Thrik

Nonsense. GoldenEye's heavily scripted gameplay and NPC interaction was a very important step forward for first-person shooter games in general, and indeed pre-dated the first truly astounding implementations of such elements on the PC. It can hardly be compared to the relatively primitive gameplay of Quake. Edit: Holy crap, can I ever get a post in first on this forum? But yes, GoldenEye really is a classic, and made far more significant steps forward than Halo ever did. The comparison is mental!

Pity they missed out on GoldenEye too.

I like to compare Halo's popularity to feeding third-world children a decidedly mediocre but filling meal.

Oh yeah, totally agree there Dan. I think the MGS series in general has excellent endings, although a lot of people were so weirded out by the relative complexity of MGS2's story that they didn't really appreciate it so much. I think it's largely because MGS builds towards the ending for quite a while with big chases, huge fights, and lots of character development; pretty much how the climax of a big action film might be approached, rather than the 'this is the final encounter; kill him' approach a lot of games take. I'd say other great endings include Half-Life 2 and Beyond Good and Evil, which again take a lot of time building up to the ending. In fact, HL2 didn't even have much of a literal ending as such, but because they built up the final hour or so to the credits so well, it felt like an excellent ending. Of course, we are talking about games that were generally brilliant throughout here, so the fact that their endings were also pretty great isn't going to surprise anyone. I think Psychonauts is probably a game that built up to the ending pretty badly. Not only was the actual ending completely displaced from the gameplay you were doing minutes before, but the gameplay itself was more focused on pure gameplay and sacrificed a lot of the character development and general world interactivity that made the preceding entirety of the game so enjoyable. I guess there's no particular formula for making a good ending, but I do think the final hour or so before it is the most important time. I suppose you could call it a really long ending, but it seems more correct to think of it as the crescendo to the the climax.

I think it's more a case of a certain facet of Schafer's audience not having that much platformer experience, because I didn't find it that hard either. I've experienced much, much, much more frustrating gameplay than that in 2D and 3D platformers alike, and in fact only spent a few hours on the Meat Circus my first time through. That or it's down to whether or not the solution to each area clicks or not when you see it, almost in puzzle-like fashion. Because once you know how to actually get through each part, you can belt through every time. Er, as for this thread, I think developers would do well to take a leaf out of what I'd imagine most people were taught in elementary English lessons, and ensure their games have a superb beginning, middle, and end planned ahead of time. With that in place, slightly mediocre in-between bits are less of a problem.

It's all about timing, basically. These are the ingredients: 1. You must be running in a direction 2. You must both fire the rocket and jump at the exact same moment 3. You must be looking right down at the floor; literally as far down as possible That should propel you to 'right onto the 2fort balconies' heights.

My arse. My arse!

Yeah, I'd probably come along. Long as the hours are Euro friendly.

Really? Man, funny how people can perceive the same things. I thought the game was pretty good until I was randomly exploring and fell down a log, at which point I thought it very good. Ford is ace, you nutter. I can't even begin to understand how ending up in his HQ would turn you off. With that said, in hindsight that guy really needed to get some better security on his place.

Yeah, I have to say I really liked the camp ground too. On my second play through there was quite a lot of times where I'd be going around and realise there was a scenario that I'd missed before. I have no idea how many times the characters move around, but it seemed to be after each level, and even between the Sasha bits (hence me easily missing some, and one cutscene). There're still probably some I haven't seen yet -- replay later this year I think. You're right though, it doesn't bring that same warm, fuzzy feeling that going back to something like Melee Island or Rubacava brings. I think that's more to do with nostalgia though in my case.

I ran into that problem ages ago (Solo), but what you can do is sign up for PayPal and use that as a proxy seeing as Steam accepts PayPal. Doesn't really take much to set up a PayPal account assuming you haven't already, beyond an automated verification call to your phone that asks you to press some buttons in response to read-out numbers. Edit: God damn!!!!! Every time. Beaten.

:tup:

Nos. I am this jerk: http://steamcommunity.com/id/ryanwilliams

The Engineer is a seriously cool class in TF2. Not only is he aesthetically and audibly pleasing, but his load-out is probably the most extensive of all the classes. I've not played with any class in any great level of depth yet, but I spent a lot of time with the Engineer in TFC (after the Medic of course) and the TF2 version feels very, very similar. Except without the EMPs. I also love the new blueprint building thingy, which is in my video during the Engineer demonstration. It's not conveyed so well in the video, but it looks awesome ingame, beautifully sharp and crisp like a piece of paper hovering just above the ground. Valve? More like master of aesthetics.

Yar, the Spy can remain disguised indefinitely. The only thing that'll break the disguise is using your weapon, so killing an enemy will consequently break the disguise. However! There is a way to make the Spy become completely invisible for a temporary period (five seconds I think, maybe 10), which may or may not have something to do with the mysterious box I selected while playing as the Spy and then shook my head at after realising I couldn't work out what to do with it. I'm guessing the invisibility is superb for making a getaway after assassinating someone in the back, and probably a better idea than diving head first into an angry Pyro like me. Man. Can't wait until work finishes so I can play some more.

Yeah, I have to say I entirely can't see how a PC/360 combination could work. First-person shooter games are as a general rule much easier to precisely aim with when using a mouse and thus immediately would give those players an advantage; Team Fortress is a game that's particularly based around insane, fast play, and I fear 360 players would simply be too sluggish no matter how good they are with the pad and'd get really frustrated Incidentally, I played for the first time last night and thought it was absolutely excellent. I was a die-hard TFC for a few years back in its day, and this seems to have captured the general feel that made it a uniquely appealing game (and that has been lost in subsequent online-only games, even if they are great in their own ways). Combined with the crazy artistic direction (which is difficult to truly capture in anything but HD videos as it looks amazing in high-resolution motion), this is a serious winner. There'll always be plenty of people who just can't get on with the rabid gameplay that is a hallmark of Team Fortress, but for those that like it... man, this is a treat. If anyone's interested, I took continuous footage of my first twenty minutes or so and then proceeded to chop bits out so it's literally a sequential demonstration of every weapon/item for each class in the game. Why you'd want to watch it is up to you, but it was all on a live server so you get to see plenty of action too. Not really worthwhile if you're already in the beta, of course -- I don't do anything special.

That's pretty mental. Or at least it seems so considering the move to ubiquitous DVDs occurred here something like five years ago, with little complaint from... well, anybody.

Tee. :~ Oh, Valve.

Okay, okay. Invite 'Ryan' into the Idle Bums group please. I'm not sure if that is actually my Steam ID, but it seems to be. Let me know once you've sent it and I'll confirm later. I've noticed that with the groups anyone can join, it just says 'This group is public' at the top. So I guess there's something in the group control panel somewhere to do with being public.

I don't mind the pre-rendered cutscenes as it does ensure all the music and everything syncs together nicely, which has become a problem with some people. Posts on my Psychonauts forum indicate that sometimes the mouth goes totally out of sync with the audio and stuff, which is weirdly something that's also been a frequent problem with Grim Fandango over the years. What I do mind, however, is that the cutscenes are compressed quite intensely which makes the sound have a weird 'purr' to it if your speakers/headphones are revealing enough, and even though Psychonauts can natively run in widescreen (and looks beautiful while doing so), the cutscenes are simply stretched sideways which looks absolutely terrible. Still, the cutscenes remain a total joy to watch, and in all honesty the 'purr' thing hasn't bothered me since I switched to primarily using speakers instead of headphones. I just play in 4:3 instead and have black bars down the sides, because there's no way I'm having stretched cutscenes.

Reading Digg comments absolutely winds the hell up out of me, because you've basically got people talking absolute shit about things I'm interested in and thus clicked on (hence seeing the comments in the first place). The reason it annoys me is because I invariably see these Digg articles like a day after they've been posted, so about a million comments have been posted since the retarded one(s) and thus it'd be a waste of time replying with some kind of 'FFS!'-orientated comment. So I just close the page feeling slightly irritated. Then open another article and get the same again.

This thing's gone final now, and it seems pretty okay. A lot of stuff is still 'Coming soon, honest!' though, such as the superb-sounding integration of your Steam Community avatar into the games themselves. I'm all for a better kind of system for grouping together and staying in touch in games, since at the moment pretty much every game does it its own way and there's almost zero consistency. Does this game support buddies? How do I add them? Can I send them messages? Does it tell them if I add them? Can I see the server they're playing in? All questions I'd like to never silently ask again. I suggest just making the Thumbs group public so you don't have to bother with this manual adding nonsense. Most other communities I browse seem to let anyone join, and it doesn't look like there's any problem with random fuckos joining (I think there're literally too many groups now for people to bother being dicks).

Hopefully we'll get an extra episode this series. Where the hell is the torrent, though? The download ones (now listed on the site) are generally lower quality.

lol!

Hee, yes that's a good point. The switchers I have are mechanical, but I can see how a digital one might be bollocks. A component switcher should in theory be exactly the same as an audio (red/white) switcher, since they're the same type of cables (RCA). My mechanical audio one doesn't seem to suffer any kind of quality loss so I assume a mechanical component one would be absolutely fine. I'd look for one if I were in your position, anyway -- I have a horrible habit of breaking either the plugs or the jacks when I switch them often. Even managed to arsehole my old Audigy sound card's speaker jack. While on the subject, would a HDMI switcher be better off as non-mechanical seeing as it's a digital signal? Or are they infeasible to even make? Not that it's a concern for a lot of people, but something to consider for media centres in the future.