Thrik

That's true, GTA4 is known for being a terrible port performance-wise. Still, that hardware is going to struggle with most modern games. I'd suggest that a well-optimised game for testing would be Battlefield 3. As the PC was the lead platform and it is an incredible tax on hardware, getting that to run smoothly means you should be in pretty good shape. Until Crysis 3 that can probably safely be considered the current PC benchmark.

Almost certainly the CPU that's bottlenecking you, I have a Q6600 and it too struggles with some things (although weirdly some games like Battlefield 3 aren't bottlenecked by it at all). You're like me though in that you're essentially on a 2006-era platform, so to really move forward you need to change your motherboard — and that means new RAM, because DDR2 doesn't fit in DDR3 slots. Another important contributor to a responsive feel is using an SSD. They do actually make a big difference to almost anything that has to do anything with your hard drive, which as you can imagine is quite a lot. People always bang on about how fast Windows loads, but in all honesty that means shag all to me. Much snappier applications and OS across the board, though? Yes please. You'd probably have to use your SATA drives as archive/storage drives though, and try to just use your SSD for software and smaller files, or move big video projects off it once you're done with them for example. Unless you have a lot of dosh to burn, anyway.

WOT IS IN KOOB. a g a m b y p e r r e r m o l n o o How long does something like this take to make?

Sounds like you might have been hit by the new Steam exploit. It makes you think you're giving away extra copies but in reality you're giving away all your shit.

Let's all kill toblix.

Yeah, that's what I meant. You just hit that function and your whole window of tabs will come right back up. I know because I make this mistake a lot in Chrome.

You can actually just use the 'reopen closed tab' feature, it treats a whole window of tabs the same way as a normal tab.

Haha, that's a novel way of getting around the 'Kickstarter is not a shop' thing — just don't use it! Surprised this is out and playable so fast, caught me at a bad time so I'll let you guys get the bugs sorted out for me first.

While kind of the point of a simulation game, I found it refreshing just how much depth Maxis seem to be going into with the new SimCity's many simulation systems. I originally watched the videos wanting to be blown away by the graphics, but instead I was more fascinated by these intricate little systems that made me completely forget about the graphics — much like how I was dazzled more by Half-Life 2's physics and material simulations rather than its sheen. That's the kind of feeling I want from more games.

More like seven. I agree, more movement is needed in terms of things like AI and other such things that can really change the way shooters are played. That said, progress has been made — Crysis was a fantastic step in my opinion, although sadly Crytek seemed to have stumbled a bit with its sequel. The third looks like it's going to take the best elements of both and Crytek has been candid about them letting art dictate design too much in C2, so I'm optimistic. I think a large part of this generation has been console developers finally being able to deliver good shooters, whereas before this generation they were relatively unpopular on consoles. So in a way I think this generation has been spent letting console players experience what the PC has had for much longer, and with the next generation people will start craving more original gameplay.

It seems crazy now because it's been so long since Valve were on the cutting edge of engine technology, but HL2 was some seriously mindblowing shit when it came out. I remember when that leaked tech demo came out and people literally didn't believe it was running in real time because it was such a leap ahead in terms of physics, materials, the water, everything. I'd love to be similarly amazed by the inevitable Half-Life 3 revelation, but I think the mantle of insane technology has been passed to Crytek and to a lesser extent Epic now.

Disallowing renderings is a funny one. On the one hand it makes sense because it's a little unfair to expect people to back something based on renderings that could potentially look much better than the final product, so expectations are kept in check. On the flip side, showing 'vertical slices' and representations of a final product is common fare in all entertainment industries and I'm guessing hardware design industries too. I guess with time those using Kickstarter will learn to put more effort into prototypes and such rather than relying on fancy renders to get people interested, but of course that means more upfront costs they may not be able to afford. Will be interesting to see how it pans out!

I get nostalgic about the HL1 mod days too. I think nowadays the amateur development scene is stronger than ever, but because there're so many avenues through which they can work on stuff it means there's no single game where most of them are concentrated like there was then. This is kind of a bad thing in the case of honest-to-god mods because it means there's less chance of you having the particular game a really awesome mod runs on, but a good thing in the case of things like BM:S where you don't really need anything to run it. In a way Valve has positioned Source well as an ultra-accessible platform for amateur developers because you can get your stuff out there without needing a parent game, like BM:S. Source itself has become that parent game, like the HL1 of old; unfortunately the engine is in need of a major overhaul so that continues to hold it back from having the ultra-active scene its predecessor enjoyed. An observation: my forum was built on a heritage of HL1 modding and most of the guys who were involved with that now spend their spare time working on Unity, CryEngine, and TF2 stuff. Of course it takes so long to create anything nowadays that most of them just create art scenes for screenshot/video purposes rather than actual playable experiences, although the 'unfinished/abandoned maps' thread is amusingly prolific — a sign of how time-consuming it is to bring a fan project to completion nowadays.

Hahaha. ...

Haha. That reminds me of Team Fortress Classic, which had the most panic-inducing effect ever when the Pyro set you on fire: loads of little flames burning all over the screen so you couldn't see a fuckin' thing, meaning you inevitably madly flailed around trying to get away from enemies until it wore off.

Whoa, female scientist!

Yeah the new iPod Nano looks absolutely superb if you're after a dedicated workhouse music player (which many people still are for many reasons). It does feel like Apple can't make its mind up regarding what to do with the iPod brand because the Nano in itself has gone from kind of big to really small, and now bigger again. Then you've got the iPod which is actually a PDA, minature tablet, or whatever the fuck you describe an iPhone without a phone as. I think they really need to start simplifying their brands and removing the clutter. Hopefully this pretty much perfect Nano is a step towards that.

Haha, no it was actually Nottingham's Caribbean Carnival. Fairly similar I gather?

Well they're all descendants of each other, right? And the Assassins are purported to be a long-standing order, which presumably intends to preserve its traditions to a certain extent. In AS1 there was a whole load of Assassins, it was pretty much their uniform. Then in AS2 I think they'd disintegrated as an order apart from Ezio's dad, although I'm a little fuzzy regarding whether or not other Assassins were meant to exist at that time. Then in Brotherhood Ezio basically builds up a whole new order of Assassins and makes it a large organisation again, which I guess could be how its traditions and clothing persisted into the AS3 timeline. We know the Assassins as a broad order remained until the present day as that's the whole point of the modern-day sequences, although by this point they've obviously shed the 'look'.

I can see what you're saying about the hood's subtle nod to the shape of an eagle being lost, but the character overall looks pretty authentic to the time — if you took the hood away he'd fit in very nicely. But the hood is presumably to prevent identification of the assassin, not to blend in. It'd be cool if he took it off when blending into crowds, as it doesn't really work the same way it did with the AS1 crowds who also had hoods. I guess the canonical explanation would be that over time the meaning of the uniform became lost and the assassin's continued wearing it simply out of tradition. It's not like tradition overriding common sense doesn't happen in the real world!

I'm actually a real fan of the skeblubobub design on the iPhone. Since switching to Android one of the things I miss is how clean, clinical, boring, and essentially the same every app looks. At first it wasn't so bad as Android's minimalist design is good, but now I've been using it for some time I'm just finding I get less of an indescribable feeling of satisfaction when interacting with the apps. I can see how it might get out of control, for example I've heard some pretty bad things about how stuff like the Calendar app is handled on the iPad. But my iPhone 4 had a pretty much perfect blend of function and aesthetic extravagence, with things like its Calendar app and phone view being nice and clean while the simpler applications like the calculator, notepad, to-do list, etc had a more fancy approach. I think where this kind of approach to design falls apart is when you try to accomplish too much functionality within the constraints of a design trying to emulate the feel of its physical counterpart. You have to know where the cut-off point is and take the design in a more abstract direction, which is something I guess Apple's designers are starting to lose sight of due to conflicting leadership. Whatever the case, I do think it's a good thing. I was genuinely tickled when I first got my iPhone and saw the level of detail put into these apps' aesthetics, without compromising the usability at all — even improving it in some cases due to the familiarity. It just has to be done right.

OK, didn't quite leave it two years but it's now been a pretty long time since I half-finished Brotherhood and have given this a go. Now I don't know about you guys, but that was one of the most surprisingly thrilling game intros I've played for a while — after the relatively slow lead-ins that the previous two games had this was exciting as fuck, and the presentation of it was quite unlike what I've seen in the series beforehand. I expect things will settle into a more traditional kind of gameplay before long having been ejected back into Animus Island for the first time after becoming Ezio, but I'm pretty happy with what I've seen. If this kind of pace can be kept up it could be the best Assassin's Creed I've played by far, if not then I guess at least it's taste of how they might be upping the ante with Assassin's Creed 3 to distinguish it from its predecessors (beyond setting). Oh, and the music is just on fire this time.

Not sure what exactly I missed in Peace Walker (I'll probably play it to find out), but it looks like the mighty 'Outer Heaven' army and base(s) described in MGS1, etc became a reality and this game may deal with how things go sour from there — the fall of Big Boss, if you will. Will be very interesting and exciting to see and I totally agree that Big Boss is one of the more interesting MGS characters (alongside Ocelot).

Considering how even many of the games I buy on a store shelf often have voice acting no better if not worse than BM:S's effort, I'm not entirely sure that's true. There're plenty of people out there who do the kind of thing in the BM:S video, though. I'd like to hear how the other marines sound though, anyone seen any footage of that yet? This particular exchange was written badly in the first place as the dialogue is shit, so I'll be interested to see how they've coped with the relatively easy other stuff the marines have to say. Also I keep calling them marines and I have no idea if that's even accurate. Just another reason to play HL1 for the first time in over a decade!

I imagine that getting decent voice acting is more difficult than everything else when you have no budget. I'm no fan of the voices and was one of the first to start grumbling about it when the video leaked, but I can't say I think the original exchange is very good either — if it were me I'd probably have just axed the whole thing as it sounds out of place in comparison to essentially everything else in HL1. In fact, the voices used in the original exchange don't really match the voices the marines use the rest of the time. Fortunately the remainder of the marine voice acting is limited to grunts and outbursts, so hopefully it won't be something that becomes offputting. As for the scientists and Barney (Is there anyone else who actually talks in HL1?), I just hope they got those right. It's particularly important in those cases as, of course, they reappeared in HL2. It's also refreshing to know that we'll be able to put the original voices and/or sound effects back in if we really want to. Should they drop the ball on the front I'm sure someone will put together a mod that sorts it out — just a shame all the original audio files are in the worst compression imaginable.