Posts by Jetsetlemming

It's a bit of laziness on MS's part that makes GFWL product protection/verification trivial, so pirates can play online/without a disc.

As far as Kane and Lynch 2 specific stuff, from my experience last night the Undercover Cop 90% of the time is the same guy in a repeat group, and this experience has been concurred by a 360 demo player.

Like I said: Don't really want to spread it around.

Played two hours straight of the demo multiplayer with a group from SA. The demo hack let us have a private game together organized through a steam group, which was grand. Undercover Cop is almost the best mode, except when the undercover cop accidentally injures a goon in the first five seconds of the round, which automatically exposes him and then he's dead and the rest of the round plays out just like Fragile Alliance except less interesting because you're down a player. The undercover cop should be able to attack the goons, god. He's undercover. Haven't any of you at IO played No Russian!?

Also we were discussing Kane and Lynch 1 between rounds in the group chat (long waits between matches for that long ass "Closing..." screen) and someone idly mentioned an exploit to the GFWL system that completely trivializes it, something that if it were common knowledge would probably kill off the service entirely. I can't believe how lazy/terrible MS was/is with GFWL.

Quote from 2d-chris

man sucks that most of the coolest SP terran units can't be build in MP no firebats, medics or goliaths! Sure balancing is important but boy that sucks so hard to remove standard units that we used in the first game.Let's hope it's possible for people to make custom maps where we can use these standard units again

Goliaths are dumb though

Has anyone else benchmarked the game and how it uses resources? The Ultra textures setting has a tooltip recommending 1GB of Vram but testing it showed a max of about 400MB used on my 512MB card, for example.

Yes, this is an interesting topic.

The PC demo has been "cracked", allowing for all gameplay modes that were disabled in the main menu to be accessed, including coop, and a server browser for multiplayer.

I can't remember a single trailer for a IO game prior to Kane and Lynch actually. I'm gonna go search up Youtube for Hitman trailers because I can't recall ever seeing one, I just saw those "How Not To Play Hitman" videos one day and got the game based on those.

Lynch saying "we're getting too old for this" is funny given the first game. There's a scene where Kane is talking about retiring cause "We're too old for this" and Lynch says "What are you talking about? You're too old, I'm not!"

Played the first two missions. Had fun. The game defaulted to all Highs for me, with one Medium (the effects one with high being Dof, it wouldn't let me select anything but low and medium". Shadows at this setting look shitty, that hatched effect on their edges. I set everything to the "Ultra" preset option and now shadows look far better cause the edges are blurred. No noticeable performance difference either. Woo.

I also learned my first "How not to suck" lesson: When you've got a big group of guys in a small space and order them to attack a dude, they'll only move close enough for the front guys to be in attack range, leaving the guys in the back all jammed up and unable to help in the fight. In that situation I should always order the group to manually move in close enough for everyone to reach before giving the attack command. Science!

I just tried online and it seems that the voice is sound activated for people with mics, there's no push to talk key, and some guy had a mic and speakers instead of headphones. The combination lead to every single sound being repeated back a second later in much lower quality. Also most of the other players were just gliding around instead of animated- it seemed to be related to how close you are to them as some sort of LOD thing, except that when you're spectating (such as when you've already made it to the escape van) they always glide when you're following them as a spectator. Also the round ended after three goes and then dropped everyone back to the main menu, no option to play again.

On the plus side though I threw a fire extinguisher at a dog and it bounced off the dog's head with a very loud metal thud, killing the dog. The extinguisher went flying and "Dog +10,000" appeared onscreen. I then reused the fire extinguisher as a makeshift smoke grenade to make it across the street.

I guess I got comparatively lucky with it. I've also heard people complaining that the AI's dumb for them, or that they see a lot of enemies shooting through cover, or sticking their guns visibly through geometry and stuff like that.

Here's perhaps a more interesting comparison:

Minimum graphical settings:

[Blocked Image: http://i31.tinypic.com/j8fms9.png]

Max settings:

[Blocked Image: http://i29.tinypic.com/29p42n4.png]

I guess the game's CPU limited, at least for this scene, which isn't something you see very often. I guess they lightened up on some of those mass crowd performance saving options in favor of having more indivduals. Too much crowd for my 2.9Ghz C2D I guess. You can't see it well in this shot but in this part of the demo about a dozen and a half different people in the street are all fleeing from you in different directions while up ahead cops start moving down towards you.

We should organize a forum game, I think this would be significantly funner with the right map and right people. And ofc that issue with dark grey guns on black backgrounds in the equipment screen patched

http://store.steampowered.com/app/28000

[Blocked Image: http://i29.tinypic.com/5wxzqa.png]

Edit: Well, at least two of my issues aren't in the sequel: I never ran into a situation where I could put my crosshairs over a guy and pull the trigger only for my bullets to hit something in the environment instead, and I didn't once have to unplug my keyboard and plug it back in. The game also looked fantastic. Like, the most real, grounded looking game ever. Very nice.

Short though. I think the demo's on a timer cause the Giant Bomb quicklook went farther. I died twice at the video store (sneaky ass cops hiding in the shadows ) and on my third try the game suddenly cut to a "buy the game" screen. Gonna run through it again with AO turned off, see what a difference that makes. It was a bit sluggish looking around. Playable, but typically AO doesn't do a ton as far as noticeable graphics increases go, and typically it also costs a ton to render.

Edit:

With Ambient Occlusion:

[Blocked Image: http://i26.tinypic.com/o6blvr.png]

Without Ambient Occlusion:

[Blocked Image: http://i26.tinypic.com/2jdfbfb.png]

Either the demo's bugged and not really changing video settings when I change them in the options (which is entirely possible- 1 FPS difference could purely be because the clock's offscreen or something), or I picked a terrible spot to use for my screenshot. Either way, both settings play equally well now that I noticed that I was (just) under 60FPS and turned off Vsync. Much better.

Edit 3: Lol, now that I post the screenshots I can actually see the difference. With AO Kane is casting a shadow on the pillar he's taking cover on.

Here's what I'll use as the standard for the sequel: If I shoot a grenade launcher or something like it from behind cover, and despite my crosshairs being clear the explosive still hits the cover and instakills me, then the game is not better. If I go to shoot one and right as I'm about to pull the trigger a squadmate/npc/kane moves and stands in front of me and the explosive hits him and downs me and the entire squad, the game is not better. If there is a forced stealth section with failure on alert and enemies can detect me through cover?

Yeah. Don't let any of those things happen!

Edit: Oh, and if Kane and Lynch 2 also constantly makes me unplug and reconnect my keyboard to continue playing, that would also be bad.

But as long as I don't see these things mentioned in reviews I'll definitely buy the game, besides the glaring issues, like I said Kane and Lynch was very close to being a good game. It was fun, it had lots of style, and I actually was interested in the story and characters (though the final chapter kinda killed that last bit for me. I laughed out loud at the ending that happens if you choose to try and save your squad because

Quote

Lynch takes two shots to the chest in the ending cutscene and doesn't give no shit except to swear about it, as Kane's daughter lies dying from a single wound behind him

. The trailers and stuff for K&L2 are looking pretty cool.

I've seen some pretty epic rants from Ken Levine pre-Bioshock's release responding to forum posts claiming that Bioshock would be terrible and have no RPG elements and be 360 exclusive and Levine sold out etc.

You know, I gotta say man, it's really refreshing to have a modder not get super ultra defensive and insulting when someone has an issue with his product. I tried a STALKER CoP mod recently and it broke my game- load times quintupled and tons of stuttering ingame. I posted about it in a CoP thread on SA (in a post covering a few different mods I had tried out separately) and the mod maker quoted me and called me an idiot and said he was glad I wasn't playing his mod. It probably didn't help that I laughed at the mod's readme claiming the mod has rebalanced mutant damage and health "to be more realistic"

I just reached the jungle, and you have to be stealthy, and the maps are designed as if being out of line of sight will hide you from enemies, but they can see you through poppies and rocks and shit, and enemies take a boatload of damage and give out more, and my gun has a lot of kick to it, and now this is, no exaggeration, the least fun thing I've ever played. This game was clearly released at least six months too early, and the way it looks now the only way I'm ever going to see the ending is to use a trainer.

There was a semi-auto rifle in the prison break level, like an M14 or something like that, and I've only ever seen that gun in that one level. I'd kill someone for it in this stupid jungle level.

Edit: Forgot you could take weapons from your squad. Took a sniper rifle, managed to beat that section with a few more retries (I never actually saw someone light an alarm flare, it just apparently happens randomly, I guess I just lucked through it). Ending blew.

This would've been a good game with a shitload more polish.

I'm not sure of the names but I think it was called rubble or ruins or something like that, it was the first map I played and all the indoor areas were pitch dark, both the church and tunnels. The outdoor areas were fine, but small. The next map after that (no idea the name, you spawned, jumped down a ledge onto a truck, ran past a tank with two flags onto it, through a tunnel, and that went around an S and exited out into the center of the map) wasn't too dark, but once the enemy team took the center and started camping that tunnel out of our base we were irrevocably fucked and it was pretty much spawn camping until we ran out of tickets. The next map after that was caves and looked like suddenly we jumped engines back to Goldsrc, and it was also really super dark.

I used the nightvision in a couple of the maps, but it made IFF even harder. I could see (with less difficulty at least) that guys were there, but couldn't tell who they were until after they were shooting at me. At least, as far as I can tell, there's no friendly fire.