Architecture

Listening to the music just reminds me that I wish the game had had stronger nods to Driver.

Would you say this would be a good summer game when it's like $25-$30?

Is there a dedicated "show off your rig" thread for the Thumbs? I always enjoy seeing what people have done to personalize their experience. So the rubberized keycaps on this board are done fairly cheaply. It's a translucent plastic that has been airbrushed with a black matte finish, and each of the individual keys have been masked so that the LEDs on the board emanate through the translucent symbols. It's an interesting cost-saving approach, but it makes no real aesthetic or tactile difference (unless you're looking the overspray on the underside of the individual caps).

Paul Verhoeven is definitely more good than bad, and always interesting if nothing else. Even Showgirls is redeemable in its hilarious atrocity.

It's going to sound weird, but this game was the primary motivating factor in me building a new PC. I do not regret this decision at all.

I think that if you were to buy a keyboard today, you'd still end up spending close to that much to get a board with brown switches. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Corsair only offers the K70 in browns, and it retails for $130 (and seems to be unavailable nearly everywhere). The Cooler Master boards are well-built and tend to not feature a bunch of useless features, but the ergonomics of boards are questionable at best and I think you're spending at least $100 to get a full-size device. I personally cannot live without the tenkey and don't really like the consolidated weirdness of the Quickfire TK. And I'll admit to being envious of the size of your SSD. I've got the 128GB 840 Evo and I love it, I just wish it had a little more room. I've been thinking about buying a second SSD and using it solely for games.

Honestly, I've never been on the hype train for this game. If you asked me a decade ago which publisher consistently put out the best games, I'd have said Ubisoft, hands down. The Clancy games were still worth a damn, Splinter Cell was putting Metal Gear Solid to shame and the Prince of Persia franchise was being revitalized in a glorious manner. At this point, they're lucky if I buy one of their games a year. I wouldn't have even bothered with Assassin's Creed 4 had it not been a freebie with my GPU. And I think that any sudden delay (the game was something like five weeks from release when it was pushed back) during development hints at trouble. From the sounds of it, they've had to redesign most of the core gameplay mechanics because the game wasn't any fun to play.

Between the development troubles and the overbearing shittiness Uplay, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to play this game.

If you pull off one of the keycaps, it should be pretty easy to decipher what kind of switches it's using. For instance, while almost all of the Cherry switches look identical from a top-down perspective, they're color-coded for easy identification. I took the board to work today to try it with Photoshop. I like this thing and that small twinge of remorse as I was swiping my VISA card as washed away. I definitely wouldn't argue that everyone needs a mechanical keyboard, but I think that it will suit my purposes wonderfully.

This game still looks fantastic.

Yeah, I opted for a full-size keyboard. I think rubber domes are just fine and freely admit this was an absolutely frivolous purchase, but it's really pleasant to me to just type on this thing. There's something about the way the keys bottom out to me that just feels better than the soft thud on a membrane board. I don't buy into this keyboard making me a better typist, but I do expect I'll enjoy typing more. Also, there's something about the sounds the keystrokes make that is just music to my ears. I know it's dumb as hell, but I'm buying into it, damn it.

So I caved and bought the Corsair. It's so beautiful.

It could simply be a prompt upon installation. You pick the language(s) you'd like to install, and the installer intelligently deletes the files for the audio you don't want. You can always download it later if necessary. And I'm mostly envisioning this in a PC environment.

I fucking knew it. This is bullshit. Compress your audio, game developers. Or at least enable me to select which language I want to download and install.

Arc grenades didn't inflict damage, they bypassed a TItan's shields and scrambled the cockpit view for the pilot or disabled a pilot's cloaking ability.

I figured it was possible they found the arc grenades a little too powerful and decided to nerf them by making them stationary as opposed to hurlable. They were basically magnetic deathballs of awesome in the beta--you could chuck them at a Titan to bypass its shields and basically clear a pesky nest of titans pretty easily. It also was great for catching cloaked hardpoint campers unaware.

Add in post-launch DLC support, and you're pushing 8 years, which is close enough to a decade for me. I mean, what's three years anyway? Half a troubled AAA dev cycle?

Got my PC key from Greenman Gaming. Pre-loading starts today. I guess the official site has listed some more of the weapons available in the full game, and hint as if there are still more to come: http://www.titanfall.com/pilots/assassin Weird that there's an arc mine, but no arc grenade. Wonder if they found those things too powerful and just straight-up removed them from the game after the public beta. Also, DLC has been announced, with three map packs costing $10 individually or available as a season pass for $25. Pretty aggressive pricing on EA's front, which is nice to see.

Because GTA isn't attempting abstraction--it's attempting to recreate our world. GTA is a simulation--a satirized, hyper-real one, yes--but a simulation nonetheless. A competitive shooter like CS of Call of Duty strives for a certain verisimilitude (holy shit, I spelled that correctly!) but the core mechanics and goals are quite abstract. I know that probably comes across as having it both ways, but there's nothing as vile as Trevor in any of those games (excepting 13-year-olds flinging expletives over chat, of course). Not even No Russian manages to be as reprehensible. The player is given more agency in that instance than the narrative moments of GTA.

Not particularly. It's a luxury, certainly--but it's going to reside in my bedroom. I won't be hanging it outside my window for passers-by to gawk at.

I wonder if Paul Dini is responsible for having nearly every character call Catwoman a bitch or if the story guys at Rocksteady are to blame.

It's one thing to watch a movie with despicable characters. It's something else entirely to be forced to play a game as one. I split most of my time between Franklin and Michael and usually only selected Trevor to advance the storyline. His level of perversion is unnecessary. The torture sequence is invalidated by its climax, at which point the game essentially says, "fuck it, go back to doing whatever you were doing before all this." There is literally no way to interact with another character that isn't confrontational. Just standing next to an NPC generates a combat scenario. Contrast this with Red Dead Redemption--a different studio, yes, but still a Houser Bros. game--where pressing the circle button near NPCs tipped my hat and offered pleasantries. I also find their "satire" to be cut-rate, and they are not as deft at skewering both sides as say, Trey Parker & Matt Stone. The game is also flat-out racist and misogynist, probably homophobic as well. Sections of GTA V are absolutely brilliant, but I was grabbed by the smaller, personal moments. I found flying a plane across the Los Angeles skyline at dusk with Tangerine Dream in the background far more affecting than any pre-determined event in the entire game. Technically astounding and mechanically competent, yes, but not particularly well-written or insightful. I completely understand the praise for this game and don't begrudge anyone for liking it. I just think it reinforces a bunch of negative stereotypes and offers no other way to play than as a fucking murdering asshole.

Can someone explain the cult of Ducky? It seems like there are comparable products at significantly lower prices--is it a build quality thing of is it just cool to own some obscure manufacturer's HID? They definitely look like nice, well-designed keyboards that aren't front-loaded with a bunch of gimmickry but man, that price. I played around on some browns at Fry's last weekend while shopping for a webcam. It certainly is a subtler response than the blues, but I find that I tend to bottom out the keys so feeling the actuation isn't modifying my typing technique whatsoever. I would be interested to try blacks out, but buying a small switch board or hammering out a couple sentences in an electronics store doesn't translate to actually using the thing. For instance, the blue board I'm typing on at the moment was absolutely loathsome to use with Photoshop; it made keyboard shorts feel...wrong. I know that's not very eloquent, but it's about as well as I can describe it.

Yeah, the Quickfire Rapid I'm borrowing is 10-keyless and I hate it. I think I've decided on MX Red switches. The blues are great for typing, but I don't like the resistance to the keys when gaming at all. The browns require the same amount of force to actuate as the reds, but I'm not sure I'm going to want to feel that bump when gaming or using my board in a non-typing environment (like Photoshop, for instance). The K70 is definitely expensive ($130 new), but it has a bunch of slick features (you can program which keys are backlit!) and I imagine it would end up lasting me long enough to be a worthwhile investment. I'm currently embroiled in a bidding war for a lightly used K70, so wish me luck on that front!

Are there prescribed methods, or do I have to try combining each item in my inventory before something happens? I'm not sure what resolution my eyes happen to render, but I'm pretty sure it would be a bitch to pixel-hunt my life.