The puzzle aspect is what interests me. There's also a big difference between static portals (Prey) and a portal gun (Portal)

there's a fix for nhancer but can't remember what forum I saw it on. beyond3d or nvnews maybe

EDIT:

http://forums.slizone.com/index.php?showtopic=8533

^^ found searching on google for nhancer 163.71


This comment was edited on Sep 29, 15:47.

I have noticed a ridiculous amount of demomen on both sides in capture point maps, especially dust bowl. It's funny because the first day no one wanted to be one.

Some other levels seem to favor imbalance of other classes, for example, scouts on granary.

It might have something to do with the Steam Version. Assuming you're using Nvidia, make sure you get the right executable file in your game profile (maybe not use the default profile set up for the game)

I don't have it installed right now because I had to make a ridiculous amount of room to install Stranglehold off Direct2drive so I can't remember if there is an AA setting within the game - if there is, you can set it to low, then set it in profile to enhance the application setting, else override. I remember specifically using 16xAF and 16xQ AA from control panel and yes I know how to tell the difference

Note I'm talking about Dark Crusade here - can't remember exactly how the last expansion and the original handle this but I don't remember it not.

This comment was edited on Sep 27, 12:40.

Yeah, they should remake Undying for consoles with Bioshock graphics, and tighten up the levels/gameplay Clive is working with Codemasters now though and Undying was made by EA/Dreamworks :/

I read that they can't do Tyranids justice in the current engine - they'll be in DoW 2

"AA controls" isn't a problem, just set AF and AA in the control panel of your video driver. Works fine in Dark Crusade

looks more paint by the numbers than Undying to me. Undying had amazing environments (for the most part - it had some bad levels too) and the monsters seemed to really fit and give you nice startle scares when you least expected. This looks more like doom3 with squads. Hope I'm wrong.

This is a good thing since I went to purchase this online from a european site and they wanted to charge me 78 dollars. No thanks.

lol come on. i remember identical crap like this in pen in paper books like Rifts that came out in like 1989. palladium, the company that made rifts borrowed from like 1000 different sources that all had this idea 10, 20, 30 years before that.

lol, when I first got the game it would barely run at all on my system despite the graphics looking very mediocre. they fixed some performance problems with subsequent patches and even improved some of the graphic effects but it would still run terrible if I hadn't bought an entire new system.

but then i've not felt like playing the game anyway because the AI is just incredibly stupid. especially melee which will run and aggro an entire level because they were hit with an arrow. well that and my first character was a wizard, a class thats really weak in the beginning of the game and encourages you to rest 3 billion times. totally should have rolled sorcerer. so anyway the druid wasn't doing what I wanted it to, just self buffing then going animal form and never healing or anything so I thought I'd control her more, but then the wizard would just throw up a huge aoe damage spell every time and get killed by 5+ mobs, never use proper CC spells, waste all the good spells, so I pretty much had to puppet control the druid and the wizard and constantly stop the warrior from running off

it's a decent game but a lot of decent games are a less frustrating so really no motivation to play unless this patch improves the AI a lot

well yeah the developers aren't angels either if they can get away with it. $5 horse armor is disgusting. but the pirates like to turn that into a justification when the real reason they do it is because it's convenient and free.

someone on the first page pretty much summed it up.

(a) any purchase has an opportunity cost
(b) people have unlimited wants
(c) if you can get something for free you can shift your purchasing power into another opportunity satisfying more wants
(d) humans have limited altruism and are more likely to satisfy their needs and desires and the needs and desires of friends and family before some faceless entity

and i would add

(e) cognitive dissonance will convince the consumer they are entitled to the creative works of others, creative works that cost 2-20 million dollars and years of work to produce, creative works that frequently lose money.

hence the very sad examples of legal and moral arguments adduced to justify personal satisfaction framed poorly in a flailing attempt to cast blame. seriously, who is being convinced by an argument that supposes that the developer and publisher should let the consumer play 90% of a game before deciding to purchase it in good faith? worst psychology ever?

at best you could argue that it's natural for consumers to break the rules but fewer would if the economics of the industry were tweaked (with real constraints mind you, not the imaginings of a pirate).

i don't however see any reasonable argument counter to developers reacting by (i) investing in platforms that have a higher rate of return (ii) engaging technologies that make it more difficult (iii) pursuing legal remedies that shut down or hinder distribution

This comment was edited on Mar 10, 11:37.

his numbers might be conjured out of thin air but I don't think he's really off base considering surveys of movie piracy.

i do, however, think he's mostly wrong about the state of pc games. we see the same thing on xbox360 and ps3 where you get only a handful of good games a year. i don't think we can blame that on piracy primarily - more like production costs rising a lot as graphics technology improves. fewer games, fewer potentially good games, especially when the only studios that can afford to make them are very risk averse. the margins for most software products are really bad.

i have to laugh at id though. doom3 sucked. i've played run of the mill 3rd person shooters on the xbox that were better (e.g. The Suffering)

WoW is a great game when you're leveling the first time and learning all the new abilities (even better if you roll on a new sever where everyone else is leveling - 100x better than rolling on an old server where it's you and 5 people still leveling). the people complaining are stupid enough to do endgame dungeons over and over. pvp is about the only thing i enjoyed endgame and you can do that without a schedule or spending 4+ hours in a dungeon.

Eventually you've done everything in the game that's worthwhile and it's not quite as fun. that's when you should quit. some people don't understand that and hate on the game while still being hopelessly addicted. i did raid dungeons at level 60 and the ones at 70 are the same. no point repeating that crap over again. and i thought the arena was horribly unbalanced and not really fun. so I quit. pretty simple.

This comment was edited on Mar 8, 08:23.

this weeks philosophy talk just happened to be on topic (taxation):

http://www.philosophytalk.org/pastShows/Taxation.htm

that issue of the Journal of Adolescence was also co-edited by Craig Anderson who had a much criticized paper on that topic published in the journal nature (where he made conclusions far beyond the actual results of his meta analysis of a number of studies). which makes me a lot more suspicious before going into any of the details

right from the gentile study:

"That youth who are more hostile also play more violent video games raises questions of causality. Are young adolescents more hostile and aggressive because they expose themselves to media violence, or do previously hostile adolescents prefer violent media? Due to the correlational nature of this study, we cannot answer this question directly"

looks like the PR got ahead of their actual scientific results

the exposure to doom study is equivocal at best. anyone who follows the heuristics and biases program in social psychology knows that framing effects are well established (in this case exposure to violence), but the trick is to show that the effect is anything more than temporary (studies on framing and racism i've seen produce only a temporary effect), and further, to show whether it is actually a significant /causes/ violence. (the "10 times as likely" in the gentile study could be misleading if the likelihood of getting into a fight without exposure to games is itself low, and also needs comparison to other effects which might be much more significant -- socioeconomic conditions for example -- ill have to have a look at it)

you would think that the genitile study and the doom study proves this in conjunction, but it doesn't unless it controls for all the other relevant variables (a serious problem with most of these studies). and the stories we hear about simple imitation of violence in video games are pretty silly judging by the statistics comparing exposure to violent video games versus actual incidence of the serious violent behavior, the kind we often see in video games.