a purple future

tnt makes the most amazing tunnel clearer if you use it smartly. in rock, you can make a 3x3 tunnel really fast. you guys might already know this but i'm going to lay it out anyway. if you start digging a 3x3 tunnel, and get it started, you'll have a wall that looks like this OOO OTO OOO if you dig out the middle block (the T) as far as your pickaxe will allow and then place a tnt inside and detonate it, it clears a 3x3x3 cube out of stone. another fun trick: sand scaffolding. the worst part of scaffolding is tearing it down after you're done. if you use sand, it's super easy to clean up. start at the bottom with two blocks of dirt, or rock, or any block that doesn't fall down. delete the bottom block and put a torch down so that the dirt block is sitting above it. build up from the dirt block with the sand as high as you need to go. when you're done, knock out the dirt block and the sand will fall on the torch breaking it down into the blocks you can pick up.

yep, i screwed up blowing up Link too. i was filling his insides with tnt when it went off and blew off his bottom half. i was going to fraps it too. oh well.

hah, good idea. a whole week of ruination. hahah! i had no idea there was stuff inside the moai! i like how the tnt blew its ass out and took out part of the thumb in the process

i'm not sure that this falls under "behaving as expected..."

what the christ?

I guess so. I guess it's just weird to me that the good will their games built up with me has carried me through some of the most abusive, unpleasant gaming experiences of my life and still leaves me looking forward to future titles.

all i really know is that the base CoD formula appeals to some weird base instinct in me so much so that I've forced myself to suffer through unbalanced terrible bullshit like MW2. and at this point i'm clinging onto my beautiful memories of 2 and 4 so hard that if Black Ops is even slightly less awful than MW2 I'll eat all the shit sandwiches it can serve me. I hate myself sometimes. also Thompson's bulleted list is 100% accurate to my opinions. it's eerie reading it.

you'd think these stupid assholes would learn to back up their data and buy backup power supplies after losing their data for the 18th time...

i tried to use the "die" button but it takes you to the donate page instead. i can't even do that right...

once i get moved in and start getting paid at my new job i'll be glad to drop a few bucks. nice splash screen

someone did a DoS attack against the minecraft server. i'm amazed you could connect at all http://notch.tumblr.com/

apparently it doesn't fix the performance issues but it does take care of the saves and various gameplay and quest bugs. there's a kind of weird workaround out there that tricks the game into thinking you have a compatible video card. it's a little sketchy and you have to be careful where you get the file from, but it worked like a charm for me. this is why i like pc gaming- between fan fixes, valve, and bethesda, it took less than a day to get a pretty severely broken game working pretty well. keep hearing about various console issues, sucks they have to wait.

I had a game that had all four stats hovering around 300 each and i had a blackout and data loss at the same time, all of them dropped to 60ish. fuck off.

at the top of the info card it says "PREV" if he worked on the previous title. try not to use anyone with that unless you have to

Some folks on the bethesda forums have narrowed down the major causes of slowdown and stuttering. The biggest one, and the one I've found, is some issue with the NPC's heads and facial animations. if you use the console command "toggleEmotions" your average framerate should jump up. I get an extra 10-20 fps around NPCs now. There's apparently a way to edit the .ini so that no NPCs have heads and if you do it supposedly the game runs at breakneck FPS speeds. of course it's half unplayable in that state, but still. I mean, I knew gamebryo characters were ugly, but not game-breakingly ugly. Also I can't imagine it's a fun day to be Nick Breckon

I don't know, Blind Guardian maybe? they're more power metal than anything but maybe.

if they were smart they would have just thrown blocks of dirt at their feet while jumping. would have gotten out in no time!

curious. I wonder if the PS3 players are having issues?

maybe? the good (?) news was that it was in Unreal, which is super easy to tweak via .ini so after several hours I got it in a mostly-functional state. but the constant crashes and framerate drops eventually wore me down and I just went out and bought the 360 version. don't most consoles use ATI cards nowadays? that might explain it. it's a shame that I can run Crysis at "ultra" on this computer but some other games just kick sand in its face. oh, side note: stealth actually sort of worked on the console version of AP

so it's looking like the pc problems might be tied to nvidia cards. do all the computers at Obsidian use ATI or something? hoo boy. re: Alpha Protocol pc- yeah that was nearly unplayable. console version worked fantastic though. shame i ended up spending $90 just to play it.

i guess that's also another reason why i'd be okay with the server reset. an excuse to start fresh with old knowledge, make some stuff that's less derivative.

you're not wrong but building that zelda stuff was the first time i'd made an attempt in the game to build anything that reached beyond the goal of "functional." sometimes you have to follow the instructions that come with the legos to understand where to go from there.

well this at least boots up without argument. beyond that though, it's close..

this game is even more broken on PC than it is on console. at least on console the game works when NPCs are visible. http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1122285-game-runs-very-choppy/ I get about 10 fps when there is an NPC onscreen (totally smooth 60fps otherwise). combat is impossible unless you use vats. i really like the parts i've managed to play. it would be nice to play the rest of it...

yeah i hit the big time doing that. my long-running series of dungeon themed simulation RPGs named "Bogglecock" just released its 9th installment. i started goofing around seeing what the worst combinations i could make would do. i made an educational marathon game that sold 6.6 million units. a motion animal game that sold 6 million, a golf trivia game that sold so well i made 3 sequels, and a checkers rpg. at this point my team is so good that none of these are flops. I still don't have a GOTY though haha okay let's see how a F1 racing card game for the wii does