JonCole

I get the Space Asshole references, but Armageddon really is a inferior piece of shit in comparison. I actually like all the other games in the bundle, I'd just recommend you skip Armageddon entirely unless you literally have no other games to play first.

I really don't know what to think of this one. I picked up Spec Ops during a Black Friday sale for $10 because I felt like I "should" to be part of this year's GOTY conversations (not like it'll win anything big, just that it might get spoilered in the process). I generally like the narrative things it does, though I'll concur with general disapproval of the loading screen bits. I just didn't think the actual combat was that good. I'm really tired of games that create new control schemes counter to contemporaries - in other words, the non-Gears of War control scheme annoyed the hell out of me. Beyond that, I didn't really like how the cover was placed in several of the arenas, the most notable and memorable of which is a boat in the middle of the sand where you're getting assaulted. There's very little cover in that sequence and the enemies are hard-coded to bumrush you or try to flank constantly, which basically meant I felt more lucky than powerful when I finally got through it after a couple deaths. Also, there's a weird quality to some of the cover that makes you vulnerable unless the enemy shooting at you is practically perpendicular to your cover object. Really sloppy stuff that I was hoping to avoid by playing on the normal difficulty. Also, someone mentioned earlier in the thread that the checkpointing was generous, which I sincerely disagree with. The last combat sequence in chapter 15 was a really protracted one with at least four total firefights, each of which had an enemy with a two-shot kill weapon and a heavy in two firefights. I felt like I lost a half-hour to stupid deaths I couldn't really avoid, which is a pretty unforgivable sin in my book. Anyways, I probably sound more frustrated with the game than I actually am, considering a lot of those gameplay problems became most evident in the late game when enemies had power weapons and multiple turrets. I think it's a game worth playing, though I'd really suggest getting it cheap ($5 on Amazon for PC right now) and playing on the easiest difficulty if you're really just interested in the narrative. :tmeh:

If a new MP3 store went online tomorrow and you bought a lot of music on it, what would your expectation be? Probably that those songs you bought are portable, as DRM-free or at least some kind of multiple machine activation feature is prevalent throughout that industry. It's shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to search through your manual or scour your website to make sure they can have some portability in what they own, granted the current standard is somewhat high. If Nintendo was going to make accounts limited to one console, it should have said something to that effect in the account creation process rather than put the impetus on their customers.

Also, it really doesn't matter to me if it's misinformation because Nintendo themselves aren't providing any information. If this whole online situation was well documented, it'd be far more offensive if people happened to be wrong in their analysis of the system's offerings but as it stands Nintendo deserves to be smacked around either way.

Didn't even realize that I was being spoilery, sorry about that. To complete the thought -

@Orv -

I really liked the traversal and exploration aspects of this game, it's really just the execution of certain missions that bothered me. Sometimes I felt like I was totally screwed in naval missions and only eventually won them if I got lucky. Or I would only win a chase mission if I caught a ledge just right and managed to stay JUST within range of the target (forget getting full sync optional objectives). So I guess between the story and exploration, I ended up liking the game but those moments of frustration made it inferior to stuff like 2 and Brotherhood as those seemed far more polished. I'd still be very interested to see a version of this where they could strip out some of the well-worn mechanics (getting tired of smoke bombs, throwing money, poison darts) and tell a more focused story (just about done liberating districts) that isn't so much about being the king of Assassins. They might be able to pull it off in a near future version of the game where they integrate active camouflage or Mission Impossible-type disguises and have you really being a covert agent while still capturing the parkour and traversal that I love about AC.

I love this thread.

I thought stalking missions aren't so bad in the Assassin's Creed, especially with 3's addition of peeking around corners and more adaptive blending. That said, I never really enjoy those elements of games.

Other technology gets review scores, given the service/ecosystem-dependent nature of consoles nowadays it seems prudent to also score them. Anyways, yeah ZombiU looks pretty good. But I also have any number of other zombie games that I own and haven't played, so I can't say I'm very excited.

I wasn't going to buy the Wii U for a little while, but it may be a little while longer with what I'm hearing in these reviews. Three-hour battery life for the gamepad is pretty pitiful and that's something that can't be fixed (at least substantially) through software. Beyond that, it won't be clear for at least a couple months if their online system is worth a shit especially since they released it in that day one patch. Anyways, reviews - Polygon (6.5) - http://www.polygon.com/2012/11/18/3660470/wii-u-review The Verge (7) - http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/18/3658130/nintendo-wii-u-review Joystiq - http://www.joystiq.com/2012/11/18/review-nintendo-wii-u/ Destructoid - http://www.destructoid.com/review-wii-u-238856.phtml IGN (final review pending 11/20) - http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/11/17/wii-u-review

Speaking of holiday sales, this could give you a good start. $10 for Metro 2033, Red Faction Guerilla (Space Asshole), Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, and Warhammer 40K: Space Marine. Well, you also get Red Faction: Armageddon and Homefront, but those games are shit. Still a super solid deal - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A3F5S0O?tag=cheapassgam08-20

Halo 3 - Yeah, man. In the run-up to Halo 4, I was going to replay all the Halo games but I frankly found Halo and Halo 2 too tedious to run through completely (might try again with Anniversary Edition). Turns out Halo 3 was the one I really needed to replay, considering I didn't remember ANY of what happened this game. Since I read the books, I had a fair amount of knowledge of the general beats but really no familiarity with the levels or themes. This really surprises me, as I have such stark memories of major scenes in the first two games, down to the exploit on Assault on the Control Room that saves you thirty minutes. Anyways, I don't care to speculate on why I don't remember much of Halo 3, just want to say that it holds up quite well and does a lot of rad things with the gameplay from the earlier games that's worth reexploring. Heck, I didn't even mind the Flood that much in this one. That's an achievement on its own, really.

I say Tumblr. WordPress is nice but really a little too complex for my tastes. Not complex in the "oh I can't figure anything out way", but rather the "i don't like sifting through all this shit" way.

Not an amazing deal, but good if you were planning on buying Halo 4 anyways. Halo 4 pre-order + 13-month Xbox Live Gold + 800 MSP for $100 at Best Buy - http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&id=pcat17071&type=page&ks=960&st=Halo_4_Game_LIVE_and_Points_Offer_69882&sc=Global&cp=1&sp=&qp=crootcategoryid%23%23-1%23%23-1~~q48616c6f5f345f47616d655f4c4956455f616e645f506f696e74735f4f666665725f3639383832~~ncabcat0700000%23%231%23%231&list=y&usc=All+Categories&nrp=15&iht=n

I figured there was already some crossover, but that's rad. Between the licensing which I'm sure Disney will lovelovelove, that kinda stuff makes this deal a no-brainer.

It's moot now that the game is no longer on sale, but I liked The Club in a shooting-gallery at the local arcade machine way. Absolutely worth that $2.50 price, if it ever gets knocked back down there.

Wishlist: 1. Star Wars license much better used in video games. Give me something better than Force Unleashed, please. 2. Original cuts finally rereleased on blu-ray. No more of this double remastered garbage. 3. ILM and Skywalker Sound makes Disney/Pixar movies even better. Hell yeah.

660 Ti is roughly 25% more expensive than the 660 on the average and only about 15% more powerful in terms of benchmarks on the average. The 660 Ti is a great card, but the 660 is clearly a little more budget friendly. It's also worth considering that when you look at benchmarks for cards in this range (250 - 300 USD), the big performance gulfs will likely be at very high framerates or high resolutions. If you're running at 1080p with something like 4X MSAA and high texture quality, pretty much any of these cards will run 99% of games at 60 fps and above.

Presuming you're talking about the PSUs, I like Corsair and OCZ. I believe all of Corsair's lineup of modular models just have an M on the end, so the alternative to the one you chose would be TX750M. My current box has an OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W, which drives pretty much the same hardware you have listed except with a more power-hungry GTX 560 Ti and a couple more hard drives.

I've used the Hyper 212 in three different builds, love it.

Looks like a pretty good set of picks. I'd still recommend a GTX 660 over the Radeon, but really you should probably just get whatever you can get the best price on since you're waiting for Boxing Day - at 1080p, a Radeon 7850, Radeon 7870, GTX 660, and GTX 660 Ti would all be more than sufficient. Aside from that, I'd also recommend spending a little more on the power supply and getting modular. Cutting down on the amount of wires in the cases not only makes it easier to get everything in there, but it also increases airflow in the case.

Are you suggesting that within the span of a year, a person would buy one Ivy Bridge processor and then upgrade again with another Ivy Bridge processor? Because that's even more nonsense than the last thing you said, considering Haswell is slated for March 2013 release and runs on a different socket from Ivy Bridge. Also, since SB and IB use the LGA 1155 socket, you could absolutely upgrade from a Sandy Bridge processor to an Ivy Bridge. In technology, there are often older products that outperform updated or more expensive versions. This was the case four generations ago with the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 which ran around $250 and it's Extreme variation which ran at $1000. While the Extreme appeared to be better because of clock speed and power efficiency, both chips had the same cache and front sidebus speed so they performed almost exactly the same. The price difference is much more stark in this example, but the difference between SB and IB is similar - better graphics performance and power efficiency, but if neither of those things matter to you and you can get a SB processor on the cheap, "it's newer" isn't really a good reason to get IB.

I'll be updating to Windows 8 alongside my next hardware upgrade (probably video card) mostly because of the performance upgrades Toblix mentioned. From what I've heard, it's mostly stuff like using Direct X to drive the UI and junk like that which just makes everything more fluid.

This is completely incorrect. The next generation of Intel processors is called Haswell and runs on a completely different socket and chipset that Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is certainly better than Sandy Bridge in some ways (graphics, power consumption) as I mentioned, but there is no "opportunity to improve your CPU down the road without scrapping the whole thing" if you buy Ivy Bridge.