What game are you wasting time on?

[Humppaleka]

Just finished F.E.A.R. for the umpteenth time, moving on into the expansions which I have never played.
Playing Hellnight on the PSX, I'm really hooked by the game but I find the time to play it maybe once a week.

 

[Don Peste]

All set! Now, where should I start?

 

[spekkio]

Not seeing the problem. Most of your game will be spent navigating 3d worlds, not browsing through menus.

k.

You pointed out that the game itself had widescreen support. I then pointed out that most GameCube games don't and require Dolphin to render in widescreen (true widescreen, not stretched out shit). UNDERSTAND?

Well, I think that there's a slight difference between this (your "true widescreen"):

And this (proper widescreen, supported by the game):

In all my years of PC gaming, I have never come across that problem. A widescreen fix for 3d games simply renders more of the environment, it doesn't stretch anything. Even the 2d Infinity Engine games have been modded into widescreen wiithout stretching.

Well, unfortunately we're talking about 3D games, in case of which... Oh, well - just observe these little .gif images on these pages:

http://www.wsgf.org/dr/age-pirates-caribbean-tales
http://www.wsgf.org/dr/alpha-protocol

Not to mention FOV problems, glitches and botched menu elements in some games. But hey - "In all my years of PC gaming, I have never come across that problem".

Not that you'll understand what I wrote above, anyway...

 

[Athelas]

Lolwut? That character selection screen is basically a 2d background but with 3d characters in it, of course it's gonna be stretched. Now you're really grasping at straws.

And both of those games you linked to seem to support widescreen, so I have no fucking idea what your point is.

 

[spekkio]

That character selection screen is basically a 2d background but with 3d characters in it, of course it's gonna be stretched

PROTIP: check out Talim's legs.

And both of those games you linked to seem to support widescreen

By Vert- (part of the screen gets cut off). So actually they don't support widescreen (properly).
Stretching the image is another method, wrong as well:

http://www.wsgf.org/dr/aquanox/en

I have no fucking idea what your point is.

This.

 

[Athelas]

By Vert- (part of the screen gets cut off). So actually they don't support widescreen (properly).

A tiny portion gets cuts off, which doesn't even matter because you can use your camera to look at something the way you want. It's not a movie where cropping does remove things. Christ...

And I have used Dolphin and it does render true widescreen. If you can't figure it out, that's your problem.

 

[spekkio]

If you can't figure it out, that's your problem.

Ok. So simply give me an example of a non-widescreen Gamecube game which you magically forced to render in "true widescreen". It's always nice to learn new things from real pros.

 

[Athelas]

Here you go:

Original aspect ratio: http://postimg.org/image/4pf6v2ybn/
Artificially stretched: http://postimg.org/image/4x2trl9ab/
'True' widescreen: http://postimg.org/image/zfp6ncge5/

 

[spekkio]

Ahh, the widescreen hack.
Too bad that it causes glitches in some games (textures, geometry).
In Luigi's Mansion it's just a stretched "gui", so no prob indeed.

 

[dnf]

I decided to give Rayman 3 - Hoodlum Havoc a try (so far I only played Rayman 2). I’m on WinXP 32 bit.

I started with a non-removed version, but found 2 problems:

1) my gamepad wasn’t recognized by the game (only keyboard works),
2) game suffers from visible slowdowns (FPS goes from 60 to below 40 all the time).

Problem #1 can be solved by using a fix:
http://af.gog.com/forum/rayman_series/rayman_23_controller_fix?as=1649904300

Sadly, problem #2 remains (tried compatibility settings, switching to single CPU core, forcing and disabling v-sync - nothing works).

Oh, another thing: the game supports only 4:3 resolutions.



Next, I DLed the game from GoG. Sadly, all problems described above remain.



Finally I decided to grab a Gamecube image and play the damn game using a Dolphin emulator. Guess what?

1) you can configure the gamepad as you see fit
2) rock-solid 60 FPS all the time
3) you can use 4:3 or 16:9 setting
4) you can save anytime using quicksaves.



Where’s your god now, PCfags?

Never got the problems you describe, and i played it with on board graphic card. Game is shit tough, a step backwards from rayman 2 with douchey characters.

 

[sea]

I'm playing the Jedi Knight expansion pack, Mysteries of the Sith. I've almost finished it now, and... eeeh. Although the improvements to the enemy variety, weapons and so on are appreciated, the level design is leaving a lot to be desired. Most of the levels are much more linear or just plain confusing in terms of layout, and that sprawling feeling from the original game is replaced with lots of endless strung-together corridors.

There are a surprising number of blatant and contrived key hunts, switch puzzles that give you no clue as to what order you have to press them in or which switch does what, proximity mines placed around random corners that exist just to blow your head off without warning and with little to no way to predict them, objectives triggering a random door in the level to open, with zero indication it's where you need to go and that it's even been opened, and other generally just plain bad design choices. There's one or two places where the game glitched out and I had to use cheats to beat things too. The best of the levels are "just" corridors, the worst are multi-story mazes with few points of reference or indications on where you need to go, and where every single successive room you visit is identical to the last.

One level aboard a raided rebel ship really bugged me just now - there's one section where gravity is disabled and you have to fly around in a massive room where the only way out is a tiny grate hidden off in a corner that you can slash with your lightsaber. All the textures are intentionally set so that the grate blends into the wall, meaning you're basically just pixel hunting to find the one 1x1 patch you can actually exit through. I spent like ten minutes floating around like an idiot trying to figure out where to go.

Not to mention, the levels are usually well lit... except when they aren't, and suddenly the game is way too dark and expects you to be able to tell what's going on in pitch blackness (most of your options for lighting up a room have tiny radius, and the best of them has a limited timer that never recharges, forcing you to ration your goddamn flashlight). Yet, the cutscenes are super bright to the point of washed out, so I'm not sure what "correct" brightness is supposed to be here. The original Jedi Knight had no problems with this whatsoever and the game never felt unnecessarily or pointlessly dark on the default setting, unless it was a deliberate design choice to have a dark area, and in those cases the lighting was logical and your tools for lightening things up sufficient.

Often the game will set rules for gameplay and then require you break them in exactly one point in the entire game. Sometimes it's clever, most of the time it's frustrating. One example: you're in a room with a door that's locked. Seems like a dead end, but there's no way to go back. Did the game bug out and you got to an area you weren't supposed to yet? Nope, turns out you have to destroy two security cameras in the area to open the door. Of course, these cameras serve no function in the rest of the game other than letting you view unvisited areas, except in this one exact scenario. Is there any actual reason this works here, and not, say, at any other door in the game? Nope. Any indication or hint given that this is the solution? None whatsoever.

And then there's these goddamn grenade-tossing alien mooks. The game throws fucking hundreds of them at you. There are entire levels where half the enemy forces are made up of them. Of course, these do huge damage which mostly ignores your shields, are often difficult or impossible to reliably avoid (especially when there is more than one of them, due to the way their grenades bounce everywhere), and the developers apparently saw fit to always put them right around blind corners or on top of high ledges where they're impossible to see until you've already ran into an explosion or two. These guys were just an occasional sight in the original campaign, and were never too bad to deal with because the game's levels usually gave you enough space to dodge them, but in this one, try walking into a room with five of them all tossing grenades at your face... hope you like save scumming.

Even the story is weak too. It starts out promising with you playing as Kyle Katarn and switching over to Mara Jade when Kyle goes off to investigate some planet he has a vision about, or something, so you'd expect Mara's plot to then dovetail with Kyle's. Except it doesn't. You just run a bunch of random missions with Mara on behalf of the New Republic and then at the end of the game she goes "oh, remember Kyle? whatever happened to him?" and then you go off to find him. It's like even the writers/designers forgot what the story was about and then realized they had to end it.

Not that it's completely terrible, but after the first pretty good mission I'm kinda stunned at how much of a decline the expansion is from the original campaign.

EDIT: Finished it. I cheated on the last two levels. They were fucking aggravating, especially the very last one. Full of extremely tough enemies that deal all health damage that ignores your shields, and thus can kill you in one or two hits and are impossbile to block, some of which can even stunlock you... not fun. Of course, there's few health supplies throughout (I guess if you didn't take Force Heal, you're fucked), and did I mention that the only weapon that really works is the lightsaber, so you can't even rely on ranged attacks to deal with the otherwise broken enemies?

The levels themselves are so damned dark and fog-ridden that it's impossible to see more than a few feet ahead of you, which makes them a fucking chore just to navigate. The final level in particular is meant to be some sort of puzzle stage, but it's not clear at all what you are trying to accomplish or how to do it; you just wander around more or less aimlessly pushing switches. Some of the paths are so well hidden that it's fucking absurd and you basically just have to get lucky stumbling into them. After you press all the switches (I guess?) you have to press more switches in the right order, about four times in a row, with no indication what the correct order is, and if you get it wrong, you get zapped for half your health. What kind of sadistic asshole even made this game?

Overall, a few solid stages, but this is probably one of the shittiest expansion packs I've ever played, almost solely for the consistently awful level design, and there isn't even a decent campy story to go along with it. Ignore my earlier idealistic comments; after finishing it, I'm really stunned how terrible it is.

 

[Gurkog]

I am still at the beginning of Dark Souls and dying repeatedly. Apparently, I can not into analog sticks.

 

[agentorange]

S A I to the NTS Row IV. Seems longer than 3, thought that might be artificial because of all the running about to collect energy orbs. I'm not sure where they can go from here; if SRV goes back to pathetic gravity obeying exploration and combat I will be very disappointed. Maybe they'll put in destructible environments.

Also continuing with Thief 2. Just finished The Life of the Party. The area surrounding Angel's Watch was extremely well crafted, and did a very effective job of giving the illusion of an open world while being meticulously laid out and directed - much like Deus Ex levels. Some of the dialogues were downright goofy, like the parody of Romeo and Juliet, which sort of took away from the atmosphere, but at the same time it was satisfying to see the city looking alive. Angel's Watch itself was a let down after the approach; simple corridor layouts and very artificial feeling guard patrols. One thing I disliked about the whole level was how many far too convenient dark nooks there were; unlike in the other maps, especially the map where you are trailing the courier (and earlier have to escape an ambush), you were always taking risks moving from one area to the next with some pretty long shadow-less stretches, but in Life of the Party it seemed like every few feet there was a small abscess - usually a door frame with an un-openable door - in the wall filled with impenetrable darkness that would completely hide you if you moved into it. It was a small thing but just kept nagging at me. If Angel's Watch had been more like the opera house from Thief Gold (or even the bank level from earlier) it would have improved the whole level; I mean considering how extravagant the building already is it would make sense that most of the floor would be tile instead of quiet wood. A surprising lack of those big robot patrols too, the bank had like a dozen of them, but Karras couldn't get more than one for his own building? I guess the excuse was that he was holding a party and didn't want to scare anyone.

 

[MicoSelva]

Crayon Physics Deluxe. Most of the puzzles are pretty trivial, but some are rather brain-intensive. What worries me, is that the last island requires 80 stars to unlock, and my math skills say that completing all other islands only provides 79 (?).

 

[DalekFlay]

I am still at the beginning of Dark Souls and dying repeatedly. Apparently, I can not into analog sticks.

That's a big reason I haven't played that yet, despite owning it for months now. I'm just annoyed at having to hook my gamepad up and experience floaty camera 5000 again.

 

[J_C]

Popping moles in Killzone: Mercenary on the PS Vita. For review purposes obviously. But God I hate it when I have to play a twitch game on this handheld. Who the fuck thinks that it is a good idea to play twitch games on a tiny consoles with even tinyer analog sticks? FPS are shit on home consoles as they are, but on a handheld...your thumbs effectively fall off from 20 minutes, because it is that unconfortable.

 

[sea]

Popping moles in Killzone: Mercenary on the PS Vita. For review purposes obviously. But God I hate it when I have to play a twitch game on this handheld. Who the fuck thinks that it is a good idea to play twitch games on a tiny consoles with even tinyer analog sticks? FPS are shit on home consoles as they are, but on a handheld...your thumbs effectively fall off from 20 minutes, because it is that unconfortable.

So, I take it it will be 9.5/10, best handheld shooter you've ever played?

 

[J_C]

Obviously. What did you expect? An 8/10? It's not that bad.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Who the fuck thinks that it is a good idea to play twitch games on a tiny consoles with even tinyer analog sticks?

These portables are designed for jap and kwan teens, with their effeminate hands.

 

[Silva]

After finishing the latest Splinter Cell, I went into into a spy-game frenesy. Thus Im trying my hand at Death to Spies 2 at the same time that I revisit good ol Covert Action and Floor 13 AND I expand my anarchist covert-ops empire in Alpha Centauri.

Oh, and I just watched the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie.

 

[J_C]

To balance out the decline caused by reviewing popamole game, I started Sanitarium yesterday. I haven't played much yet, but I'm liking the atmosphere of the game.

 

[Cyberarmy]

First time playing Sanitarium? Well better late than never I guess, it's a great adventure game imho.

 

[Ivar the Boner]

Yeah, I remember playing demo of Sanitarium back in the day and then trying desperately to get full version. It was hard to get even pirated games where I lived you know. I finally played almost upon completion (I was moving out from my parents house then so I had to abandon that playthrough) and really enjoying it. And that comes from a guy who usually dislike adventure games.

 

[J_C]

First time playing Sanitarium? Well better late than never I guess, it's a great adventure game imho.

Yes. I watched my brother playing back in the days, so I knew what the game was about, but I never played it myself. Until now that is.

 

[vitamin]

Infiltration 2.9 CE - mod for UT. Really well made realistic shooter with lots of good quality maps to choose from.

Check the review and this vid.