Epyo

okay I effing hated Oblivion,

but Skyrim is pretty rad so far (4 hours). very nice interface. mouse is effed up in menus but WASD+E is way better and faster for menus anyway. I like the Q favorites-menu a lot. I read online that you actually can create hotkeys for 1-8 via the favorites menu, but I'm not sure I'll actually ever bother!

just killed my first dragon!

Huh, the only Sonic Advance I really liked was 2. 1 was uninteresting but pretty good, and 3 was nonstop falling off cliffs.

Finished the game and loved it! Still replaying the levels over and over, and even doing all of the side missions, which I am actually enjoying (for the first time in a modern sonic).

For background, I've played almost all of the games in the main Sonic series. The only huge ones I haven't played yet are Sonic 2006 and Sonic Colors, and I own Sonic Unleashed but haven't played more than a couple hours of it. Anyway, I'm a typical huge Sonic fan who hasn't been interested lately.

However, the promise that each zone's first act would be entirely 2d was a good enough guarantee for me to pick this up, and holy hell I'm glad I did, because it's fantastic. The level design is smart, beautiful, and fun. I'd say the biggest factor in whether a Sonic game is popular or not is how often you fall off of the world. If stupid Sega would learn their lesson and make that result in a loss of rings instead of instant death, I bet Sonic games would still be 100% popular. Anyway point is, there isn't much falling off in this game, and when there is, there's always a gigantic orange diamond street sign warning you of where there is a bottomless pit (a pretty lazy design choice, but it works well, because at least you feel like some of your death was your own fault.) Usually, however, when you fall off a cliff, and you think you're going to die, you just end up on a lower path. That's what recent Sonic flops have been missing -- the multitude of lower paths and non-linearity that the genesis games capitalized on.

There are nine zones, which is actually more than I expected. The first three are from the genesis era, the second three are from the DC/PS2/GC era, and the last 3 are from the PS3/Wii/360 era. I actually think I ended up enjoying the last 2 zones of the game the most, (the zone from Unleashed and the zone from Colors), those are some fantastic, huge environments. And honestly, even though I bought the game for the act 1 levels, the act 2 levels were just as enjoyable or possibly even better.

The act 1 levels are slightly harder, and depend much more on the player's attention and skill. They're satisfying, but I bet most players are actually going to enjoy the act 2 levels more. The act 2 levels switch seamlessly between 2d and 3d a lot, so you kind of get the best of both worlds. In addition, Sonic has a lot of different moves which leads to more varied gameplay. The air dash is extremely versatile and mastering it's different utilities is fun. His instant extreme speed boosts (first seen in Rush) are an excellent addition as well, unfortunately they're pretty much the thing that will kill you--using boost at the wrong time can easily lead to your death. Anyway, the act 2 levels are chaotic fun, while the act 1 levels are more minimal and technical.

It's a great combination.

To be fair, I'll mention that the bosses are all either too confusing or too hand-holding, and the jump-dash is as glitchy as always, but you'll probably be having too much fun to notice.

For 3d sonic, my ranking would be something like
SA2 > Generations > Heroes >>>>> SA1 >>>>> Shadow > Unleashed.

Vordakk said:

Remember the flashlight in DOOM 3? Sure as hell didn't do a damn thing for gameplay, but it did allow id to show off its new unified lighting and shadowing effects.

pretty sure the goal of the flashlight was to make a trade-off of power vs fear

Today I played for 2 hours and everything was excellent. Very happy with the game right now, six hours in. Finally found the sweet spot in graphics. Today I didn't see any texture pop in at all, and frame rate never went below 60 smooth. Didn't have to worry about it at all =] Unfortunately I'm in 800x600 but I can live with that. I always sacrifice quality for framerate. My first three times through Doom 3 were probably in 640x480!

This frickin' game...I've got 4 hours played according to steam, but maybe 30 minutes of that is actual shooting gameplay. That might be not a huge deal, but the graphics are still pretty effed up here so I can't enjoy the scenery much. I can't get my framerate to stay at 60 while I turn the screen, it just can't be done. I set AA off, turn down the resolution to 1024x768, it has no effect basically.

I'm enjoying RAGE so far, (1+ hr in), but holy shit is it ugly on my ATI card right now. It's essentially the ugliest game I've ever played. Hope they get some more patches in here soon. The new driver released mid-day today (day 1) was pretty good, fixed the flickering. That's about it. Texture pop-in is still rampant.

I also encountered a strange bug. I went exploring a bit and found a "garage" zone so I tried to enter it, but crashed. Crashed every time. So I left, and it turned out to be what I'd call "level two", and when my quests led me there, I didn't crash anymore.

Played as soon as I got home last night around 3am. At first it wouldn't load, had to turn off triple buffering in my driver, that fixed it. Unfortunately, the game's all fucked up like in the video entryway posted. Flickering triangles, flickering gui, insane texture-pop, and just generally low framerate. I dunno if my laptop's even good enough but it has an i7 and an ATI mobility radeon hd 5730 1gb. I'm assuming it's just some ATI problem someone will fix somewhere.

rage is ready for pre-load on steam, if you've preordered. click on rage in your library, then click pre-load.

just a little PSA because usually steam games pre-load automatically.

I haven't left Reddit Midwest in about 400 hrs of play. It's scary out there!

I know with Zdoom you can just drag+drop the wad onto Zdoom.exe and it goes. Some other source ports do this too. Of course, the source port's exe needs to be in the same place as your doom.wad/doom2.wad.

I know, it's amazing? Did you solve the second level? I was wandering around for like ten minutes, think it's broken in Zdoom. I remember it being broken years ago too

Yeah that's it! Great, thank you. Very excited to play this now. Haha, funnily enough, I wrote a comment on there probably 5 years ago:

"I forgot all about this one, but it's definitely one of my favorites. Glad I found it again. -Epyo"

EDIT: Playing now, it's even better than I remember. Music is wretched though.

Really in the mood to play it. It's very old, probably pre-2003, and it was vanilla compatible. It's an episode 1 replacement that is supposed to be similar in style to the original levels...but then again I remember it having a mancubus, so maybe it was actually replaced Doom 2 but was in the Doom 1 style. E1M8 was set in the sky with very few walls, and had a monsters-teleporting-in event. The secret level was in a big rectangular building. It was definitely 8 levels + 1 secret level. I feel like the title was something like Doom resurrection or return to phobos or something like that, and I remember getting it confused with the Zdoom wad doom resurrection which I also liked a lot at the time.

Anyone have a clue?

Ehhh I actually thought the article part was great. There's nothing quite like Doom's level design, and there actually probably cannot be ever again. I think he's got a point there in that Doom's locales have less resemblance to real structures than any other game.

The pictures chosen are incorrect choices though, mostly. I like the one of Pandemonium.

Enjay said:

Really? I think that the books are competently written, for the most part, but sometimes clunk a bit around the edges. I regard some of the choices made as questionable. Some things work well, others less so. They are a good enough crafting of Rowling's vision and quite entertaining but IMO they stop a long way short of being masterpieces.

yeah you're probably right

they're just a lot of fun.

My favorite movie might be Kiki's Delivery Service, I first saw it three years ago but I've probably watched it ten times since then. I also love Wet Hot American Summer. You should try those movies first.

Playing with bots is super frame-laggy, yeah. You're not really supposed to play with bots in offline practice for more than a couple of hours if even that much. It's better to just join games and if you die, you die, that's part of the game. If you die a lot, you die a lot. Everybody dies.

TF2 is generally not about living/dying at all--that's other games, that's Counter Strike, or TF2's arena mode. In fact, in Attack/Defense maps and payload maps, if you're on Blu, you're supposed to throw yourself in and make yourself vulnerable, dying over and over until your team finally penetrates and progresses. That's by design. In fact, there are two reasons why payload and Attack/Defense are by far the most popular public gametypes:

* more kills = more fun, but more deaths is necessary for there to be more kills!

* kamekaze missions that succeed are extremely satisfying.

Blu has almost no respawn time in these gametypes. Meanwhile, Red has extra long respawn times--for them, staying safe is arguably important...then again, being able to push Blu back and/or sabotage their preparations is even better!

Aimbots are rare and extremely obvious when they're around. Oftentimes they won't aim anywhere near a target, then as soon as they click shoot their crosshairs instantly shoot to a head. You can spec someone and immediatley know if they're cheating =]

Whoa i typo'd the title of this thread

Saw it, here's my spoilerful opinion. It was extremely fun to watch, it was beautiful, it was funny, and it was totally exciting. There were a lot of things I hated about it (listed below) but overall it is probably the best in the movie series.

Keep in mind that the movies are terrible comapred to the books. The books are masterpieces. The movies are pretty dumb. However, I will give some credit to the movies: Ron and Hermione are much better characterized in the films, while in the books they are not fleshed out very well at all in my opinion. (Too bad they didn't make Ginny interesting in either case).

They released about half of the Meet The ____ shorts before the game was released and when the game was released. They've put a few out intermittently since then (Meet the Spy came out a year or two ago I remember).

To those who just started playing and are judging the game's userbase by the players they're seeing in pubs, keep in mind that 3 out of 4 players right now are brand new, probably more than that in the auto-selected valve servers. The veteran players are all packed away in full servers, and even there, probably half of the players are new as well!

btw pyro takes a fuckle of skill to use effectively

pps counter-strike is too hard now, otherwise it's a pretty cool game, and i like how simple it is on the surface. but at this point there's no point in starting to play cs or css. everyone there is a master, and since there's no respawn, you'll be spending more time watching than playing (and watching isn't that useful in a game of headshots).

If you let it pick a server for you, then you were probably playing with almost all brand new players who did the same =]

There are tons of reasons! However, the absolute biggest reason is that content is extremely expensive these days compared to before, and no game can have that big of a budget. Think about how big of a budget the recent Call of Duty games have had, and yet how short they were! This, combined with the popularity of carefully constructed, highly-scripted level design, makes nonlinearity out of the question. Too hard, too expensive.

It just goes along with the style of cinematic games.