Section_Ei8ht

Finished the first playthough yesterday on Regular. Hella fun. A few pacing complaints, but other than that, excellent top-notch campaign (also had a few crashing issues [DirectX errors, and also a crash when loading the very last level . With the advanced settings on anything but "High" (Extra, Medium, even Low), the game crashes with a memory exception]). Doing another playthrough on Veteran now (to tide me over until L4D2 and AC2). Spec Ops is awesome, though you definitely need two people to get the full experience. With Campaign and Spec Ops, I'm completely satisfied with my purchase. I played with a buddy 'till 3 AM doing spec ops and it's insanely fun (escort missions and wave defense missions are the most fun). Multiplayer is very "eeeehhhh". The matchmaking system is terrible. I'm a level two and I keep getting thrown into matches where everyone else is level 25 or higher (saw some 50's in there). The no dedicated servers doesn't really phase me because I don't give a shit about multiplayer (I'm just playing it to see what it's all about). I haven't had any trouble getting into games or laggy hosts. Played three or four matches and everything went well. I also like how when the host quits it automatically finds another one. It's a good 10 second pause in the game, but better than just crashing the whole thing.

^^ yep, nothing says fair and balanced debate like what I just watched there :roll:

This, plus the voice acting is very sub-par and the dialog just doesn't seem to be there. Also, the animations just seem thrown together. Graphically, the exteriors look great, but the interiors are very bland. The game plays/feels like a medieval KOTR, which isn't a bad thing, but the problem is that it doesn't seem to have updated anything from it. Because of all these reasons and Stepp's reasons, I'm finding it very hard to become immersed in Dragon Age. Dunno, maybe Mass Effect just set the bar too high for me :/

Same here. Played for a few hours and all I can think is "eeeehhhh". It's decent, but it's not mind-blowingly awesome like Mass Effect was. I'll give it a fair shot, but as of right now, I'm unimpressed.

As a massive Josh Homme/Queens of the Stone Age fan, I approve. I'm definitely listening to the rest when I get home.

Had a similar experience in High School. Our Dean of Students retired mid-school-year and my chem teacher at the time took the job. He was replaced with a sort of permanent substitute for the rest of the year that was giving it an honest go, but couldn't connect with the students. Students started coming to me for help in the class. I seemed to be the only one that actually got along with the new teacher, so I pretty much acted as a proxy between him and the rest of the students; he would still teach the class, he would have me offer clarifications to what he was saying and do after school help sessions with the rest of the students. Specific to your situation; I don't think you're going to get that teacher back with new teaching habbits. Not without somebody holding her hand and jumping on her during class (eg: assistant/student teacher). Your best bet is to try and get a sort of permanent substitute. When my Calculus teacher had to leave mid-semester during my senior year of high school due to her pregnancy, she was replaced a permanent sub for the rest of the year; a college student (math major). I'd tell your school to go for that. Try and find a college chemistry student that's looking to make a few extra bucks, and have them teach, and then offer after school help. In my experience, bouncing from sub to sub is not going to work. That's what happened in junior high school to my History teacher. She had to leave due to a pregnancy and was replaced with different subs every day. It's a clusterfuck because the subs to sync with each other. Sure, you have somebody in the room watching the students, but none of the information syncs in because the subs (try as they may) will never be in sync with each other. The only way the sub to sub routine will work is if there's only a week left of class. Then it's not that big of a deal, since the majority of the information on the finals will have come from the previous teacher anyway (and while she may have sucked, at least the source of information was consistent). It's a touch situation, but in all the substitute situations I've gone through in my academic career, the permanent sub that actually knows what the hell they're talking about works best. Just make sure there's an offering of after school help.

finished it the other day. Gotta agree with dux on most of his points. The thing that pisses me off about the paper-thin story is that idea of what's there is actually not that bad, it's just horribly executed. Overall the gameplay is very fun and highly addictive and it's an all around fun game to play, but the ending (if one can even call it that) is just plain horrible. I see what gearbox tried to do there, but since it was so poorly executed, it leaves you with a sense of... well anything. I agree with a friend of mine's analogy of the Borderlands story structure: "It's like Star Wars Episodes 1 through 3. It's not a bad story. It's just horribly timed and horribly executed. The useless parts are drawn out much longer than they should be, and the important parts are rushed through with little to no exposition". Also, the folks at gearbox really need to work on boss fights. The majority of the boss fights consisted of weak AI on bosses with about three different attack moves (and they pretty much only stuck to one) and very obvious weak spots. I'll do a second play through at some point in the future with another character. Borderlands was good, but not good enough to play through twice back to back.

There's a group of current/former Black Mesa people that have a dropbox set up that acts as a repository for hilarious images/sound clips found on the internet. 'Bout 1.1 Gigs and counting

Yeah, it's basically Pocahontas with space marines and blue aliens. I'll still see it though, simply because of Cameron's track record.

Skype has the overall best voice quality, but the trouble with Skype is that you really can't have more than 8-10 people in a call before things get foggy. Plus the burden's on the host to invite people into the call, whereas with vent or teamspeak you can come and go as you please. Skype get the best results, but i think it wouldn't work for a community as big as the core (for the above reasons), unless you just had a general chat that somebody managed invites to, which then just spawned smaller separate calls from there at people's will. Personally I prefer vent over teamspeak, but that's just me.

I'm gonna have to agree with Skjalg. It's not that Bioshock isn't an FPS/RPG, but to say it's more about the RPG than the FPS is a bit much. Bioshock's RPG elements were so stripped down compared to other FPS/RPGs (STALKER, System Shock, hell even Borderlands) that when you put it next to them for comparison, there's barely just a skim off the top of RPG. Upgrade weapons? Yeah, sure, but in an incredibly linear fashion. No inventory management in an RPG? A fairly linear story line that, when boiled down to its core, really is just a linear shooter? There's really no alternate quests or choices to make (sans Little Sisters, but that's about it and from what I recall, there's no middle ground between the two. You harvest three or more for Adam and you get the evil ending, less than that you get the good ending). I'm not saying that Bioshock doesn't have RPG elements, but to say that Bioshock is more about the RPG than the FPS just seems wrong. Bioshock is an FPS first with an RPG afterthought. Bioshock has about as much RPG elements as Wolfenstein does.

Gotta agree with a comment I read on Slashdot: I wanna see this scene in context with the rest of the plot. I'm ok with it. I trust IW's got something worthwhile cooking here.

Call of Duty: Volksdeutsche! I've been saying it for years!!

I think the whole point of it is to make you uncomfortable. I wasn't planning on getting the game before but I think I just might have to, now. I love a good campaign that makes me uncomfortable to play it, but is so engrossing/good/effective that I have to. It's like watching a great movie that makes you feel like shit or sparks a emotions that normal movies don't (Requiem for a Dream, anyone? It's one of my favorite movies, yet I've only seen it once because I can't put myself through that again). Unless IW gets massive heat from this and ends up having to remove it because of the damn general public. Then I won't get it. That'd be like if Aronofsky re-edited Requiem to have a happy ending, but then again I'm one of those games-are-art hippies.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=1001264 This really makes me feel dirty... being on the same internet as some of the [derogatory/vulgar insult word/phrase here] on the steam forums. Just... wow... if this is how the community reacts to a simple 24 hour delay, I'm not at all surprised Valve hasn't said anything about Episode 3. [EDIT] They just merged that thread with all the other threads about people bitching about the release date... it's 208 pages right now... I want to just scream at all these people to get a life, but I'm so fascinated by this spectacle of idiocy I can't look away... wouldn't want to call the kettle black.

Played it for a few hours last night. Overall the game is very good. I'm having a good bit of fun playing it. My only complaints are nit-picks, which don't really detract from the overall quality of the game. //begin Yahtzee-esqe rant (I apologize in advance) if it was the developer's intention to make me want to kill Claptrap because he's so.fucking.annoying... job well done. In the very beginning And when you're supposed to follow him to a gate, it's all well and good when you have to follow characters, but for the love of God, game developers, whenever you drag behind a little bit, don't make the character yell out "I'm over here!" every three seconds while I'm distracted by picking up nearby loot. Wolfenstein did this as well, although much worse. When you're following a resistance dude through town, you could be close enough to start a conga line with him, yet every corner he would stop and say "This way" or "Hurry Up" or "We must move quickly!"... if you want me to move quickly, shut the fuck up and keep moving, I'm right fucking behind you, we'd move faster if you wouldn't stop at every fucking corner to tell me how quickly we have to get there! //end rant Also, didn't Randy Pitchford say there would be no loading screens after the game starts? What ever happened to that? You can call it whatever you want (a Transition, is it?), it's still a loading screen. At least Assassin's Creed masked the loading screens by letting you run around a cloudy construct. Unless the loading screen "transitions" are a PC version only. Again, just nit-picks. The game is very good. Glad I bought it, and will probably do multiple play-throughs. [EDIT] Ah, buddy who used to work at gearbox told me the "no loading screens" quote was for the pre-cell-shaded version of Borderlands. Loading screen complaint withdrawn. The game is now certified awesome by me, except for those damn annoying robots...

Sweet! RAMs a harsh mistress, my friend. Glad you got it all taken care of.

if memtest reported 303 errors on one test run, then your RAM is most likely the culprit. Perfect RAM can run memtest for days and report no errors. Bad RAM can cause so many different problems that don't even seem remotely related to RAM it's not even funny. RAM is dirt cheap, just replace all of it to be safe. If you really want to, yes, you can test them a stick at time with memtest. Just pull 'em all out but one, run memtest, lather, rinse, repeat... I never recommend mixing RAM types in a box, though, so if you're looking to replace just one stick of the RAM, do your damnedest to replace it with the exact make and model of RAM. Some motherboards don't care about mixing RAM brands, but lots do. You avoid potential headaches by not mixing brands. I wouldn't worry about the NTFS.sys driver file just yet. You've found a problem with the RAM, so worry about fixing that. If after you fix the RAM you're still getting bluescreens, then we'll start looking at the NTFS.sys driver (it's a big ball of wax dealing with Microsoft driver issues without a reformat, especially ones as low level as file system drivers, so you really only want to deal with it if you _really_ have to) Let me know how everything looks after the RAM replacement and we'll take it from there.

Damn... I remember following the Unigine back in high school when it was open source. That little engine's come a looooong way.

Second. PC version is 6 days later

Yeah, you want the ISO image: http://www.memtest.org/download/4.00/me ... 00.iso.zip Download that, use Nero or your favorite CD burning software to burn the image to a CD, and then boot off of the CD. Alternatively, you could download the exe, put it on a thumb drive and boot off the thumb drive, but CDs are easier.

Disk I/O Error screams hard drive fault, but I've seen several Microsoft applications that use that terminology to denote "File Not Found". The stop errors you're posting suggest to me a memory issue above all else, but the problem is I've also seen them happen with corrupted drivers, which could be caused by disk failure or improper shutdowns. I've tech supported a _lot_ of desktops in my day (it's still part of my day job as a sysadmin for some reason), and I've seen it every way. Most of them are denoting Paging errors, which are pretty evenly caused by either memory faults (page pointers changing), bad/corrupted drivers (improper de/referencing), or hard drive faults (write errors corrupting the page files/read errors) First thing I'd do is test the memory. It's the easiest to test and rule out. Download memtest86+, burn the iso, boot it, and let it run overnight. If it reports no errors (lots of times memtest needs a few runs before it encounters any errors, hence letting it run through the night so that several tests will run), then you're probably looking at a corrupted driver or a decaying hard drive (more likely), or both. Run the memtest if you haven't already and post the results. I'll chip in with some suggestions for diagnosing/fixing the HD problem if need be. Edit: also, when you boot up into safe mode and it bluescreens on bootup, which sys file does it stop at? Or is it bluescreening at random intervals after some period of use after boot up?

spoiler tag, bro I wanna read what you have to say.

Not sure why that makes me a tosser. I just said I used to pirate but don't anymore because I choose not to. I also said that the reason that I pirated games was because I just didn't want to pay for it. I never said that was everybody's reason. I never said piracy was bad and horrible and if you do it you're a horrible person. I couldn't care less about whether or not you pirate games and for what reasons. All I said was that I don't pirate anymore.

QFT and LMAO. I pirated a ton of games in my day, but have since given it up. I'd like to say that it was because I didn't have the money, or I didn't want to commit myself to a game without making sure it was good blah blah blah... but nah, I'll say it, I just didn't want to pay for it because I could get it for free. I buy all my games now (have for the past few years now), and yes, whenever I see a classic on steam that I played but never actually bought, I pick it up on steam. But anyway, back on topic. If IW was really concerned with ease of use for people and getting rid of that "confusing server browser"... why not just make the matchmaking thing default, but still have an option to do things the old fashioned way? That way everybody's happy. It's not like server browsers are hard to code. Also, Rick_D's post +1