There will be pain and suffering...

So I had a great birthday get-together, with Dennis and Mags and the Casa crew. Just sitting around, talking shop and having a good time doing it. Dennis did his usual misdirecting wrapping job with nesting boxes and extra weights and such, but it all came down to a copy of Neverwinter Nights!

So the party wound down, and I cleaned up, and installed NWN on my computer. Install goes off without a hitch, and all is good....

...until I run the game, see nothing but a black screen, then get kicked out.

Turns out that my Voodoo 5 5500 AGP card isn't good enough for NWN, since it's not a TNT2-based OpenGL 1.2 compliant card, and to get the thing to work, one must jump through several hoops. This is what I feared - that NWN would require a hardware upgrade. Well, there's a couple of possibilities.

1) Give Dennis the game back, tell him to get a refund, and move on.
2) Put the game on hold until I can get a new GeForce 4 card.
3) Try to kludge together a fix and jump through all those loops.

The inner geek in me wants to try #3, but the practical side that just wants the thing to fucking work is looking at #1 or #2. As much as I'd love to get a new $150+ video card for ONE GAME, I don't know if I can justify that. I mean, every other game I have works fine, including the newly released Warcraft III (which, btw, seems awesome). That Bioware is in bed with NVidia just twerks me off even more, because it seems like this game was made incompatible for a reason to sell (guess what) more NVidia cards, making NVidia more money. I mean, this is a highly-hyped game, so it's sure to generate sales for them. Not from this little geek, though - at least, not yet.

Ah well, at least I can vent frustrations with Seth and Kim's gift - 10 Kung Fu films on DVD. There shall be ass-kicking tomorrow night as I watch a couple of them. Until then, it's time to go hack up some orcs in the Human campaign of Warcraft III.

Pondering.

Well, I can get a GeForce 4 64MB SDRAM AGP card from Best Buy for around $100. That would make NWN playable, and would make sure my system is supported well into the future.

And I can take my Voodoo 5 and put it in the machine that we're going to build for Maggie. We'd just need a case and hard drive at that point.

Decisions, decisions. We're already going to be dropping $100 on a router for our home network, and I really don't need to play NWN, although I know Z would probably love to play online with Jaz and Dennis too. Decisions, decisions. Pluses and minuses.

Or do I jump through hoops and kludge together a fix, or try beta community-made drivers that may or may not work?

Or do I just ditch the damn thing and move on to other games that I have that work?