robdot wrote on Aug 28, 2012, 14:35:
it is completely impossible for any car made, for the engine to overpower the brakes. this has been proven over and over. it cant be done. its always operator error.

I had this exact problem (accelerator stuck) a month after passing my test while growing up. I was in a Golf at the time driving down country lanes in Devon, doing like 50 or 60 mph. After panicking for a bit and catching the car up in front, I tried putting it in neutral but thought it might damage the engine to rev like that. I put it back in gear then discovered that yes, the brakes were far stronger. It's definitely reasonable to expect an experienced driver to work out what to do.

I recall Duke Nukem head to head back at university, using BNC cables that we threaded along with the electric cables between our two rooms. I remember on the first level barricading myself in that room with the pinball machine and defending it with pipe bombs... and blowing up my mate again and again until he came to visit me exasperated and angry. Good times!

Surely cloud computing benefits the software publisher more than anyone else, isn't it mainly just a method of control to host everything and just grant access? Home consumers don't have processing needs so vast that they require remote processing and remote logins. Home entertainment is dependent on rich media and a good response time, why would you host or operate these things remotely? Computing power is cheap, network bandwidth is metered, why would you not run everyday software apps at home?

Are there any benefits to the consumer? Above the "remote storage of some data" that you sometimes get masquerading as a cloud currently.

They'll definitely try it on, I'd bet anything on it. They might have a tougher time though because it feels like there is more resistance to Win8 than there was with Vista before its launch. The concept of consolitis is well known and the prospect of having your actual OS designed with the multiplatform market in mind is pretty offputting.

That article is horse shit. It's well known that most review sites have a professional cooperation with publishers and perform a marketing function for them. There are no doubt some people trying to do the right thing but they are outnumbered so you can't trust anything at face value. Nothing's a bigger problem than that.

Bloody hell I just looked inside the D3 general forum for the first time. There is a tidal wave of dissatisfaction in there! I know only the people who feel strongly tend to post but that was still pretty overwhelming.

reisub wrote on Jul 22, 2012, 18:27:
I can beat that:

Binding of Isaac: Wrath of the Lamb - 49p.

Nice work, I've been out-thrifted!

My "list":

Galactic Civilizations II Ultimate
==================
Grand total: £3.24 !!!

I played GalCiv2 years ago and was a little underwhelmed but I love 4x and don't really have a space one on the go at the moment so this is a real bargain with the expansions.

Damn it those Curry's adverts here are still screwing my browser and no other ads have shown for a couple of days. I've put BN back on adblock for the moment so that I can actually use it...

I swore by Metacritic ten years ago but hasn't it passed it's usefulness now? It occurred to me a while back that it had been at least a year since I had even gone there, and I'd still happily bought new games without getting burned. If you have specific experience that a review site is trustworthy then by all means go there and listen. Going to a review aggregator cannot help because the majority of review sites are an extension of game marketing and they are all included. User review scores are equally useless, there is no standard and the amount of people posting honest reviews without an ulterior motive are swamped by those that do.

I'd like someone to make a metametacritic site where it scrapes the metacritic scores, you log in and maintain a list of what review sources you trust and it gives you a personalised summary of those reviews!

Isn't it easier to just watch all you can on YouTube, avoid preordering unless you specifically want to show loyalty, and just go somewhere like this site and ask people about the specific things you want to know? It's been working amazingly well for me so far.

Is anyone having trouble with the "Curry's Knowhow" adverts on this site? They make both my cores stick at 100% and I can barely scroll the page. I am on Firefox 14 on Windows 7 x64, and have never had this trouble. The top, top right and sidebar adverts were all Curry's at once, and the Flash player pluging saturated both CPUs and was consuming about 75Mb memory. I killed the player but when I came here to post all 3 ads reappeared on the new page and the same problem repeated. Not that I trust Adobe Flash player 100% at all but I've not had something like this before...

Edit: I tried again, also no other adverts rotate in at the moment, it's just Curry's! It's also not a bug, if I don't kill the ads and navigate away the resource usage returns to normal. The ads simply consume that much PC it seems. This is my main gaming PC and the ads slow down the loading of the page a lot and allow me about a screen update every 3 seconds when I try to scroll.

Silicon Avatar wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 18:32:
I think EA should buy Blizzard/Activision so I can hate them properly.

Can you imagine? All that concentrated hate in one place - I think EA would collapse in on itself and rip a hole in the universe.

I find this story very believable. I worked in contract data warehousing for years in London and it was totally unregulated. Ideally you would have a good CV and references but half the time the projects I worked on were asking for such a specific permutation of skills (specific business area, specific database, specific toolset, specific OS etc) that they would take a chance on the most promising people based upon a good skill match and an interview that went well. Everyone got six figures, and the worst that could ever happen to someone for incompetence would be to not be renewed at the end of three months.

The work I did personally required being on client site so I can't relate to that bit in the article but I did meet a guy who hired someone cheap to work on his contract for him and pocket the difference. Also the frequent travel is accurate, you always go where the work is and swap one group of work mates for another at the drop of a hat. This specific chap suddenly leaving of his own accord seems like a specific quirk to him but the month to month transient nature of the work definitely made some people dysfunctional in the long term. I met more than one guy who worked abroad all the time and barely saw their wife for like 25 years, and several guys who lived double lives. They would have the family life at home but live away in hotels during the week, hitting the town big time in the evenings. They'd normally work hard but have massive nights out drinking, taking drugs and routinely cheating on their wives...

I'm completely satisfied that I stayed away from this one, from all I've read the cash cow and online only design choices definitely have constricted the fun to be had.

My question is though, if you could strip away those negative surrounding features like the online only restriction and the prevalence of the auction house and strip the game down to purely the gameplay... is it actually noticably better than previous dungeon crawler games? Diablo 2, Torchlight, Titan Quest, Dungeon Siege etc? How does the action compare, are the character builds interesting, what's the long term appeal like? From the vids I've watched it reminds me of Starcraft 2, mainly an update to modern technology and production levels but largely the same game we've played before. Is this the case with Diablo 3?

Yeah, this is amazing news, Rome was my favourite setting for Total War by a long shot. I really hope the open world capaign will still be there with the whole choice of nations to be... it was great to play as the backward nation of hillfaring spearmen and ignore all the world's politics as you concentrate on fucking up your hated neighbours from the next set of hills.

Strangely, the trailer reminded me of real actor trailers of the past like Command and Conquer! Oh and it was nice of the dog from Skyrim to make a cameo

... then the mask was removed and it turned out that Blizzard had been the Prime Evil all along. The end!

jdreyer wrote on Jun 27, 2012, 15:44:

Frijoles wrote on Jun 27, 2012, 15:41:
If HL3 does come out, I'm wondering if they'll be making movies. Seeing Gordon and Alyx in a cinematic. *swoon*

Corrected.

Given enough time, the chance of any decent game getting a sequel approaches certainty. They know they've got that one in the locker when they need to pull a guaranteed bestseller out...

Wowbagger_TIP wrote on Jun 24, 2012, 23:12:
I guess it's ok if you <...> just want to play with the decks they give you.

It's definitely a bit diluted in the way that you say. From what I've seen so far though, the deck customisation options are quite a bit better than last year. You get 60 cards plus 30 unlocks this time around, last year you just unlocked more powerful cards and mainly just optimised the deck. This time you have enough unlocks to push the decks in one of a few different directions.

Also for the ambitious, the mod tools just got coded for 2013. If you are prepared to learn how the game expects you to articulte all of its rules and then code cards in Lua within XML then you can put your own decks in the game. Even the AI makes excellent use of the new cards and the heuristics it uses have frequently improvised combinations of attacks and spells that I haven't thought of myself. It plays like a chess computer in that it plays very few short term mistakes but it doesn't always pursue long term goals in an optimial fashion and you can sometimes distract it away from it's best interests.

Sepharo I guess you are quite handy at Counter Strike!

Chromius wrote on Jun 24, 2012, 16:52:
Civ IV was the last Civ game for me. Civ 5 was dumbed down (simplified) way too much for the console masses just like many other titles in the last few years. It is good they improved it a little though. Have not played the expansion, but I just cant see how it competes with Civ IV Beyond the Sword after reading about it?

I haven't tried the expansion but stopped playing Civ 5 after a couple of games as I disagreed with some of the design changes. I hated Social Policies instead of Civics most of all, it made the game feel much less like a political or world simulator and just another game where you can unlock arbitrary bonuses from some trees. It felt much more like every other modern game because of that.

I also didn't like the City States! In previous civs, all cities adhered to the same ruleset of claiming ground and building improvements and buildings to utilise the natural resources. In civ 5 an arbitrary number of city states would run on a completely different system of not expanding, spawning units on a timer rather than producing them, etc. They also had their own diplomacy system that didn't use the same personality or relationship methods as the other civs. You even had civilisations and policies that gave bonuses to dealing with just these kinds of rival! I felt they took the original, organic setup of previous games and crowbarred an unneccesary set of game mechanics on top for the sake of it, and they made things a lot worse.

While that probably sounds like a rant, I do appreciate that many of the things that made Civ great are still there, I expect crushing people with tanks and helicopters after they've dicked you around still feels pretty great. I understand why it's been a polarising release; for me the new additions detracted from the epic scope and drained a lot of the flavour too and left something that left more like a board game.

Incidentally Chromius, if you still play Civ 4 have you tried K-Mod? This chap Karadoc works on Beyond the Sword to this day, he's quite restrained with changes to the vanilla game but he's made a great many AI improvements, some balancing and done some nifty things with the GUI like rewrite the unit cycling logic so that after you move a unit it cycles to one nearby instead of jumping to the other side of the planet... many nifty things like that. It's really worth taking a look!