Thrik

Comments from people who I know/trust and have actually played the game are saying some of the more critical articles (ie: Ars Technica, Joystiq) really are trying very hard to make the game sound as bad as possible and the reality is more in line with what Eurogamer and IGN have said — which I can believe because it's far from the first time the former sites have been a little exaggerated with their opinion pieces. So my inclination is to not be a dickhead and not buy the game based on a few bad reviews while ignoring the torrent of positive reviews (ew Metacritic, I know) that are out there, although I'll admit I was initially wobbled a bit. I guess my expectations of the game have been sobered somewhat though as it was fairly ambiguous what to actually expect before (some people were clearly just expecting another Fallout 3 or Borderlands).

LMAO!!!!! I've literally got streams of tears at the above post!

Yeah that's the problem I've always had with trying to play Metal Gear Solid non-lethally: so easy to accidentally twat someone up. Granted that game doesn't auto-save, but it's still a pain in the arse if you do it due to MGS's intentional discouragement of loading by making it inconvenient.

Holy mother of God that is an ugly peripheral. I've not been impressed by a single thing that's happened since the release of the 3DS and am extremely glad I opted out of early adoption.

I don't get how people of influence at Ubisoft haven't yet figured out that their DRM is the stupidest shit ever because the only people suffering are legitimate consumers — every pirate has a copy with the DRM nicely chopped out. I mean, is this a hard thing to understand? It's fine to implement something which complicates easy duplication and distribution of a retail copy, but this shit doesn't accomplish that task any better than the protection used a decade ago. Publishers just need to understand that it doesn't matter how fancy your DRM is, the pirates will still get round it. Argh. Fuck me.

That's the problem with the games industry: it loves to pull cheeky, shitty little moves to see how they go. Just look at Call of Duty's subscription multiplayer thing (which is matched and exceeded by Battlefield 3's free counterpart, incidentally).

Sounds like the PC version is an absolute bag of shit. How disappointing.

Yeah they cancelled the region locking for Europe.

Yes, I too would like to know the surely exciting and twisty tale behind this decision!

You shouldn't need to unless it's changed. I've never really used the mode but when I once had a dead connection but fancied some Half-Life 2 it simply prompted me to go into Offline Mode when I started Steam and it found no connection.

Because Steam has this: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-agcb-2555

You big gossiping women.

Going off the reviews, seems like the sequel might actually be great as opposed to... not. The videos I've seen looked absolutely fantastic, so I'd say it's a sure bet I'll be picking this one up. Hopefully its supposedly quality multiplayer will be popular, as the PS3 could sure use a decent online FPS. Any of you press-ites played it? Any thoughts?

Automatic or word-for-word translation is a waste of time guaranteed to produce inaccuracies — no good if for anything remotely serious. Best off just getting it from the horse's mouth. Not that I'm implying all German speakers are horses.

This should be using PlayStation Move.

It's not that expensive, though. It's definitely not as cheap as consoles and I'm not even proposing the argument that it is, but the PC hardware market has changed during the past five or so years due to the extreme affordability of powerful components — I bought my quad-core 3Ghz in 2007 for about £100 and it's still kicking ass, and my 8GB of RAM set me back like £100 and is similarly going strong. The only area of real expense is the graphics card, but again my four-year-old card is quite capable of running Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on high graphics and I can comfortably max out Crysis (which is more graphically sophisticated than any existing console game including Crysis 2). Overall you're looking at less than a few hundred quid to keep you going for a generation of games. If you start wanting to run PC games on max at 1080p+ and with perfect frame rates then you will pay considerably more, but you're not getting that with OnLive anyway. Plus this generation of consoles has kind of accustomed people to shoddy frame rates. My feeling is PC gaming is only going to become more affordable with time as hardware becomes increasingly powerful at increasingly low prices, and it'll get to the point where everyone has a powerful-ass PC or laptop that they don't even necessary use for gaming — that's simply how powerful PC hardware is. And then if they want to run games on them they just can, leaving services like OnLive unnecessary, inferior, and probably more expensive overall (ie: over several years) too. But really I'm not trying to put down OnLive as such, just sharing where I think the PC gaming scene will go.

To be honest I think the whole Market value of OnLive flawed. It's not actually that expensive to kit out a decent PC with hardware being so affordable nowadays, unless you opt for top-end hardware — which OnLive isn't going to be using anyway as it'd be financially impossible.

Well it depends on your set-up and expectations I guess. If I were given a 720p feed at the level of quality you're likely to get from most UK connections (ie: comparable to YouTube) I would not be happy with that on my 1080p screen — which most PC screens are at least nowadays. The quality wouldn't be so much an issue on a TV as you're not right up against the screen, but you'd be mad to do OnLive that way when you'd get infinitely better value for money, better responsiveness, and probably better visuals by simply using a console.

Oh the UK is awful, my examples are probably the nicer ones out there because I'm in the middle of a relatively major city and just happened to live right next to the phone exchange when I did live in a town. For the most part UK connectivity is shit, using the same copper cables laid down decades ago that've degraded, use inefficient routes, and basically are probably in exactly the same state as it sounds like the US's are in. With that said improvements are being rapidly due to the small size of the country, but it's still only major areas that can lay claim to decent copper speed or fibre-optic — anywhere remotely off the beaten path is going to struggle. Even 10Mb/s isn't enough to get a decent HD broadcast without considerable buffering so I'm not sure what level of quality they're expecting people to tolerate.

I used to live in a flat right in the centre of Nottingham and I could only just attain 5Mb/s, whereas in my new one still in the centre I get about 12Mb/s. Before both of those places I got 22Mb/s in a small town. There seems to be no real pattern to internet connectivity in the UK beyond pot luck because the wiring is so random and so universally SHIT that until you move in it's Russian roulette whether or not you get a decent line. That immediately makes OnLive a waste of time for much of the country unless you enjoy playing games through low-quality video feeds on mid-spec machines.

Yeah the UK's internet infrastructure is so ready for this.

Looks like even Rockstar thought Team Bondi's management were dickheads: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-07-05-rockstars-disdain-for-la-noire-dev

It actually makes complete sense if you have a vague understanding of trademark law. Trademarks are all about the context: if it weren't a WW1 era-themed game it'd probably be fine to release a game called 'Trenched'. Unfortunately it is, and so it falls foul. It sucks but I don't think those who own the trademark have really done anything particularly wrong here. Don't forget that trademark owners have to vigilantly protect their trademarks or they lose them, so they're not necessarily just being asses.

Yeah I too would say San Andreas is my favourite. Don't get me wrong GTA3 and Vice City are great and obviously brought forth the formula we all know and love, but really GTA3 and GTA4 are so alike — set in Liberty City — that it's hardly worth playing the former after the latter, particularly seeing as it's the least aesthetically pleasing of the lot and the story is basically shit. VC has a wonderful Miami-esque setting but the city is rather small and once again the gameplay is very similar to what you've seen before. If you like the idea of playing a massive Scarface tribute then it might be worthwhile. SA is the one that a current-generation GTA hasn't yet matched, in that it takes place over a whole state that contains multiple cities and also smaller settlements such as farming towns, hippy communes in the forest, etc, which takes the atmosphere and feel of the game to places you've probably not yet experienced in the series. My fondest SA memories are of going around the deserts, forests, etc. Kind of disappointed Rockstar haven't yet gone for a SA-style GTA this generation now.

Ouch.