James

The people we started out with seemed to be cycling guys from their (not especially great) clan, then we had some other guy in with us, so things weren't entirely stable even when I was there. As is the way with the unvetted public, guess.

Yeah, the adverts were my favourite thing about the game. I don't mean that as a slight to the game itself; they were just so out of the blue and well-made and surreal and (lazy word ahoy) evocative. After such a weird and unexpected intro, the main story couldn't avoid seeming a little mundane, despite its craziness. To get all pretentious about it, it seemed like a very convincing peek into another world, which is something that appeals to me a lot (it's what I look for in a lot of music, for example). My favourite was the one with the two women doing flying kicks at one another while tiny military vehicles and walking cities fought it out beneath them.

This discussion's no fun when it's not ruining another thread. KIDDING, there's some interesting stuff in here.

Is the bush the guy with the giant sword? WELCOME, NEW PEOPLE. I WAS NEW ONCE. NOW LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED.

In my defence, I only joined the game (Danny Boy's friend was pestering me) on the proviso that I'd leave early, what with work in the morning and all. Of course, it inevitably took me some time to stop faffing around and actually get to bed, because I have horrendously poor willpower. Anyway, it was good fun as always.

I've heard that the sheer physics of long-distance networking means that it'll never be as responsive as some people are hoping. That's not to say it won't be playable, and I'm certainly not especially picky about having the highest possible framerate and so on, but it seems to me that that latency will make it forever a budget alternative to local processing. But if it increases the market for PC games, that can only be a good thing. And perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps it'll be one of those shifts to a slightly inferior (according to one measure, anyway) but considerably more convenient technology, like analogue to digital, or CRT to LCD (in terms of contrast ratio), and so on, where people are more interested in the numerous benefits than the few losses. I wonder how much it will cost, too. Theoretically there has to be pretty much one PC's worth of stuff for everyone playing at any one time. Presumably they can cut a bit on the assumption that at no point will every subscriber be playing at once, and perhaps there are some savings that can be made due to economies of scale (although the scale isn't that great, since the server stations have to be localized to reduce latency), but the required hardware would still be considerable, so it makes me wonder whether it'll be accordingly expensive. I don't know, it's all been said before, and I'm no expert.

I don't think they're meant to. I'm pretty sure it's a network synchronization bug thing. EDIT: Wait a minute, does it have black bars on all sides? Bugger, I'll have to sort that out.

When the donkeys arrive that portion of road basically becomes a tiny linear slice of heaven.

I had to make a trip to Richmond to see it, but I enjoyed myself. I'm not sure it quite lived up to some of the praise it's been getting, but it was definitely a refreshing change from all the blockbuster dross I've been subjecting myself to recently. Good stuff (just not amazing stuff).

Well, we had a go at Expert, and were doing OK (dying a lot, but gradually progressing), but then Skratche crashed, and since he was the host our game came to a premature end. Still, this happened: 30t9sJKkYPQ

Perhaps he's talking about games you can't save. You'd have to keep starting from scratch until you could get to the end without running out of lives or having to stop for some other reason. Yeah, for me Settlers is like an ant farm, except the ants are people and donkeys. I hardly ever bothered with combat, if I could avoid it. Consequently I never got very far in those games, but I had a good time while I played. I wasn't so into the demo for one of the more recent ones that removed the roads. The road system was kind of idiosyncratic, but I really liked watching the increasingly busy networks, seeing the resources gradually make their way around, occasionally altering things to reduce pressure on bottle-necks. That game was at least 50% road management for me.

That's definitely very rewarding, but as with many hobbies it's also kind of intimidating to somebody who's not yet confident at it. It's great that you can do things yourself, and get them just how you want them, and get your hands dirty, and so on, but when you put together your PC and it doesn't work, and you're not sure why it doesn't work, you might start to have suspicions that it's something you did, and nightmare visions of the horrendous damage you've done, and the associated money that's been wasted. In my childhood my PC was pretty much always my primary gaming system, but I only ever got a couple of replacements, and did significant upgrades to my existing systems even less. I didn't have much money, and I couldn't reasonably expect my parents to buy me a new system every birthday or Christmas. Eventually it seemed that the only way for me to continue gaming was to take the console route. With time, my PC became horrendously outdated, and I didn't do anything about it because I was getting along fine with consoles. The most I did was bring it up to a state where it could just about manage Half-Life 2 and Episode One. With time, though, my interest in PC gaming was rekindled, until the release of the Orange Box inspired me to get a new PC (the idea of playing that on console seemed wrong). I went with a pre-built one because I didn't want there to be a chance of my fucking it up. That arrived, and worked OK for a while, although not quite as well as I was hoping for. Then, part way through re-playing Episode One it died. I probably should have returned it, but I'm kind of an idiot, and I'm not sure whether it was still under warranty, anyway. Anyway, at that point I had entered an extended inter-job period, so the prospect of all that money being wasted was quite depressing, and the whole affair kind of put me off PC gaming. It seemed too cruel and unpredictable for me to bear. Yes, in retrospect that does sound ridiculous and melodramatic. Then, a few months ago, having had a job again for about a year, I decided it was time to give things another go. Since I now knew that I couldn't necessarily trust others to get it right, I decided I'd probably be more satisfied and generally happy about the whole thing if I built it myself. Which I did. And it didn't work. Well it did, but it crashed as soon as it tried to run anything in 3D. And that, again, was quite depressing, and I made half-hearted attempts at sorting it out, but I wasn't really sure where to start, and I was paranoid about making things worse. I also kind of avoided thinking about the matter in general, because the whole situation was so miserable. Then it stopped even booting. After a while, though, I decided that this whole affair was ridiculous, so I took it to the PC shop down the road to see if they could work it out. They took a look, and it turned out the processor fan wasn't mounted properly, which is obviously bad news. But they sorted that out, and returned it to me, and it booted, but it still wouldn't run 3D stuff. So I took it back, and they very kindly took another look for no additional cost. It turns out there was some sort of conflict between the RAM and the graphics card or something, and the two solutions were either to take one stick out or to reduce the clock speed of the RAM. They did the latter, and now it works fine, and I'm very happy with it. The processor fan thing, incidentally, happened during my half-hearted attempt to fix the original problem, so my paranoia wasn't entirely misplaced. All the components seem to have gotten so obscenely large since I last had my hands in a PC. It's really difficult to get anything done in there without taking it all out and starting again; something I very much don't want to do. This is a long and boring story, but the point is that even for someone who used to be primarily into PC gaming, and helped build his first PC as a child, the whole thing can be quite forbidding. The risk of things not working are higher, there's the chance that what you've bought won't support what you want to play on the settings you want to play it (I'm never sure quite how far the recommended specs will let you push things), and the investment you're making is greater. I'll readily admit that my defeatist attitude played a large part in putting me off for all that time, but I would also contend that I probably have an initial level of interest that people without a history of PC gaming don't. They might not be as generally pathetic as I am, but they might not be willing to put up with the potential problems simply because it doesn't seem like a worthwhile use of their time and money, when there are alternatives. I don't know, I'm making a rather sweeping generalization there. I guess my point is that it takes time and experience for that stuff to evolve from disheartening catastrophes to mere facets of a hobby. It would probably help to have a more experienced friend to help you out, but unfortunately I'm probably the most PC-knowledgeable of my friends, so when I get stuck I'm kind of buggered. Having a relatively powerful PC that works is great, and PC gaming in general excites me more than console gaming, but there can be significant hurdles in getting there, and I'm not sure what the best way to convince people it's worthwhile is.

I'm guessing most PC gamers that any of us regularly talk about PC games with probably run as administrator all the time (even though that's apparently a bad idea, security-wise), which is why it could seem to be a new thing in Vista. I have a friend whose family PC was set up by some friend of his mum that decided it was a good idea to put a password on the admin account and not tell anyone, meaning he couldn't install some stuff. Now, there's a worryingly high chance that I'm going to say one of those things that are wrong and later cause me embarrassment, but it seems to me like those things might be the sort of things that wanted to have direct access to non-user areas. Then again, maybe not. I don't know, it's just a guess. I used to umm and ahh about that stuff quite a lot, wanting consistent structure, but also having some sort of weird innate subservience to the authority of the people providing me the software. Also, I found it kind of weird to have my "proper" games mixed in with Minesweeper and Solitaire and so on. At one point I think I gave them their own subdirectory called "Simple Games" or something equally patronizing (I actually have a category called that on my PS3). Now I pretty much just launch everything from Steam, so I don't really spend much time in the Start Menu at all. I have returned to installing all my games in C:\Games, though, after letting it all be put in Program Files for many years. Except for Steam, which is in Program Files. I can't remember my exact reasoning for that. I think it might have been because Steam itself isn't a game. I don't know. I always end up with a slightly messy system that I'm not entirely satisfied with. I kind of wish there were stricter standards about this that everyone would stick to and I could just trust that and get on with my life. The Linux way seems to work pretty well (I have my netbook on Ubuntu), although having been conditioned by Windows for all these years I half expect it to descent into an incomprehensible mess if I install more than a dozen programs. You know, as opposed to what happens in Windows. SO, YEAH, TALES OF MONKEY ISLAND. I bought it but haven't played it yet. I probably won't for months. I've got about a billion other games waiting for my attention. Sorry Telltale. You have my money, though.

IGN.com

Soon enough every game will be game night for me. EDIT: Oh, American time.

I'd certainly like one day to be able to get somewhere on that difficulty. I kind of feel like I'd have to practice an awful lot and probably get better at co-operative gameplay in general for that to happen, but, you know, baby steps. In other words, sure, although I'm also a big fan of Versus mode. Can we do both? Can we all quit our jobs and devote our lives to this game?

You seemed to get into the spirit of it, which is what really matters. Totally! It would have been so satisfying. One time in the single player I shot down a police chopper by taking out the pilot with a pistol. I was very pleased with that. It used to be a regular (we finished with it a lot), but I think some of us went off it or something. I still like it. I guess it can be frustrating if you keep dying without seeing anyone. Fortunately, I have mad skills. (Actually, my ratio is pretty average, but I get into enough scraps that my kill score is pretty high. This applies to a lot of games I might at first glance appear to be good at.) Yeah, that was pretty great. Who needs an engine when you can make your own engine sounds, anyway?

Just remember that as a hunter you want to spend pretty much all of your time crouching. And pay attention to the little circle around the crosshair. It tells you how close your skill is to recharging.

Good game, all. Explody!

That film's based on a comic?! I had no idea. The FULL-MOTION PICTOGRAPHIC ENTERTAINMENT MODULE was very good, though. As was Eastern Promises, which was wozzname's next film, wasn't it? I watched The Woodsman yesterday. It was pretty good and helped me keep my quota of extreme filmic unease nicely topped-up. Both that and History of Violence make me think about the relationship or difference between points in time and on-going periods, and the nature of identity, and of blame and guilt and responsibility and stuff like that. Which, I suppose, is nothing too ground-breaking, but a whole lot of films don't make me think about anything at all because I am uncultured and lacking in perception. I also watched Road to Perdition, which was very well-shot. That sounds like I'm tactfully avoiding the film's content itself; I'm not, and it was good, but I don't have much to say about it. Which, incidentally, was apparently also based on a comic/graphic novel/whatever. Is the whole of Hollywood secret based on comics or something? No, of course not. The Woodsman was based on a play. Comics and plays. Maybe a book or two.

Oh yes, I should have mentioned. Obviously in the 360 version that's less likely to be a problem. Yeah, the PS3 could really do with some game-independent party and chat features.

Yeah, once I'm in a game it seems to be fine, short of some problems with voice chat, as I mentioned. In one game it just cut out for most of the match; in another it was choppy to the point of incomprehensibility. I've noticed it also suddenly gets a lot louder for brief moments every now and then. I'm sure it'll be ironed out in time, but at the moment it's a bit bothersome.

So another friend of mine bought it and said he was having no problems playing online, so I picked it up, and most of the time it connects OK, but we had a lot of difficulty getting into the same game and having the voice chat work. Eventually we gave up for the night, after which I played with moderate success on my own. Snipey snipey! (I must confess I'm not especially focused on my team's success.)

Hilarious and mostly silent. After a few minutes of fiddling, I have the on-board sound handling microphone duties and the PCI sound card recording for the video. In the current set-up I have voice chat coming through my speakers, which would mean that the video will record everyone else but not myself. This seems a little unfair. I could route all voice chat through the on-board sound, but I don't really want to wear headphones while playing. Alternatively, I could get a 3.5 mm splitter and run the microphone through both ports, and record stereo mix on the card. I guess I'd have to unmute microphone echo on my sound card, though, and things could get ugly. Can anyone think of a more elegant solution? I guess I could just get a 2.5-3.5 mm converter thingy and use my 360 headset for my PC as well, and not bother recording voice chat (it'd probably just be embarrassing, anyway). But for that to be practical I'd have to hook up the front audio ports, which would require going inside my PC, which I can rarely be bothered to do.

Incidentally, the reason the video doesn't have sound is that both the recording software and the game just follow the system setting for audio input (it may be that they're unable to do otherwise -- I don't know), which means that when the video set itself to record general sound it did so by switching the input device, meaning it all got broadcast over my voice chat channel. That was the source of all the noise at the beginning. It was a while before I worked this out. I'm not sure if there's a good way around this, either. It's bothersome.