nin wrote on Sep 4, 2014, 11:10:

Blue wrote on Sep 4, 2014, 10:15:

InBlack wrote on Sep 4, 2014, 09:56:
When I decide to use Amazon to purchase something privately Ill be sure to use your link Blue. Does it have to be game related? Can it be a book? Or maybe a peripheral?

Yeah, they have their own rules about what does or doesn't qualify, but it's not about being games related at all.

I'm assuming 3rd party resellers don't count? Or gift cards? I just ordered some (work) stuff and used the link, but it's a "fulfilled by amazon" 3rd part seller. So I don't know if that'll count or not...

The LED bulbs were mine, and they were from a third party and "fulfilled by amazon", so those work too.

Yeah, 2 weapon limit is in. George B posted over on Shacknews back when the whole gearbox deal was announced that it was actually 3d realms that made that decision, well before gearbox was involved. I don't have time to dig up the quote, but he said it was directly tied to having difficulty with selecting among a large set of weapons when using a controller. They tried several approaches but weren't happy with any of them, so opted for the current 2 weapon limit

After Schafer called Kotick "a dick" and a "total prick" and said he was "allegedly" a person, Activision took issue with the comment that "he makes a big deal about not liking games," and sets the record straight:

"Bobby really does like video games. We agree he is a dick, a total prick, and probably not really a human, but he does like video games. He plays Tetris and Solitaire all the time!"

None of the above 3 are perfect, but I will take Windows and Linux any day over a Mac (yes I know OSX is Linux based now)

The OS X kernel is BSD based and OS X is a certified UNIX. It is not Linux.

Performance seems to get better later. I have yet to find any consistency to what I see. Some rather simple areas give a slideshow, some complex areas are fluid. It really makes no sense. My suggestion is to turn everything (shadows, res, water effects) down or off until you get to Fort Locke. Then start turning stuff back up to make it pretty again. It's about a couple of hours in or so at most.

There's also a lot of people really enjoying NWN2, myself included. The Obsidian folks are all over the board addressing issues as best they can, which bodes well for future support of the game. It does have issues, notably inconsistent performance, so I'd give it a patch or two unless you have no patience. The other things people are complaining about (camera, UI, whatever) don't bother me in the slightest, but YMMV, and Obsidian says they're working on improving that stuff too. Stability wise, I haven't crashed once, nor hit any scripting bugs, though some have been reported.

I'm about 8 hours in (running around Neverwinter now) and the game is getting better and better. It eases you into combat, perhaps too slowly, but it's getting more tactical by the minute, which is great. I really missed the tactical nature of BG2 and IWD.

The NPCs are quite good, and I haven't enjoyed party NPC banter this much since BG2 (the insult 'contest' was awesome.) Early game voice acting is not as good as what I'm seeing at this point. A couple of recent encounters I'd even rate as excellent.

The story is interesting, and getting more complex all the time. There's some nifty side quests, and most are not fed-ex. The progression has a bit of an 'on-rails' feeling to it so far, but I hear it opens up a bit soon. On a first playthrough this is fine, but it may be a problem for replayability. I am looking forward to going through at least one more time as an evil bastard, since there seem to be lots of options for a fun evil playthrough in the dialog trees.

Oh, and I'm still in Act I so it appears the game is quite long. I haven't seen any posts anywhere from people who have finished yet, though many are playing steadily. I'm sure some have finished but the lack of such posts would indicate it's damn long.

Provided Obsidian finished the plot so the payoff is there I think it may be a winner, especially after they work some of the remaining kinks out. So far the OC kicks the snot out of NWN1's, but you have to give it a little time to get rolling.

I had to replay a couple of missions to get the medals, but beyond that it's not too difficult, though the defense of hill 317 or whichever it was had me scrambling a bit. The most annoying medal was the early defense mission where you need 250 kills to get it. It took me like 5 tries to find the right combination of good (but not too good) defense and pulling back at the right times. I kept coming up about 5 kills short. Annoying.

http://www.download.com/Prey-demo/3000-7453_4-10552043.html?tag=pdp_prod

Started fast but is slowing way down here.

EDIT: haha, can't post fast enough

This comment was edited on Jun 22, 00:19.

cnet download.com mirror

http://www.download.com/Prey-demo/3000-7453_4-10552043.html?tag=pdp_prod

Started fast but is slowing way down now. Guess I'll go watch a movie or something.

I heard rumours that secuROM also burns bagels and pop-tarts.

I'm gonna get flamed over this but it's the plain truth.

I doubt that, considering it is the truth. Apple is very much a hardware company and anyone that thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. I'm typing this on a powerbook, and have a powermac sitting next to my xp box here, so I'm very much drinking the apple cool-aid and see nothing worth flaming over

What do you mean Creston? You mean the ability to toggle the cockpits on|off?

He means the lack of cockpit graphics in X3, as in there are none, only a HUD this time around. I'm a bit disappointed too as this seems like a step backwards for the series, but whatever, I'll get over it about 5 minutes after starting the game I'm sure.

I ordered the original X beyond from import before any one hear even knew it existed

Don't be so sure about that

The devs have stated fairly recently that the plan is to have a rolling demo out before the game hits the shelves, and a playable demo as soon as possible after that (but probably not til sometime after it's actually out.)

Whether or not that's still the case, who knows, but I'd be surprised if they didn't follow through here. People still post benchmarks in the X2 rolling demo thread on their forums.

LOL. His comments had me pull X2 out again. Now I owe him a slap on the balls for taking my life away again...

Same here, I'm playing it again right now. I love the bonus scripts, I hadn't played since they released all this stuff. Good fun.

Bah, eDave beat me to it. Bastardo!

It's nice to see ATI getting more involved in the gpgpu arena, and pushing shader tech. NVidia has been pretty much eating their lunch here for over a year now.

The article is extremely misleading about nvidia's interest in this, as they've been sponsers and presenters at the siggraph gpgpu courses for the past couple of years now. These always include fluid dynamics sims, since they are generally large systems of linear equations, which gpus shine at solving. Not to mention nvidia sells Gelato which is a partially hardware based photorealistic rendering solution.

Competition is always a good thing
This comment was edited on Oct 11, 23:59.

Actually a couple of posts from Apoch on the egosoft forums (one of the devs) hint at a big announcement 'shortly', and this in threads with people speculating about release dates and going gold. So I'm guessing it's about ready to go. First time I'd looked at that forum in like a year too.

It sounds like a lot of issues with the first two have finally been addressed (uniform gate layout, too rigid an ecomony, no faction wars, etc) which would be nice.

I'm in no hurry really though. Too damn many games coming out the next 2 months already, a lot of them potential huge time sinks as well, like Oblivion. Ah well, hopefully spring will be dead so I can catch up.

edit for Ray: they also mentioned there won't be a demo before the game is done since putting one together takes too much time away from finishing the game.
This comment was edited on Oct 11, 01:27.

I know of several scenes that were cut for running time purposes only and will likely return in an extended edition, notably in Marv's section (my favorite), plus some others scattered throughout the film. There was actually quite a bit of work done that was never seen in theatres.

Off the top of my head (some are E3 trailers)... Dragon Empires, Empire Earth, Spy Hunter 2, Blood Rayne, Everquest 2, and going way back, Quake 2 (which I did a full sequence on)

Blur does a lot of stuff, including ride films and general visual effects, but they fill in the schedule with game cinematics. They were recently nominated for an Academy Award for an animated short which is cool.

I left there a few years ago to start a small software company which specializes in rendering software (which was used for the DoW cinematic) but still have a good relationship with the Blur peeps.