Posts by Thrik

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.

Interesting, I always assumed this game was completely built around its Wii U game pad aiming gimmick and never paid much attention to it, but I guess it must be considered a worthwhile play in its own right to be ported. I do actually have a Wii U so if it's a legitimately good game I could get it for that...

They actually released an update for UC3 not long after release, adding an option to the settings that restores the aiming to the UC1/UC2-like way. It makes the game feel so much better it's not even funny, that really should be the default now.

Quote from marks

Uncharted: The Outsourced Edition

The Bluepoint remasters I've played (God of War Collection and Metal Gear Solid HD Collection) have been superb so that's all good with me.

Absolutely splendid. I know that the plethora of remakes are often criticised, but why wouldn't you want this wonder of a series to be preserved in the best possible quality? Definitely adding this to my collection for years of replays to come.

Yeah, @jackophant is right about it being a drag. It's always a challenge finding a balance between not destroying staff sanity and keeping spam out, because of course it's possible to make everything super-restrictive but when you've got 10–20 people signing up every day (that excludes ones blocked by automated spam detection) that's a serious pain in the ass and queues will inevitably build up.

I think that the 'must have X posts before posting threads' will work quite nicely in that it'll discourage hit-and-run spam and drive participation in existing threads. Like Sprony I don't like the idea of a promotion forum because frankly, if we don't want it in our regular forums I'd rather avoid having what is effectively a 'spam bucket' forum. Our registration form does actually say that hit-and-run spam isn't OK and that promotional threads are only welcome from established members, so I think this could work out.

Quote from jackophant

Rather than resetting the signatures, would removing all the metadata from them work so that we can reorganise them ourselves?

Possibly, although that's quite a bit more work and could lead to even more broken signatures as it'd effectively be search/replace stuff. It'd take longer as I'd need to simulate it on a test DB a bunch of times. I'd rather invest my time into other enhancements than pursuing this for too long.

Another approach that I'm considering is creating an announcement that signatures will be going live a week later, and that members should take the opportunity to update their signatures before then so that they show up correctly and adhere to the new limits (few lines or whatever). Then if non-adhering signatures appear we re-save and/or nuke them, which will be a bit of a PITA for staff for a little while but will probably result in less crapped-up threads.

Quote from laminutederire

@Thrik I strongly think that it should have been preserved since 5 posts isn't that big of a deal, you provide feedback for other older member, or post in general threads or even in extreme off topic, that would have helped people getting more feedback, because when I looked at the ten first thread at the beginning of the week, in the contest section, there were 7 people who only posted in their threads and only there, which is a bit sad, because if everyone would have done that, well it would be awkward ! It is too late to do something now, but this should be said at least one time.

On the spam subject, could it be more the consequence if the more intense flow to the website rather than this software update?

I think I'll bring this restriction back, but in this particular case I do think it was correct to allow free posting in the contest section simply because it's a cross-site contest with reddit and disallowing members there to not easily post threads here wouldn't go down very well. Nonetheless I understand what you're saying and will consider how to re-implement the minimum post requirement in a way that ideally encourages participation in the creative forums.

And yeah, the spam almost certainly has increased because of traffic. We've clearly ended up on the radar of spammers who don't just use bots to sign up, but actual people. This makes it much harder to fight but the minimum posting requirement will hopefully serve as an effective deterrent.

Haha, yeah you are right that it is because of the contest. We did have a system in place that allows new threads only after a certain number of replies to existing threads (first five, then just one). It was disabled for the contest because of the obvious requirement of people being able to post their stuff.

With that said, it is possible that with our updated software I can configure this more precisely so that the restriction doesn't apply in the contest forums. The spam is something we've all been battling with, and automated means aren't proving effective because it's actually human beings signing up — so revisiting the earlier system will be a good step I think. I'll look into doing that this week.

Just to give an update on the signatures, I did enable them last week however the forum almost immediately exploded due to all of the old signatures being broken and screwing up threads. I've been discussing with the vendor how to just reset them all, which basically requires some database stuff but I aim to do this week following a cautious backup. So they'll be back soon... I swear!

Absolutely excellent.

That new trailer is much better, I really like that the much-criticised annihilation of the city is serving as the catalyst for what's happening in this film. Unlike in Avengers where there was a similar amount of absolute destruction yet it seemed like nobody really gave that much of a shit after.

It's certainly not gamer-friendly, but then you can buy both consoles for the price of a single decent gaming PC so I don't have that much of a problem with it within the scope of consoles. Ironically enough though, there are less platform exclusives around these days so it's more of a pain in the ass to buy the second console because there's so little stuff that I need it for — except those sweet-ass few games.

The XBone sure needs some decent exclusives that aren't repackaged old games or sequels. This is like the only thing I'm anticipating coming out for it. I wouldn't mind buying the console if there were anything to do with it.

Welcome back friend. What happened?

I get what you're saying jackophant, but in all honesty I don't think DICE is even doing that much. Like with Battlefield, the footage really does speak for itself and people are unsurprisingly spreading it like wildfire. Every thing that I've thought to myself about this game — hopes that you get to pilot the signature vehicles, that you can play as a lightsabre-orientated class, etc — are all being fulfilled.

It's clear that DICE is resting heavily upon its own laurels by incorporating a lot of Battlefield-esque gameplay into it, but in this case I think that is exactly what the majority of people want. After all, Battlefield is an extremely mature and fun series, and its brief foray into more futuristic theming with Battlefield 2142 and the Battlefield 4 DLC was great but needed to be taken much further. Star Wars and Battlefield are just a match made in heaven.

They probably should have just called it Star Wars Battlefield though. :cool:

I've only skipped through a few parts of the video but it looks extremely similar to the previous game, including the setting. With that said, I wasn't particularly impressed by the pre-release stuff for that either yet the final game ended up being quite a delight because despite the blatant aping from Uncharted (which itself did the same to the earlier Tomb Raider games) it distinguished itself with the more open-ended hub approach to the gameplay and such. I really liked the atmosphere of feeling like you could freely traverse the whole island, at least once you unlocked the areas.

I don't know if they're keeping that concept this time, but in my opinion that's the one thing that really set the previous game apart from Uncharted, which is comparatively more of a linear fixed roller coaster ride of awesomeness. I hope that haven't lost sight of this.

God yes!!!!!