RedEye9 wrote on Mar 1, 2021, 09:52:
Looks like my next watch will be the extended version.

It's a mixed bag, IMO. Some scenes really do flesh out details and make the story a bit richer, but others I could do without. In particular, Annie's gender equality comments seem forced and I'd have preferred to live a life in which I never learned what felching is. Per the advice of the movie, don't Google it if you haven't already. That scene is the reason I have to insist that certain people—my parents, for example—never watch the extended cut.

That article on the extended edition of The Martian is from 2016. Am I missing something?

I'm really curious to see if this game's ten missions deviate at all from the original Startopia's. In all other respects it seems to be substantively identical.

Where's Anachronox 2, Tom?

deqer wrote on Jun 20, 2020, 16:11:
Cool. But, no thanks.

The effect really isn't very good, either. I only tried a couple Mega Man games, so YMMV, but it seemed to just add needless graphical clutter in an effort to make it look 3D, and was often quite glitchy, with parts of the extra bits flickering off and on, sometimes even obscuring original details.

Maybe it's better in VR, but I gave up after about ten minutes and went back to a normal emulator.

EDIT: I hadn't watched the video when I commented, but... wow. That looks very different than what I experienced. They even showed some Mega Man footage and it looks nothing like what I saw. Maybe it's come a long way since I tried it...

Regardless, as interesting as it is, I honestly think I prefer the games in their original form.

This comment was edited on Jun 21, 2020, 07:09.

Why is a defragger running on SSDs at all?

Another vote for 2143. Nearly a decade after they first started teasing it I'm getting a bit pissed it's still nowhere to be seen. That said, after Hardline/1/V I'm skeptical they can make a good game again, so maybe it's best they prove themselves with a modern iteration before making the game I really want.

Truth be told, though, I think their design philosophy has strayed too far from BF3/4 and the Battlefield I love is dead.

Beamer wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 19:17:
It's like some PC gamers are just willfully ignorant. [...] Every topic about this is filled with the same fundamental refusal to understand.

Again, I don't think it's about game design. He made a claim--that no amount of money can match the performance of the PS5's SSD on PC--that is not true. That's literally all it's about. It doesn't matter what he meant to say or what he should have said or how he should have clarified the implications. It's about what was said and that it's incorrect.

I am curious, though. This thing is supposed to push 9GB/s compressed, 5.5GB/s raw data. Isn't that a bit like saying that if I compress some data to a third its original size and then transfer it to an SSD at 5GB/s (throughput you can achieve with a single drive, btw), that the compressed data rate is 15GB/s? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the metrics, but that seems really disingenuous, not to mention far less impressive than a drive that has raw throughput of 9GB/s.

This comment was edited on Jun 3, 2020, 02:00.

Maybe you could explain how ignorance might be the reason...

Regardless, it seems like pride to me. Sweeney claimed the PS5's throughput can't be done on a PC at any price, which is simply false. You don't even need enterprise class hardware to do it.

ForgedReality wrote on May 25, 2020, 08:41:
What you don't get is that you're killing me and my family when you bring the shit home that you selfishly contracted [...] Should your victims be considered weeded out while you, the stupid fucking selfish asshole, remain alive?

I do get this, which is why I haven't left my house in 13 weeks. I think you missed the part where I alluded to people protesting isolation being idiots.

Orogogus wrote on May 24, 2020, 04:28:
Has anyone been pushing for shutdown until a vaccine is developed?

No. I haven't seen that here nor anywhere else. It's not a reasonable position; even with promising candidates, we're not likely to see a vaccine made available this year. People certainly couldn't survive that long without income.

Liberal tears, ever the retort of those without an actual argument. Schoolyard insults tend not to convince others of the soundness of your position.

Personally, though, I agree that it's time. Reopen everything--restaurants, hair salons, churches--but with a warning that it's not safe and social distancing should still be observed. Let the people make their decisions. Evolution isn't weeding out the stupid for us since we've gotten so good at keeping even the dumbest of us alive. We're overdue for a purge.

Simon Says wrote on May 23, 2020, 21:00:
Nobody will pay by the month if they keep it for 5 years. They'll take it yearly, that means 144$/year, even after 5 years, you're still deep in the red ( you'll have barely paid for the GPU alone @ 720$ ) when you consider company expenses + initial hardware investment. And after 5 years, that 2080 won't attract anyone that they're targeting, they'll have moved on to much better hardware.

This really isn't difficult. The lowest price for a 2080 system is the annual at $25/month. The cheaper plans don't have a 2080. And you still seem stuck on the notion that the hardware can only be used by one customer. That's just plain dumb.

Also, do you really believe that five years from now they'd still be charging $25/month for a 2080-based system? The 2080 by then will probably be relegated to the budget plan and they'll be running 3080s or better on the higher end plans.

I mean, come on. Pipedream? Sounds to me like you have no idea how these businesses work and are purposely avoiding learning anything.

WaltC wrote on May 23, 2020, 15:25:
Sounds just like you are renting the hardware...

The article is literally titled "Rent an RTX2080 PC..."

whitelined wrote on May 23, 2020, 15:30:
I'll hazard a guess that the "dedicated PC" you get is allocated from a pool, and it's only dedicated once you're using it

Exactly. Of course they're not dedicating an entire gaming computer to one customer and leaving it idle when not in use. Cloud services depend on pooled resources. What you're renting is a virtual machine that makes use of some portion of the attached hardware.

As for profitability, even if they paid $700 for an RTX2080, at $25 per month on an annual plan they'd only need 10 customers to pay off the card in three months. Point being, it's eminently doable. Or--shocker--they'd go out of business pretty fast.

This comment was edited on May 23, 2020, 22:30.

WaltC wrote on May 23, 2020, 15:07:
Twitter bots are, like COVID-19, much exaggerated in effect.

There are 340,000 people who'd like a word with you. Except they can't speak because they're fucking dead.

I thought DayZ as a concept was great. Learning to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where any population center--and any resources it contained--was a hive of undead, with firearms in short supply? It was thrilling early on. I enjoyed the fear in spotting another group of survivors maneuvering quietly along the treeline, worrying that they'd discover our camp, hoping they were just passing by. Actually exchanging fire with a rival group was, at the time, quite rare.

Unfortunately over time it became just another pvp shooter. I'm still looking for a survival game that recreates that sense of tension and fear, but I haven't found it yet.

jdreyer wrote on May 8, 2020, 15:08:
Or am I thinking too deeply on this?

You're thinking too deeply, but only in comparison. I wouldn't mind if more thought went into the game, but it doesn't seem like that kind of endeavor. It looks like it's just Serious Sam with dinosaurs.

EDIT: "electric raptors" kind of says it all...

This comment was edited on May 8, 2020, 16:06.

Agreed with everything above. The franchise had been pretty well neutered. I think BF3 was the high point, though BF4 was close. After those, I was really hoping for 2143. I mean, they teased it enough. Now, though, I hope they don't make it until they've figured out how to make a good BF game again.

Yeah, no. Despite my annoyance at every developer that puts simulator in their title, I actually thought this might be interesting from an educational standpoint if it took a no-nonsense, realistic approach. Then I got to the horror elements and lost all interest. The trailer only confirmed it's not for me.

I started playing for the first time when the immersion patch went live. From what I understand about their loot-shooter, gear score mechanics, immersion is much closer to what I'd expect from a Ghost Recon game, but I still find it really lacking.

The story thus far is interesting, but the world just feels empty. Bad guys are in no short supply, sure, but gone are almost all the civilians from Wildlands; no peaceful towns, people walking along the roadside, and the only vehicles you see on the road are hostile, who now immediately identify you as an enemy even when you're driving calmly in one of their own cars. All subtlety and depth seems to have been stripped.

Game mechanics are oddly clunky. Hopping on a ladder causes your character to look to the side momentarily before you're given control and allowed to climb. Sliding down a ladder requires you to hold control for a duration before you start to slide, instead of just sliding if you're holding control. You can't shimmy back from a ledge while lying prone because your character turns all the way around instead. Gunplay at least remains pretty satisfying compared to Wildlands, but I think that's mostly because they didn't really change anything.

About the only real improvement that comes to mind is in character animation--facial features and mannerisms--but even there the cracks have begun to show with poor lip-syncing and awkward pauses and bad dialog. And sweet holy hell, the repetition in non-story NPC dialog is so annoying. If you stand near NPCs for 30 seconds (changing gear or settings) you'll hear the same 2-3 voice lines repeated several times. They just don't shut up, even when they're alone.

All in all, it's an inferior product to Wildlands. Where I wish they'd retooled the game for a more hardcore route, they seem to have gone the opposite direction. Immersion is a step in the right direction, but I think the game itself is fundamentally flawed and will never live up as a sequel.