Posts by Thrik

Quote from Quotingmc

On 3/6/2016 at 6:24 PM, Quotingmc said: Everyone's profile has a "Community Reputation" number yet it has no apparent affect or cause.

The only thing in some of the older profiles "Reputation Activity" is status updates but seeing as they are gone now, what actually impacts this number?

Even if something such as likes increase it, what is there to decrease it and what purpose does it have all together?

This number is purely determined by likes. It's your total number of liked posts, but it doesn't affect anything aside from allowing you to track how many of them you've received. /emoticons/[email protected] 2x" title=":)" width="15">

It is a bit sporadic, I assume it's down to the connection it makes in the background to look up names lagging. I have some maintenance updates to install shortly so I'll see if these provide any improvement. If not I'll file it as a recurring issue with the vendor to see if it can be addressed.

Came across an electronica/chill album I like. Really reminds me of Bonobo and Emancipator.

Been enjoying some more laid-back stuff today. OK maybe not so much the first one. :cool:

Hi everyone,

Just in case anyone noticed a little discussion about this on Twitter and/or status feeds, I thought I'd clarify that we've recently been undergoing some changes to the site's structure. Things have slowed down a little, and I'll hold my hands up and say that this is largely because of myself having considerably less time than I have in previous years to keep things moving forward due to various personal things and other projects. While I've no intention of leaving after being part of this wonderful community for 15 years, wearing so many hats has become too much and I've become a little burnt out.

MapCore staff have contributed a lot of time bringing you things like our contests and articles. However, in a bid to make it even easier for them to do so I've decided to move two staff who've been particularly productive during the last couple of years — FMPONE and Sprony— into a more prominent role so that I'm no longer a bottleneck when it comes to decision making and coming up with nice new things. As you'll see from the updated staff directory, this means that my site management role has now been split out and given to them, while for the foreseeable future I will remain on hand for coding, technical administration, and advice. Essentially, day-to-day decisions are now theirs to make.

Both Shawn and Sprony know that we have a great formula here, and that anything going forward is all about enhancing and improving on what's been a great few years for the site. They've done superb work to make that happen and I have no doubt whatsoever that between them and backed up by our experienced and seasoned staff the site will continue to flourish. On that note, a number of new staff from the community have already been approached and will be brought on board to bring their vision of better and more frequent content to life. This is also a good time to point out that if you'd wish to write something, Shawn and Sprony will probably be delighted to hear from you!

Hopefully everyone will be supportive of these changes so that the community can continue to grow and thrive. And hopefully I'll have more time to simply post on the forums now that I have less things to worry about.

I think it's safe to say that my body is ready for this. It's not going to be easy to equal or even surpass its magnificent predecessor though! :oops:

Sorry guys, it's been a pain in the ass but I just got through installing updates that look like they might relieve the speed issues. From what I can tell it's mainly been about caching issues with the software, a recurring theme since the new version came out. Nonetheless I've been testing out all kinds of server-related things but the server itself is very snappy.

My hope is they finally figured it out now. I guess they didn't test enough with forums with 12 years of data like this one.

I've done some things which should hopefully speed things up, including just rebooting the server. I suspect something went wrong and started using more memory than it was meant to. If it isn't better let me know but it seems to be from my current machine.

There are now some maintenance updates to install, so I'll (briefly) take the forums down to do those some evening soon. It looks like various bugs have been fixed including some caching performance stuff so that might help with whatever's causing this nonsense.

Very sad to hear that Mazy. Hope you're doing OK.

He looks about the same to me, just more detailed. :???: Especially compared to his Blood Money rendition. Forgot he looked so ugly in the original Hitman.

Yeah PS4 has been offline-only every time I've played. The game's so broad that there's more than enough to do until FOB is back in action I guess.

Quote from blackdog

So after a Maltese platter, a pizza, and two bottles of wine, I had to clean up after my girlfriend sick. (The sink doesn't drain properly in the apartment we booked.)

I'm still up just in case she's sick again…

Quote from Sprony

Just wait until she's pregnant. Then you can spend you time holding her hair while trying to eat your own food without throwing up as well. Good times.

You know it's love when you don't mind doing that.

Right you early delivery BASTARDS, I'm getting this tomorrow and I can't bloody wait!!!!!

Yeah me neither, you absolute bastard.

Put them on imgur now.

Like an absolute bell end I managed to burn my arm by reaching over my just-boiled kettle for some kitchen paper. The steam did this in about half a second:

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/TNomJlM.jpg]

I was advised to keep it wet and dressed as it's apparently faster healing that way rather than scabbing. Unfortunately this means a lot of pain each time you change the dressing and if you fuck it up and get the adhesive on the damaged skin like I did...

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/ElwD2C1.jpg]

Yes that fucking hurt! So keeping it wet can get stuffed. I'm going to keep it clean but dry so it can hopefully scab over and if it takes longer to heal or scars then whatever. I'm also missing out on swimming because of this nonsense, so hopefully once scabbed I can resume.

I know what you mean, I've literally grown up with these crazy-ass characters like Snake and Revolver Ocelot. I played my first Metal Gear Solid game when I was... 11? And I'm now 28. It's all so silly but when you've spent so much time following the series it becomes something else. What else has run for so long and been consistently good? Not many games, mostly Japanese ones.

To see a huge missing part of their evolution as characters brought to life and also the best Metal Gear game yet in terms of gameplay is going to be brilliant. Also the fact that it looks like we'll see the return of some other much-loved characters (although perhaps not in a lovable way) — wonderful.

Wow that is one off-the-charts engagement! Congratulations!!

Absolutely excellent reviews across the board. What a relief after hearing about all this turbulent development.

Twin Snakes is an interesting one. I personally prefer to replay it over MGS1 because the latter is just so dated now that I can't enjoy it. It was excellent in its time but I think that 3D games started to become somewhat timeless-looking as of around the PS2 generation, and games before then really haven't aged very well at all.

I don't believe there to be anything wrong with Twin Snakes' voice acting. There is the odd bit of dialogue that perhaps isn't delivered with as much success as in MGS1, however I would say that the performances are better more often than they are worse.

For example, Snake clearly sounds a lot more like he does in the later games when Hayter got more comfortable with the role; the same goes for Colonel, who sounds more like 'he' did in MGS2 and MGS4. The Ninja was voiced better (wasn't just the same voice actor as DARPA Chief), Sniper Wolf was better, and the original actors were retained for almost everyone else. Naomi losing her accent was no problem and it never made sense for Mei Ling to have a non-US accent as she wasn't Chinese, both of which were retained for MGS4.

Some gameplay mechanics make the game a bit easier, but that's why you play on extreme which provides a superbly challenging game. Everything else I would say is pretty much a triumph for Twin Snakes, from the graphics to the music to the cutscene direction. The main theme was dropped, but you might notice it's not in later MGS games either because of legal reasons.

Admittedly the oft-mentioned flip Snake does over a rocket was a bit excessive, but aside from that the cutscenes were much better in almost every way. I mean I just can't take the originals seriously when compared. Better music, better dramatic timing, better dialogue delivery, better cinematography. Considering how important cutscenes are in MGS games, this matters a lot yet is frequently overlooked.

OK I went off on a bit of a tangent there, sorry. But I do think that Twin Snakes often being so readily written off is an injustice to what is an excellent and faithful remake. It might not get everything right, but neither did MGS1. Nostalgia does give MGS1 a plus, but then I get nostalgic about both.

If choosing which to play today, after drawing up a list of pros and cons I always lean towards Twin Snakes. And if I'm recommending to someone who've never played either, I find it very difficult to believe they won't prefer Twin Snakes over MGS1.

Indeed, I've only played it a little because holy shit I don't have the time needed for this game, but it's like the ultimate gaming equivalent of Lego with built-in adventure mechanics for easy role playing.

I can only imagine how wonderful it must be to play it as a kid. Children are unsurprisingly a huge part of its audience.