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Posts posted by The Bard
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To be honest I didn't really enjoy what I played of the beta so I can understand if people are a little underwhelmed. Specifically anyone who played Borderlands, what, five years ago now.
I assume the powers and abilities give the action a flow and a cool toolset that Bungie have undoubtedly designed encounters very well around, but it seemed pretty pedestrian for my tastes. Didn't want to say anything before because of the overwhelming levels of excitement in this thread, and I was allowing for the possibility that the game proper was substantially better than the beta, but I'm glad I waited until more opinions rolled in.
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I never thought it was anything other.
I never thought it was not anything other than not a joke.
m(√64) don't even try to make sense of that sentence without an English degree.
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You know how people joke about doing English/Philosophy degrees pretty much guarantees you'll be unable to get a fucking job? I'm beginning to think it's not a joke.
I think I feel about jobs the way Serebii feels about women; my standards are too high and my other commitments (playing videogames, pickle tickling, idle internet browsing) are more important.
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I know I'm gonna get flack for this, but I will never ever understand how the original Goldeneye ever became a "classic". Splitscreen shooters just don't work (people always peek, can't be avoided) and I'll never understand how anyone can get over the controls. And don't give me the "at the time" speech, FPS games on PC during those days controlled exactly the same as they do today, so the standard for excellence was already there. I remember playing it at the time and thinking it was ridiculously cumbersome to play compared to the stuff on PC.
Rare are the most overrated dev ever.
Yeah bro Goldeneye was totally shit but I played it to death because it was the only FPS I'd ever played at the time. Then I got Quake on PC and it was like I didn't actually have to play these games like a palsied out treacle swimmer. Can't go back to it, it's trash.
Also this thread has so little discussion that it's turned into a meta discussion about the thread itself like some sort of fucking Nintendo singularity.
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What you described sounds like the Sonic Advance/Rush/portable series. Where really all one has to do is press forward and most of the level is beat.
The Mega Drive games are good because they possess a really good physics engine, where Sonic himself actually has momentum. Sure, speed is an option, but only because it is something you can achieve, rather than it being the default (or even the expected) mode. A lesson that the Rush/Advance series never got.
Sonic games were made to be easier (or more fun) to rush through the levels like a speedrunner, but it also expects you to learn the levels at your own pace before you try (why else would they throw you so many waiting obstacles in the first game? You know, like pendulum platforms, or the entirety of Marble Zone). Granted, Sonic 3&Knuckles do offer more moments of speed, but they're interactive (and short) set pieces at best.
Furthermore, different speeds and different terrain slopes lead to different jumping heights and angles (unlike Super "My jumps are directly proportional to my speed" Mario). Also unlike Mario, Sonic has more than 3 set speeds. If we're talking about platforming depth and complexity, Sonic has more than mere elaborate obstacle courses. If you don't learn how Sonic moves, you'll never beat Hydrocity Act 2, for example.
Just saying, your words sounded like a shallow evaluation of the games.
I think your argument hinges on the idea that the Sonic games weren't designed (poorly), marketed and evaluated on their ability to confer a speed of movement on the player, and secondly (as well as more subjectively) that they were actually fun to play through in their capacity as slow moving platformers. I reckon you're wrong on the first count, and weird on the second
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Saying the games are good on the back of their "physics engine" isn't exactly a statement that screams quality analysis - the gist of my argument was that the way the environment is organised is incommensurate with the movement of the character, in the same way that Sonic's top movement speed is incommensurate with any average person's reaction times. There are the frequent environmentally imposed stops from hitting a wall, a spike, or misjudgment of an enemy movement path, added to the fact that his momentum takes a while to build, leading to you getting near a decent flow within a level, hitting a wall and then having to bumble around collecting rings before working at building your speed up again. What you get is a recipe for initial runs through any given level after the first three or four being full of frustrating starts and stops as you try to find the most expedient course in a platformer that's sold on the promise of its speed of movement; a promise that's never actually delivered to someone who doesn't want to play the same levels again and again.
And for real, the physics engine argument reminds me of when people used to say this or that FPS is amazing because it has Havok physics and that means levels play out differently each time because every time you cap an enemy they fall a different fucking way. You can't seriously be the person to make that argument with a straight face when what they do with that physics "simulation" is inconsequential or actually detrimental to the game. You basically pointed out about three disparate parts of the game (momentum, jump angles etc) and presented them as if naming them adds up to a well designed game when my argument is more that unlike Mario, the actual game surrounding the way Sonic feels and behaves with a controller is dissatisfying to play for people who don't want to learn the levels by rote.
And hey, I think it's healthy to have a discussion where not everyone is unconditionally singing praises, so don't take this as me saying the games are worthless - I'm just trying to provide an alternate perspective.
Anyway, I like the games for reasons other than the platforming, so I'm off to play Sonic 2. Dat Chemical Plant Zone music...
God damn it. For the love of god, please play S3&K. Please? And then once you've completed it, write a blog pieceHonestly, the game is fucking ace.
Dude I fucking love that game but more for the way it modified Sonic 2 and 3. Don't think I ever actually played the game proper all the way through!
Also get on Streets of Rage Online, let's get our coop on and fuck up some 16bit shitkickers.
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I think that's probably fair, but for me the Sonic games aren't actually good games to begin with. They were amazing at the time because they moved super fast, looked great and had catchy music (still do). But each of the levels is an exercise in either rote learning or frustrating start/stop gameplay that isn't satisfying to me because it doesn't let you build up any momentum without having you run into a wall, or spring hopping into a spike, unless you know from trial and error where they are.
Compare it to something like Mario 3 where it's more a matter of mastering the way Mario moves. Once you have his jump trajectory down, you can pretty much encounter any new level and be fairly sure that you have a good chance of getting through it almost without stopping.
So yeah, that broadly is the difference between platformers I like and platformers I don't. The first kind expands from mastery of a moveset into an environmental challenge, the second type is more of an abstraction of learning a song or something; you practice until you can either get through it or make it feel fluid (in the case of sonic games).
Not to shit on Sonic too much, I still play the Megadrive games because my brain is weird and I'm constantly mesmerised by the colours that chipset produces, along with the fantastic music.
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The only advice for the single player is to not play the single player, it's poop from a butt.
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Sounds like a chain of quests from Skyrim. You need to open the gate to bullshit mountain, but the gatekeeper needs Grandpa Witherspoon's essence of dank-nuts for his pot roast. Grandpa Witherspoon died and left the essence of dank-nuts to his errant nephew, but his estate is in arrears so the solicitors are withholding his assets until you bring them dust of unicorn horn which incidentally is only sourced on bullshit mountain.
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Barfzilla Joan Rivers' death should be sounded off with crickets and tumbleweed, much like her painful comedy.
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So, my confidence is slowly building. Managed to do something I never would have before. I went to an event, without any friend as a buffer, and managed to socially integrate and speak to a couple of strangers.
Even a couple of my friends say they couldn't do that themselves and they're shocked I managed it.
Slowly getting there
Soon I'll be able to actually talk to the opposite sex without prior association.
I couldn't manage that. But then I'm not what's called a "people person."
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Wot a choon m8
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If you're at the stage when getting a match on Tinder gives you a hard-on, then good for you.
Shifting the goalpost here a little aren't you? (Forgive the football metaphor, I'm trying to become more fluent in moron).
People were talking about Animal and his recent experiences with a girl he met on OKCupid which were more than encouraging going on the conversations as they were presented. So yes, after a couple of hundred pages where people are doing little other than lamenting the state of their love lives, inability to interact with women and find success with online dating, it's pretty fucking fair to have a few comments dedicated to congratulating someone who seems to be having success or a positive, reciprocal interaction with someone they're attracted to.
If you're talking about Drahkon's tinder chat, it wasn't so much celebrating as saying "Yet another girl is interested in getting a piece, while I'm here anointing my unit for tomorrows all-you-can-fuck buffet." So shut the fuck up you dour, emotional iceberg.
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No, sergeant buzzkill here would rather have everyone celebrate on his terms. I wish we could all be manly enough to use such eloquent football metaphors to portray our attitudes towards the opposite sex.
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I've got the gameclip for my Xperia Z and it's pretty comfortable, downloaded emulators on it for everything from the NES to the PSone, I imagine a similar setup for remote play would be fucking great. My contract is up for renewal around January too
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If I'm honest, Destiny is pretty boring next to Battlefield.
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This has probably already been posted, but ShopTo are selling the Destiny PS4 Bundle for £320 off eBay.
I just went ahead and bought one.
Wicked I'll hit you up on this. Need to convince @Goron_3 to get on this.
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Final note; don't skimp out on a case. I just moved my PCs guts into a brand new case with nine fans - it reduced the GPU temperature by 15 degrees and the CPU temps by 10 under load. If you're ever planning on overclocking, or getting a GPU like the R9 290, you're going to need a well ventilated system.
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I put a pea sized blob on the centre and then layer the heatsink down on it.
Ok good, that's the way I did it, but there are a bunch of nerds saying you need to scrape it all over the component with a credit card. Sounds like some smelly chat going on over at Yahoo Answers.
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You're right, but I was banking on both the better performance of Intel CPUs which with Magnus' specified budget, unless he wants to build a holodeck worth of monitors in his bedroom, is probably the better bet.
Also the 4790k is better both theoretically and in practice. If you look at the comparative statistics on CPU boss, the 4790k comes out way ahead, and if you take actual gaming benchmarks for CPU intensive games like Crysis 3, the Intel CPU comes out ahead too. I reckon it's worth the £30 difference.
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@Magnus For your CPU I really wouldn't recommend the FX8350, its single core performance is below par compared to even four generation old Intel CPUs, and the idea that its multithreading capabilities are going to help you going forward is a little contentious since raw efficiency in any given i5 or i7 Intel CPU will completely leave it in the dust. Personally, if you want the best of both worlds, I'd recommend you go for the i7 4790k, it'll allow you to run every game out so far at Max settings (if your GPU isn't a bottleneck) and is also hyperthreading enabled so it'll be well suited to handle ported code that's been written with the PS4/XBone in mind.
Considering your budget, the 4790k is your best bet going forward unless you want to fork out for the new Haswell-E chipsets, specifically the i7 5820k. But that comes with a whole load of other considerations, including Z99 Motherboards and DDR4 Ram which are all heinously expensive.
Other than that I'd say go with what @MoogleViper says, specifically the single card thing. Going forward, a lot of PS4 and XBone games are going to rely on the unified 8GB of RAM the APU has, and if you crossfire or SLI two GPUs, they're only capable of using the VRAM from one card. Which is obviously a problem since the best single cards on the market only have about 4GBs of VRAM (You're going to want to upgrade later on, whereas your CPU and all else will keep kicking for fucking ages).
Also: What are people's preferred methods for applying Thermal Paste? Thinking of re-applying it onto my GPU, but there are a variety of conflicting accounts on the internet and I'd rather just ask here since I'm fairly sure you guys aren't going to bullshit just to fuck with me
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So just put in my first job application...for a communications manager position at the uni I just graduated from
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Bitch got served
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Oh. They sound perfect for Bard then.
Still too good for you though.
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Chill brev, I was only twentyfive at the time
Love? Relationships? Boy girl stuff? Complaints and appraisals! Gifs be welcome.
in General Chit Chat
Posted · Edited by The Bard
Fucking hell, you make a simple story sound like a passage from Ulysses.
Essentially you had two friends who were dipping in stinky pink outside of their relationships but at some point the two who were being cheated on got together on your couch so as to complete this unseemly circle jerk.
I don't understand why J was invited though seeing as from what I can tell, you guys only knew him as your ex-flatmate's presumably ex-boyfriend.
Edit: They went to school together, great. Where did they grow up, Dawson's fucking Creek?