Wrestlevania

That's the thing, though; the blip is at one particular gun shop, opposite the bar where my buddy said I should meet him. The bar's locked and empty -- can't even get in the door. The gun shop is open but abandoned. My original 'base' was an abattoir near the main cease fire town (can't recall the town's name). I went there after freeing my now-buddy from a farm out building at a cock-fighting arena. When I got back to the abattoir, I was shown how to find diamond cases and then told to go buy my first gun at the waypoint location I have now. I've been told I must speak to the owner first before I can buy any guns. That's where I'm stuck.

As you may (not) already know, I recently bagged myself a virtually brand new Gainward 'Bliss' 7800GS off eBay for the princely sum of £2.75 (about $4.50 US). The seller was a computer hardware "returns" (faults, ex-warranty, etc.) company and sold me just the card alone; no driver CD, no cables, nothing - just the PCB effectively. On the back of the card, there's a 6-pin external power port which needs to be connected to my PC's PSU. However, this port seems to be a male plug and not a socket. Furthermore, as I didn't get any of the accessories with the card I don't know what cable I need to hook this up. The card's running fine (after a necessary registry hack to the Nvidia drivers), but I'm fairly sure it's only running at about 25-40% optimum at the moment. Does anyone know what cable I need to get?

The game seems broken for me... I've freed my first "buddy" and been told to meet him at a set location, and also buy a/some gun(s) while I'm there. But every time I go to the rendezvous, everything's shut -- the gun shop I'm supposed to be buying stuff at, the bar where my newly-freed contact should be. Every single time, and I've been trying now for the equivalent of 3 days in-game. Doesn't seem to matter what time I go there, how I get there or where I go before I come back and try again. All the buildings are closed up, no-one's in the gun shop and so I simply can't progress the game. Really annoyed.

Just been sent this, and thought I'd share: Just... staggering.

Steven Spielberg's Crytearia See what I did there?

Wonderful. Evokes the same sort of bleak humour I loved in Ren & Stimpy.

Played it a bit more and quickly got pissed off with the very poor wingman AI; they kept shooting me out of the sky whilst clumsily trying to hit nearby enemy targets. Disappointing.

I'm very much in the "dad" camp Nachimir mentions. 6hrs is about a week's gaming for me, on average, though I've been pushing things a bit lately since getting my PC more up to spec. I've also stalled twice in trying to complete Fallout 3, because it's a game that's not only long, but commands long play sessions to get the most out of it too. Games where you can't simply duck in, play for 30 minutes and then duck out again tend to fair pretty badly with me, regardless of how critically great they might be. Portable gaming does come to the rescue to a lesser extent, but not when the machine's gaming library is as hobbled - and glaringly dull - as my PSP's is.

Top work, fella.

6, thanks, without question. Especially if the alternative is arbitrarily doubling the size of the levels and therefore completely diluting the extremely well crafted gameplay of the shorter game. No, I'm more than happy with what some might consider to be a ridiculously short story as the main game. Instead of trying to force the story out to be longer than it needed to be - a teeth-grinding agony I have with almost all popular TV serials at the moment (Lost, Heroes, etc.) - Infinity Ward were smart; they stuck to their brilliantly paced 6hr design and then augmented the single-player story experience with the inspired Arcade mode and their amazing multiplayer game. Take Left 4 Dead as another example; the main story only takes approximately 4-5hrs to play through -- with or without friends. But Turtle Rock new exactly what they were doing, by augmenting 4 excellently designed scenarios with the randomness of multiplayer and their AI Director. That's what I'd rather have over anything else: brave, inspired and confident game design. And when it's this replayable, I get way more than [26hrs] out of it anyway.

In the nicest possible way, up yours. The single player game in Call of Duty 4 is still one of the best player experiences I've had in recent years. Fan-fucking-tastic!

Agreed; I'd like an Attack Friesian this time, please.

A different friend of mine had exactly the same happen to him. Problem was, it happened to a rather expensive Panasonic slot drive. So he couldn't really fix it...

That reminds me... I remember a friend once completely replaced the guts of his machine with a new motherboard and everything -- typical base upgrade onto new chipset/socket platform. Only he left one of those brass, six-sided mounting pegs loose under the motherboard when he installed it. Turned it on, ran fine for a short while, then the peg must have slipped and there a bang and a nasty smell of burning. Completely cooked the motherboard, but luckily nothing else needed replacing.

Shit, that's horrible. Good ol' PC gaming!

Meant to update this thread sooner to say it arrived on Tuesday and so I fitted it that evening. The plug was slightly different to the socket on my particularly card -- centre-bottom pin was squared instead of having rounded shoulders. Decided to just jam it on anyway and power it up, with my hand gingerly on the power cord in case anything started to smell funny. Luckily, all seems fine. Can't say there's been a huge leap in raw frame rate alone, but I can now turn on much more advanced Shaders and other features without any noticable impact on performance. Left 4 Dead looks even better than it did on my 360! Thanks again for the tip-off, ThunderPeel.

Bizarre. Also: woo, embedable videos at last! Thanky, Lords of the Thumb.

Could be one bike spawned per player. Can't imagine Rockstar would make it a fixed number of bikes -- either too many or too few just wouldn't make sense either way. I think you're right; slightly dodgy scaling/spawning algorithm, possibly.

Agreed, but I also wish it wouldn't flake like it did either. Having the game constantly flip-flop between "get the last bike" and "return to base" - when the bike in question is on the very opposite side of the city - got really annoying. I think it took me just under 15 minutes to finally track it down and bring it all the way back again. And in a 20 minute limit game, that's not really acceptable. In fairness, though, this didn't happen the last couple of times we played this mode. So might have just been an annoying spawn coupled with a conditional glitch/bug. Such a shame, as the co-op-like stuff is really good fun -- especially riding pillion on another player's bike and causing lots of gun-related mayhem as you travel around the city.

I'd like her more if she were on the end of a pike, personally.

Extension? Speak for yourself.

You send me €500 and I let you in.

This doesn't hold up in the face of Firefly - the cast were superb throughout.

That's really shitty and ruins the experience, regardless of the film. I had a similar sort of thing happen when I went to see The Dark Knight at my local flea pit. I avoid our local cinema somewhat dogmatically, as it's poorly kitted out, isn't very comfortable and is generally populated by... well, let's just come out and say it: scum. Fortunately, the group of shit-heads in question - whooping, running about and texting on their phones most of the way through - didn't spoil the film for me. However, I enjoyed it a lot more watching it at home on my 30th last month with Mrs V.

I played this for about half an hour last night myself and, apart from the ridiculous premise and the poor English, it seems entertaining if very, very easy. The graphics are impressive and the controls are simple and direct. But there are a couple of annoying oversights in my opinion: It seems like a lot of the game is being procedurally generated, not unlike Elite. Unfortunately, that's where the similarities with Elite end. But I think this had the potential to be a portable version of that classic game. Instead it comes off as a minimalist, public domain / shareware version of Microsoft's Freelancer. There's no apparent scoring whilst in-level, you just get a summary at the end. It could've been an interesting and addictive time-/score-attack game were this displayed as you play. For some unknown reason, the ship's boost lasts for a predetermined length of time. Instead of just holding down the boost button for as long as you need, it fires for a predetermined length of time instead. Meaning you can completely overshoot your intended destination. And there's no way of cancelling the boost once you've activated it either.