thl

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by thl

  2. Posted

    Also, in the first traffic case, with the bloody car in the rail yard: how does the receipt with the guy's name on it prove he was there? I failed an interrogation, because apparently I was supposed to use it as evidence, which to me seems weak.

    If i remember correctly, the lie that you call him out on was that he hadn't seen the victim that day or something like that, and the receipt places him at the car on Sunday (or whatever date was on the receipt), so the date on the receipt is the important factor.

  3. Posted

    As I remember, R&D was mostly puzzles so that should make a fine (fun) transition between HL and Portal.

    Not to turn this into a mod discussion, but if you haven't played the Minerva mod that's worth it as well. it's surprisingly detailed and they ended up hiring the guy who made it.

  4. Posted

    I don't think the PC patch had the same issues as 360 (corrupted saves ;( ), or at least it didn't corrupt anything for me. i'm currently deciding whether to go through the DLC or not. I pretty avidly went through all the FO3 stuff (and had a good time with most of it), but on the other hand i'm not sure i'll have any interest left after finishing all the Strip quests that just got dumped on me.

    i felt like there was kind of a dearth of actual combat after a while

    yeah, isn't that strange?! I spent so long on the Strip talking to people that I fast travelled to Primm just to shoot some deathclaws for a while. I guess I had similar experiences in Vivec/Imperial City/Rivet City but for some reason it didn't feel as uneven as Freeside/The Strip does here. Especially that

    King's quest where i had to basically run back and forth between King HQ and the old mormon fort 5 times in a row

    .

  5. Posted

    i'm playing this now. Just reached my level cap with the majority of the main quest to go. As a completionist, it bugs me that

    most of the main questlines are split into seemingly mutually exclusive factions that promote playing a 60hour game 4 times

    but thanks to the wiki I can avoid too many unhappy experiences. I do appreciate the sheer number of things to do but because there are so many possibilities i think that my conversations have many options where i don't really understand why I'd want to say that.

    the great khans are a good example of this. Just because I went to Red Rock Canyon, that means I want them to not support Ceasar's Legion?

    . I'm having a lot of fun with it though, when it works.

    The latest patch actually broke my game. I had some weird bug that made me crash every time I opened my inventory or went to VATS. Turning off anti-aliasing seemed to have fixed it although it still crashed on maybe 1 out of every 30 loading screens. Oh well.

  6. Posted

    Sorry for three posts in a row, but I just wanted to add something separate:

    I actually got stuck in HL. There was a bit where I had to push metal crates into electricity charged water (great logic, Valve!) in order to jump the water. But try as I might, there was no way to push the crates past a certain point in the water. (Almost like an invisible barrier had appeared.) That spot was just short of where it needed to be, so I couldn't make it to the other side without taking the -36 damage from electrified water... Except I had 34 health.

    There were no health packs and no scientists around, and so nothing I could do. Quite frustrating!

    So Gordon Freeman ended up floating over the water.

    NOCLIP saved the day.

    Does everyone else play HL on Medium difficulty?

    I don't remember this in my play-throughs. Perhaps it's a Source conversion bug?

    Actually I remember there being more invisible walls and barriers in HL2. I thought HL1 was pretty self-contained in terms of you can get everywhere you think you should be able to. I remember playing Day One (the demo that basically cut the game off when you first get to the surface) and being very frustrated that there were clearly some ducts in that last area that I could fit through but I couldn't figure out how to get in them. Then I play the full game and it turns out you come back through the areas in those ducts.

    With HL2, the beginning-ish areas where you are in the sewers... There's a very definite point in which they give you a ton of crates and I spent maybe 20 minutes trying to position them just right just to learn that I was physically incapable of making it up onto street level.

  7. Posted

    If you really want to try and argue that Half-Life was the first story-driven first-person shooter, you're just wrong. Period. Even if we're not talking elaborate first-person RPG's like System Shock, there's still games like Dark Forces that predate HL by as much as three years. (Dark Forces has two sequels that each on their own still predate Half-Life.)

    These are not games with simple info-dump text screens like Doom, these have elaborate fully-constructed narratives that are conveyed through cutscenes and numerous story events within the levels themselves. (System Shock basically pioneered the audio log gimmick that is to this day all over the damn place.)

    you're right. statement withdrawn.

  8. Posted

    my only problem with Xen, as I remember, was that it was a little too long. I really liked how alien it was with the plants reacting to me and the health pools and whatnot. Having the Gonarch and the Nihilanth was a bit much though, and it could get frustrating with all the warping going on in the Nihilanth chamber. I appreciated how different it was though.

    The biggest gripe I had with HL: Source was the AI. Even if most of HL1's enemy tactics were scripted, they were still effective. The squad-based behavior with dudes trying to flank me, how bullsharks hated other alien races, the guerilla tactics of the ninjas (running one down and shotgunning them in the back was SO satisfying), etc. The combat had a real feel of diversity and danger. With the source engine (especially HL2 and HL: Source) it seemed like every enemy acted the exact same: "oh, you're shooting me? i'll move to somewhere where you can't see me and stand still some more."

    As another heavy FPS player back in the late 90s, I can say that Half-Life innovated or improved over every other game in the genre in several ways. Not just the seamless levels (I remember Gave being asked how many levels there would be and him answering "well, it doesn't really work that way but if you want a bsp count it's somewhere around 100" and that getting reported as "Half-Life has 100 levels!") and the combat-less first chapter but just that it had a serious tone with consistent level design. Going back through the facility after the explosion was a new experience because most if not all games before had completely linear maps that only vaguely connected between each other. Duke came close but my memory of that was that it was still just a formality, like the back of the bar led directly to the san andreas faultline or whatever.

    Also, talking about story, Half-life was really the first FPS to HAVE a story, at least one not told via text on a screen or in the instruction manual. That it seems simple and tired today is true, but Call of Duty and Medal of Honor and every other FPS realized from Half-Life that it helped to give the player a reason to going around shooting people in the head. Valve's obtuse story delivery system is still something I find fresh and exciting today and it makes me explore the world more to find the newspaper clipplings, graffiti, etc. that fleshes out their world.

    two cents added.

  10. Posted

    the popular optinion (i.e. irc and reddit) is that the individual game bars are just a percentage of total players for that game, so none of the individual bars will fill up unless everyone who owns a game is playing at the same time. Instead, it's just a guage to see how many is playing what.

    Valve says that just playing the games counts. However, and this is important if true, some believe that the number of potatoes you have act as a multiplier for your cpu time. So if you have a bunch, your time will be weighted heavier than if you don't have any. So striving for some potatoes while you play the games will make the progress go faster.

    And of course, if you are awesome enough to get all 36, they've promised a special reward (that is not a TF2 hat). A lot of those potatoes are pretty hard to get though, or require you to have already played/unlocked stuff in the game.

  11. Posted

    i wish i had sources for this but i read somewhere that the guy who did that Minerva mod for HL2 was subsequently hired and was responsible for the E3 Portal 2 announcement ARG (with the BBS numbers and ascii art of the first wave of screenshots), so presumably he's behind this one as well.

    I have to say, the level of complexity is astonishing. Did everyone see that lego puzzle? where mosiacs formed the blueprint of a lego block that, when all the yellow blocks are removed, split into pieces that match the satellite photo of a group of buildings and when the blocks are arranged according to the photo the negative space makes a password??? That shit is IN SANE.

    http://valvearg.com/wiki/Defense_Grid#Mosaic_Puzzle

    so does everyone think that the "recruited users" were plants to begin with or avid fans approached by Valve to become part of the game? One of them has a steam podcast and they all seemed to have well-stocked user histories. That's an impressive amount of work to win over a thousand geeks who can understand what's going on.

  15. Posted

    not to derail the thread but i want to throw a recommendation in for a book called Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss. I just finished it and found it to be pretty good.

    It's about a guy who decides to write about all the classic video games until he gets stuck on one game that he can't find a ROM for. Although "Lucky Wander Boy" (the mysterious video game) is fictional, it's loosely based on the "Polybius" urban legend and it gets pretty weird.

    If you like video game novels, or surreal novels, or surreal video game novels, this is one!

    resume cloud-talk!

  17. Posted

    Can we please get back to gushing over Skyrim? Thank you.

    I played Oblivion yesterday and it started snowing. After a moment of supreme beauty and goosebumps (proving that games are art, Mr. Ebert!!), I noticed the snow moved along as I walked through the forest. It became so painfully clear there was just a particle generator slotted to my vector in the world, it made me chuckle.

    Apparently Skyrim has dynamic snow that falls and sticks to surfaces. It seems like an indulgent special effect, but for a game where the mountainous setting is so important to the experience, this can potentially be a huge thing.

    snow sticking to things seems awesome to me. that's always been kind of an irksome thing for me whenever i see snow in games. it seems like a cheap screen effect but if the snow actuallly manifests in the world and not just in front of your face, that will rock!

  18. Posted

    Hey! Remember this?

    double_fine_xmas.jpg

    Everyone was trying to guess if the other box's wrapping paper gave clues to the then unknown games (Double Fine said they were producing four games -- two were known at the time).

    Looks like the box on the left did hold a clue afterall... So what's going to be in the box on the right? (It looks like razor wire/barbed wire to me... Some war game?)

    some war game indeed!!

  20. Posted

    I do get an urge to replay Morrowind every now and again, just for the music. As soon as I leave the ship and meet the first ugly denizens, the urge passes. It is too bad, since I really enjoyed the world of Morrowind more than Oblivion or Fallout 3...

    me too. The giant crab shell city, all that weird organic tower stuff on the east side. the vampires. I haven't tried to go back to Morrowind because I don't have the time and have heard similarly disheartening things about it not holding up, but it's firmly notched in my heart and memory.

  21. Posted

    If you're a lowly Xbox gamer like me, you can download the Bulletstorm demo, see that it's unexceptional, and delete it—all in one evening!

    Agreed. I found a little bit of pleasure in discovering the different kills but so much hype has been made out of them and there are way fewer than I thought there'd be. Once you put a grenade up a dude's butthole a few times, it gets old.

    The co-op footage shown off in the trailer looks like more fun, but it's still the same handful of moves shared amongst friends. I thought the combos would be much more dynamic.

    It's not terrible, but not special either. Unexceptional is a good way to put it.

  23. Posted

    I loved it. got it free with Back to the Future and rushed through it last night/today. I really like the explicit separation between the puzzle and the story. The pared down exploration/examination in adventure mode was also welcome to me. It's a somewhat different take on the genre but I thought it really worked. It took me a while (the whole game) to get over my achievement-minded-ness of not getting every puzzle perfect and going back to play again even though it doesn't help your scores was kind of a taunt to me for the ones that I didn't get on first try. Still, with no punishment or reward for getting them all right, in the end I was fulfilled.

    I personally loved the ending.

    It's kind of a statement on needing to know and to solve the puzzle in front of your face even when pretty much everything and everyone is telling you not to.

    Hope that wasn't spoilery. I'll tag it anyway.

    great work, Video Games n' Famous!

  25. Posted

    I am somewhat disappointed there is no hell in SMP... I don't really see myself playing much single player again... MP is so much more substantial and experience. Maybe we can get a sister site of some sort to run a hell server?

    i just had the same thought for a private server that i run with my old college buddies. hopefully Notch will come up with some easy way to designate which IP each portal goes to. It would be cool to have a dedicated hell server linking in with the standard world. Maybe he'll add more controls for the biomes so you could have servers that are all desert or all snow or whatever...