Lay off Romero; at least he's no Uwe Boll!

I would think that your skillzorz will still have a negligible imact; it's just more fun when you're doing something to affect the fights. In some games, the Fallout series for example, you participated as a tactician. In a first-person, real-time RPG, it just seems natural that you would tell your character when to swing. It's not really much less RPGish than ensuring that your weak sniper doesn't role-play himself out into melee combat.

I think you're misunderstanding what the "RP" stands for. Role Playing is the game. Role playing is not stats. Stats are not role playing. Stats are a means. They are there so that you feel like you're getting better at the things you do.

Second, I've only done a limited amount of kendo, but I can tell you that if you're a master with a sword, you're probably going to be proficient enough to stab someone with a knife. Maybe having them as related stats would be more realistic, but frankly, it would be a hassle for me as the player, and other skills like Sneak will do a lot of make sure that most giant sword wielding players won't be able to use a dagger effectively.

Finally, nobody used the thrown weapons. The only time when I used thrown weapons in Morrowind was when I ran out of arrows with my bow. I don't want a month for thrown weapons to be designed and added to the game. That's not worth it for something I never use.

Second finally, I agree about the compass. I'm OK with main objectives showing up on it, but if it's still showing tombs and caves, that takes all the fun out of exploration.

Third finally, play Gothic or Gothic 2.

Iron Harry Rackham

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!


Arrr!

I'll promise to buy all your games forever if you let me play with that right now.

*Tears of joyous anticipation*

OK, I played this demo. Keeping in mind that I actually liked the single player demo, I think this multiplayer demo is abysmal. Maybe it could be fun for 10 minutes if you get in the mech and shoot everyone while being nearly invincible. There's no balance to it, and there's no fun to it. The guns kick like mad and don't recover steadily. At least in this level, there's not much point in playing the different classes. Each class gets one gun and a knife, there are no buy stations. Even with a 50 ping, I lagged significantly.

Last but not least, the game required me to restart before playing, which I find entirely unacceptable. There is no program that you can't run after the computer has started, unless system files are being modified. If you went to a linux server admin and said "I'm going to restart your computer now," he'd probably physically assault you to stop you from doing it. I do not like being told to restart.

I was going to buy this game just for the single player, but this multiplayer demo actually makes me not want to buy the game.

Sorry, Kytolon, all you needed to do was put in some decent Team Fortress-style capture the flag and I would have been all over this, but this multiplayer is actually a detriment to the game and not an asset.

Starforce is the ONLY copy protection to date that actually installs additional software on your harddrive and disables other perfectly good programs because they -could- be used for illegal purposes.

I don't know what copy protection software Doom 3 used, but that game wouldn't launch because of CD emulation software, and I didn't even have any installed at the time. At that point, I was glad so many people had pirated it early because there was already a no-CD crack ready for my legally purchased (preordered even) copy.

So, this may be asking a little much, but did anyone actually try this demo? I seem to be one of five people in the world who actually thought the single player demo was fun, for all its flaws, and I'm interested in trying multiplayer but I'm stuck at work.

I hate to interrupt the StarForce debate, but since I broke it back when I got Scrapland, I really don't care about it.

Is it fun, people? Fun?

On second thought, this thread would probably have under 10 comments if it wasn't for StarForce, and any publicity is good publicity. In this case, StarForce might actually sell copies.

Space Captain knows what he's talking about. I've never even thought about boycotting a game because of its copy protection. I buy games, but I circumvent every copy protection scheme I encounter, just on principal. I'm not A#1 Pirate Captain, but I'll say "Arr" with the best of them to keep my computer under my control.

Anyway, this game. I'm sure nobody read my post in the demo thread, but for it's flaws, I liked this game. I certainly enjoyed it more than FEAR, but then the last Monolith game I liked was Blood 2. I don't think BoS will do great, but I do think the developers deserve some support: At least BoS isn't a WW2 tactical squad shooter.

I liked it. Say what you will.

I had already broken StarForce to prevent it from seeing my Daemon Tools, so it's not a hassle to me any longer.

The graphics are decent, certainly good enough for anyone who likes to go around saying "gameplay over graphics", but they are nothing too special. The gunplay is pretty fun, although it may not be what some people are expecting. It's very arcadey, and the health question is handled by having a bunch of different armor pieces that take damage independently. This goes for the player as well as the enemies. The result is that you're not likely to be killed by three random shots, but you're also able to kill an enemy in that many if your aim is good.

The movement feel is OK. Not quite quake-engine, but good enough. Although the frame rate (with all details high) was not quite smooth, there was no mouse lag on my AMD64 3000+/9800 Pro, so I was happy. The weapon feedback is very good and shooting people with the War Shotgun (the new best weapon ever) was very satifying.

Most of the cutscenes are less than great, but only one is (hilariously) terrible. Voice acting quality is mixed, but it was easy to tell it was done by a bunch of French guys.

Compaining that "sensitive" translates to "sensible" in French is really looking to nitpick. So what if they left the word? Dictionary.com definition number 1 for sensibility: The ability to feel or perceive. I think that's clear enough that I'm not confused.

Anyway, it's clear that most people complaining didn't play. If you didn't play because of StarForce, I'll let you off the hook, but look around and it won't be long before you find out how to keep it from interfering with your software.

It's not the greatest game ever, sure, but I look forward to the multiplayer demo all the same.

Score of 63 minimum, by my count. One of 64 squares is filled, leaving 63 left to fill. Each of those 63 gives you one point.

By Enahs's method, when you have a score of 1, there are 2 boxes filled and 62 unfilled. Unless you're stopping before the end, you have to click 62 more times to fill those 62, for a total score of 63.

This comment was edited on Aug 24, 19:23.

I got 82 on my first try, then 70 while sort of trying to go in circles.

Edit: I got 66. I went around the edge and tried to take advantage of the pattern it made as I circled. I can see that I'm going to be spending a lot of time on this...

This comment was edited on Aug 24, 17:55.

Yeah yeah, like I said, both parties love censorship. Now, I'm a flaming liberal myself, but really all I am is a person who can read the consitution. Whether or not the founding fathers could actually live up to what they wrote, they wrote it, and it's the foundation of this country. Were some of those rights just for show? I don't know. All I know is they're right there in black and white, so that's what I have to work with. I used to think that made me a conservative, but as it turns out I'm not.

I understood from Warhark's post that on issue's on censorship, O'Reilly would oppose the moral majority (TM) and go the traditional conservative route. That is also, however, why I said he wouldn't be able to do it, he'd alienate too much of his neocon fan-base.

Face the facts: Democrats love censorship. Republicans love censorship. China loves censorship. The USSR loved censorship. If a person can gain or hold a power by supporting censorship, they will probably support censorship.

Vote Sharpton.
This comment was edited on Aug 16, 20:41.

O'Reilly infuriates me, but I would order an O'Reilly vs. Thompson match on pay-per-view... Unfortunately it can't happen, too many O'Reilly viewers fear videogames.

Both political parties have seized on this opportunity to make themselves look good, and unfortunately it seems to be working.

Anyway, I propose a Sharpton/Schwartzenegger ticket for 2008.

Genetic alorithms could work, but really for bots in a deathmatch/tdm game. It's easy to make AIs that play very well. It's not easy to make AIs that play their roles convincingly at the same time. If there's one thing you don't want, it's an AI enemy playing the absolute best the computer can do.

Edit: Not to mention that'd you'd have to define the behaviors/responses as genes, so you would not come up with any new, creative behavior, simply the best course of action inside your already-defined set.

This comment was edited on Aug 15, 16:33.

Yeah, that's definitely a bug. I can see how you'd be pissed, but really? Ranting because a patch introduced a bug. I assure you, they're not trying to screw you.

I think that CD-key in use thing was pretty common with the original release of the game. I would head over to the support forums and see if anyone has a solution. It could be as easy as waiting for your login to time out, or you may have to reinstall the game and all the patches, but I certainly doubt that this kind of bug could be caused by a hardware incompatibility issue or some such thing.

TLDR: You have a right to be pissed, they broke your game, but it's not supposed to be that way and you can probably fix it.

FarCry has now been crossed off of my purchase list.

Ok, but if that's all it took then you must not have been very interested. Loads of people already through the same "hassle" just for GunBound!

Perhaps further clarification is in order:

To play single-player or on a LAN, you do not need to enter ANY information.

The first time you play online, you need to enter your CD key (you do not enter it when installing) and your username and password.

To play online again, you need to enter your username and password only. The game used to give you the option of savving your username and password, but it does not offer this feature any longer.

Personally, I don't play the game online much. The multiplayer is fun, for sure, but I recommend the game for its single player mostly, and because it's fun and easy to modify the game.

Yes, I will also clarify:

You do not need to enter your CD key every time.

You do need to enter your ubi.com username and password every time.

I would say that I expect the Far Cry community to have a patch to allow you to save your info ready any time now, but I'm trying to make one myself and it's not going as smoothly as I planned. I think the login process stuff might actually have been moved into the game's executables so that cheaters can't avoid the authentication process. A quick look through CryNetwork.dll seems to indicate that this is the case.

Unfortunately, I never got into ASM hacking, but maybe somebody will look at the code and find an easy way to get a stored user name in there.

Edit: I should comment that, although it's a bit of a hassle, I don't find typing in my username and password each time I log in to be particularly straining, and I wouldn't advise people to hold off on patching just because you'll have to type 15 or 20 characters when you want to play.
This comment was edited on Aug 10, 20:04.

There have been a lot of Jack Thompson email exchanges reported, and I'm pretty sure Jack would know if there was someone writing inflammatory emails in his name. It's my impression that these emails were actually written by Jack, and that he really is up-front about not caring about things like "reason" and "intelligent discourse."