty of official patches that cleaned up all of the bugs. Even with a high speed cable modem it took a while to download all of these patches from Atari. It does have some flaws. There is nothing in my mind that really seperates it from NWN. I was hoping that they would take NWN to significantly higher lever. They raised the bar slightly. I think that the expectations for them to make the sequal were a little bit unreasonable. NWN was a super high quality game with little room for improvment. Soon I hope to start playing fan built custom modules. That is where it should become interesting. That is the best thing about the game. It offers virtually unlimited playability. There are so many people who make quality mods that you can always find a quality new campaign to play.

Baldur's Gate 4 in 1 Boxset
$19.99
All I can do is create a character, when the action screen loads up, the game crashes, booting me out of Baldur's Gate completely.

Also, is this supposed to have a manual? I ordered a "like new" copy, but it doesn't have a manual.