Posts by Thrik

Wtf? I never came across that mission in the PS3 version. Sounds positively terrible.

Trip mines + ladders =

Haha yeah, you could do some incredibly annoying things with those trip mines. I really wish they were in Team Fortress, although the TF2 sticky bombs were close. xD

As someone who hasn't played it yet I'll pay, but I can see how it's a tough sell for those who already had it. I find it hard to take a strong stance against though because of the sheer time put into it, and they deserve some payback — I just hope it gets shared between ALL contributors!

I'm still waiting for Xen before I play though, lmao.

Got to live life to the full lads, we'll all be in coffins before long.

It shouldn't be too bad if it does, with credit cards you can generally get it all written off.

Konami is off the god damned rails right now. I'm just thankful that Metal Gear Solid 5 is too far done to be cancelled.

Quote from D3ads

Why is Superman portrayed as a villain..?

Sounds a lot more interesting than the predictable tosh a Superman movie could easily end up as.

As for Batman, it's not a stretch to imagine that a completely gadget-reliant dude like Batman would use a full-on endoskeleton or something to combat ultimate adversaries.

Aside: Holy shit Ridley Scott is 77.

Yeah, might replay it one day. I finished it a long time ago and as an overall package it was absolutely superb. It had some issues with variety and pacing, but it built up an excellent foreboding atmosphere that is unlike anything I've experienced in another game.

Maybe replaying it isn't the best idea because it'll remind me of the less great parts, but my memory of the game is really positive. A very unique creepfest.

That's just filming though, right? There's surely an absolute tonne of CGI to put together, and everything else that comes after getting the raw footage.

With that said, it does seem like this film's been on its way since forever. It's the Metal Gear Solid 5 of movies right now.

Looks absolutely wonderful. I'm so 100% on board with this after loving things like Battlefield 2142 and PlanetSide.

Quote from knj

Am I the only one sooo cautious about this game ?

I WANT IT TO BE the best shit ever, but EA you know right ?

DICE has never let me down, man... I even liked Battlefield 4. D:

The talent creating this makes me ridiculously excited about the possibilities here.

Lovely chilled electronica/rock track from Mt. Wolf, it's a slow burner so give it a few minutes:

'Burgs' from the same EP on Spotify is also quite wonderful.

I'll be playing through the Director's Cut so I can do the new bosses, but I did love the piss/higher contrast filter to be honest. I don't know if they made it optional, but if they did but I'll be putting it straight back on.

Agreed, they did a terrible job there. The ones in the director's cut are meant to be much better though, so I might opt to play that version if I ever replay — although when I last checked, there were some weird lighting changes and stuff that I thought looked a bit shitter? As in, they changed the actual light sources. For example, the mood of Sarif's office was quite different.

[Edit] Oh yeah, this is what I'm talking about:

You can certainly get a good TV now Chris, but what I really meant was that now is a very difficult time to buy a TV because there hasn't been a particularly significant jump in quality for quite some time now — and now that Panasonic has stopped making plasmas, it's actually harder to find a TV with good black levels compared to a few years ago.

It's not an exaggeration to say that my 2009 plasma still kicks the shit out of the black levels that most TVs my family and friends who've bought them in the last year or so have, and at least two thirds of what's in your average department store.

My dad was gobsmacked when he recently upgraded his 2010 Panasonic to a 2014 Samsung LED-backlit LCD for the same price and it was actually a significant downgrade in quality. Mostly because of grey blacks and viewing angle wash-out, which no amount of colour grading or tone adjustment could fix. Black levels are no joke!

To put it another way, the TV market is currently a lot like the PC monitor market. There are great options if you know what you're looking for, but the majority of consumer devices have relatively shitty panels. Hence why I outlined what those better options are, to avoid being the guy who wonders why you'd possibly buy a £400 (IPS) monitor when the same size can be found for £150 (TN) because you assume all modern units are good.

When I was looking into this a month or so ago I was finding it very difficult to find any 4K TVs that didn't have significant failings in other regards. There are lots of sites out there that do all kinds of in-depth testing, but the key things I look out for are:

• Black levels
• Colour rendition
• Viewing angles

As simplistic as this might sound, just like with monitors there are still endless TVs that fail to meet these basic requirements to a satisfactory level. No matter what TV you consider, find a site like HDTVtest that objectively measures things like black levels, because nothing will piss you off more than playing a dark scene in a game and everything is just a washed-out grey rather than black, or when you don't sit literally right in the middle of the sofa in front of your TV everything starts to fade.

Regarding 4K specifically, the premium on them is so high that I would seriously just get a significantly cheaper set for now and then upgrade again in a few years. It's literally impossible to see the difference between it and 1080p beyond a very short distance (if you Google for 'TV size graph' you'll see the specifics), and in most games and TV channels we're still getting sub-1080p so we're yet to even see the true benefits of that resolution — let alone 4K which is years away from being widespread.

The key thing to keep in mind is that you can get affordable 4Ks at the moment, but the money you spend on the 4K premium could be used to get you a TV with much better handling of those bullet points above. In other words, picture quality vs resolution.

Finally, the LED thing. There are really just two variations of this term when it comes to TVs: OLED and LED-backlit.

OLED has been considered the holy grail of TVs for years, and only this year have affordable consumer sets started to appear (when I say consumer, I mean ~$5,000 rather than ~$20,000). They live up to their reputation in terms of incredible picture quality that absolutely decimates both LCD and plasma, but even these highly expensive early models still have teething issues that mean they should be avoided. Give them 2–4 years and they will absolutely dominate the TV world. The reason this technology is so excellent is because each pixel has its own individual light, allowing a black pixel to be 100% black or eye-searingly bright. This has a massive effect on quality and image depth, and actually no TV has ever achieved truly 100% black like an OLED can.

LED-backlit is basically just a better kind of LCD than the previous formats. There isn't really anything that's particularly different about it to other LCDs from a viewing perspective, because all LCDs are characterised by a backlight that sits behind all of the pixels. This means that the white pixels share the same light as the dark pixels, limiting true contrast and image depth — which is why they use various tricks like making the image darker and lighter on the fly. If you are going to get LED-backlit, consider more recent ones that have zones where there are actually a number of smaller backlights behind the screen. This isn't as good as the per-pixel lighting OLED achieves, but it does divide the screen up into 50–150 little squares which allows for some of the benefits.

You might also see quantum dots as a feature. These are cool, they have benefits, but they still have the limitations of LCDs and so they're still not as good as OLED. They're effectively a stepping stone between the image quality of traditional LCD vs OLED by allowing for pixels to be brightened up more effectively, which lets the backlight remain relatively dark while individual pixels become very light.

This is actually a terrible time to buy a TV precisely because of us being on the cusp of OLED becoming mainstream. To put it into perspective, OLED is the first truly huge jump forwards in quality since we went from CRTs to LCDs/plasmas, and just like back then we're still in the awkward 'early models are very expensive and have build/quality issues' phase. This is why I wouldn't go too crazy right now, and definitely don't pursue the cutting-edge end of things like 4K and OLED because future proofing just isn't possible right now.

I had stutters like that in The Sims 4 (lol) and it turned out to be the network connectivity. Try disabling it within the game and/or your OS to see if it helps.

I'd be surprised if it did, but it's just yet another of endless stupid fucking PC gaming issues I've experienced over the years, so it's now on my list of things to try when certain symptoms occur.

God it's refreshing to just put one 60GB disc into a console and play.