miffy495

Yeah, a used PS3 is definitely a good way to go. You may even get lucky and get a 60 gig one like I did, which would still allow you to play PS2 games on it. Cost me about $300 back in January '08, so I assume it would be much more reasonable now. For the two years I've had the thing, I've definitely thought it a good purchase. That said, FFXIII seems like the opposite of something I'd be interested in, so I'll quietly duck out of this thread again.

I'll also add on the subject of the game that this thread is about that I have now played the demo 4 times in 3 days, which is quite a bit for such a seemingly limited experience. Every time the map zooms out at the end of the demo to show how big the actual map is, I get shivers. Honestly, I think I could get enough mileage out of this demo to justify my $45. Can't freaking wait for Tuesday.

I used to play a lot of Lemmings with my mom, but that was about the last time she really liked a game. We played a bit of the original Mario Kart back in the day too, but mode 7 graphics quickly made her motion sick. That was about the last time. My dad was already 52 when I was born, so despite being surprisingly tech-savvy for a man born in the '30s (always had to have the latest shiny thing) he had kind of missed the boat on video gaming. That said, he always watched and took an interest, which was appreciated.

Yeah, that game aged very fast and very badly. If you enjoyed Timesplitters, the last thing I can say for PD is that the team that made it later split off and made Timesplitters. The Timesplitters multiplayer was based off of the success that they had with GoldenEye and PD. Timesplitters is totally one of my favorite franchises, so I'm with you on that.

I got it back in October to be a games machine, so I'd certainly hope it could still run things pretty well. It's an ASUS something or other. With 4 gigs of RAM, an Intel Duo T9600 dual-core processor, and an Nvidia Geforce GT 240M running the video. It's actually a pretty capable gaming laptop. I'm very happy with this thing. It's become my primary game machine, as I can take it anywhere with me. I used to play Pokemon Pearl or Air Traffic Chaos during downtime at work, now I play Dawn of War 2 and Just Cause 2. I know a lot of negative comments get thrown at laptops as dedicated games machines, but I couldn't be more pleased with the way this thing rolls. EDIT: Here we go. Not one of their explicit gaming models, but my upper spending limit was $1500 for a laptop (scholarship fund) and this one was the best in that price range. It can run Crysis. Well. It can run Just Cause 2 very nicely. I like this machine.

The mulitplayer is basically Quake 2 mulitplayer, but with all sorts of crazy mods and pretty well designed levels. Comparing PD to Serious Sam isn't really fair, as SS is completely a PC pure action shooter and PD was made at a slower pace to accommodate the console controls. If you weren't playing on a PC, this was as good as shooters got until Halo, when we got a second analog stick. In that respect, it's incredibly cool to have it as a historical record. The level design is certainly as you said, which I think I explained well enough earlier. It's simply a different mentality. Have you tried to replay any late 90s PC games lately? That's just kind of how maps worked. Everything looked the same and there were doors to nowhere everywhere. PD is still one of those. That's what I meant by "the oldest of schools." It feels like the Quake 2 single player levels, which I could never find my damn way through. If you don't like it you don't like it. Don't force yourself. It's a specific kind of design that doesn't really exist anymore, and probably died out for a reason. If you can't or don't want to shift your brain back to a state where that kind of thing was the norm, you'll only frustrate yourself further. If you haven't played PD before, I think PDXBLA is mostly interesting for historical education and, of course, Thumb deathmatch and trash talking.

I'm running on Windows 7, which I thought had no option to not run in DirectX 10? Oh well. I'm sure I'll try again in another few months. I always do, in the hopes that the game may actually fucking WORK for once. At this point I'm worried that all this shit has permanently soured me on FC2 and I'll never actually be able to like it because I'm too pissed off at it.

Goddamn it. Someone please tell me why I should keep trying to play this game. I just loaded up a third new game in the hopes that it would actually let me play past the first 2 hours without something being ridiculously broken this time, and the very first thing I notice in the game is that all voices are missing. All the ambient sound is there, but the cab driver looks like he's trying to mime his intro. I let it go for 3 silent minutes before I tried another new game, same issue. Am I just never going to get to play this goddamned game?

Your average is 50%? I should have never bought this game. I've never won a match. Dammit.

Dammit, the search function on the forums failed me. You'd think putting in "Just Cause" would turn up this thread. Oh well. Anyway, holy shit. I just spent the half hour that the demo gives you with the game and preordered it on Steam immediately. I also just downloaded the demo of the first game for a laugh. Man, that game was hilarious. And amazing. And exhilerating. And, just, damn. If S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is this year's Far Cry 2, Just Cause 2 has to be this year's Red Faction Guerilla. Less in the "man, I can blow up fucking ANYTHING" sense, the buildings are not destructible. More in the "holy shit I just grappled onto a helicopter, hijacked it, crashed it into a water tower, landed on a motorcycle, drove into a construction site, pulled a minigun off its mounting, and used said minigun to bring down a huge construction crane onto the head of an enemy that was standing 4 feet in front of me" sense. In so many words, this shit is dope. The cool thing is, the game doesn't do this for you. It certainly facilitates it more than other games, but if you want to grapple to something while in motion, you'd better have damn good aim because you need to target it perfectly and lead for movement. Unless it's a vehicle, those you can lock on to. You need to do most of the work yourself. The game doesn't seem particularly hard to just run and shoot through, but if you want the really cool shit to happen you need to learn how to do it. I definitely like that. It's still not particularly difficult to make cool things happen constantly, but it's a far cry from a "win" button that a lot of games have. If you play the game in a straightforward manner, you're going to just have a GTA game that happens in South America from what I can tell. If you play to be crazy, goddamn will you be rewarded. The only thing I can say against the half hour I played is that it took a bit of doing to find the sweet spot for graphics settings on my laptop. In the end, I got it looking pretty good by setting the water effects down from "Very High" to "High" and that freed up enough horsepower to get everything else up above medium. I really don't know what else to say about this game right now. It is pure, most-outrageous-James-Bond-moments joy. It's an engine for bringing out all the best scenes from crazy spy movies and letting you control them. As I played, I was giggling. Pure, unrestrained happiness is contained within that box. At least download the demo, for whatever you have. I played it on PC with an Xbox 360 pad plugged in, and it immediately recognized the pad and changed the interface to show the buttons on the controller rather than keypresses, so if you prefer your third person action with a gamepad as I do, this game accommodates perfectly. The only concern is that it won't work with Windows XP, so if you don't have a Vista or 7 box, you may need to look into the consoles. Do it anyway. Goddamn this is fun.

I could have sworn that this already had a thread, but I couldn't find it anywhere... EDIT: And it does! Go here. Damn, I'm dumb.

Well, if you're looking for "never played it" then Patters fits the bill. Although he spent so much time with its predecessor that it may not count for you. In that case, I believe that it's held up amazingly well, but I'll throw out some potential negatives for a newcomer: 1) The map design is of the oldest of schools. By this I mean that it's all very stark shapes and there's really only one path through a level, but they hide that by having a lot of booby-trap rooms. If you go along the correct path, you'll find probably about half of the enemies in a level. There's no indicator that you're on the right path until you get to the end though, and it's very easy to get lost. This is to give you the illusion of an open map, and it works as well as could be expected in a 2000 console shooter. They keep you thinking that you're going the right way when you're not by filling all of the dead end areas with a crapton of enemies, so you'll get shot up a lot while exploring too. 2) The controls are adapted from an N64 pad Although there are other control methods (called "Spartan" and something like "Duty Calls") that I haven't tried, by default the controller settings are pretty much N64. It goes for the same method most shooter developers used on the system, where the C buttons were basically used as a second stick, so they just mapped those functions to the right stick now. This means that you can now do things a hell of a lot easier, and it controls much much better than I remember it. The autoaim has not been changed though, so it's still amazingly generous. I saw an interview with Ken Lobb where he said that they kept this in to keep the speedrunners happy, as this game was big for that in the day and the autoaim was a big part of strategies. I'm not positive, but I think the other control methods do away with it, or at least reduce it, so if you don't like it you may be able to change it. Still, by default, the controls are a bit archaic and the autoaim is HUGE. Also, while we're talking about archaic control, you need to manually switch to your fists to do a melee attack. No simple tapping of a button here. 3) The story is from a time when games rarely took themselves seriously. Almost more of a plus for me, but if you're looking for a game with a real plot, you're going to be disappointed. Two rival companies are being funded by two warring alien species, the Maians (standard, Area 51-style "greys") and the Skedar (giant reptilians). You work for the dudes allied with the Maians. If breaking into Area 51 to bust out a grey who may or may not have actually been Elvis back in the day (and still goes by the name) and then having to decide which US President is real and which one is a clone (and of course, killing the clone) sounds ridiculous and easy to miss for you, then you may want to give this game a pass. If it sounds awesome beyond words, we should be pals. Basically any of this says that the game was designed 10 years ago and it shows. If you can get yourself into that mindset, it's amazing. It was one of the best console games of its day, easily, and I'd say is worth experiencing. You do need a certain tolerance for the old though. I've been loving these Rare remakes on XBLA. I have all of them (including Jetpac! Whoo!) and all this is making me really want DK64 on Wii or Jet Force Gemini on XBLA. Blast Corps on whoever owns it. The Banjo games were totally worth the $15 for me, and this one is amazing value for $10. At least try the demo and see what you think.

Yeah, I've been noticing that quite a lot. Played the Chicago mission earlier and I could actually tell what was supposed to be happening. The context of that level had eluded me up until today, due to everything being so horribly muddy and weird. It feels so much less abstract and comprehensible. On one hand, I'm using my imagination less. On the other, holy shit, that was supposed to be a hover car? That makes WAY more sense!

Yeah, the music had me laughing a lot. It's all kinda perfect. Well done.

Deathmatch just seemed like the simplest way to keep everybody happy. It usually is. Dude played nothing but Perfect Dark on the N64 from 2000 to 2006, when he got a Wii. He skipped the console generation in between in favor of more PD. He may be a little set in his ways, but I'll keep after him and break him out of it eventually. I like that the game has Goldeneye weapons and maps. We should do a "classic" weapons match on Facility or Complex sometime soon. About as close as we'll ever get to the real thing online, short of Goldeneye Source. EDIT: And I should add that as this guy was one of my best friends in those days (still pretty tight, considering that I have barely talked to most people from the day since then), having him there and talking trash with him definitely upped the nostalgia factor. I need to see if my buddy Dylan has this. Then the only person missing from our 4-person PD sessions in high school would be missing because he doesn't have an Xbox. Getting the crew back together for some online would be sweet.

Oh man, you got in our boat duel and my trying to drive on the wall until I exploded. Well done. Also, lots of evidence of the party system being goddamn terrible in that video. Go Microsoft.

Are you trying to get a regular weekly together, or just using this as a hub for occasional games? I'm on Mountain Time (which means two hours behind you) and usually have breaks from school in the mid-afternoon. My Tuesdays are occupied by GTA and my Wednesdays normally by Forza, but I'd be up for a game now and then, for sure.

Monkey, 'blix, where were you today? Patters and I were killing time in Perfect Dark and were ready to leave the game as soon as you came online, but you never appeared. At least good times were had in PD...

Patters, his non-thumb friend, my non-thumb friend, and I just spent a little over an hour playing some 4 player free for all. Was good fun. We did the first two challenges as well, which were automatically humans vs. simulants. Patters was host though, so all the game settings were up to him. We didn't play any mode other than free for all when it was non-challenge though, so no idea yet. Really liking the way this game is handling. Aside from the fact that I couldn't throw a handful of Doritos at Pat when he pinball grenaded me, it felt like I was back in high school/junior high sitting around a TV with a group of friends. Good times.

Oh man, that's fantastic. Also, happy birthday.

...I'm sorry I ruined your thread, SquidDivision.

Yeah, like when you were killing me and yelling "YOU WILL REMEMBER MY NAME!"

I just got an email from my professor. She has a cold, and so the class that I was going to have to be in at game time today due to DST is canceled. Normal game time (ie: without having to worry about my stupid clocks being changed) is fine for me, no special accommodations required. I may jump on an extra half hour early or something though, for a quick spin of Perfect Dark. I hear that the controls have been kept N64-style by default, and I'm really curious to see if I remember what it was like to play an FPS when I was 13.

Glad to help man, and Forza tomorrow as well. You'll get through this. With the power of VIDEO GAMES!

Conversely, I would totally be up for a Perfect Dark match any time.