Neverwinter Nights 2

Finally got my hands on this game. To be honest, I was looking forward to it more than any other game this year. Downloaded the install over the local network, and at first I was upset that it was a pirated version, but as I found out later, nothing was actually cut out of the game itself. Of course, I'd have liked to have the original two-disc version of the game, but you'd be hard pressed to find one like that in town.

In the end I spent the whole weekend downloading patches for the game over GPRS internet, up to version 1.03b — I started out with 1.00. Then a localization from Akella showed up online too, but after reading through the forums I realized it's worse than even the pirated version because of the added copy protection and the encoding of the game's Russian text, even though it had supposedly been patched up to version 1.01. Besides, the extracted translation was already floating around the internet, so I settled on the original version of the game. The patches, surprisingly enough, installed onto the pirated copy without any trouble — good thing the game folder had backup copies of the exe files. True, they installed with the system lagging badly, and on minimum to medium settings the game runs at 12 frames per second in open areas, but that's just the machine being what it is — still, you can play. And it's worth playing, I think — after all, it's the best RPG of the year, according to some. Too bad I don't have much free time right now to really dive into the game.