I'm looking for good RPGs, something I can play and pause at will to deal with the baby. Stuff I've liked:

- Morrowind, and Oblivion. Morrowind won hands down for environment.

- Dragon Age Origins/Mass Effect line

- Gothic series

- Fallout series

- Boiling Point

- KotR/KotR 2

- Two Worlds

- Witcher

- Divinity II was the most recent. Excellent game, fun gameplay elements when you can turn into a dragon.

Any suggestions? I definitely don't mind older games. I tend to like first/third person, but not top down, something with a decent story. I wish there were more scifi games in this genre.

Well, there's the obligatory System Shock 2. :) Seeing as some of the games you listed aren't "pure" RPGs, you might like it, if you haven't played it already. (It's a FPS/RPG sci fi/survival horror blend.)

Assassin's Creed I and II are fun if that material interests you.

I think I've looked for System Shock, but can't find it at a decent price. I'll definately keep that on my radar.

I should add the DeusEx games to my list too. I enjoyed both, even if the second one was basically a copy of the first.

I played the first Assassin's Creed. It was okay, but no real sense of character development/inventory/control over the story. I might try the second when it comes down in price a bit more. Does the second one have subtitles? I frequently play with volume off or waaaay down.

All of AC is good IMO.
If you liked Mass Effect then you'll love Mass Effect 2.

Older stuff.... I really enjoyed Baulder's Gate and Icewind Dale sagas.

Does the second one have subtitles? I frequently play with volume off or waaaay down.

Yes (including translations of the Italian).

The development is a bit better in II. You basically get an entire town of your "own" to make improvements to, which turns profits. There are skills you can learn off the main quest path. A selection of armor/weapons you can buy.

Like the first one, you're mostly in control of how "on the rails" you stay. You can ignore the main quest line for lots of side-stuff if you want.

I got it on Steam recently for like $15. They've been having a lot of sales. Might come up again.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was also on sale on Steam for like $10, it may be $20 now. Tons of independent ones on there, too. Impulse and Direct2Drive do similar seasonal deals. I've gotten to the point that I just don't buy games at all until December, then pick up any I may have wanted to play for $5. Except Civ 5 ... which convinced me to never pay for a game until it's a year old anyway.

I've been spending more than I want to admit on Steam this year. I missed Crysis Warhead the other day - $4.

NWN2 is great, played through those. Slow paced though.

It's not an RPG, it's an adventure game, but it's the best damn game ever made. My screen name is based on the main character!

Grim Fandango by Lucas Arts. Awesomest story, ever.

That is an awesome classic...but I can't get it to load under Vista 64 anymore.

Well, there's always Sam and Max Season 1....

Assassin's Creed 2 is much better than #1 in terms of story development and variety. While missions obviously have mechanics in common, none--not even the smallest optional side quests--were really generic, from what I remember.

AC2 also introduced tombs, which were probably the highlight for me: they were basically optional climbing puzzles, putting you in an elaborate location that acted as a sort of 3D maze. Random example (you can skip to 1m40s):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-ivSbyN5Uo&t=1m40s

Those were definitely fun. I went from the 2nd level to top level armor accidentally, because I kept going to the tombs before the quest stuff. Some of them were kind of brutal with the odd camera angles that screwed up your directional controls without warning though. Stupid console ports...

wait you played AC2 on a PC?
I can't imagine doing that.

Close your eyes and picture the idyllic scenery of the Italian countryside wafting by at 95 DPI instead of the ~45-50 DPI a decent sized HDTV degrades your eyeballs with.

Slowly inhale, as you feel the fine-grained precision that your mouse affords, without losing the ability instantly look any direction with the flick of your wrist.

Finally, exhale and feel the wind in your hair as game data loads near-instantly from your PC's SSD instead of a console's DVD or HDD.

There, now you've imagined it.

LOL, ty
but, I'll stick to the console for this one. It feels better to me when scaling buildings to have a controller. And I enjoy sitting in my comfy LR more than at a desk.

I don't know about the Xbox, but the PS3 controllers are USB and gamepads cost $8.

Wired XBox 360 controllers are USB as well. I don't know if any special drivers are needed for Windows, but in Linux it worked out of the box (much to my surprise). To use a wireless XBox 360 controller, I believe you need a $25 or so receiver for the PC. Of course as mentioned there are plenty of cheap game pads, although I definitely prefer the feel of my wired XBox 360 controller over my $10 game pad.

I played AC2 on XBox 360. There were horror stories about the DRM in the PC version, like requiring a constant Internet connection just to play a single player game, with progress lost if your connection went down for a moment--that's the kind of thing that legitimate customers should never have to deal with. (From what I understand the backlash was bad enough that Ubisoft later removed this, so it might not be an issue now. Still, the damage was done--I'm going to be wary of any PC games by Ubisoft going forward.)

Also, AC2 was released months earlier on consoles. :P

As far as DPI goes, shouldn't dots per...arc-second, or something, be what really matters? It's not like you're going to view a PC monitor from the same distance as a TV.

Even though DPI does already, I think you'd have to also factor in the size of the display somehow. I definitely can't see my 300 DPI iPhone display as well at two feet as I can my 95 DPI 24".

Curiosity aside, there's really no comparison. A 1920x1200 PC display has more pixels than a 1080p HDTV, so even if you normalize for distance/DPI/size, a 16:10 PC monitor still has 11% more vertical pixels than a 16:9 display. Whether that's used for a wider FoV or more detail, both are definitely welcome in FPS type games.

Oh, and console controllers are training wheels for FPS games! If it doesn't have WASD and a mouse, you aren't really playing.

I don't consider AC an FPS but generally agree with you about FPS on PC vs. console. I just prefer to be comfy for some titles.

Maybe I take my AC'ing more seriously than you!

If you want to be comfortable at your desk, this is where it's at: http://www.hermanmiller.com/Products/Embody-Chairs

Interesting wonder what it really feels like :o

Good. It's worth every penny.

How do you vary movement speed with a WASD setup? Unlike most FPS games, you occasionally benefit from moving slowly in the AC series.

Unmodified is slow walk, with right click is run, and with space is sprint.

edit: Oh, and with just space is fast walk.

The way the game is set up, I'd bet that with an analog directional you're really only getting those four states anyway. It seems to like to transition between the speeds smoothly, but ultimately is trending toward one of those four speeds as its target.

Well, for attention and willingness to jump purposes you're always going to get one of those four states (with similar button modifiers), but actual movement speed and direction is much more fine grained. I can get a very, very slow walk or run in a wide circle if I choose, not to mention jumping in a direction other than the four cardinal directions plus diagonals without playing with the camera. And when fighting a crowd, analog directional control makes it easier to select the target I want to focus on, since I'm again not limited to those 8 directions.

All the people in the follow missions went one of those four speeds.

Fighting was easy - point the mouse at who you want to kill. That's why I call it FPS-like. Using the mouse lets you play it fast/accurate like an FPS (without going first person).

Palarran - from what I've been given to understand, a wired controller works out of the box connecting to a windows box (who knew). I think the only situation you need drivers for is if you get a wireless adapter so you can use your wireless controllers on the PC.

Some RPG recommendations:

NWN1/2 (though I think these were mentioned)
Borderlands can be enjoyable, though it's lighter on the story and heavier on the action.
If you have a 360, I recommend Lost Odyssey. Traditional JRPG, long and a great story.
Lost Horizon is not really an RPG in the traditional sense, but it's an old point and click adventure with a good story and a unique art style. I enjoyed it.

Is Boarderlands any fun solo? I don't have a lot of desire to play with other people when I'm just unwinding after school.

Risen is shaping up to be fun, and a very different flavor from other games like Oblivion.

Unfortunately if you don't have other people to play with, it probably isn't as fun. It's a good game in general, it's just loses something without other people to play with.

Borderlands was awesome 4 player co-op, tried to play solo and it didn't compare TBH.