I R PLAYING TOO MUCH FAR CRY 3

Got myself an N64 off ebay for £19, bloody bargain. I have Lylat Wars and Wave Race 64 on their way as well Spotted an awesome games bundle on ebay - Goldeneye, Zelda OOT, Smash Bros and Pokemon Arena for £17 with a day to go. I hope it stays low, I want all of those games.

N64 may be my favourite console of all time.

Too bad you live across the pond, I just got a bunch of great 64 games on a trade-in at work today.

Got my DB15-to-USB connector built for my $2.99@Goodwill olde schoole MS Sidewinder joystick, and have been spending the last day or two trying to get Rise Of Flight not to play like a WWI Airplane Crashing Simulator. Steep learning curve a bit.

Game is pretty as hell though, and the plane really does fly and "feel" like a pile of baling wire, canvas, and flexing wood. Kind of difficult to fly straight, what with continually getting shoved around by wind currents. I can usually take off, and often even land, but holy shit, trying to actually shoot something, air- OR ground-borne, is a whole other story.

Also, super bonus points for planes whose wings rip off if you try to dive too fast and then suddenly go into a hard climb.

ALSO. On this aeroplane kick, i also picked up Wings Of Prey, because it was reasonably well-reviewed and for some reason Amazon had it for download for $6 with the DLC, instead of the normal $30 or so? First software i have gotten through their download service. We'll see how that goes in the future i suppose.

Game is cool with multiple caveats. The "realistic" and "sim" modes are total bullshit, really fucked up implementation, really wonky physics model, and the player vs. AI difficulty is completely fucking wrong.

HOWEVER. Played as an arcade flyer, it is actually pretty solid. Another very attractive game graphically. The sound is kind of pants, but can be mostly ignored. The physics model still shows some wonkiness even with most of the sketchily implemented "sim" features disabled, but you can deal with it a bit more. Reasonably fun arcade flight shooter.

BUT. The Wings Of The Luftwaffe DLC is TOTALLY skippable. Adds nothing, other than serving to foster the suspicion that the developers might perhaps be Russian, and perhaps made some sort of internal decision to make the German campaign insufferably frustrating, and in some cases nearly impossible to win? [This is not just me being flight sim rusty having not played one in fifteen years or so either. After the fact, i went around and read some more, and apparently, this add-on is generally very badly reviewed for this reason.] Either that, or they just halfassed it, and shoved it out the gate in a very unbalanced and not-at-all-playtested state. Because: the thing is a complete piece of shit, honestly. No sense in spending the extra to have it, even if the extra is only like $2. If i could sell just the DLC it back to Amazon, i would.

The main game is worth a go if one wants to mindlessly blast WWII planes out the sky, in an arcade manner, with pretty pictures to look at.

As with all flyers though, joystick required. I mean literally, there are few things that are less fun than trying to fly a plane with a keyboard. It is even worse/more shitty/frustrating to me than trying to drive a car sim without a wheel/pedals.

Further research shows that the developers for WOP are indeed: Russian(how was that for a guess?).

So the futile shit-ness of the German add-on campaign does make a frustrating but also vaguely hilarious sort of sense.

On the topic of fight sims - this looks like it could be a cool WWII sim: http://warthunder.com/en/
Free open beta too. I'm downloading it now. I'll report back when I manage to get a game in.

Interesting, so basically, all of the current decent WWII flight sims come from the same place. OG IL-2 Sturmovik, Wings Of Prey, IL-2 Cliffs Of Dover, War Thunder, The New IL-2 Battle Of Stalingrad thing that is in the works between the IL-2 devs and the Rise Of Flight doods, etc etc. Those Russians like their flight sims for sure.

I guess that is a good example of getting the most out of your IP and physics engine.

I still am not into the multiplayer thing, pretty much purely due to my curmudgeonly luddite gaming tastes. And my experience with sims online is not too encouraging either, though i wonder if old timey planes would be better than all of the various driving/racing sims that are muli-player capable. From how people talk about it, the online element of Rise of Flight is supposed to be pretty good, though i suspect that this might have something to do with the flightmodel learning curve weeding out most/all of the most impatient and trollish douchebags who might be inclined to attempt it.

Yeah they most certainly do, also check out DCS black shark. Super realistic attack helo sim. Its pretty nuts.

Hopefully its downloaded now. I like that it has all sorts of modes, from arcade bullshit physics and fun to adjusting flap angles and being concerned about angle of attack and rate of climb and I imagine there to be a few graduation in between the two.
Its been what I've been looking for in a sim. Flying the jets in BF3 is cool but the handling was nerfed on the xbox for some stupid reason so dog fights become a bit lame quick as its very hard to jink and the draw distance limitation does make engaging ground targets difficult. To be fair it is really impressive that they have an engine of that magnitude running on 8 year old tech with 512mb of ram. This should give me something else to get my flying funz on.

In other news, this game is really looking awesome to me?



Once i figured out that my problems with 2033 were more or less framerate-related and i then reduced its graphics slightly, that game became kind of a surprisingly good time for me(picked it up for random giggles without knowing much about it other than that the_bleeding liked it, at $5 on i think a steam summer sale?). It is one of the few games where i played through it enough times to actually almost complete all of the achievements and shit.

Last Light of course looks amazing graphically(i hope that i will be able to make it look well enough and run a decent enough framerate as with the previous) and the things they have added i am really into. The original was a shitload of fun for me to play through stealthlike, and it looks like they have maybe fleshed out that aspect a bit more for this one as a playing choice.

The weapon mod and slot utilization thing looks better to me too. One of the few things that struck m as odd in the first one, was how often you would be ditching weapons resources for new ones; it didn't seem to jibe 100% with the post apocalyptic vibe. Being able to carry multiple weapons of the same class makes more sense, as does modifying what you have instead of only having the option of just buying a new slightly modified version of the same. The latter is more of a subtle change obviously, because game mechanics-wise, it is about the same, you spend some amount of money to acquire a slightly updated weapon. It is only a smarter way to do it IMO, for this specific game world's immersion.

I won't be able to afford the thing until it shows up on a Steam sale a year or two from now, but i am looking forward to when that happens.

I think I have 2033 on Steam, but my PC is fuckered right now so I am running off the wife's laptop until I get the power jack input on mine replaced (again).

I love ASUS but fuck their power jacks could be better. Granted both mine broke under some decent enough pressure, but I have had/seen other laptops take way more of a beating without much of a bruise. In fact, my wife's laptop is an older ASUS that is a fucking tank, so it may just be my specific model. I know their "gaming" line uses hex power plugs, so maybe that will become more of a common thing?

All that said, I think I just need to splooge on a laptop whenever I have a good enough job to afford one.

I have been thinking lately more of a desktop build should money fall out of the sky upon me. I love this laptop, but it will wind up out of date(actually if i could afford to try them, i am pretty sure that any of the more recent crop of games released in the last couple months would be a bit much for it to swing at highish detail levels) and it would be nice to be able to just plug in a new videocard in there instead of having to replace the whole thing. CPU power hasn't changed too much, nor have RAM requirements. But videocards have been moving right along, and games are now asking a lot of processing power of the cards as well(all those pretty exploding destructable cement bits and dust/haze/lighting effects in Metro being prime examples).

I mean, i would love to be able to go to some insane Sager SLI laptop arrangement, but i will just never be able to afford(or even if i could afford, to justify) that tier of electronics device. A i5/i7 quad core of decent speed, a solid amount of memory and whatever is going for the middle-to-high tier of current videocards would probably do the trick for me, for a while to come, just as this then-upper-middle-tier laptop has been serving me for the last 2-3 years, and is still solidly plugging away at 90% of what is available.

For portable recording this thing will continue to rule(especially if i am stuck with just eight channels incoming for very much longer), but having a bit more horsepower for editing/mixing and gamestuff is becoming an increasingly attractive concept to me, and i am simply not seeing very many options that are on equal footing to what this was when i bought it for $600. A modernized adjusted comparable level in current gaming laptop tech looks about double that now, which is the point that i start to think that a properly modular desktop build probably makes more sense to me.

Still too broke to do anything about anything anyhow, so maybe by the time i am able to upgrade, a good laptop solution will present itself. At the moment, a desktop seems to look better to me though.

How are you killing them? What does the connector look like on those? My older Asus is just a standard type barrel plug?

And i thought that you got this laptop recently? What would you be looking at to replace it with, should said scenario of enough money coming in to allow it, materialize?

Both times the plug has been yanked from the jack in a not pleasant way (feet, cats, cat feet etc....) Like I said it is understandable they broke, I just have done/seen worse to other laptops with no problem. It is the old barrel plug, but it is a straight plug as opposed to a 90-degree plug, so it sticks out of the side of the computer a good 2-3" where it can easily get fucked with. My wife's older ASUS has a 90-degree plug and it has never had issues despite taking much more punishment.

I got the laptop about 3 years back now, it is still good by all means just inconvenient to work on. As for the new computer, I would probably want a pretty similar setup, though probably built around the 3000 (I think) series i5s (I have a mobile i7, which are solid but do not perform as well), maybe the new 3rd gen ones but IIRC I heard something about them running hot.

Probably 8 gigs of ram with room to expand in the future, a 2gig video card all sitting on an ASUS mobo in a nice cool case (doubt I would be serious enough to go liquid on the cooling, but at least a well-designed case with some nice fans.) It would sit under my big office table and I'd probably run it into a 23" screen.

Not a lot more power than my laptop if you go purely by numbers, but I could get much better performance out of a setup like that then what's running in my laptop for not a lot of money. This is all of course based on need, if I do go the way of a programmer and I want to work from home (especially if I want to build games on the side) I will need something that can compile, render and run programs quickly. Especially if I want to do some virtual machine bullshit magic to test software on various platforms.

My mate gave me Fahrenheit the other day, this game is so awesome. A playable movie! Who'da thunk it?

I really suck at the bits where you have to match the colours though, that office bug fight was intense.

The new Humble Bundle has some fantastic fucking games (Hotline Miami, Capsized, Awesomenauts and Proteus are all cool) and of course is on the cheap and charitable side of things. I really suggest snagging this one.

https://www.humblebundle.com/

If you guys know where the video game MUSIC thread is we might as well move this there, but, check out this motherfucker.



100% boss. Check out the rest of his channel.

Dota2 has eaten my soul. I started in february. I have 396 matches under my belt. Average time is 45 minutes. And then theres menu time and load time, i'm pretty sure my steam says the client has been open for 800 hours. What am i doing with my life.

Also mechwarrior continues to be hilarious.

Just bout a few things on the steam summer sale, even though i haven't really been playing anything lately.

Hardly started with:

Shift 1
Shift 2
Dirt 3


Still to get to:

Samorost 2
Spirits
Machinarium
Brothers In Arms 1, 2, 3.
IL-2 1946
System Shock 2

And now additionally:

Dishonored
Crysis 2

I suppose it might just be a it's-summer-and-i-don't-feel-like-it sort of thing. In general i guess i really just tend to play more, in the dark corners of the wintertimes. So this is kind of like collecting and burying acorns for later i suppose.

Rogue Legacy is awesome and 20% off at the minute. It's definitely the best/most addictive platformer I've played in ages. It has RPG elements as well.