Defrag

I thought portal was a cheery little game with a lot of fun touches, but I was somewhat taken aback by the praise lavished on it. I thought it was good (if a little short / sparse), but I didn't fall in love with it or anything . It'll be interesting to see how Portal scales up now that they're throwing a lot more resources at it. Looks really nice so far, though!

It's interesting to see all of the gushing reviews that pretty much sidestep these things or don't even mention them. I recall the same thing happened with BF2 -- one or two of the reviews awarded a lower score due to the numerous bugs, but the 'big' review sites acted like everything was perfect. I guess it's a side effect of wanting to get your reviews out asap -- you only get a true picture of a large online game once it's hit the stores and these issues start popping up.

Hmm I just checked out the official forums and there's a 70 page thread about disconnects, (additional) punkbuster kicks and loads of threads about crashes. It sounds like there's a lot of issues to be ironed out. Great game or not, I'm going to wait for a while -- I have no desire to go through the first month of BF2 again, it was an exercise in futility.

The fov was sorted in BF2 but the GUI / HUD was still mangled. Regarding BC2: The server browser in the beta was worse than BF2's, and BF2's server browser was a steaming pile of poop. The funny thing is this: Remember that thing called Gamespy (pre-Gamespy Arcade) back in the early 90s? It was this like, you know, server browser that you could use to -- shock horror -- find and ping servers. Also recall that it ran nicely even on Windows 95 using a 56k modem. It updated servers as it found them. You could cancel a search, filter by any number of criteria and various games were hooked into it. Well, it's now 2010 and Dice are still making the most godawful server browsers. Why? Seriously. It's not a trivial problem, but it's been solved scores of times in the past, including a decade ago when using vastly inferior hardware.

How is it bug-wise? I cancelled my pre-order as the beta was unplayable for me; I'm either waiting for re-assuring noises from PC owners, or a demo to check out.

I just cracked and pre-ordered from play; heard a lot of good things from people playing the beta.

I loved dolphin diving in BF2. So many idiots did it compulsively that it was a cinch to mercilessly exploit their brain-dead habits Step 1: Edge around corner and see enemy running towards me down an alley Step 2: Back around the corner from whence I came Step 3: Watch as the guy insta-prones without thinking Step 4: Edge back around the corner with xhairs on the guy and insta-kill him, as he cannot get back up in time and he cannot fire at me without being a sitting duck I used to get loads of cheap kills that way. ^_^

Nice one, GL! That wasn't so painful, was it?

Unfortunately, if it turns out great, then it'll probably be a bad thing for the employees who stay as it'll 'prove' that crunch works.

The trailer was doing the rounds at work today without me saying anything! It's spreading

I've spammed it on various forums I frequent. I'm gonna buy the 4 pack

It's definitely not a hoax -- it's plausible and possible with today's tech (even without the bespoke compression stuff). However, whether it's a good time to roll out the technology is another thing entirely, though. I'm still sceptical they can deliver a good quality service and turn a profit, but I guess the cash behind it says "we believe so".

I thought you were saying the opposite

Cool, Reno You should prolly update your sig

Haha, I just saw this pop up on the Steam page and though, "well, it seems it is time!"

The important thing is that you can build a reliability mechanism on top of UDP so that only certain messages are treated as important whereas the others can be discarded without much of a problem. I.e. the protocol doesn't guarantee delivery, but the application code adds in that support. It's a bit more work, but a fairly common thing to see in games.

The more I play this, the more mixed feelings I have about it. I haven't played it enough to form a full judgement yet (particularly regarding the SI combinations), as I've been pretty busy lately. I'll post a revised opinion after I get in another few weeks' play. Anyway, here's my bitch list. Many of these are problems that have been repeated from the first game which I find to be very strange. Swamp fever is deathly dull with a terribly boring finale, Dead Centre's mall is hardly dripping with detail and even hard rain's "ooh it's getting stormy" thing doesn't distract from the rolling greyness. I quite like The Parish and Dark Carnival is the best of the bunch -- I think that's a really cool map; it has a lot of distinguishing features and things to see and do. Compare Dark Carnival to Swamp Fever -- is this made by the same company? Quite a few of the maps are obscenely short and easy. E.g. Hard Rain 1 & 4 are almost a joke. On Hard Rain 4, a rushing team will face 3 (three) SI attacks; unless something goes badly wrong, nothing is going to happen. Many of the maps have limited cover for SI. Various routes involve walking along a road with parked cars and nothing else to help. This gives many of the maps a Death Toll 4 feel -- rubbish for attacking. Throw in the fact that there's lots of unnecessary medkits + pills and they're even easier. Worse still, there are extra medkits in the safe room or immediately outside the safe room most of the time, rendering early attacks pointless. I'm still convinced the variety in things like shotguns + rifles is largely pointless. More to the point, as with the first game, tier 2 weapons are still too strong. Instead of being auto-shotty biased like L4D1, it's all about the rifles now. 3 or 4 people with AKs shred just about everything. The game is a lot more balanced and challenging with tier 1 weapons. Tanks get shredded by assault rifles. You can't even throw rocks from afar as they get shot to pieces more or less instantly when rifles are involved. At least in the first game it was an actual distraction to shoot rocks. Valve may have done this to try and force tanks to rush, but rushing on a lot of maps is suicide. Disappointingly, teams can still set tanks on fire when they're AI controlled if the tank gets a poor spawn, plus many tank spawns involve the tank being cut off by a doorway or something similar, meaning you either lose control or get set on fire instantly. This wouldn't be so bad if the choke points let the SI spawn, but you usually end up with 4 survivors in a room blocking all the spawn points. I'm getting somewhat irked by the ineffective combinations of SI, too. There are many critical points where you need a charger in particular, but you may not get one. Worse still, you end up with a smoker and jockey in enclosed spaces where you need a charger, boomer and spitter. This is really annoying. In L4D1 the main gripe was that you didn't get a smoker at critical moments. This problem has now been exacerbated by the variety of SI in L4D2. I guess this was somewhat unavoidable. Oh and the characters are still boring me. I found the original game's characters a lot more interesting/amusing ("attention all boat owners: We are the boat cops! We command you to pick us up!"). Regardless of the new narrative (which makes versus feel a bit weird) and linked maps, I've yet to come to really like any of the characters other than Coach, and that's because he's a one man cheeseburger apocalypse. What do I really like? The charger is awesome for splitting teams up, the Jockey is a funny fucker, 4v4 matchmaking is very good, zombies + frying pans = good combination. The rolling crescendos are much better than the old cupboard fest. It's generally easier to wipe teams and the scoring is better, though not necessarily fair (almost won a game yesterday despite getting owned on for most of it solely because I wiped them as tank on the finale -- we ended up losing by 50 points or so). I fully realise that I'm excessively critical because of how much love I have for the first game, btw. I just expected better.

Small, incremental goals help. They help me focus and break up the day. "I want to complete task x before I take a break" I always used to find it really easy to get overly excited at the beginning of a project, then find myself exhausted and somewhat aimless after the initial, giddy design phase had passed. Structure is your friend

PC: 1 & 2

They should have a motorbike with a raptor riding in the sidecar

What we need is Fisheye!. It's hella cool. Unfortunately you need to render the scene five times per frame to make this work, so it's only viable for old games.

It should be a well known problem. Play through Half-Life 2 and you'll notice that when you get in vehicles, the fov is dynamically increased by something like 15. This isn't like a GoW running effect which is stylised, it's done to reduce nausea. A selection of Valve's testers felt nauseous or even threw up when playing through the vehicle sections. The combination of low fov + high speed compounds the problem. It's not fair to assert in a blanket fashion that it's "someone's own fault" for feeling sick while playing a game. You may end up with extreme cases where the person is far outside the region of tolerance of others and that's fair enough, but it's up to the developers to ensure that a wide spectrum of gamers can play the title without feeling sick. I used to play TFC with 110 fov and I know people who played with 120 and beyond. IMO anything below 80 in a fast-paced game is asking for trouble -- it just feels 'wrong' to me. I get a much nicer sense of speed with a higher fov

Uh, my friends and I played a couple of campaigns on advanced and made it without dying or getting incapped much either -- it's not hard. So, either the 360 version is buggered or their review is way off kilter.

Positives I'm thoroughly enjoying the game when I can actually play it. The sense of urgency and a need to move forward now exists in a way that the original lacked. The best thing is that you are no longer safe in any area. I'd say outside is still the most vulnerable place to be, but inside you have chargers and spitters to contend with. One charger can skittle your whole team in a tight corridor which means no more dicking around and spending a lot of time thinking. You have to stick together and move quickly, while also balancing the need to move forward with the need to scavenge for items. In short, it's pressure pressure pressure! The scoring is much more straightforward and easily graspable, too. While I'd argue it is an improvement, my only quibble is that you don't get much of a completion bonus. I.e. the scoring is improved, but I think they may have gone a little too far in making it almost purely distance based. Negatives [*:17eksmkm]There's still a lot of lobby/server issues to be ironed out. I'm really disappointed by this, particularly because the first game had almost the same issues, yet these mistakes have been repeated and, in some cases, made worse (local hosting is now unannounced... fail). [*:17eksmkm]Various bugs such as the "I'm stuck in geometry" one after a charger slam. This is a game breaker -- if can easily cost you one of your team, and once that person is dead, it is much harder to proceed with 3. [*:17eksmkm]I personally think some of the new levels lack an easily identifiable path to the goal. In the first one, you nearly always knew where you were meant to be heading as all of the levels were dark and they showed the path via lighting. Alright, the sequel is definitely less linear thus making the problem harder to solve, but I still lose my bearings and start running in the wrong direction a lot of the time. [*:17eksmkm]There's multiple weapons that feel much the same. Unless I'm missing something and they are actually different, I would've rather they just consolidated the similar guns into one gun model to avoid confusing players. E.g. there's a couple of auto shotties and assault rifles that are extremely similar. Am I wrong here or are they noticeably different? Despite people bitching, I felt the first game's simple "shotgun/smg" + "assault rifle/auto shotty" choices were simple and to the point. They were distinct and the differences were obvious. Now it's a case of a lot of shades of grey with no intuitive feel of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses.

That ain't got sort it in an online game because it requires sv_cheats. The best way to get freed is to get charged or hit by some other special infected -- that sometimes frees the character.