Thrik

Hmm, I guess you're right about the hub -- it is fairly unimaginatively produced. Although to be honest, I've never actually thought about it or been bothered by it. I guess it does pale in comparison to Mario 64's concept of giving you the entirety of Peach's castle and grounds (briefly seen at the beginning to Mario Galaxy, for those who didn't play 64), and Sunshine's really big island environment. If nothing else, they had secret stars hidden around to find.

Five minutes? More like less than one. Everything Yufster says still stands true. I bet your parents have left you in worse circumstance, whether you remember them or not. Every parent has lapses, and all it takes is an unfortunate incident to occur during one of those lapses for disaster to strike. If you think your own parents have never had a lapse then you're seriously deluded. This is severe bad misfortune on the McCann parents' fault, but they don't deserve contempt for it. All testimonials indicate that they were excellent parents. It's too tempting to just blame the parents in cases like this. Did you see the news story about where the 8-month-old baby was left to sleep in a blanket in the next room, and the family dog ate the baby's genitals? Are they bad parents too? No. They just didn't expect their fucking dog to eat the baby's genitals -- it wouldn't have even crossed their minds. Similarly, a great big hulking paedophile going and taking their daughter while they were across the road didn't cross the McCanns' minds, compounded further by the natural false sense of security that most people get on holiday (despite really being more vulnerable than ever).

I was under the impression that they always had a line of sight with the apartment doors, and that they were checking in every 20-40 minutes. I'm not saying that I'd do that as I'm paranoid and overprotective, but I'm sure not seeing your kids for 60 minutes at a time is something parents do on a regular basis. Some sick fuck could climb in through an upper window while you're watching a loud film and be off with your child and you probably wouldn't know. All they'd have to do is observe what you're doing and/or your habits. If a sick fuck is really intent on taking a kid and is enough of a sick fuck to actually do it, I'm not sure any parental vigilance is enough. The sick fuck in this case probably sat there for ages watching the parents' movements (as well as the family friends who were also checking by), and targeted the perfect moment. With a dedicated sick fuck like that he would have probably eventually gotten her by waiting for the opportunity no matter what. The sick fuck probably probably fancied the hell out of her.

You will Yufster when she finds out about this thread, waits until you have a baby, lets it grow up for several years, and then steals/rapes/kills it just so she can do the same to you.

Something worth mentioning is that on the cheaper two packages you don't get any access to games (the ones where you get a hard limit of how many items you can take out per month rather than a limit of how many you can have out at once). Do not be the Thrik that got one of those packages and ended up arseholed upon browsing into the games section.

You're probably being silly as the Elite really isn't that much superior to the normal 360, at least in ways that're actually significant. A lot of them don't even have the revised motherboard that is meant to fix the overheating 'red ring of death 'issues. Ultimately you'll be playing the same games in the same way. I'd go for a PS3 as it's a new console, some great exclusives will be coming out such as Metal Gear Solid 4 (and others -- this is a Sony console after all, and even until relatively recently there've been awesome PS2 exclusives). You'll probably get one eventually anyway if you like your games. The Wii stands out a bit there as it's so relatively cheap; clearly it's the persisent difficulty in getting one that's adding the value, but if you can wait you might as well just get the more expensive PS3 and then buy a Wii later on (much better than the other way round).

I had the bright idea of challenging my two sisters; the first one to hit 120 stars gets £10 (A superb prize for ~10-year-old girls!), and the title of 'better at games than you'. Except now the bastards put in about two/three hours a day and: Of course she did that when she had about 10 stars. ¬

Hee. I don't allow myself to move onto the next galaxy until I've gotten everything I can possibly get, but then you move on and it opens stuff up in those earlier ones! Man. Some of the daredevil stars are downright evil.

Imagine being the fuck who abducted her, raped her, and then killed her hours afterwards. He must be watching all this media coverage just going on and on, knowing that despite constant hope pouring out of the parents she's really buried in some location only known to him. I mean, it must have got to the point where he just wants to tell them. But then, that could get him arseholed as it opens up the whole forensic thing. Perhaps he's just committed suicide, unable to cope with the decision completely. I spent an entire bus journey the other day thinking about what could possibly be going through the mind of a sick fuck in a situation like that.

Holy crap! It's made everything look all smooth like it's been through some kind of clean-up Photoshop filter. I agree, it's an absolutely shit game but the concept is intriguing and I like the visual effect it's given my eyes.

There are so many awesome memories I have of Atari and Amiga games that I played with my dad when I was, like, three. But I remember none of the names (most likely never knew them). GODS and Magic Pockets are two I remember fondly, though. All the Dizzy games too. There was a platform game where you play as a baby I liked, as well as all your New Zealand Storys and Rainbow Islands. None of these are particularly obscure, of course. I just enjoy mentioning them as they get me nostalgic.

I've not even gotten home from work yet. My mum slipped it into the conversation while I was asking her something on the phone. It's a good job she did tell me then because if I'd discovered it upon trying to play the game I'd most likely throw the Wiimote through her head. As it is, I've had enough time to cool off and will instead just be all in her general direction for a while.

Haha. Man, after getting to the third solar system or whatever with all stars, and doing all the speed/daredevil/etc runs, I've just discovered my sister accidentally overwrote my file today with her file towards the end of the first solar system while snooping at my progress. Fucking hilarious.

Hopefully. It could just be that the disc hadn't inserted itself into the drive properly, which I guess is the downside of having a magic self-feeding disc drive. It seems to be pretty foolproof but I'm guessing there's a small potential for poor insertion technique to cause problems.

No. Sounds like a possible disc drive problem.

Gameplay is the best for this type of thing I've found. I preordered it a couple of days ago and they managed to get it to me today, which is a day before the actual UK release. I've not played far enough to get to the inevitable frustrating parts, but man has this made a good first impression on me. I really love the fact that nostalgia is oozing out of every orifice; starting at the Super Mario 64 castle as it appeared back then (albeit with a bit more detail around the outskirts) really made me happy, and it only got better once the likes of Kamek appeared and such. I definitely rate Galaxy's first two hours of play a lot higher than I did Sunshine's.

Heh yes, it really is fun once you get into using the different abilities to take out enemies in increasingly elaborate ways. There's really a shitload of potential for different gameplay, but I suspect a lot of people will just stick to the old run and gun technique. The video that plays at the start of the demo is actually quite inspiring, with moves such as using the strength ability to vault over a jeep about to run you over, etc. I decided to try this and ended up landing on the jeep, at which point I panicked and smacked the driver in the head with my fist, inevitably causing a crash. I had a particularly hilarious moment in my last session where I'd used the cloak and some sneaking to get inside an enemy encampment, and thought I'd take some guy out a little fancily. So I pick up a big object (possibly a washing machine), activate strength mode, and chuck it at the bastard. ... Well, not only does it miss, but it then proceeds to rip right through the wall and bring the entire fucking section of the building down. Needless to say, this did my stealth strategy no favours. Until this point I did not realise the buildings themselves were destructible.

Yes, I also think Fable: TLC is a game of superb quality. Again, probably helped by total hype avoidance. It exceeded my expectations, even if not they weren't the lofty ones from the Molyneux factory.

Yeah, I do find it pretty annoying when there's about five snipers on the same team and you can't get anyone to help you mount a decent offence or defence. I do enjoy a bit of 2fort sniping though, though I tend to use the lower levels of the fort (ie: the front doors) so I can get all the guys coming over the bridge. The same bridge obscures me from the enemy snipers pretty well too.

I don't think there's much to discuss here. The very presence of gore in a game clearly makes the two of you think there's a lack of creativity, so nothing but the final game is liable to change that. I'm sure you will end up liking the final thing, though. What kind of nutbag doesn't like a Schafer game? I do think it's a daft opinion, though. Anyone could have said Full Throttle was just trying to be cool and edgy, and in fact people who had just come from Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle probably did. Adults, that is -- not us kids.

Eh?! You're mental. 2fort is ace!

Anyone else click this expecting something about a wedding? No?

I personally think the game is ace. The storyline seems like it could be pretty cool having played through the whole demo, but more importantly I just love the feel of going around the island and taking on the (sub-)objectives at your leisure. It seems more balanced than Far Cry was, in that you're actually confined to a loose path but the path happens to be a million miles wide. So getting through different parts of the island can be as action-filled as you make it, and if you want to just take guys out for the sake of it you can have a great time doing so. I kind of imagine myself in a Solid Snake type position though, and try to use stealth as much as possible. The sandbox nature of the game encourages coming up with your own rules, and my rules are to totally avoid detection and take everyone out cleanly. Of course I've just gone mental and blown everything the hell up too, and it can get really exciting when you've got the context-sensitive soundtrack blasting away and reinforcements swamping you with gunfire. I suppose it's a game that requires more from the player than most, just like Far Cry was. It doesn't hold your hand, but instead gives you objectives that're miles away and expects you to choose how to approach it yourself; if you don't like messing guys up just for the sake of messing guys up it could be a very brief game. Probably the opposite of HL2 in that respect, which led you on a very tight course and forced you to interact with each adversary. I'm hoping the final game has more sub-objectives like the demo where you're told there's an outpost somewhere with some intelligence or whatever, and just getting in and out of there can be half an hour of gameplay. If you try to do it stealthily anyway, which is fairly mandatory when playing on the hardest difficulty. :~ The reward is just some backstory, but it's at least an incentive.

Yeah, this game is definitely designed to be ahead of its time. There's actually an 'Ultra High' that can be accessed through some console fiddling, which brings it almost exactly in line with those earlier E3 previews (that many thought were pre-rendered). Needless to say, this is a mode you don't want to be enabling until your computer hails from 2010. I'm on similar specifications to you, and I also have to tone down my graphics in some very key areas to get good performance. With that said, if I go down to 1024x768 instead of my native 1920x1200 I can get it pretty playable on 'Very High'; I'm not sure if it's the 169.04 drivers I use that make that possible. Anyway, here's my way to get 1920x1200 looking great but also running at 25+ fps: 1. Download the .zip file I've attached 2. Go to C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis SP Demo\Game\Config\CVarGroups 3. Make a backup of everything in that folder 4. Overwrite everything in that folder with the contents of my .zip 5. Play Crysis in DirectX 9 mode; if you're on XP this will always be the case, if on Vista you need to go to 'Games' in the start menu and right click the Crysis launcher 6. Change all in-game settings to 'High' (the highest available in DirectX 9) except Post Processing and Shadows, which want to be on 'Medium' Unfortunately DirectX 10 still seems to have quite a bit of overhead in comparison to DirectX 9, which means that using the same settings in both will invariably result in worse performance on DirectX 10. I think this is because to really take advantage of DirectX 10 the game needs to be totally focused on making the most of that API; however, this comes at the cost of no DirectX 9 compatibility (which obviously isn't acceptable at the moment). Weirdly though, there's not really anything in Crysis that needs DirectX 10 to work; the configuration settings are simply hidden from you when you play in DirectX 9. My modified config files trick the game by copying all the DirectX 10 settings into 'High' mode. So when you play with 'High', you've actually go the 'Very High' configuration running, but without the DirectX 10 shader overhead. The only exception to this is 'Objects', which I left at their normal 'High' level as they do degrade performance quite a lot with very little visible difference. This always gives me 20+ fps in 1920x1200, so it should definitely be very playable on 1024x768. Note that if you find very little difference in frame rate between a low and a high resolution, that's a sign your processor is bottlenecking your graphics card. Your processor should overclock to around 3GHz on air cooling, FYI. crysis_config.zip

I don't know if I'd call using gore inherently immature. Perhaps it's just the type of game Double Fine want to do, and it's nothing to do with trying to appear edgy. After all, metal as a theme usually carries some violent undertones, so avoiding the whole violence thing would be pretty weird. I know a lot of people have said the Brutal Legend trailer is exactly what they'd say a metal game should look like, and I have to agree. It feels right, and I can't really think of another way the theme could be approached successfully off the top of my head. I think to assume Double Fine would only use gore as an immature cop-out to look cool is a pretty shitty assumption. With all that said, I can't help but feel that the final game won't be the relentless gore-fest that the trailer makes it out to be. I'm sure there'll be plenty of killin', but it wouldn't be a Double Fine game without great characters and storyline to back it up.