MeanJim wrote on Oct 6, 2024, 22:45:
I used to use an Aeropress for years. I now use a French press. IMO, it makes better coffee and is a lot less effort, both in brewing and cleanup.

Yeah, this is the truth. Aeropress makes a fine cup, but it's small, finnicky, and easy to shoot all over the counter. Also forget brewing for 2+ people. A v60, press pot, chemex, or Kalita are better all around.

Though the Flare manual espresso brewers are kinda nice for the price.

What a weird choice. Do they have a pedo quota or something to fill after banning DrDisrespect?

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 12, 2024, 17:22:
The "AI Upgrade Cycle" can happily pass me by. Just one more on a list of things that I do not want on my phone.

Yeah, same. The AI upgrades hold nothing for me but thousands of dollars of not buying new phones. The camera upgrade cycle was brutal on the wallet.

Hah, just what everyone wants: an even more buggy, rushed Bethesda game.

And here I thought The Road was the Fallout movie. They even had their own Vault!

While I've read the spin, it sure feels like an intentional money-grab; the very thing many of us, I'm sure, feared when we heard BioWare was getting absorbed into EA. I would love to have heard the discussion that led up to this release timetable. It would certainly seem like they didn't ask anyone outside the pocketbook for their opinions.

As for me, I think this may be enough to push me away from buying the game, at least at full retail price. The buzz hasn't been the greatest and I am always leery of supporting anything from EA. Certainly the (perceived) slap in the face does nothing to sweeten the deal.

The concept of a parallel development team is great if true, but I'd still rather have had those folks working on the main title to make it bigger, better, and more bug free.

I sure wish games would stay away from the fixed third person camera approach, especially when the angles aren't very good.

Kind of reminds me of Ultimate Spider-man and Stolen. In those terms, it's more on the Stolen end of the scale. More or less just a ported button masher, judging by what's available. Weird key configuration, too.

Anyways, how is 2142 anyway? seems to me like people are sticking to BF2, but I might have gotten the wrong impression.

In my opinion, having recently gone back to BF2 for some fun, BF2142 is a lot slower and less lethal. There also appear to be fewer "good" maps and generally less... attention to feel.

I'd forgotten how much I missed things like the humvees with the gear-shifting, or the way the APC sort of rocks to the side when firing sideways. I was an armor whore in BF2, but I find it really boring and simple in 2142. The main strategy is get in a hover tank, circle strafe, win. 2142 is fun, but it really does feel like a semi-professional mod.

That said, there are some nice improvements. The unlock system upgrade is kind of nice, as well as the NetBat stuff (an enhanced version of spotting, in a way, supported by things like pulse detectors, radar drones, and hud-reticles).

Do I regret purchasing it? Yeah, sometimes, especially with the cheating going on, but it has tided me over for awhile.

Despite all the bugs and hacks (some of which are still working, including a built in tag hack apparently), BF2 was a suitable upgrade to BF1942. BF2142 isn't. It's closer to BF:V to BF1942.

Sure, there was some fun to be had, just as there still is in BF2. EA/DICE has a nasty habit of leaving bugs in for a long time, though. Let's not forget the in-game advertising. I'm fine with the concept, if it's a seamless integration (think racing games, or the screensavers in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory), or the game is suitably reduced in price (Anarchy Online, for example), but full price for a mod with ads? No thanks.

Just out of a sense of misplaced curiousity, why is this labeled massively multiplayer? If you check out the maps page, you see a lot of 16 player maps, 24 player maps, 36 player maps... not much more. Oh, and mostly deathmatch. Blah.

I guess the chat before the game is truly massive?

I saw these a few days ago and my first thought was "wishful thinking." They could be real, but they sound kind of cooked, though I couldn't tell you why I think that, really.

Personally, I think this patch is going to be the compatibility patch for the expansion, hence the delay. The stat changes could reflect the new weapons, vehicles, maps, etc, in the expansion...

Yup, if I don't have my unlocks, there's usually a hiccup with the stats server. Typically clears up within five minutes or so. It's pretty rare that a ranked server has them turned off completely.

As far as fixing the exploiting, I don't think removing the rankings is the right option. I enjoy seeing my progress, and wish there were more benefits (once you hit Lance Corp, or Sargeant, it gets pretty boring). I think a step in the right direction would be to remove the leaderboards and let people only view their own stats. I don't know how you could enforce that limitation on third-party sites, though, especially since it's kind of fun to compare with friends.

Stretching their resources? Maybe, with the expansion and all, but they have a variety of dedicated hosting companies as partners, as well as their customers, on the look-out for stat exploiting players and techniques. As (most) people don't want to lose their ability to host/rent a ranked server, someone is bound to report it... then it's just a matter of patching it. Well, "just" makes it sound easy, but you get the idea.

While I avoid ranked servers during prime time hours, I've not had any problems getting on and playing lag-free in the offer hours (i.e. before 5-6 pm EDT, and after 1:30-2 AM EDT... while not convenient for most, it works.). The stats were updating before or soon after the end of each round last night. Previously, it had been up to 12 hours.

Rumor has it that we may see more ranked servers early this week, as the stats problems are sorted out, so hopefully that will alleviate some of the issues.

My dislike of GSI has more to do with them shafting the original customers of GameSpy 3D about the time that GameSpy Arcade, the bloated pile that it is, came out. Lack of support, updates, bug fixes (namely for BF1942).

I've also recently been told that in-game profiles have nothing to do with GameSpy, despite being taken directly to a GameSpy ID page when creating a new account and having the profiles tied to that account... Go go gadget GSI/IGN support!

Apart from that, my only problems with BF2 have been incredibly long waiting times for the "Loading complete. Verifying client data." stages, often several minutes longer than loading the map itself.

Seeding it only does so much good when it requires a unique key from the lameness, assuming it follows normal fileplanet exclusivity rules.

I don't get it in this case. Battlefield has a pretty big following, especially if you count the people who loathe them for their errors in previous titles in the series. Exclusivity deals are becoming horribly annoying, especially if you're cheap. Maybe that's the root cause of my annoyance. Nice to see it's not a FilePlanet exclusive, though.


This comment was edited on Jun 8, 00:05.

Well, if you're not in an instance, there's not much incentive to group, but I'll concede the point. Server difficulties aside, Blizzard has been pretty nice to the playerbase. It's a shame it's taken them so long to get battlegrounds and the honor system in, as they were supposed to be in beta a few months before launch(there was even one patch when you could earn titles for about 24 hours).

I was looking forward to AutoAssault when it was first announced because I was huge fan of Interstate '76... now it's coming across more as Diablo with wheels. We'll see, though. It has the potential to be something good.

As far as PlanetSide, I feel somewhat vindicated in my opinion that the game has turned into a sort of test-bed for feature games with the announcement of their upcoming action MMO to debut at E3 2006. It's still a good game, and they're still pumping out patches and updates for it, but core issues with netcode, etc, still exist.

This comment was edited on Apr 28, 23:26.

I would certainly hope it *doesn't* play like WoW. WoW is generally a mediocre, if extremely polished, recreation of the popular facets of previous games. Also, it does a fair bit to encourage players to solo, which is fine, but not exactly promoting the lasting community that holds a lot of these games up.

Internationally, there is still plenty of room to compete. EQ1 didn't fail because Lineage was a huge success, and we still have games like PlanetSide hanging on. While we may see a shift to a smaller scale than massive, games will still be successful, especially picking up underdeveloped niches(which LoTR is not, of course.).

Also, there are a lot of people that don't like WoW, or are already getting tired of it. And there will always be a group that drives initiate box sales, even if they don't stick around.

I upgraded from a Ti4200 to the MSI 6600 GT AGP and have been very pleased. I did have a few issues with with some models(the trees) in Joint Operations, but newer drivers seem to have fixed that. Better fps, higher resolutions, more features turned on, etc. Running a P4 2.4 800 FSB, 1024 DDR3200 Kingston ram, and an Abit IS7-E board.

The crashes are pretty nasty, too. A nice message informing you that Windows has recovered from a device failure, and you should reboot to restore functionality. Click okay, and my screen goes black, monitor goes into standby, and the system doesn't reboot.

On the bright side, you can hear the game audio purring away in the background, and I can only imagine the fun I'm not having. Oh well.

What have they done since the last beta? I really enjoyed the first preview we had during E3, but the last beta weekend seemed to show a leaning towards a less... original experience. Maybe I just didn't care for the setting of that one, or expected too much, but I no longer really see the benefit of Guild Wars over, say, Neverwinter Nights.

I'm getting tired of the guided RPG/hack and slash experience, I guess.