Posts by Jetsetlemming

So, totally regretting that Scott Pilgrim PSN purchase. The game randomly just fails. Freezes on the main menu after pressing start, misses the trigger of all the enemies dying to let me move on on random screens, etc. This is like Vampire Bloodlines v1.0 shit. It's really fun when it works, and I wish I could play it.

Quote from Taylor

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game: Don't really care for Scott Pilgrim, but a retro brawler with Paul Robertson's art direction? Yes please. Dash punch for infinites and currency. Winners don't eat meat.

Bought this myself after seeing the Giant Bomb quicklook. Actually my first purchase on PSN.

Killzone 2 judging by the demo is the most monochrome game ever made, I'm including Atari games in that assessment.

I saw plenty of atmosphere there, but then I also saw a Jules Verne flying city and someone saved from falling by a magic cloud of roses and an animated golem beating up a man. It was a shock (heh) to see the Bioshock series lean so hard towards fantasy after Bioshock 1 was all alt-history sci-fi.

Left 4 Dead 2, Beat Hazard, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl with the Stalker complete 2009 and complete 2009 realistic weapons mods, Red Faction Guerrilla, Starcraft 2.

This feels kinda crazy to me. It's like they're parodying themselves, and the name reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. It doesn't help that I watched a Joystiq video interview with Ken Levine shortly after I saw the trailer and he looked like a crazy person in it.

I watched a stream of the first two levels last night and uh, I guess I hope there's a day one patch or something coming cause it was looking pretty janky, especially with animation for doing stuff like blind firing from cover while moving (makes your hand freak out), and it seemed like the difficulty was really iffy, something I noticed in the demo, too- you can take a bunch of shots from a distance and get knocked down and get up again and get to cover and be fine, or, you could take a single bullet from a nearby dude and instantly die and have to go back to a checkpoint. Dying sucks, dudes. I think we can all agree on that. Dying especially sucks in checkpoint games where the checkpoints aren't quite close enough and you have to replay two or three (or more) minutes of stuff you've already done to get back to where you died. And then you die again. I saw that happen twice to the guy playing. It's not even like he was a bad player or playing on a high difficulty either, he selected Normal and for being on 360 he was pretty impressive at accurately and quickly shooting dudes.

The characters still were the absolute best part of the game and it made me realize that this would be like ten times a worse game if you were deaf or had the audio off and went to play it.

Judging by Borderlands I think Gearbox could definitely write a Duke game. I don't know so much about designing one, though. Besides Borderlands the only Gearbox titles I've enjoyed were the HL1 expansions.

On the latest Three Moves Ahead podcast they discuss and analyze Starcraft 2 and it's a really interesting discussion. I especially thought the part where they discussed how it seems that despite the streamlining SC2 still has some UI limitations that seem to be for the people who view SC2 as a sport that needs skill to play, not just strategy.

http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2010/ ... hris-remo/

I can think of a number of UI things I wish I had in SP, like being able to organize a group into a formation, when dragging a selection box over units have it ignore workers like it ignores buildings, having buildings endlessly produce a unit based on a set time interval (eg Build marines endlessly- put ten seconds between the start and end building of each one), earlier warnings when you're about to run out of supply like the supply number turning red, etc. I'm a super noob when it comes to RTS: Like I said earlier, the two Starcrafts and Warzone 2100 are the only ones I've ever played. All of those listed things would help my game

Edit: Also when ordering a group with different types of units in it, the fast units hang back to stick with the slow units. In the lava level I kept ordering my combat group forward only for the marauders to leave my marines, firebats, and medics behind in their dust to go jumping over cliffs and jetpacking across the level.

Also also, default selection groups for each type of unit that newly built units are automatically added in.

Just tried the demo and some of it was good and some of it was bad. Only visual setting that made any noticeable difference was turning on Physx, which made some bits of debris hit the floor and stop instead of falling right through it, and it dropped the fps by almost 30 average in the benchmark. In general the textures looked kinda bad. Flat, kinda washed out. Biggest issue though was the driving. Maybe I just picked the wrong car in the magic garage but the Thunderbolt handled like a car in GTA that's had its tires popped, especially while going slow- it weirdly gained more control the faster I drove. Not a mechanic I can say I've ever seen before in a game.

Shootout in the distillery was ok, nothing out of the ordinary. Cutscene was funny though.

Playboy centerfold collectables.

I think that changed a bit with Starcraft 2, I mean, it still runs on the standard for shitty hardware (integrated graphics) but on lower than max settings the shadows and textures look ass, especially the shadows. I despise that grainy shadow effect. Of course, I can just set the game to all Ultra on my sub-$300 home built computer, so

Speaking of performance, I hope Kane and Lynch 2 get some optimizations for crowd situations because it dropped my framerate by 40fps during that one part in the demo where you're out on the street and a bunch of npcs are running from the firefight. Kinda surprising given Blood Money and its mardi gras level. Even KL1 had some crowds going on like in Hong Kong and the prison and nightclub. The street in KL2 had maybe a dozen people total... It's not like my shit's subpar either, 3.2Ghz C2D, can't expect much more than that average. Cheap ass quad cores are starting to be packed in Dell/HP PCs based on the "more things = more value = we can bilk them for more" logic that leads to those same machines having 8GB of shitty low quality fail prone ram, but according to the Steam hardware stats 55% of users are on dual core machines.

I heard Mafia 2 has super computer as its recommended stats because they went way overboard with Physx simulated buildings exploding, to the point where two cards in sli is required to render it all. Clearly this negatively impacted the Xbox magazine's review, as the Xbox does not have two video cards. It barely even has one

The multiplayer is definitely a mess. I have the PS3 beta, and in the TDM map it's absolutely horrid, the firefights feel crappy, the spawn system super unfair, and frequently even if you're on the winning team the game gets no fun because the way the map is designed leads to easy camping for a spread out winning team and you can end up not seeing an enemy for a few minutes straight as they're all killed on spawn by someone else.

The objective map, where the US has to go through checkpoints to blow up some AA is better, but ends up having a ton of spam, and maybe it's just me, but I always just end up murdering the hell out of everybody and completely dominating the server whenever I play that map from the US side. I don't think I've ever once see the US win because the insurgents have a really long spawn timer and have to hold out the US until the game clock runs out, and the US gets more time each checkpoint they reach. It's like a really badly balanced TF2 A/D map.

Starcraft's a pretty good candidate for spectator sport. It's better than pro counterstrike at least.

Those videos do not make Idra look like the super pro zerg he's played up to be. Also he moved to South Korea to "persue a career in starcraft" lmao

Quote from Minotauro

I envy you. I was planning on buying a telescope but there's really no way to see any significant stars in Sao Paulo (too much light pollution + the weather is always cloudy)

Isn't that that Brazilian cyberpunk city where everyone lives in skyscrapers and travels by helicopter?

Haha, they've shown that scene in other trailers (including the one at the end of the demo) but I never noticed that when Lynch offers to shake Kane's hand he's doing it opposite the hand Kane's holding his luggage with, which is why he gets snubbed.

Woah, goddamn. Just got to that lava mission (I'm taking the game slow, RTS isn't really my genre) and suddenly my GPU spiked to 95C. Turned the settings down to minimum and the card seriously dropped 20 degrees.

I've yet to play retail SC2 MP but in the beta my most successful (relatively successful I still lost half the time) strategy was to get a barracks going and start pouring out a mass of marines, and then get a starport and start making endless flying units (I can't recall their name, viking maybe?). I'd send the ground units to attack, leaving about 15 behind for base defense (invariably as soon as I sent out my invaders the other team's guys passed by on a different unseen path and attacked MY base), and while the marines hit the front door I'd fly in the planes from behind and murder their gatherers.

Quote from 2d-chris

Vs AI anyway

A massive fleet of units from the far end of the tech tree is powerful you say? No way