Jayel

I'm just having hell of a time reading issues with this game. Some highlights (I think the first one is already mentioned in this thread): The sims don't have any destinations or even an identity. They go straight to whatever nearest open house/job/store/whatever, which is an unacceptable flaw in an agent-based sim if you ask me (not to mention creepy). Industry demand is fake. The goods your industry produces may not contribute anything to your city and you may be better off without it. Population is also fake. The number of citizens each sim represent inflates significantly as city grows, which may explain a lot problems. Maxis strung together very broken low-level behaviours and hoped that somehow it will produce a high-level simulation of a real city. They probably realized that it didn't/couldn't work, so they introduced even more broken bumps and tweaks to make the city function barely. Of course now the numbers don't make sense and players are taking notice. I think they should've gone for simple statistical+area of effect models like the previous SimCity games instead of an agent based one. It would've been more accurate simulation (at larger scale) and more satisfying too, when you see your actions produce more measurable outcome. Or do it right - I've been playing Tropico series lately and it seems like they do everything SimCity set out to do but better (the population is a lot smaller but still).

Hmm, sounds like they could've prevented some of this downward spiral by making emergency vehicles not abide by traffic rules and not sacrifice too much of gameplay. After all, why not. they hardly follow traffic rules in real life anyway.

So Polygon gave it a 9.5, then changed it to 8 because of early launch issues? Are they gonna raise the score again when the server loads lighten? They should make a timeline graph of their scores.

limited space -> specialization -> cooperation -> fun? I haven't bought the game yet... Still on the fence. It almost feels like it was originally designed to be a facebook game. As if one day a Maxis designer was rummaging through EA social games division dumpster and discovered a design doc and said "hey... this could work!" Obviously they couldn't turn their beloved flagship franchise into SimCityVille so a few things had to change: "Real money transaction, that's gotta go. Waiting forever for things to get done? Well we can't let the players get bored and quit, so let them fast-forward. But then the city gets filled too quickly and the player has nothing to do. Let them build multiple cities." I mean if I'm going to create multiple cities, of course I'll create them in the same region and specialize differently so they benefit each other (for variety's sake if nothing else) negating the need for other human players. But isn't that at odds with its primary design goals? Might as well be a single-player game at that point. Worse, if I play the game the way it's intended to be played and take a smaller role in a region, then I may again run out of things to do, get bored, and create cities in other regions. So not only will my attention be spread across multiple cities, but multiple regions! Who plays SimCity like that? Has anyone played 2 worlds simultaneously in a management game? I would've been a lot happier with a traditional SimCity game. At least then I know I'd like it. This looks too different and I don't like things that are different. rant over who am I kidding. I will end up getting it. I'll just wait until some of the issues are ironed out.

I recently finished Force Unleashed (the first one). I needed to clear my hard drive and this thing was occupying 30GB. I figured that if I beat the game, I can get rid of it and would never have to re-download this massive game on my crappy internet connection (Canada). I really didn't like the main game. Unresponsive combat, bad port full of bugs, cheesy storyline... etc. I almost uninstalled it without trying the DLCs, and a good thing I didn't! The DLCs are hilarious-awesome (especially the Tatooine one). They assume you chose the evil ending and completely throw all canon out the window. The best part has to be

Hey I just (yesterday) finished Spec Ops too. I got it because Zero Punctuation called it the game that most deserves to be played. I entered the game knowing that I'll be doing horrific things as a player (again because of the Zero Punctuation review) so when stuff started happening, I was expecting it, and it unfazed me, and I took almost nothing from the experience. Any opportunities for introspection was lost on me completely. I guess there's still plenty to appreciate at intellectual level, but I wish I had picked up the game knowing nothing about it and expecting another CoD clone (as Yahtzee did).

This would've been my excuse to buy PS4. Too bad (for Sony) it's only a timed exclusive.

I'm struggling to form an opinion. Hmm. I like that it will have streaming demo via Gaikai. Playing demos instantly was by far my favourite thing on OnLive (to make purchase decision on other - better - platforms). Resume/suspend thing is pretty cool too. Touchpad seems like a useful thing, but the placement of it seem awkward (wouldn't the analog sticks get in your way?).

My favourite RTS game of all time. Its atmosphere alone is enough to put it on the top, even if it were a terrible game (which it isn't). And speaking of no-HUD, Homeworld had none! (until you start to interact with a unit that is) A rarity in an RTS. I'm really looking forward to their next project, Hardware.

But what about the other unfortunate implication that, maybe - just maybe - had Ripley not lost her daughter, she would have not bothered rescuing Newt? Is she an awesome heroine or a crazy mom? In any case, this is all I can think of when I watch Aliens now:

Did I mention how much I hate the special edition of Aliens? Knowing that Ripley lost her daughter makes Ripley-Newt relationship creepy sad. Leave it on the editing room floor, I say.

As long as there are no stupid combat sequences...

Flash could be very useful if you need to store vector art and animation for your game engine. There are free open-source libraries out there that can load and playback swf assets (gameswf library for example), so if you're building an engine and your artists are already using flash, then I guess you could do a lot worse than swf. There are also commercial tools like Autodesk Scaleform, made for creating game UI's specifically, and is entirely based on Flash.

I saw the quicklook and it got me in a JRPG mood, then I remembered that I had Dragon Quest VIII (by the same guys I think) sitting on my shelf virtually untouched. So I played it for a while yesterday and it completely put me off.

Intel NUC managed to fit Core-i3 + HD4000 in much smaller package than Piston, so I don't see why it's not possible right now - right now it's about $400 + mSATA ssd which makes $500 pricepoint impossible, but future UCFF boards may be more affordable.

All I know about Unity is

Hmm It seems really unlikely I delivered these images in JPG format. Besides, I stick to sRGB because that's all my monitors are capable of.

I've been "playing" this one for the past few months and it's been very very helpful (I'm using a cheap fender squire). I have 3 big issues with this game though: 1. it doesn't have any songs I like (can't blame the game for that though) 2. loading times are brutal - and you're forced to reload if you want to retry. I might grab the PC version if its loading time are better. 3. adaptive difficulty does more harm than good. I rely mostly on muscle memory and the fact that a few mistakes can drop difficulty level mid-song just throws me off.

free* xbox music streaming in Windows 8 is awfully tempting.

I believe all intel SSDs have 5 year warranty - they're pretty confident about their longevity. I've only bought 3 SSDs over the past 2 years (2 intel drives and 1 Crucial), but they're all running without any problems and according to SMART attributes still have over 99% write cycles left. Even if I was worried about them dying, I could never go back to platter drives because it feels like I'm just wasting my life waiting for stuff to open. Really? 320 series is the only intel SSD to get a bad rep for poor reliability and people losing data in the event of power failures. As for their flagship sandforce drives (520) they outperform other sandforce counterparts and reportedly don't suffer from the infamous BSOD problems that other sandforce drives do. They are no means "bad" and still probably the safest (and the fastest) choice. The only problem is the much bigger price tag.

A stock Android OS is an open platform and you can get your apps from any sources. Some of the skinned ones (such as Kindle Fire and, most likely, Ouya) won't give you access to other stores in order to foster their own ecosystem. I doubt there's going to be any worthwhile exclusive content on Ouya, but at only $100 it seems very low risk. I'll probably wait until the thing actually exists though.

Even as a LSL fan, I don't know if I want to give money for a remake of a game that's been remade 2~3 times.

Better to form your own opinion than to pick one up from a stranger on the internet. I just noticed that the link I posted there are 2 topics hilighted in yellow: one regarding multiplayer and one regarding 1-unit-per-tile. I was trying to point out the 1-unit-per-tile part, not the multiplayer. It's been a while so I don't remember, but I think you can launch any one of them, and within the main menu you can switch between expansions.

There are many people who feel that Civ5 is fundamentally broken. This is a lengthy criticism, but the most important bit is near the end of the page - highlighted in yellow.

That's good If I organized it, it would be a complete disaster. Unless i was the only attendee - then it might have been okay.