I've been using DVD Workshop with a bit of success. It has some limitations that irk me, though, such as only 20 still images in a slideshow and motion menus that can only last about 5 seconds. It's phenomenally limited in a number of fundamental ways, however, and I'm seriously considering splurging on Encore, or maybe the whole Adobe video collection ($1k for Encore + After Effects Std + Premiere Pro + Audition isn't too bad, actually).
So here's a question: It sounds like Encore is leaps and bounds beyond DVD Workshop. Is there anything significant that Encore can't do?
I just heard about Turbo Codes recently, but from a different perspective. I think at the time, they developed these codes with rates so close to the Shannon limit, and no one believed it. Even then, I don't think they were aware of the theoretical basis for why they worked.
Theory finally caught up with them more recently, from the framework of probabilistic networks. It turned out that if you have a Bayesian network with cycles, inference is difficult. But there is a method of belief propagation through message passing that can be used, and it turned out that this is exactly what these guys were doing. (The network itself would include a probabilistic model of noise and its effect on the messages from the sender to receiver.)
> On my i8k in Mandrake it allows either battery or external power. If I plug in / detach the cord, the computer freezes
Just an FYI for ya. I have an i8k relative (m40) and Mandrake (9.2 maybe?), and I had the same problem. However, you can actually fix the freezing problem by -- you guessed it -- recompiling the kernel.
I don't have my laptop with me at the moment, but if you recompile the kernel with ACPI support disabled, you can plug and unplug the power cable to your heart's content without any lockups. I think removing support for it also required removing support for some IBM hotplug-related device. Let me know if you're interested and I can try to get a more specific list.
I have not tried it myself, but you should be able to use the pcHDTV card. It's an HDTV card designed specifically for linux. It won't solve the cable-box problem, but it does support the OTA broadcasts.
Sure, I agree this can't do much to prevent intentional removal of classified documents. I see it more as a way to prevent accidents. Much the same way that they don't allow classified media in an office of a type that can be read by an unclassified machine in the same office. There's nothing stopping someone from doing it intentionally, but it helps stop you from doing something stupid and causing an infraction through mere carelessness.
MakeStorm wrote: I mean seriously, is there some problem this if really fixing, do we need to track paper documents?
Working in a classified environment, I can certainly see a use for this. I imagine if they could, the government would absolutely like to know if a worker carries top secret documents home with them.
Excellent point. Not an urban legend at all. Check out the rules from this Occupational Safety and Health Administration publication. For up to eight hours a day, you can have noise levels at 90 db. But that's it. At 95 db, you need hearing protection for an exposure of over four hours. At 110 db, you aren't allowed more than 30 minutes unprotected.
As this is OSHA, the employer is responsible for making sure these rules are followed. For dorms, of course, just be aware that 24/7 exposure at much lower levels, even under 85 db, can be harmful.
Good points. Additionally, if you are at the point where you have to do it late at night, your choices are to either get a lower grade, take a late day (if you're lucky enough to have one), or do the work late at night. And if you're going to do it, I think it was awfully considerate of the poster to actually attempt to find ways of avoiding waking his roomies.
Speaking for myself, I had a lot of homework in college. I realize that varies by university and by major, but I wasn't the one who had stayed out late partying the night before and screwed himself into having to work on something late at night. I was the one who had stayed up late working on other homework the night before and had to stay up late the next night. My roommates all had different majors, though, all in the Engineering college, and we were all in the same boat. We were lucky to be in an apartment instead of a dorm room, that's for sure....
Now developers have to start deciding whether or not to support higher resolutions, and if they do, what to sacrifice for the increase in calculations required at those higher resolutions.
Yep. Which is why so few games actually support it, even new ones. Disappointing for those of us with HDTVs, but I can understand why so few developers go through the extra effort.
I think you're correct; we're talking about different facets of the same problem.
You're right -- it's easier to make a game (especially a good one) if you can target better hardware. And I'm exaggerating the complexities of development, especially concerning Windows of recent years. (I won't bother to include Linux varieties here, and Windows used to be worse than it is today.)
But at the same time, my point is that it is easier to target fewer varieties of platforms -- sure, GC/PS2 are quite different, but the set is a small discrete space instead of a multidimensional almost-continuous one. And I think this is also a valid point.
These two factors are not mutually exclusive, of course. So while it would be better for developers if the XBox had better hardware, in my opinion (because we're talking about predictions now) I don't think MS is going to officially allow upgrades like this, because I think the degree to which it makes life harder on developers will overwhelm the improvement in games for some people. Instead, they'll just make an XBox2. (I think this was my original point, at least!:)
I don't think this is related to pride. He has an actual business on the side. Businesses make money. Since he is self employed, what he does for his other company is in danger of being considered "given" to the new company. This could result in his new employer receiving money from licenses granted by his old company.
> Except, of course, that console developers get special Development Kit versions of the consoles, that are more powerful and capable of outputting higher resolutions.
You're right, I glossed over that point. The development consoles need to be different, at least to handle debug code at close to a reasonable speed. The point still stands, though, that they have a single target, even if intermediate development is on a different platform. Even with three consoles, three targets is an easier thing to deal with than, say, 5 video cards speeds X 5 cpu speeds = 25 "speed" configurations.
And even then, I've simplified the picture for PCs. Do we keep using DX8, or switch to DX9 now that it's out? Am I going to have an issue with ATI cards if I use pixel shaders? What glitz can I drop for a slow video card -- can the CPU take over some of that work? How about giving more work to the graphics card for a machine slow CPU? When the game is finished a year from now, what will be the base CPU speed we can allow? Not only do I have to worry about different speed configurations, I need to worry about different brands now, too!
> Consoles have limited graphics capability (due to the extremely poor resolution of the standard television)
True, but the limited resolution makes it easier to develop for, not harder. You may be able to do less with that resolution, but damnit, you know what that resolution is going to be and you don't have to worry about someone who wants to run at 2048x1440 and someone who wants to run at 640x480! Anyway, that is passing with HDTVs becoming more common. Many PS2/XBox games have support for progressive scan (e.g. 480p/720p).
> very limited control set (even the Xbox's 4-axis 10 button controller pales in comparison to a mouse with a wheel, and a 102+ keyboard)
That's true. However, there are many games -- entire genres -- where a mouse+keyboard doesn't make sense. Even so, that is simply another hardware restriction, which makes it easier to handle because there is less variety. You don't have to worry about supporting mouse+kbd and a joystick.
> That's like saying Children's Books are better for Authors because children have a lower common denominator.
Not sure I see the analogy. A book for a 2-year old and a book for a 6-year old bear absolutely no resemblance to one another, and trying to make one book (game) to appeal to (work on) all children (configurations) is virtually impossible.
First, developers would hate it. The beauty of consoles has always been that you know, as a developer, whether the game will work on everyone's system based on a single data point: whether it works in the exact same console you have sitting in your office. They don't want to have to worry about varying systems, and gamers don't want to have to worry about system specs.
It is absolutely in the developers best interest to target the lowest common denominator (i.e. the base system) to have the widest market, even if there ever did get to be a significant percentage of people with upgrades in the wild.
Not only that, it most certainly would void your warranty with MS, so I don't see the average customer ever being interested in it. How many console owners (including XBox owners) are less tech savvy than TiVo owners, and what percentage of TiVos have been upgraded? My guess is that the percent of modded TiVos is actually quite small, and the percentage of modded XBoxes (where the benefit of upgrading is even less apparent) will be even smaller.
Re:I won't give them the satisfaction.
on
Paperless Billing?
·
· Score: 1
I wasn't very clear myself, actually. I do receive both an online, itemized statement, as well as the paper one.
Oh, and yeah, checks suck. They're stupid, too. Seriously.
Re:I won't give them the satisfaction.
on
Paperless Billing?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
they refuse to allow me to get my bill online and off
I do almost all of my bills online. Interestingly, my credit card company allows me to keep getting my bill in paper even though I pay the bill online. (It's not that interesting in that they're not the only ones doing this for me, but judging from this comment, I'm guessing it's not uncommon to disallow it.)
Here's the problem, though. They keep "offering" to stop sending me my paper bill. First question: why would I want to stop receiving it? It's an automatic reminder that it's due, it leaves me a way to pay by check if I change online banking companies, and it's a nice double-check that they're not screwing me.
Continuing on: when I choose to stop receiving my paper bills (by a simple mouse click online), they won't allow me to go back to receiving them. I might be able to do so if I sent them a letter or something, but still.... Zero incentive to stop receiving the paper versions.
Oh, sure it's painful! Extremely, tremendously painful. But mathematically it all works out.
Take caustics, for instance, like a magnifying glass focusing a light source onto a small point on a surface. This is, and has been, done using raytracing.
I've not actually implemented it, but I'm slightly familiar with the techniques. I imagine some intelligent sampling of incident rays, and maybe adaptive supersampling of these rays, would help a lot with the phenomenal costs.
Photon maps are another solution, and (if I remember correctly), they implement forward ray tracing instead of the usual backward ones. Since you can then cast rays from the light source outward, this can be much, much cheaper.
Sure it can! Raytracing can absolutely model diffuse interreflections. However, while radiosity is an analytic (though approximated through a mesh) solution, raytracing typically uses a Monte Carlo sampling technique to achieve this. You can imagine how painfully slow this is, but it works just fine. (And it doesn't require meshing your objects beforehand, either.)
Yeah, I'm a little torn as well. Take GT3's SSR11, for example. On those two 90-deg left-right corners, hitting a wall can be disastrous without any additional penalty. But on some of the longer, smoother corners (esp. the 180's), hitting the wall is almost guaranteed to make you go faster. So in one case there's no need to make life worse for you, and in the other, it's almost a necessity.
To be fair, though, even in GT3 there was some concept of damage -- the tires. Wall-bouncing could force you to pit a lot more often than normal. I find it hard to criticise any decision Polyphony has made, simply because the results have been spectacular as a whole, but I think just a progressive damage model -- just a little bit of texture modification, a little loss in HP/handling, and keeping the extra tire wear, might have been a good addition, and a little less suspension-of-disbelief reducing.
Out of curiosity, did you read the articles? They all talk about how you used to be able to bounce off opponents and walls in GT3 to better your time, and steps have been taken to alleviate it: while it's true that there is no collision damage, there are penalties for bumping too hard into either. I'll quote the GameInformer article.
Also, for all of you out there who go used to driving like a madman and slamming into walls and other cars, you're about to get a heavy schooling. Major impacts with walls and other cars will penalize you and after the collision you'll be forced to drive at a top speed of 50 km/hour for 10 seconds. So, you may want to think twice before using some poor opponent as a spring on a tight corner.
... Then several OSS distros have a security breach in a short space of time.
OSS advocates respond with "Must be a conspiracy against us by some evil entity", "Hey, look how quick we caught it", "It would have been much worse with Windows".
There's a fundamental distiction here, isn't there? I mean, the servers that host the distributions have been compromised, right? That's like saying Microsoft's source code repository got hacked, not like saying a MS box got hacked.
The reason for a conspiracy theory is that in two months, the source code repos for three different distributions have been hacked. Reserving judgement on the validity of this theory, the theory would hold the same amount of water even if the servers were running Windows Server 2003.
I realized I wanted the magic sword spell [...] but once I got it, the game was trivially easy to beat..
I can see that, but frankly I hated that spell. I got it just to try it, said "this is stupid because it does almost no damage and doesn't require any skill", and never looked back. I can understand how it would take the fun out of the game for sure. Have you tried the other characters? The archer is a whole lot of fun. Drizzt is fun for a little while, too.
seem to get in to the "finding treasure" and the dressing aspect of these games. She really got a kick on just picking up everything she could and trying to get over a million gold
That's hilarious! Our significant others must be related. Mine would love to buy new outfits and would get offended if I picked up something good before her.
On a related note, my wife's fave is the Sorceress. Not because she's the girl, but because many of her spells don't require much aiming. It can be a little tricky to see which way your character s facing when fighting hand-to-hand, especially when there's a lot of stuff going on at once. Oh, and the Sorceress has that nice Karma... er Charisma bonus that lets her get a discount at the shops. How perfect is that! It's just like a Sale! And then I'd *want* to give her stuff to sell for me, and she'd buy me stuff.
She's starting to get into the Archer a little now, though, because you can use Targeting with his most powerful attacks. Very helpful.
Related links and other thoughts....
on
Games For Both Of Us?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I submitted a similar question several months ago. You might want to check it out. It was more geared towards the PS2 and consoles, but there were a lot of good suggestions all over the board.
On that note, by the way, consider a console. I never saw the point in them, as I've been playing computer games for twenty years. But then I got married, and (as you're discovering) the computer games are not nearly as social as the consoles. Consoles are geared towards multiple players, whereas there are very, very few games out there that utilize multiple players on a computer.
On a highlight, there's always something like ePSXe and other console emulators. Get one set up and go rent some PS1 games! They're cheap to buy, now too, and almost any modern computer emulates the PS1 with cycles to spare. Get a couple of joysticks, (or buy PS1 pads and the converters -- they're out there but I have not tried them).
There are also plenty of good old arcade games, so as another poster mentioned, MAME is a great idea. You can, of course, find ROMS online if you are so inclined. Golden Axe, Gauntlet, Double Dragon, Xenophobe. These may not be the best examples, but they're out there.
So in short, I'm clueless for computer games per se. But for PS2/Xbox, my favorite is Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. It's simultaneous two player, cooperative, not split screen, contains plenty of shopping for new items (my wife loves that part -- seriously), and although it's not phenomenally long, it has pretty good replayability. The sequel comes out in the next couple months, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I think only the submitter would call cicadas "June Bugs". Nowhere in the article were they ever called June Bugs. And here is what I think of when someone says June Bugs.
(That and the Bugs Bunny marathon on Cartoon Network.)
I've been using DVD Workshop with a bit of success. It has some limitations that irk me, though, such as only 20 still images in a slideshow and motion menus that can only last about 5 seconds. It's phenomenally limited in a number of fundamental ways, however, and I'm seriously considering splurging on Encore, or maybe the whole Adobe video collection ($1k for Encore + After Effects Std + Premiere Pro + Audition isn't too bad, actually).
So here's a question: It sounds like Encore is leaps and bounds beyond DVD Workshop. Is there anything significant that Encore can't do?
I just heard about Turbo Codes recently, but from a different perspective. I think at the time, they developed these codes with rates so close to the Shannon limit, and no one believed it. Even then, I don't think they were aware of the theoretical basis for why they worked.
Theory finally caught up with them more recently, from the framework of probabilistic networks. It turned out that if you have a Bayesian network with cycles, inference is difficult. But there is a method of belief propagation through message passing that can be used, and it turned out that this is exactly what these guys were doing. (The network itself would include a probabilistic model of noise and its effect on the messages from the sender to receiver.)
> On my i8k in Mandrake it allows either battery or external power. If I plug in / detach the cord, the computer freezes
Just an FYI for ya. I have an i8k relative (m40) and Mandrake (9.2 maybe?), and I had the same problem. However, you can actually fix the freezing problem by -- you guessed it -- recompiling the kernel.
I don't have my laptop with me at the moment, but if you recompile the kernel with ACPI support disabled, you can plug and unplug the power cable to your heart's content without any lockups. I think removing support for it also required removing support for some IBM hotplug-related device. Let me know if you're interested and I can try to get a more specific list.
I have not tried it myself, but you should be able to use the pcHDTV card. It's an HDTV card designed specifically for linux. It won't solve the cable-box problem, but it does support the OTA broadcasts.
It has been supported to some degree in MythTV since October (v0.12), and with continued updates since then (v0.13, v0.14).
Sure, I agree this can't do much to prevent intentional removal of classified documents. I see it more as a way to prevent accidents. Much the same way that they don't allow classified media in an office of a type that can be read by an unclassified machine in the same office. There's nothing stopping someone from doing it intentionally, but it helps stop you from doing something stupid and causing an infraction through mere carelessness.
MakeStorm wrote: I mean seriously, is there some problem this if really fixing, do we need to track paper documents?
Working in a classified environment, I can certainly see a use for this. I imagine if they could, the government would absolutely like to know if a worker carries top secret documents home with them.
Excellent point. Not an urban legend at all. Check out the rules from this Occupational Safety and Health Administration publication. For up to eight hours a day, you can have noise levels at 90 db. But that's it. At 95 db, you need hearing protection for an exposure of over four hours. At 110 db, you aren't allowed more than 30 minutes unprotected.
As this is OSHA, the employer is responsible for making sure these rules are followed. For dorms, of course, just be aware that 24/7 exposure at much lower levels, even under 85 db, can be harmful.
Good points. Additionally, if you are at the point where you have to do it late at night, your choices are to either get a lower grade, take a late day (if you're lucky enough to have one), or do the work late at night. And if you're going to do it, I think it was awfully considerate of the poster to actually attempt to find ways of avoiding waking his roomies.
Speaking for myself, I had a lot of homework in college. I realize that varies by university and by major, but I wasn't the one who had stayed out late partying the night before and screwed himself into having to work on something late at night. I was the one who had stayed up late working on other homework the night before and had to stay up late the next night. My roommates all had different majors, though, all in the Engineering college, and we were all in the same boat. We were lucky to be in an apartment instead of a dorm room, that's for sure....
Now developers have to start deciding whether or not to support higher resolutions, and if they do, what to sacrifice for the increase in calculations required at those higher resolutions.
Yep. Which is why so few games actually support it, even new ones. Disappointing for those of us with HDTVs, but I can understand why so few developers go through the extra effort.
I think you're correct; we're talking about different facets of the same problem.
:)
You're right -- it's easier to make a game (especially a good one) if you can target better hardware. And I'm exaggerating the complexities of development, especially concerning Windows of recent years. (I won't bother to include Linux varieties here, and Windows used to be worse than it is today.)
But at the same time, my point is that it is easier to target fewer varieties of platforms -- sure, GC/PS2 are quite different, but the set is a small discrete space instead of a multidimensional almost-continuous one. And I think this is also a valid point.
These two factors are not mutually exclusive, of course. So while it would be better for developers if the XBox had better hardware, in my opinion (because we're talking about predictions now) I don't think MS is going to officially allow upgrades like this, because I think the degree to which it makes life harder on developers will overwhelm the improvement in games for some people. Instead, they'll just make an XBox2. (I think this was my original point, at least!
I don't think this is related to pride. He has an actual business on the side. Businesses make money. Since he is self employed, what he does for his other company is in danger of being considered "given" to the new company. This could result in his new employer receiving money from licenses granted by his old company.
Pride is not the same thing gobs of cash.
> Except, of course, that console developers get special Development Kit versions of the consoles, that are more powerful and capable of outputting higher resolutions.
You're right, I glossed over that point. The development consoles need to be different, at least to handle debug code at close to a reasonable speed. The point still stands, though, that they have a single target, even if intermediate development is on a different platform. Even with three consoles, three targets is an easier thing to deal with than, say, 5 video cards speeds X 5 cpu speeds = 25 "speed" configurations.
And even then, I've simplified the picture for PCs. Do we keep using DX8, or switch to DX9 now that it's out? Am I going to have an issue with ATI cards if I use pixel shaders? What glitz can I drop for a slow video card -- can the CPU take over some of that work? How about giving more work to the graphics card for a machine slow CPU? When the game is finished a year from now, what will be the base CPU speed we can allow? Not only do I have to worry about different speed configurations, I need to worry about different brands now, too!
> Consoles have limited graphics capability (due to the extremely poor resolution of the standard television)
True, but the limited resolution makes it easier to develop for, not harder. You may be able to do less with that resolution, but damnit, you know what that resolution is going to be and you don't have to worry about someone who wants to run at 2048x1440 and someone who wants to run at 640x480! Anyway, that is passing with HDTVs becoming more common. Many PS2/XBox games have support for progressive scan (e.g. 480p/720p).
> very limited control set (even the Xbox's 4-axis 10 button controller pales in comparison to a mouse with a wheel, and a 102+ keyboard)
That's true. However, there are many games -- entire genres -- where a mouse+keyboard doesn't make sense. Even so, that is simply another hardware restriction, which makes it easier to handle because there is less variety. You don't have to worry about supporting mouse+kbd and a joystick.
> That's like saying Children's Books are better for Authors because children have a lower common denominator.
Not sure I see the analogy. A book for a 2-year old and a book for a 6-year old bear absolutely no resemblance to one another, and trying to make one book (game) to appeal to (work on) all children (configurations) is virtually impossible.
I don't see this ever becoming common.
First, developers would hate it. The beauty of consoles has always been that you know, as a developer, whether the game will work on everyone's system based on a single data point: whether it works in the exact same console you have sitting in your office. They don't want to have to worry about varying systems, and gamers don't want to have to worry about system specs.
It is absolutely in the developers best interest to target the lowest common denominator (i.e. the base system) to have the widest market, even if there ever did get to be a significant percentage of people with upgrades in the wild.
Not only that, it most certainly would void your warranty with MS, so I don't see the average customer ever being interested in it. How many console owners (including XBox owners) are less tech savvy than TiVo owners, and what percentage of TiVos have been upgraded? My guess is that the percent of modded TiVos is actually quite small, and the percentage of modded XBoxes (where the benefit of upgrading is even less apparent) will be even smaller.
Here are correct links:
FriendTech
The FriendTech DreamX XBox project
I wasn't very clear myself, actually. I do receive both an online, itemized statement, as well as the paper one.
Oh, and yeah, checks suck. They're stupid, too. Seriously.
they refuse to allow me to get my bill online and off
I do almost all of my bills online. Interestingly, my credit card company allows me to keep getting my bill in paper even though I pay the bill online. (It's not that interesting in that they're not the only ones doing this for me, but judging from this comment, I'm guessing it's not uncommon to disallow it.)
Here's the problem, though. They keep "offering" to stop sending me my paper bill. First question: why would I want to stop receiving it? It's an automatic reminder that it's due, it leaves me a way to pay by check if I change online banking companies, and it's a nice double-check that they're not screwing me.
Continuing on: when I choose to stop receiving my paper bills (by a simple mouse click online), they won't allow me to go back to receiving them. I might be able to do so if I sent them a letter or something, but still.... Zero incentive to stop receiving the paper versions.
Oh, sure it's painful! Extremely, tremendously painful. But mathematically it all works out.
Take caustics, for instance, like a magnifying glass focusing a light source onto a small point on a surface. This is, and has been, done using raytracing.
I've not actually implemented it, but I'm slightly familiar with the techniques. I imagine some intelligent sampling of incident rays, and maybe adaptive supersampling of these rays, would help a lot with the phenomenal costs.
Photon maps are another solution, and (if I remember correctly), they implement forward ray tracing instead of the usual backward ones. Since you can then cast rays from the light source outward, this can be much, much cheaper.
So, it can't work.
Sure it can! Raytracing can absolutely model diffuse interreflections. However, while radiosity is an analytic (though approximated through a mesh) solution, raytracing typically uses a Monte Carlo sampling technique to achieve this. You can imagine how painfully slow this is, but it works just fine. (And it doesn't require meshing your objects beforehand, either.)
Yeah, I'm a little torn as well. Take GT3's SSR11, for example. On those two 90-deg left-right corners, hitting a wall can be disastrous without any additional penalty. But on some of the longer, smoother corners (esp. the 180's), hitting the wall is almost guaranteed to make you go faster. So in one case there's no need to make life worse for you, and in the other, it's almost a necessity.
To be fair, though, even in GT3 there was some concept of damage -- the tires. Wall-bouncing could force you to pit a lot more often than normal. I find it hard to criticise any decision Polyphony has made, simply because the results have been spectacular as a whole, but I think just a progressive damage model -- just a little bit of texture modification, a little loss in HP/handling, and keeping the extra tire wear, might have been a good addition, and a little less suspension-of-disbelief reducing.
Out of curiosity, did you read the articles? They all talk about how you used to be able to bounce off opponents and walls in GT3 to better your time, and steps have been taken to alleviate it: while it's true that there is no collision damage, there are penalties for bumping too hard into either. I'll quote the GameInformer article.
...
Then several OSS distros have a security breach in a short space of time.
OSS advocates respond with "Must be a conspiracy against us by some evil entity", "Hey, look how quick we caught it", "It would have been much worse with Windows".
There's a fundamental distiction here, isn't there? I mean, the servers that host the distributions have been compromised, right? That's like saying Microsoft's source code repository got hacked, not like saying a MS box got hacked.
The reason for a conspiracy theory is that in two months, the source code repos for three different distributions have been hacked. Reserving judgement on the validity of this theory, the theory would hold the same amount of water even if the servers were running Windows Server 2003.
I realized I wanted the magic sword spell [...] but once I got it, the game was trivially easy to beat..
I can see that, but frankly I hated that spell. I got it just to try it, said "this is stupid because it does almost no damage and doesn't require any skill", and never looked back. I can understand how it would take the fun out of the game for sure. Have you tried the other characters? The archer is a whole lot of fun. Drizzt is fun for a little while, too.
seem to get in to the "finding treasure" and the dressing aspect of these games. She really got a kick on just picking up everything she could and trying to get over a million gold
That's hilarious! Our significant others must be related. Mine would love to buy new outfits and would get offended if I picked up something good before her.
On a related note, my wife's fave is the Sorceress. Not because she's the girl, but because many of her spells don't require much aiming. It can be a little tricky to see which way your character s facing when fighting hand-to-hand, especially when there's a lot of stuff going on at once. Oh, and the Sorceress has that nice Karma... er Charisma bonus that lets her get a discount at the shops. How perfect is that! It's just like a Sale! And then I'd *want* to give her stuff to sell for me, and she'd buy me stuff.
She's starting to get into the Archer a little now, though, because you can use Targeting with his most powerful attacks. Very helpful.
I submitted a similar question several months ago. You might want to check it out. It was more geared towards the PS2 and consoles, but there were a lot of good suggestions all over the board.
On that note, by the way, consider a console. I never saw the point in them, as I've been playing computer games for twenty years. But then I got married, and (as you're discovering) the computer games are not nearly as social as the consoles. Consoles are geared towards multiple players, whereas there are very, very few games out there that utilize multiple players on a computer.
On a highlight, there's always something like ePSXe and other console emulators. Get one set up and go rent some PS1 games! They're cheap to buy, now too, and almost any modern computer emulates the PS1 with cycles to spare. Get a couple of joysticks, (or buy PS1 pads and the converters -- they're out there but I have not tried them).
There are also plenty of good old arcade games, so as another poster mentioned, MAME is a great idea. You can, of course, find ROMS online if you are so inclined. Golden Axe, Gauntlet, Double Dragon, Xenophobe. These may not be the best examples, but they're out there.
So in short, I'm clueless for computer games per se. But for PS2/Xbox, my favorite is Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. It's simultaneous two player, cooperative, not split screen, contains plenty of shopping for new items (my wife loves that part -- seriously), and although it's not phenomenally long, it has pretty good replayability. The sequel comes out in the next couple months, too.