Erkki

Hmm... I'm actually liking the projector idea more and more, except for one thing*. As I said, I was planning to get thick curtains anyway, so I could make the room dim when I'm using the screen. Also if I believe this guy then projectors can have better picture quality than large TVs. I looked some more at TV prices and the size I would be willing to buy at the current prices is 50-55". We have a similar sized LCD TV at the office so maybe I'll try it out for gaming to see if that would work for me at that sitting distance -- in my last place, I had a 32" TV and had to wear glasses to read texts in games when I was just 1 or 1.5m away. I'd prefer if I could play without needing glasses. If I really want a big screen, projector seems to be much cheaper (as I understand a sub-1000$ projector could go over 100" with good brightness, which is twice the size of the TV I could get at a similar price). I wish I had a friend with a projector setup so I could go and see myself what kind of screen size is good at what distance. (Note that I could also be further than 3.5m if I was at an angle). A projector also has the advantage that the screen size is adjustable. If I bought a TV I would have to put all consoles and stuff somewhere near the TV and I would have there at least 4-5 devices that would want a network connection. Which means I'd have to put a network hub there as well, as there is only one wire coming in. It might be much smarter to place all the devices in a less visible area, at the wall next to where the all the network wires come in anyway and where I could also connect the projector. * A big problem with a projector setup might be things like the PS Eye or Kinect. I'm not sure how much I would use those anyway, but they seem to require lighting conditions opposite to what a projector wants. On a similar note, with a projector people couldn't say, play a board game and someone else use the screen at the same time.

In Estonian, Steam Machine translates to Aurumasin, and it looks something like below, so that's what I assume the form factor will be:

Yeah, by cheaper I mean a price around there, maybe even a bit more expensive. Actually, now that I think about it, a projector in the ceiling would be pretty close to a wall that is easy to poke holes into, and the box where all the network wires in the apartment run together is basically on the other side of that wall. I could also put consoles, computers, TV boxes next to that wall (also next to couch), and not where the plugs are now (in the opposite wall where image is desired). Audio cables would be the main problem then, probably, but I guess wireless or network solutions for speakers are possible? And with a projector, I could get almost a 120" image on that wall (but maybe that's even too big for 3.5 m sitting distance?) How does a projector's image quality compare to plasma or LCD TVs?

All the cheaper (50") plasmas seem to be 1024x768, though. Maybe that's enough for 50"?

Did I get it right that the beta machines they'll ship (I signed up) will only ever be prototypes -- Valve will not become a hardware manufacturer?

yeah, I've played it and loved the ending. Although with open world games the dramatic structure is more in the player's control anyway

Actually I'm not sure whether to go for streaming only or something that can play more demanding games by itself as well. If I built a real gaming PC I'd go for something high end and then I definitely wouldn't afford XBone or PS4 for a while. Anyway, haven't even gotten a TV yet. The size of the box I probably don't care that much about, main thing is that it should be quiet.

Input? That might be problematic, but then OnLive probably works and it's much further in the network.

I want a game called Big Ghost Dog

SteamOS sounds good! Somewhy I stupidly was not expecting this home streaming thing, but it makes perfect sense! Keep your noisy high-performance computer in an office room and just stream the games to the living room! Perfect sense! And I'm sure there are things they can improve at the Linux kernel level specifically with the living-room/gaming computer in mind, so it makes sense that it's not just a normal Linux distro (I assume it will not be). I'm already thinking about what kind of computer to build for this. Any tips, Elmuerte?

Sorry, I haven't played the game yet, or read everything in the thread, but I saw the word dénouement and just realized that aren't basically the vast vast vast majority of games almost completely missing this from the dramatic structure? Usually the final conflict escalates right up to the end, then a short video is played, and 30 minutes of credits (considering recent AAA examples). At least some recent games have (smartly, I think) not made the "end boss" super-hard so you can relax a bit at the very end. Some cases, I'm not sure about, e.g. in The Witcher 2 after there is some resolution and falling tension in case you decide I love games that let you actually play a little bit more after the final challenge has resolved. I think LBA did this, but can't remember many more... There are of course open world games that let you keep playing, but that's not the same.

God dammit, I think I might give up before I get to the good parts of the game. I'm definitely seeing some of the charm of the previous ones, but also all of the problems ... that they haven't managed to fix in 4 games (counting from Gothic 2) are still there. No real evolution seems to have happened. I've been playing the island I'm on for several hours, and am still no better at fighting the warthogs, which was my first enemy on the island. And what's worse, when they started appearing as 1 or 2, now I'm often finding 3 or 4 of them. And the game really sucks bad when you fight multiple enemies. I might keep playing, we'll see. Or maybe I should just admit that it might have fun moments but I don't want to waste time levelling up to the fun level (jesus how the hell? I forgot the word for when you just trudge through more and more fights for the sole purpose of leveling up). Maybe I should play Dark Souls instead, which I still haven't started.

For some reason I now resumed playing it after several months. I forgot a lot of what happened in the beginning already, my savegame was just as I got to the second island (I think). Things started feeling more like the Risen and Gothic games on that island. One interesting thing is that you start out pretty much as a wimp, and mostly I have gotten beaten in duels that I've started for various reasons, but the game acknowledges that somewhat. For example, I stole a hat from somewhere, then a pirate wanted it back, I refused, had to fight, lost and had to give the hat back, which he is now wearing. Later, I fought for a bandana and somehow won, and now I assume most of the fighting in the game will be over headgear. The controls still feel somewhat crappy though. It's interesting to compare this to The Witcher series, which made quite a jump from 1st to 2nd game in how the combat and everything played, and looks like will make another jump in Witcher 3, but Risen 2 still plays a lot like Gothic 1 from 2001. There's an annoying thing about the day-night cycle which makes the shadows jump after every few seconds. It looks quite annoying in dialogues. Quite early on you get access to trainers that require lots of gold to train you in specific skills. It's a bit annoying to seemingly have access to so many skills but not have the money to buy them.

Satan Compo

Cool news!

Actually all of the books have been translated by fans. But I'm not sure if I'd recommend reading them. The Sword of Destiny is good, but the novel series translations are full of spelling and grammar errors and nonsensical sentences. It might make them annoying to read, but the story was interesting enough that I just learned to ignore those problems (or tried, at least). I read something about no plans for officially translating some of the books, but not sure if that's true.

You know, I think the difference between movie scores and game scores is actually all right. If you watch a bad movie, you've only wasted a couple of hours (and maybe a few bucks). If you start playing a bad game, you may have wasted 60€ and if you still want to play through it, you'll waste potentially tens of hours (but you probably don't). So if you make purchasing decisions based on review scores, it's fine to expect better scores from games you would buy than movies you would watch. But yeah, scores should be killed.

BTW. It was actually quite interesting to be replaying The Witcher 2 and at the same time reading in the novels about events that some characters in the game were referring to. I also wonder if Sabrina Glevissig's curse is described in the last book, but probably not.

Not every criticism must be based on technical achievement or triple-A values or whatever. Too early to critisize the critics before playing the game.

Finished it. It was a bit boring in the beginning, and as a whole not as scary as the original, but maybe mostly because I was determined not to be scared? It got more interesting at about half-way through, and the ending was great. One disappointing thing was that it felt a lot less interactive than the original -- but maybe I remember the original wrong.

You mean the evil machinations?

So I got myself a Galaxy Trucking Simulator after seeing the recommendations here. It's fun! We played without time limit at first, as one player had played it before and complained about it. Didn't have to wait too long for last guys to finish (except in the second two-player game where the other guy was just taking all the time in the world to build a perfect ship -- and of course he won too). So I think the time limit is appropriate, but I don't know if the standard rules for it have the right balance. The rules of this game are written really confusingly. Nice idea to let you start with reading only parts of the rules, but in practice you end up looking through the whole rulebook to find what the hell does it mean that "ships with more engines are faster" and then you read that when the Open Space card comes up, you can actually move forward on the track instead of "nothing happens". I also got The Big Expansion because I'd like to have more variance than in the base game. Any recommendations which parts of the expansion to start with?

I don't follow games writing a lot these days, but did I see something about this game being about the American Dream again? Right, if the American dream is to rise up to be a leader of a criminal organization (maybe it is?)

I suddenly became really exited for this after seeing the map of the Carribean and the seamless land/sea transitions (looks like it might be completely open world?). Then after reading posts here, I remembered... Abstergo, Animus, Assassin Garb. Agree with the above points that they should just make these as separate period-games and not ruin it with some sci-fi glue and a stupid overarching theme that ties it all together (although I'm sure having some elements stay the same helps them develop so many of these games so fast).

Hmm.. I'd rather have a better game than more map. I'm torn between waiting for PC and getting it for PS3. My PS3 is still at my parents house because I don't have a TV. So I would have to buy a TV to play this because I'm not going to go and play a 100 hour game at my parents'. But I don't really want a TV [edit]Hmm... I could take my PS3 to the office, where we have a big screen... but it's the same room with a conference/ping-pong table and I would have to keep moving stuff around to play in the evenings and pissing off people who want to play ping-pong instead.