Posts by Rick_D

  • STALKER release date and countdown

    Just played the demo, and oh my god this is such a disappointment.

    The guns are in the worst possible FoV, they look totally squashed up and frankly, retarded. The animations for the guns are even worse, it seems like shit doesn't play properly or it skips a lot.

    It's also really laggy even on relatively low settings.

    I know it's only a beta demo, but jesus they have a lot of work to do before release.

  • Splinter Cell: Double Agent

    in theory - i tried playing hitman, and I just can't anymore, splinter cell has spoiled me. it looks fantastic, plays amazingly and it just works really well.

    it's a pity it has a lot of problems with bugs (that have been there since it was released and have gotten worse with patches, apparently) and it's just so damn short.

  • Splinter Cell: Double Agent

    That makes a lot of sense Zacker, after looking at the credits and some of the in-game graphics options it really doesn't surprise me.

    You can either choose a 'standard' graphical setting, or a 'next gen' graphical setting. The custom settings basically let you change anisotropic filtering and resolution. It's lame, leaves' the in-between PC owner shit out of luck, luckily my PC managed to run it all pretty smooth on 'next gen'.

    And for so much work, and 10 gigs (10 gigs for god's sake!) I finished it in under a weekend. That's a really shitty deal - I would rather have had a whole game in the 'standard' setting but with an extra 3 or 4 missions. Sure the textures looked great (you'd expect them to if they take up so much space) and some of the effects on the Fisher character were really nice, but the gameplay was what kept me playing for a weekend, not the fact that I could make out the tiny details on his bald-spot or the textures that didn't repeat very obviously.

    I just feel kinda let down by the whole experience, it seems the final mission was very rushed, probably due to budget and time constraints. It was kinda like the 'Hitman: Blood Money' final mission where you come out of your 'coma' and kill everyone - except the SCDA level seemed to comprise of a small boat where you walked two foot, hid for two minutes then ran forward and completed the mission.

    I'm only glad I didn't pay full price for this because it seems like there's so many shoddy elements gone into it and it really shows in the final product. And it could have been such a good game, I mean above and beyond and Metal Gear: Solid. Unfortunately they focused on the wrong areas or didn't focus enough; who knows. I'll be uninstalling it tonight and carrying on with 'Hitman: Contracts' anyway

  • Splinter Cell: Double Agent

    That's what I've read in a couple of reviews and all over the ubisoft forums; seems like people are really pissed that ubisoft did such a poor job of porting over a game that owes its fame to the PC. And there's a hell of a lot of bugs and they are all down to a shoddy port, I still can't believe they were in such a rush to get the game out that they didn't test it properly; is this down to time constraints, budget, or just apathy? I would really love to know because it's shocking that people have to pay for something in it's alpha stages

  • Splinter Cell: Double Agent

    Ok so before you kick me in the balls, I know this is a mother of a bump but I did a quick search and this came up as being the newest thread for SC:DA.

    So I finally bought the game after seeing it for 15 quid in my local (and lame) game shop (side note: I tried to buy GRAW too but they only had the case, not the disc, this is the same shop that had the disc but not the case for Doom 3 <_<). I haven't played a Ubisoft game in like, ages, and I really loved the first splinter cell but not so much PT and never bothered with CT based solely on how weak PT was.

    /rambling

    After freeing up 10 gigs (10!!) so I could install the game I loaded it up, and that's where the problems started. The training mission bugged out on me, the loading got stuck in a loop and the graphics glitched. A quick restart of the game and things seemed to work a little better.

    The game is really really awesome (if you can look past the slightly random storyline), so many nice new features and improvements on the Fisher character. Some of the shaders and particles seemed to give my PC a really hard time though, the snow and smoke is a real killer but luckily I got past the snow level pretty quickly.

    Then it started to seem like the port from console to PC had gone badly, cracking safes for instance relies heavily on the analogue stick of the 360, but using the WASD keys (and the mouse wheel to control your speed) seems to make for a really buggy system when it comes to the safes. I get repeatedly stuck in places because the game requires you to do something with a safe (or some other analogue task) and you can't do it!

    I heard that the port was handed over to some other branch of ubisoft in asia, I don't know if this is true but they did a really horrible hack job of it.

    Has anyone else experienced these problems, has anyone else found any solutions? Has anyone had experience of game ports (from console to PC or vice versa) turning the game into a buggy pile of crap or is this a lone incident? (I get the feeling it isn't )

    I'm just interested to know how the whole porting thing works, if there's any other cases of this kind of thing happening to any of you or your companies, and why do developers let ports go out, apparently, untested?

  • Get a degree or not ?

    I work as an electrician and am trying to get into game development, so if I ever get a job and then get sick of it I can just go back to earning 20 grand a year and drinking myself to death. Either way I don't see university as a necessity, just an excuse to get into debt, fuck loads of slappers and eat badly.

  • Now playing

    riddick: escape from butcher bay

    I got it free with a gfx card I bought years ago, only just got around to installing it - it's actually a really good game - although I think I'm almost finished it which is a real shame, only got about 7 or 8 hours gameplay out of it so far. I wish I sucked really badly at games, they'd last a lot longer

  • Brits hit by FF

    This has been all over the news here, and frankly the Americans are behaving the same way about this that they do about every other similar incident: denial of wrong-doing, saying their military courts did an investigation and cleared everybody of everything.

    I would like to know how many FF incidents occur between the Iraqis with their low-tech (by comparison) equipment