Reply With QuoteOh I definitely realised that, just wanted to set the record straight.Originally Posted by demagogue;2110[RIGHT
[RIGHT]963](It's a joke anyway...)
I kind of agree, at the same time thinking "isn't a keyboard just a large game pad with lots of redundant buttons?", just to play Devil's advocate.
Oh I definitely realised that, just wanted to set the record straight.[RIGHT]963](It's a joke anyway...
Eva is right though. Saitek makes cheap, flimsy garbage and Logitech is great with high-end stuff (expensive mice, the G25/G27 wheels) but their consumer-level shit is garbage. Microsoft's peripherals sometimes have questionable design but their build-quality is always great.
I have no issues with my $25 Logitech joystick. Best flight stick for the price I've ever owned.
I have an Explorer mouse from... probably 2003 that still works as well as it ever did. Meanwhile my $70 Razer mouse (comfortable as it is) can't survive a fall from my desk. The plastic spindle that the wheel rides on snapped, so I replaced it with a metal one that I had to create from a finishing nail... Then I dropped it again and left click stopped working. Yes I'm too hard on the mice but I guarantee both the Explorer mouse and the 360 pad could easily survive multiple similar falls.
/ranting because I just finished fixing this stupid Deathadder for like the fourth time. Any suggestions on a gaming mouse brand that's built more durably?
Playing the waiting game... Yesterday I came home to find this weirdo burnt smell surrounding my computer. Not quite sure what went kerfizzle - I suspect it's the graphics card, although it seems to have happened either while Windows was shutting down the evening before or (yikes!) while the computer was switched off. I'll be sending it in tomorrow, since it's still well within the warranty period. Here's hoping I won't have to reinstall everything afterwards.
Anyway - this gives me a good reason to spend less time playing games and more trying to finish Infinite Jest...
I've been using a Saitek Rat7 for 2 years. Despite what's been said, it's solid and nothing has broken. You just have to make sure you have a very clean mouse pad or the sensor goes a little nuts. I've never dropped it (it's wired, I dont like wireless mice) but if I did I'm sure it would survive. Its base is aluminum and if any of the plastic fringes did break, it came with spares to suit your tastes (textured, non textured, etc) and I'm sure replacements would be easy to get. But still, I've had no problems with it.
It's much better than anything I've used from logitech. But I haven't used much.
http://cyborggaming.com/prod/rat7.htm
Just my $0.02
Finished Portal 2 and moved on the DX:Human Revolution.
This is the most up to date I've been in a very long time.
It's kinda awkward to get into after Just Cause-ing for a while, since it's not meant to be as smooth really (incidentally, did anyone else think Just Cause 2 actually did Spiderman better than Spiderman games? Albeit upside down. When you're gliding around with the parachute "web swinging" via the ground anyway).
It's good so far, (ie up to the police station bit just after some early side missions). I think the fact that I don't despise Invisible War with every fibre of my being helps a lot there. Mostly it seems like IW but bigger. A lot bigger. Which answers its biggest problem.
The whole sneaking/third-person thing is so dumb though. It makes you invisible unless they are on top of you, which is ridiculous. If you're not using it they can see your head sticking out just fine all of a sudden. It's awkward as hell too. Since the decor is unlikely to give you much help in most normal circumstances, half the city has apparently been bulk ordering bar fridges so there's enough boxes absolutely everywhere for you to get around.
And what the hell is with ladders? 20yrs worth of 3d games and now we can't let people do it themselves. When I think of how much programming, testing and animation went into all this crap. Just give me a fucking lean. And an actual melee attack.
What the hell is wrong with people?
Anyway, It seems like it's pretty well written so far. The side missions are nicely in context and filled with character and detail (not just random stranger offers you money to kill someone for some reason).
I ballsed up the first mission completely, but went back and did it better. I sort of feel bad about that, since the game was perfectly happy to carry on. But this problem occurs a lot in games with options. All the choices seem equal at this point. Your agency in the situation isn't exactly clear, so you have no idea how anything is going to go and you're bound to screw up. If I felt like I honestly screwed up I would play on more readily. But negative options at this point seem like something for a replay instead of realistic outcomes arising from the circumstances.
I screwed up the hostages bit. They all yell not to walk through the door and I couldn't find the damn vent entrance, so I left it. Of course the realistic option there is to radio it in and let the bomb squad deal with it. They'll have a much better hacker than me etc etc (that's another thing; playing this gave me a vibe of Swat 4 rather a lot. So I was reaching for the radio all the time. Only it wasn't there). But doing nothing results in them all dying for some mysterious reason (I think it was on a timer too, but knowing that's I'd have made a different choice).
Then there's the stand off at the end of the mission; I picked letting him walk the first time, since I didn't have a gun on him or anything. So he walks out with the hostage and they are both gunned down by trigger happy SWAT (and somehow this is my fault). So I do it again and this time talk him down part of the way. After a much longer conversation he leaves by himself and somehow SWAT aren't waiting outside.
Neither of these situations seems like honest fails, so I go back and try to win. It'd be better if I didn't feel like that is all I'm saying. Games like this often run into trouble there, particularly early on. I appreciate it's hard.
Anyway, I'm enjoying strolling around town talking my way through most situations. Obviously you can sneak the police station, just from looking at it. But I think that'd be really irritating. Was really glad you can just walk in after a chat with some old compadres.
For me, as balled up as some aspects of the gameplay were, each area was still vastly superior to the first game. Despite the flaws in stealth, it was vastly superior to the original game and anything except dedicated sneakers like Thief (and, IMHO, even some "stealth" games).
The real letdown was in the writing. What happened to the society? Mechs are everywhere in this series, when in the original even mechs were a bit of a minority (ie, NSF guy talking about how useful just one mech would be). Or the electronic locks on everything? The first just had a more plausible setting which made it a much stronger work.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the DX1 style controls were more awkward on a gamepad. I don't want to just say "DUH CONSOLITIS", but that's really all I can think, seeing as they must have known the the fans would have been gunning for a similar system to the original, so it must have been to draw in new crowd, most of which would be playing it on gamepads.
Or more probably, the devs themselves aren't PC gamers. No need to attribute that to a day one desire to reach new crowds.
Could be, but I seem to remember that their initial work was mostly just having the whole dev team play the shit out of the original. I guess there's always the chance they were playing the console port and were saying "hey, what the fuck is up with this first person, leaning and ladders shit?".
Call me strange if you want, but for me it was precisly the flaws and the rampant glitches that made the game so enjoyable. Sure, it was superior from a stealth point of view, but no other game has made me laugh as hard as Deus Ex.
The original DX had a great amount of charm. It's something modern games can't get away with very well because the production values are so high. It's hard to have little throw-away details in there that you don't feel were planned by committee & vetted by 10 focus groups and demographic analysis. And even the glitches in old games could have charm like they couldn't have for a AAA game today. That's not to say that objectively speaking modern games don't have "better features" all around; they do. It's definitely an x-factor kind of thing. (Edit: And to preempt "that debate again", I'm not calling for a return to the old ways. You can't turn back the clock nor should we want to. Let the indies & homebrews have that amateurish charm today.)
Guys, guys, there's a DXgen thread, go take this conversation over there so the rest of us don't have to read it.
Yeah guys, dont post about games you are now playing in a thread about games you are now playing! GTFO please!
As for ladders, I honestly dont see the issue. I can kinda buy the 3-rd person popout argument, but the locking you into the ladder is absolutely fine as long as there isn't a long delar or pause between getting or on off. I prefer that to HL1 style slippery-slope where if you dont align yourself perfectly you can randomly fall off. And getting on/off those laters could be a bitch too.
SKYRIM HI RES TEXTURE PACK SKYRIM HI RES TEXTURE PACK
THREE GIGABYTES!
I think I can tell the difference...
Good for you.
Well last night I finished off the final boss (main quest line wise anyway) of .hack part 4, meaning that I've now finished off the series. The end boss was somewhat challenging, but not overly difficult. Overall story of the 4 games was wrapped up well. So in all a good end to an excellent game series.
Thoughts on the 4 games as a whole: Great amount of side stuff to do (there is endless side stuff to do technically in each of the games), the same music and level appearances are used in all 4 games which does get a bit "same old, same old" after a while. But on the overall whole it was all quite good and never too hard. That said I've yet to do the final optional dungeon which is apparently difficult.
And now with .hack finished (of the original series, I will do the 3 .hack GU ps2 games at a later point) it's time to get started on Skyrim. I had wanted to get a better graphics card before I started on it, but ah what the hell.
Staying in first person and pressing against cover is just as effective as using the cover-mechanic, and you get the added bonus of being able to actually shoot for shit. For that matter you don't even need to press against it, it uses the normal 'if you can't see the enemy's face they can't see you' line of sight mechanic.
@ icemann: Thanks for your thoughts on the .Hack series. I had the first one years ago, but never got the urge to finish the series. It was nice to get concise opinions of the games as you progressed.
I've not done any testing or anything, but that doesn't accord with my experience on a couple of occasions.
I can recall going down some of those stairs in the labs at the Sarif plant in mission one and being spotted in FP but not 'in cover'. Which is particularly interesting because being in cover view shows that your head is sticking out quite clearly.
There have been a couple of instances where I'm crouched at the end of a corridor junction type area and the patrolling person stops about a half step out. He spotted me straight away when I was just crouched by the doorway against the wall (something to do with there being a large and unsettling shape at his feet). In 'cover' he ignored me.
Alerted foes also seem to spot you very easily when you aren't in cover, but less so when you are. This is to say nothing of crossing between cover; normally crouched you can be spotted from across the space by people looking your way. If you use the flippy roll tumble to get from one cover to another you basically have to do it right in front of somone's face to get spotted.
But I haven't done any serious testing. Maybe if I was looking at the ground through all this it wouldn't matter.
That said, the cover mechanic does serve as a subsitute for manual leaning, and is the only way to do the quick jumps across cover gaps, so it's probably not a good idea to avoid it out of spite
Personally, I found using and not using the stealth mechanic as fundamentally changing the game experience; it almost feels like two different games. I played the first half making a generous use of wall hugging (seeing no point in some augs like the see-through-walls) and the second using strictly FPS mode (where the see-through-wall aug become my best friend). Both were very different, yet very enjoyable for their own reasons. It's a bit weird to have to artificially impose that limitation on myself, but I did appreciate having the choice in how I experienced the game.
Posting Permissions
