toblix

It's really a shame. I played WoW for over a year, but I never actually got around to playing with a group using Teamspeak or Ventrilo, which'd also help. I can only imagine how much better non-english speaking people must become now that voice-chat is everywhere. I've found that one of my main problems with speaking English is tone. I'm perfectly able to mimic tons of various dialects and ways of speaking, but when I'm trying to speak English seriously, not just joking around, I don't know what to pick. Since I'm not English or American I don't fall back to my "natural tone", and my voice instead just goes up and down unpredictably. And also I don't know any English words when speaking. It's ridiculous. I've promised myself that when I get moved into my apartment, I'll hook up the Live headset and get my chat on for reals.

So I'm playing this steaming, festering pile of shit called Crazy Machines II. It's a TIM-clone* with nice graphics and a physics engine. It's really fun and is awesome. Oh wait, remember the part where I called it shit? That's because of this. The game has a linear progression from puzzle to puzzle, like the TIMs of old. The whole progression is divided into chapters of about ten puzzles, the first being The Village, or whatever, the next some Chinese shit, I dunno, it's not important. Neither is this: one awesome thing about the puzzles is that not only is there a goal (break A using , there is always bonus objectives (before breaking A, break C without touching D). If you manage the bonus objective you get a goal medal (or gear or cog or some fucking thing). Awesome, right? Bonus objectives! Yes, except no, because the people who made this game are complete idiots, and this is why. To test your puzzle solution you hit the space bar. Everything starts to move and drop and is awesome. The ball, B, moves around and breaks shit and bounces off of shit. Then it breaks A and the game goes AWEOMSE YOU BROKE A HERE IS A SILVER MEDAL CLICK NEXT TO GO TO THE NEXT LEVEL! All right, you think, but I'd rather try again and move the fucking or adjust this spring mirror or whatever over here, because: I'm a completionist who wants a gold rating on all the levels I was this close to getting the bonus objective So you move the mouse cursor over to the button that lets you try the level again, but guess what? THERE IS NO SUCH BUTTON Listen to this: To retry the puzzle you have to go back to the main menu and select the puzzle again. And that isn't even the part I was so furious about that I started this post in the first place. This is: When you retry the level you can't get a better rating! To be able to improve your rating you have to reset the chapter, meaning you lose all awards and progress for the chapter. So, if you're on the last puzzle and fail to complete a bonus objective, but you're too slow to stop the simulation before the main objective is completed you're shit out of luck. So you have to constantly sit like a hawk, prepared to abort the moment things don't go as planned, and if you're too slow and the bowling ball falls into the crate, well, fuck you. This is beyond anything I've experienced. This is worse than Phantom Hourglass' save system. Worse than Dead Rising's mission structure. God, it's even worse than Steam's policy about lifting bans from victims of having their Steam account hijacked. *If you don't know what TIM is, go play it so you do because it's truly awesome.

Exaggerating, obviously. But seriously, can anyone imagine the rationale behind this? Forcing the player to go through all the previous puzzles doesn't make sense in a game like this! There's no timing or randomness involved, you're just forcing the player to place all the various pieces in the same exact spots again and hit start.

Well, I am of the opinion that any game that doesn't really save your progress, only some undetermined, wishy-washy checkpoint can go to hell.

Awesome! Now I don't have to play it!

Yes!

And finally: At least they responded in under five minutes.

I know they're probably in tears about this.

Big fucking surprise: Basically, I'll have to juggle around multiple Steam accounts. Fuck that. At least I'll never have to pay for Steam games again.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that works out. The guy said it would be a hard achievement, which sounds to me less like being able to complete say, Fallout, without firing a single bullet and more like being able to complete Super Mario without killing a single enemy. If the game has alternate non-violent solutions more advanced than Splinter Cell's "click left to stab and right to knock out" method, it'll be totally awesome to the max.

I'm no good at this, how you say, letter writing, but here went:

On second thought, I won't bother. They've made it perfectly clear my ban won't be lifted. Ever. No matter where I go on their support pages, huge letters tell me THE BAN WILL NOT BE LIFTED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! WE ARE NOT GOING TO LIFT THE BAN! THE BAN WILL NEVER BE LIFTED! Fuck Steam. If they're not willing to provide a way, however work and time-consuming, for me to be able to play the games I've bought online, I'm not going to buy their games. I'm astounded that there hasn't been a huge fucking uproar over this policy. Obviously I'm to blame for having too simple a password or whatever (although there's no way to prove their system is unhackable), but they should at least have some way of "proving" my innocence or something. I could even pay fucking dollars to have the ban lifted. This is so inconsistent with my impression of Valve I've gotten from their games, commentaries, etc. Gabe always saying his email address and being really friendly and BAM! fucking Valve Nazi slam down their leather gloved fists on my balls.

I'm considering putting one of those chips into a Wii to play the "proper" version of this game. Great idea or no?

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean it like that. I meant that I know so little about it that apart from looking and sounding good it may suck, for all I know. I fully expect it rock awesomely, though.

I'm not sure I understand your post, Cigol, but I think I will contact them. Most likely it's too late, but at least I tried.

Exactamundo!

Well fuck me. I was going to watch part 2 last night and then this showed up.

3.5 Problems occurred in the arrangement of the compositionLook at the following composition selected from students’ writing:Should Students Take a Part Time Job or Not silkroad online goldIn recent years, taking part-time job is very popular on the campus, more and more students spend more time taking part-time job, and this phenomenon causes a lot of hot argument, is it right or not? In my opinion, we can’t say it is right or wrong directly, because the reason is complex. On the other hand, many students take part-time job in order to reduce the burden of their families because their families have not enough money to support them. So their action is reasonable. We can not say it is not right, as to those students whose families are not very poor, some of them taking part-time job just want to practice in the society and gain some experience. Earning money is not their main purpose; we cannot say it is right, either.It is not conformed to the Standard English writing. Firstly, in the above text, there is no definite idea. We cannot get the author’s attitude after reading the text. In this sense, this composition is a failure. To English-speaking people they tend to choose one aspect to illustrate. Secondly, the whole text just has one paragraph. Generally speaking, an English composition consists of three parts: the introductory paragraph, the body and the conclusion. So the text should be rewritten as the following:maple story goldIn recent years, taking part-time job is very popular on the campus. More and more students spend more time taking part-time jobs. This phenomenon causes a lot of hot argument. Is it right or not? In my opinion, it is right based on the following reasons.FFXI GilFirstly, they can reduce the burden of their families, because their families just cannot afford the tuition. In addition, where their life expenditure comes from? Considering this, many students may choose to take part-time jobs to reduce their financial pressure.dofus kamasSecondly, by taking part-time jobs, students could gain more social experience. Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it. There is always some gap between what we know from textbooks and what we can do in the real world, and social practice helps us build the bridge over it. If you are a qualified student, working as a private teacher will enable you to test out the theories acquired in classroom and to guide you to make your own discoveries. From the above mentioned, we can see that taking part-time jobs has many advantages. It is beneficial to the college students. So do not hesitate, join in the line!The rewritten text is clearer than the original one, after reading the above text. We can easily understand the author’s opinion with sufficient supporting arguments. In addition, the text is fully conformed to the three-part model of English writing.world of warcraft gold ...or is it???

Could someone remind me why this game is awesome? Is it the graphics or what?

So, I pirated Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Good thing I did, too -- the game is such a buggy piece of shit it's ridiculous. Now it seems I have to get the Xbox360 to play both this and Conviction -- sorry -- ConViction. Anyway, stuff like this, where it's so obvious that the PC version is some half-assed afterthought, annoys me to no end. It's like they have all the levels and graphics and get some hack to make it just work on the PC, and then: Just map the controller buttons randomly to the keyboard Don't change any UI elements so that using, say, a mouse makes any sense. Navigating menus has to feel like navigating 90s DVDs. Just barely cover up all the console references. Go fuck yourselves, Ubisoft.

Whoa, how did this get past the federales? Anyway, I just finished this after getting it for the Xbox 360, playing about a third, then packing the Xbox for moving and being unable to use it for almost half a year, and finally unpacking it and playing the last two thirds these last weeks. All the Splinter Cell developers seem to think that Splinter Cell gameplay is great, but for a proper end game, nothing beats a good shootout. Splinter Cell is about the sneaking around and hiding under desks, crawling through vents and throwing people overboard. It's about making your way through a city ravaged by civil war by keeping to the rooftops and zip-lining across exploding buses. It's about rappelling down a Hong Kong skyscraper with fireworks going off around you and the drunk inside looking funny at his bottle as you pass by. It's about entering a bad guy's hotel suite through a bathroom window and without being noticed putting all his bodyguards in the jaccuzi. So why do all the Splinter Cells end with having to gun down bad guys with limited ammo and defuse the bomb before the timer reaches zero? Why can't it be something to do with fucking sneaking? The prison and Hong Kong levels were awesome, and almost enough to make this a great game. They should have less crappy levels and more epic shit like this in the next games. The new undercover missions are sort of cool, but I hate time limits. I don't get the whole trust thing. Everything was built around "trust", and keeping the two different sides happy. I later find out this is only used to determine which of the three endings you get. :tmeh: I don't know why I played this game to completion, and liked it. Looking back there are only a select few things I loved, and for the most part it was pretty boring. This better be the last Splinter Cell game like all the others, though. Also, achievements are like a drug. I'd press the A button a thousand times if it got me an achievement. Resource management evaluation: They should've: Dropped multiplayer Dropped the undercover missions Made two / three more epic levels like Hong Kong Now I'm going to play Assassin's Creed, which I'm really looking forward to. I played about an hour before putting it back on hold to complete Splinter Cell, but I loved what I played. It was beautiful and the controls felt great, and being chased by guards everywhere was awesome.

This thread should be renamed to Guitar Hero III (and counting!)

Man, I keep coming back to this game in my mind. Last night I played Vigil from the Mass Effect soundtrack. It's the one from the main menu. There is something truly magnificent about this game.

I completely agree. I make it a point of playing evil in Bioware's games, since I think they do it so well. But in Mass Effect, I never felt evil. Okay, maybe when I executed people left and right, but it was less "it's fun to kill people" and more "if I kill you I'll save thousands of lives", etc. I wonder how much they'll actually carry over from my save games in ME2. I guess this is this is like the destructible environments in Red Faction, and the adaptive physiology in Spore; in the end it gets too difficult to take every little thing into account, and the feature is reduced or eliminated. If the game takes place a million years later the backstory can reflect what you've done, what character you played, etc., but if it's a direct sequel it's not like they can consider every single combination of events. Or, they can. That would be awesome. I'm just thinking how I'd get shivers down my crooked spine if I played Mass Effect 2 and I meet Shepard, and he looks and talks exactly the way he did in ME1. They should have the ability to upload save games, though. The sequel won't be out for years, meaning most people'll have deleted theirs. At the end of the game, you should get the option of uploading it to their server or something.