Frenetic Pony

Oooh, ooh! Go watch "The Conversation" ok, joke. Rush is quite good, us Merican's aint seein none of it cause they drive them there cars in sometin dat aint a circle. Which just ain natural I tells ya! But for all the racing behind it there's not actually a TON of racing on screen. It's a lot more about the people behind the cars and their relationship than it ever is about the racing itself, not that the racing isn't fun to watch when it shows up as well.

Well one probably needs to try it out one way or another. I'm pretty sure something like this hasn't been tried before, so I'm finding it hard to imagine specifics of how it will feel one way or another. Speaking of which thanks Chris! Trying it was really what I was wondering. The other thing I'd have to ask is, versus a mouse how precise is it? I'd been daydreaming about a better control pad scheme lately (what with the PS4 announcement and Google console rumors and whatnot). Combined with actually paying attention to how the PS3 controls work in GTAV, and finding them incredibly frustrating when I realize how much better they could be (failing Trevors Uncharted Riff train mission a dozen times in a row will do that). So, if you had to get a HEADSHOT!!! In whatever how much better (worse?) would this be than say, a 360 controller?

"Best game writers" I've seen enough to say I don't care for that guy at all. It's entertainment other people may want in and of themselves. But it has little to do with the actual, game itself. That thing's not a review that helps anyone decide, it's an entirely different form of entertainment. The kind of thing I absolutely hated in literature class, "analysis of the literature" and other stuff that didn't have anything whatsoever to do with enjoying the book and more to do with phantasms called up by people's own imagination. It's sitting in English class writing about what the damned green light meant in The Great Gatsby. If you want to enjoy him and stuff like that I'm not complaining. If you think his vague analogies and long winded writing have anything to do with actually playing games for 99.999999% of people out there then I don't know what to say. I was mostly just reminded of how much I hated literature classes and the self important attitude therein that I dropped English as a major.

Yeah that is among the stupidest things I've ever read. It's pure click bait "Let's say a bunch of shit about a huge selling game so I can get more ad revenue" It reminds me of another thing along the same lines. "GTA V isn't misogynist but it's supporters are!" I mean, seriously, I get it you want ad revenue and are saying the loudest thing you can to bait people. But what happened to video games being, fun? Why not save the bullshit for politics. At least the micro transactions are only for the online thing. I'm up to "the big score" on the single player and I hope this is the one where I actually make a lot of money.

UE4 looks great! I want to know what they did for their Infiltrator demo, as the reflections look great and possibly realtime, and I know they dropped their voxel cone tracing for it. Maybe next GDC they'll say. I wish other next gen games had their priorities. I wonder what Fable: Legends looks like. It's using UE4 and is apparently basically "Fable 4: The MMO" despite what they "revealed" at E3. Which was like nothing, I guess they were just forced to say "Something Fable!" because of the Xbone launch. But as a huge Fable fan I think they shouldn't have said anything at all, because I got the impression it was primarily some weird tower defense thing rather than anything actually Fable at all. Wow that was off topic.

I'm a graphics programmer as a hobby, who talks with industry pros, I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about. I wasn't trying to be disingenuous, but somehow I always end up sounding like it. I just really enjoy learning about... well everything. Including chip design and game programming. It's just sort of what I do for fun. Digging up "references" to support my arguments, when they're just built on years of knowledge and experience is always rather hard. If you do want references I can point to one of Crytek's primary graphics researchers being rather excited for 8 gigs of video ram in the new consoles (hell he was one of the guys that pushed for that much in the first place). Or just how games are made to begin with, more memory is not so much a "problem" as an "oh thank gawd we don't have to spend months and months optimizing and our artists won't get mad at us for compressing their beautiful work into mud anymore". I.E. I know what the specs of the PS4 and Xbone are. I know what programmers and artists do with consoles. I know what generally changes over time with respect to how games use consoles. So while I'm still guessing, it's a highly educated guess. It will be interesting to see what "minimum" specs are. That's a very different argument from "recommended" specs, as scaleability becomes easier the higher up the visual fidelity ladder you go. But for recommended specs, a lot of video ram is good, something more than Radeon 7770 is good (as that's basically what the PS4 already has, except with a 256bit bus). More cores is good IF you are on an older platform, because games will able to make use of it as the new consoles have 8 cores and thus games are going to be able to use up to 7 logical threads at a time (There are reserves for the OS now). In the end I just want to give people correct advice so they don't end up with computers not as good as they could have been. I don't even particularly want to "argue" anything here, just give the best advice I know.

Factually incorrect, but that's ok. Most "studies" on the "benefits" or "harm" that a specific food causes are immensely flawed. Any proper statician cringes at survey studies based around foods, there's so much selection bias and such a high ratio of signal to noise that they mostly end up being useless. They're often retracted or another study finds something the exact opposite years later. After all it's utterly impractical for long term controlled experiments concerning diets. The studies I've found around milk almost all match this pattern "we've found a small discrepancy in some of our statistics in a study we didn't do right and now we print!" The reason being you're more likely to get tenure and more respect for going to print than if you never print anything. What evidence we do have is that we don't need that much calcium, it's barely needed from the point of milk. Vitamin A and D (assuming you don't have other sources, like I said I hope this guy does, it's probable) and protein are the major benefits, while it's hard to know what milk does and doesn't do, we do know that there really isn't any strong indication of it being "bad for you" in any way. At least from any study as of yet. And yes, I know the "drink all the milk!" FDA advice comes from the dairy industry, I mainly drink it for the protein as I'm a vegetarian. As for lactose intolerance when adult, yeah not everyone has the correct gene sequence, there are enough adults that don't have it (spontaneous mutation? just lack of it from heredity?). Either way drinking it as a kid is fine, and has no bearing on whether you become lactose intolerant later (almost certainly anyway, it would be interesting to see if there's some DNA methylation activation/deactivation of the sequences going on). As for China, no, Bro is about as American as it gets. For reference he's the guy that thought Falun Gong (a quasi spiritualist movement) was getting holocausted in China. Which they aren't, I mean there's repression, but there's no special concentration death camps just for a movement that's not even that religious.

Err, because we know the PS4 and Xbone have 8 cores? Yeah, that was easy. And that's mostly if you're back on a AM3 socket, as Phenom stuff is pretty old. If you're on Sandy Bridge+ for Intel a quad core should do fine as their IPC is a heck of a lot better. I know it's not your intent, but the internet is currently filled with "Hardwre gurus" giving out advice on how to build computers for next gen games, and their only knowledge is a couple benchmarks from HardOCP based on cross generational games built with last gen consoles as the min spec. Rather than, let's say, the Xbox One and PS4 in mind. I'm just hoping to give people better advice than that, as Jon Cole pointed out all you need to do is look at Battlefield 4's recommended specs to see something close to the lines that people SHOULD be thinking about. Also, is there more announcements from Valve? Is that what those pictures are about? I know Abrash has been experimenting and even built a prototype, it's been fun interacting with all those people on his blog, he seems like a really cool guy. But I also know one of the people that left Valve recently was complaining about how impossible it was to actually get hardware built there. And knowing "Valve time" them having a prototype doesn't mean they're going to release anything soon, or ever. One can hope though.

So remember that guy, I described who "Knew so much about oppression in China!" Yeah, I've nicknamed him "Bro". He works at the same coffee shop as the girl I'm interested in, this is his continued adventure in pseudo intellectualism. A while ago another employee here asked me about milk, saying her "Friend" was telling her about how people weren't supposed to drink milk. Because we aren't adapted to it and so its bad for us. I've heard this little scientifically derived factoid "telephoned" into bullshit before. It seems to originate from the fact that thousands of years ago all human adults were lactose intolerant, and so couldn't drink milk. At some point(s) a lactose digesting sequence that's dominant was mutated and has now spread throughout virtually all of humanity. But the little factoid that we used to not be able to drink milk beyond being a toddler has mutated into the urban myth that "milk is bad" because "cavemen didn't drink it". Today I saw "Bro" refuse the rest of a latte, "I'm trying to avoid drinking milk." Bingo. Considering milk is the major source of vitamin A in most human diets I suppose I can wait till "Bro" crashes his car at night and dies due to night blindness. I'd love to correct him, but people get weirded out when I connect things they've said without them ever speaking to me. Maybe I can just hope he gets Vitamin A and D some other way.

Talking about next gen man, not console ports of this generation that stick to optimized 512mb, Vram doesn't do anything for performance in terms of size, but you need for bigger games sitting on the PS4/Xbone. It's also much easier (read: really sort of possible rather than fantastically difficult) to optimize for CPU and GPU specific chips than fit more into ram than you have. As devs optimize for the GCN Next ISA and even the specific CPUs and GPUs in the Xbone and PS4 the equivalent chips for PC you need will go up (BTW the CPU on the PS4/Xbone are actually nearly double the equivalent speed of a iphone 5 soc already). So, yes you do need video ram, you do need decent enough CPUs and GPUs. You don't need some MASSIVE advantage like you did at the launch of the 360. But you're aren't going to get away with some cheap PC components and expect to stay future proof for very long at all.

Ehhh, I'd move to at least a six core Athlon, next gen games should be heavily multithreaded (8 cores man! 7 useable by games) and the big thing is video ram, which devs are gonna eat up if it's a high end game. GTX 760 4 gig would be much better. I'm personally disappointed by the announcement. I've no interest in Steam OS as my laptop (and almost undoubtedly any future laptop I get) has HDMI out already. I don't need a dedicated HTPC when I can just plug my laptop in (and when I end up getting a dedicated console at some point or another anyway) and I don't particularly want to stream games from and to since hey, input/output lag is still lag, even over a local network. Hey Valve where's a game, ANY game? You do still make games right?

I immediately made Michael look like Robert Deniro from Heat. The impression is quite accurate and he looks slick as hell, too bad his personality doesn't match so it looks a bit mismatched during cutscenes. As for Trevor I haven't found an appropriate look for him yet, nothing seems to say "deranged" quite well enough. As for Franklin, he seems to locked in to bullshit hip ganster crap for me to do much with him so far. I mean, I'd like to get Samuel L. Jackson from Jurassic Park going, but I'm not sure he has the right hair options (or the clothes for that matter). Also: Ewww micro transactions. Not that I've actually a found much use for money yet. If you want a motor car you pluck it from the trees, clothes don't seem too costly, helicopters seem in high supply, and the only mission I got for my one property asked me to go pick something up, I don't know where and I don't know how to accept the mission (was I supposed to call them?) and after a while they just dropped it. So it didn't really seem interesting.

I still don't get it. All I see is, frankly, people determined to be creeped out by a commercial, something you see and hear every day of your life a thousand times over. Maybe I'll never get it.

What exactly was creepy about it? I'd never considered that anyone would even find it creepy, so I'd like to know what it is I'm missing.

The same way all religion works, people believe what they want to believe. It's also why they don't want to hear anything bad about religion. That's tantamount to ruining their belief and taking away something they get happiness from. I'd love to do a study with the hypothesis to the effect of: A. as better sources of entertainment become available people (on average) are less interested in religion B. as medical technology advances people (on average) are less interested in religion. After all, you don't need to pray for a cure for leprosy when (in the fantastically unlikely chance you get it from your pet armadillo farm) you can just go to a doctor.

Did you say Half Life 3? HALF LIFE 3????? HAAAAALF LIIIIIIIFE THREEEEEEE!!!!

Also known as "bullshit". Or "an engineering nightmare." or rather "No battery life." or, I could go on. Phones are highly integrated peices of technology, especially to get them so power efficient and small. Regardless, Steambox is an interesting concept. Do they go for "yearly upgrades" and ditch ultra native optimization, or the opposite? How much do they sell it for? One of the most interesting things I can think of with it is open software. Want to stream to twitch, to youtube directly, to that new whatever? You get the app and you're done, the hardware and software could be even more open than the PS4. I just wonder what controller they're doing. Hopefully not a dualshock like gamepad.

Eeecth, a torture scene? I guess it's weird to complain about a torture scene after I just ran over a dozen people, got into a chase, and shot 4 cops to death. Then again it's also weird that I can do that "for fun" and feel bad about needing to kill a virtual dog because there was no way to get away from it attacking me (no cars around to steal). I also wonder what the next gen version is going to look like, because for how good this game looks most of the time it's also rather.... barren. Just last summer I was camping and went to a small wooded town near the campsite with my relatives, and just had fun looking around the town (I live in California). In comparison GTAV is rather sparse at times, while some of this is accurate to southern California, the small woodside town leaves a disappointing "this generation" taste to them. Oh, and Trevor is the best playable character. He's kind of a "Heisenberg" type character, except he makes Walt look like a well adjusted peace loving pacifist. He's friggen hilarious.

Ok, for those thinking Saints Row is the only open world game capable of making fun of itself and being spastically insane and in sync with any murderous rampages you go on hooking up with the story, I can say GTA V is back far closer to Vice City than 4 or even San Andreas was. So, yeah. It's still not balls out crazy, but there's much more acknowledgement and even embracement of the idea of over the top insanity in the story than there ever was in 4. It's kind of hard to even assume it asks you to take it too seriously when on one of the first missions a conversation takes place to the effect of "Isn't this being a little melodramatic?" "Yeah, well... whatever." as you .

Impressions: My god the map is huge, I'd been fooled by the size of the blocks from that map, they're biiiig! You can just drive and drive and drive. Speaking of driving, while it's still clearly not a dedicated driving game, once you have the feeling it goes well enough. Also, my god the lighting in this game is gorgeous. That's what really sells it, the lighting and atmospheric scattering (smoggy as shit) really make it feel like LA and give the game a great look. The textures are decent enough, the characters look decent enough, there's a lot of doing their best to avoid blockiness with low poly counts going on. Walking down the street and everything looks rather flat but fantastically lit. But look off into the distance and witness mountains and hills and skyscrapers and it doesn't matter as much. Speaking of looks, I'd agree with notch, I'm actually more hesitant to go on murderous rampages now than I was in previous GTA's and GTA alikes. Not that the models for the npcs look super realistic, but that with the fantastic lighting they look close enough from far enough away at a quick glance that it gets a bit more disconcerting than it has been. I've also been doing the story missions more. I like the characters more than I liked them in San Andreas or 4. There's still a ton of ripped off movie and TV moments. I just pulled down a hollywood, scuse me "vinewood" hill house with a winch and tow truck ala Lethal Weapon 2. Oh, and there's still strip clubs, and now the strippers are topless if you choose a "private dance". I'll leave the rest of that for you to discover, a quick look just to see what on earth was there out of curiousity was enough for me. As for other "side activities" I actually enjoy the towtruck job, which is literally just doing towtruck stuff so far, but Tennis was rather boring, definitely not up there with Mario tennis. Also, the opening really, REALLY makes me want to play a next gen Red Dead game.

I'm mocking the suggestion that GTA V should get terrible review scores because it's not opinionated in a way that is different from me and sensitive enough. I'm sure making a game out of murdering random innocent civilians at will though really has a need to be terribly opinionated in a way that is different from me. I mean that was the problem with Hitler, not that he committed genocide, but that he didn't do it equally Is my mockery better this time round? Or should I just spell out that playing GTA to see a thoughtful story reflecting on the state of society is like watching a Transformers movie and expecting it to be a daring romantic tragedy, and that any comments about it from the makers of such would reflect on their own comments in the manner of "How on earth did I get dragged into such a stupid argument and what does it have to do with anything I'm doing anyway?"

Games reviews based on misogyny rather than the actual game. I'm glad I just enjoy games as a damned game and do not find amusement in tearing apart people for the their "effective commentary on society". What boring drivel. I suppose physics is boring drivel to others even though I enjoy it immensely, but at least its useful boring drivel. Which allows me to feel superior for no apparent reason, which is also useless to everyone but me. In other news, Gamestop shipped out pre-orders today instead of tomorrow, which I was worried about. Thus tomorrow is a "skip school" day. I just hope UPS delivers things earlier than usual, I know their facility is on the exact opposite end of town but c'mon, I don't want to wait until 4:00pm to actually get my "overnight delivery". Sometimes they show up quite a bit earlier, hope this is one of those times.

The most punk thing ever: Also one of the most energetic songs I've ever heard. Which is awesome in its own way.

There is a single player only mode from what I understand.

Pain and Gain is such a good movie Michael Bay doesn't even deserve to have his name on it. It's hilarious, and interesting, and you actually care about the characters even if you aren't really "rooting for them". It's the best movie I've seen this year.