What game are you playing now?

[Timbuk2]

Right. It's a very short demo.

thanks for long feedback to short demo pls

Sounds good enough to me imo.

Atmosphere was such a large part of the original XCOM, and it sounds like they've retained that. I still remember the tensenessness of the original, whether to risk those last few action points to send your trooper through a doorway or not, whether to shoot or run, whether to flank or duck.

The noises the aliens made were scary as fuck too when you turned a corner and came face to face, heard them screech and hiss, the last of your points spent so you had no choice but to watch them suck your trooper's brain out during their round. Fucking great game.

I liked the whole setup too - your base of operations, the alerts of alien landings, when and where to send out your troop ships, the research on alien artefacts and weps discovered. All worked so well. And again it looks like they've retained that.

I don't remember the original having the clunky, counter-intuitive interface you describe. Games have come on such a long way since then I suppose ...

~

TBH I'll probably buy this regardless, just to get my hands on a proper turn-based action game again.

[Khendraja'aro]

Just bought Carrier Command. After my measly 3 Mbit connection has finished downloading, I will let you know how much the game is true to its roots.

(Also preordered X-COM)

[Ominous Gamer]

Not fully game related, but for us US folks, BestBuy is selling Sony's 24" 3D Playstation TV for $159. Thats pretty much half price. Its an edgelit LED LCD with a 240Hz refresh rate, 2 HDMI ports (and component), internal speakers, comes with a pair of 3D glasses, and a Motorstorm game. Free shipping and bestbuy is a Discover merchant so thats 5% cashback.

Doesn't have a tuner however, so its not a "real" TV. I picked one up and plan to replace my computer monitor with it. Hoping it works with Nvidia's 3D vision.

[Khendraja'aro]

Maybe that might help: http://blog.bagearon.com/2010/11/fix...pported-model/

In unrelated news, Steam obviously has some issues and "Release on 28th of September" means something different at Valve. At least I can't explain why no one can download Carrier Command.

[Catgrrl]

Finally decided to sit down and try InFamous on the PS3, after having it on the hard drive for months (one of my free games I received after the hacker stuff Sony went through). Very GTA- like. It's been awhile since I've played a game on the console so I have to get used to the movements. Not too bad so far but definitely not a game I'd have paid full price for (not that I've bought a new PS3 game in a few years anyway).

[Khendraja'aro]

Okay, finally downloaded the last bytes. For some reason unbeknownst to me, they decided to include an FPS part in a game which is supposed to be about... wait for it... Carrier Command.

A bit like Rome: Total War forcing you to fight as a single Roman soldier before you get to command the troops.

Second problem: The story/acting/voiceovers are hamfisted and unlogical. For instance, you're dropped planetside through a drop pod. First drop pod that I've seen, though, which has wings, is fully maneuverable and has an engine propelling it. Your initial command consists of 2 soldiers (which are always somewhere else doing God knows what. Seriously, one of the lines was: "Okay, men, you know what to do!" and off they go. Only that I was never told what it is that they know to do.) and a technician.

Who has a name ("Essi") which is called about every other sentence, grating a bit after a while. More seriously though: She doesn't wear armor, just a coverall. On a battlefield. And insists on going through doors first. I mean, that's another line: "Let me go through this door first, Essi, we don't know if there are enemies on the other side!"

You don't say. What kind of half-assed military do you run where people don't know that maybe, just maybe the guys with the shields and armor are the best people to step into the line of fire first?

On the other hand, I now know why they supposedly lost the war on Earth.

Another thing: The UI is doing a piss-poor job of highlighting waypoints. In the beginning, you regularly stumble around because you're told that you have to get somewhere. Only: The direction of that "somewhere"? Who knows? Maps? Pshaw.

Mabye I'll get to the actual commanding part tomorrow. I've seen that there's a new patch out which breaks savegames, however. So, in order to spare my sanity, I'll stop playing, wait for the patch and then suffer through the FPS part again.

At the moment a clear: "Don't buy" from me.

[Khendraja'aro]

And the saga continues. For a game where you're supposed to pilot one vehicle at a time and give broad orders to the others - there are astounding issues with the AI.

Like in the first mission where you get two "Walruses" (dumb name for a light tank). You're told that you can give the 2nd vehicle the order to "assist", namely, it follows you and shoots at enemies. So I tell it to assist and drive off to the next objective. Which is located half a kilometer down a straight road.

Upon reaching the waypoint, I wonder where the other tank has gone. Well, somehow it has managed to veer off the straight and very broad road and get itself stuck between a wall and a rock. Worst pathfinding routines ever.

Not to mention that I killed only about 80% of the enemies myself. The rest? Friendly fire. Seriously, two enemy robots will line up, shoot at me - and the robot in the back will thusly shoot the crap out of his companion in front.

[Flixy]

Sounds like realistic AI for battle robots, to me

[Nessus]

Anyone try Cortex Command?

[Khendraja'aro]

Anyone try Cortex Command?

Wouldn't recommend it. Was interested at first but then I stumbled across a thread in the Steam forums where the developer comes across as a total dick. Plus, it's an Alpha version. After supposedly 11 years of development. That alone should tell you something.

[Khendraja'aro]

Here are some excerpts from the forum:

cool story, bro

yikes! sorry you feel bitter; was never my intention when i set out to build a game that i hoped people would enjoy. how can I make it up to you? refund? make it to your liking and desired pace? i'm happy to do the former.. it appears I can't deliver on the latter. :/

wow so bitter! sorry you didn't like my work or work ethic. a straight month of all-nighters culminating in a 22-hour workday yesterday, and sticking with a project for over a decade apparently isn't enough for your high standards. sorry, but i guess i'm just slow and "lazy". Youve said your piece, now take your refund and please change the channel. people are enjoying this game in its current state, but it's not for everyone. deal with it :]

Please remember that this "work" was 11 years in the making.

And the best part?

zanvolt: the "professional" way to handle personal insults and general customer anger is to ignore it, just like the big studios' PR firms do. I thought it would be appreciated to personally engage in a constructive conversation instead.. guess not?

[RandBlade]

May lack a bit of tact but he's given a refund it seems so if someone's continued bitching and whining after getting a refund then I understand his annoyance.

[RandBlade]

Any way to stop Origin from starting up and especially opening multiple pop-up windows trying to sell me crap I don't want when you load Windows other than disabling it from startup via msconfig?

I don't mind it being installed to play games in the background but when I boot my Laptop up to work it seems to slow start-up down remarkably and clicking away games isn't professional. Steam at least loads quietly in the background on startup.

[RandBlade]

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaren - just started so can't review it yet, other than to say I bought it physically rather than online code and it came with 2 DVD discs ... not entirely sure what for. When I inserted the disc it just loaded the game launcher and nothing happened, I loaded the game selected the upgrade option and entered code etc and now its worked smoothly but nothing seems to be getting taken off the discs it just appears to be downloading it as and when required.

Seems pretty so far [literally just started].

[Ominous Gamer]

Any way to stop Origin from starting up and especially opening multiple pop-up windows trying to sell me crap I don't want when you load Windows other than disabling it from startup via msconfig?

I don't mind it being installed to play games in the background but when I boot my Laptop up to work it seems to slow start-up down remarkably and clicking away games isn't professional. Steam at least loads quietly in the background on startup.

Coulda swore I already replied to this, but the option to disable launch at windows startup is in the settings.

[RandBlade]

Coulda swore I already replied to this, but the option to disable launch at windows startup is in the settings.

Found that thanks.

What I kind of hoped for was a way to have it launch "silently" in the background rather than launching advert windows to the front. Oh well, disabled launch of both that and Steam and suddenly Windows loading is much quicker again. Couldn't understand how even after upgrading to 8GB RAM it was going so slowly, not sure which was causing the drag.

[Khendraja'aro]

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaren - just started so can't review it yet, other than to say I bought it physically rather than online code and it came with 2 DVD discs ... not entirely sure what for. When I inserted the disc it just loaded the game launcher and nothing happened, I loaded the game selected the upgrade option and entered code etc and now its worked smoothly but nothing seems to be getting taken off the discs it just appears to be downloading it as and when required.

Seems pretty so far [literally just started].

You only need the DVDs when you're installing from scratch and from a physical medium. Any other way and you'll just use their phased downloader which grabs neccessary files first and then already allows you to play while downloading the rest.

Which means that if you had patched up to the last patch level of Cataclysm (the 5.0 one from one month ago), you already had all the content on your hard disc and it only needed to be unlocked.

Found that thanks.

What I kind of hoped for was a way to have it launch "silently" in the background rather than launching advert windows to the front. Oh well, disabled launch of both that and Steam and suddenly Windows loading is much quicker again. Couldn't understand how even after upgrading to 8GB RAM it was going so slowly, not sure which was causing the drag.

That's because it's thrashing the hard disc on startup - large amounts of relatively small files are loaded, which means that it's your random access time which matters rather than pure read speeds. Swap your hard disc Windows is on for a SSD and you won't have to worry about loading times anymore. My Windows 8 installation boots from the UEFI screen to (fully usable) desktop in about 8 seconds (password typing included).

[Ominous Gamer]

Guildwars installs in the same way. You can add launch commands to the shortcut that will either download the entire game from their end, or install all the files from the disc. Otherwise the files are grabbed (almost) as needed while playing.

I've seen first hand how SSDs make a huge different on bootup. I currently allow utorrent, steam and origin to load at startup and my desktop still loads before my monitor notices there is a signal to display.

[RandBlade]

The problem I have with an SSD (and never bought one) is from the specs they're quite light on space to be the only drive for what you spend on them, even if you dump your downloads etc onto an external drive [which I imagine to be an inconvenience].

Looking at my current spec, I have a 0.5TB HDD which only has ~100GB left. My download folder is 115GB so even without that I'd need to spend about £300+ to keep program files etc or start having to uninstall/reinstall more often which seems to defeat the point.

In a year or two I imagine the price/GB will really start to fall.

[Ominous Gamer]

SSDs are already in free fail. You can get them now for about 50 cents a gb, and thats down from the ~$1 when I built my computer only a couple of months ago.

Newer motherboards can also treat them as boot devices to solely speed up startup times. With slots for them to be installed directly onto the motherboard.

You also don't need an external drive. The OS goes on the SSD and everything else can go your old drive, even Steam allows you to pick which drive games are installed on now.


I use 2 120gb SSDs. I have an external 2tb drive connected to my computer via USB but its never turned on unless I'm backing up one of the other computers or dumping a SD card onto it. Only behavior I had to change is that I don't have all ~250 steam games installed at the same time.

[RandBlade]

Didn't realise you could have 2 drives in my Laptop, so I could have an SSD and the original I guess. Might look into that next time I have some cash available.

[Ominous Gamer]

laptops, thats my bad. I was thinking desktop, in my head. Yeah laptops mainly have space for only 1 drive. Sorry.


Never properly adjusted to laptops coming to play in a gaming thread. Damn you intel graphics!

[RandBlade]

The laptop has an AMD graphics card (when plugged in ideally), so works rather well for games. I haven't played on my PC all year.

[Ominous Gamer]

Oh no doubt, they work good now. My netbook has an AMD graphics chip in it and I'm always surprised by how much power it has. It didn't used to be that way. Laptops used to almost completely Intel Integrated, horrible horrible chips for graphics. Its only recently with the i family of chips has Intel picked up its game and those laptops have something thats slightly comparable to AMD's and Nvidia's low end offerings.

[Khendraja'aro]

The problem I have with an SSD (and never bought one) is from the specs they're quite light on space to be the only drive for what you spend on them, even if you dump your downloads etc onto an external drive [which I imagine to be an inconvenience].

Looking at my current spec, I have a 0.5TB HDD which only has ~100GB left. My download folder is 115GB so even without that I'd need to spend about £300+ to keep program files etc or start having to uninstall/reinstall more often which seems to defeat the point.

In a year or two I imagine the price/GB will really start to fall.

That's not really a problem. Unless you only have space for one drive. For example, I simply symlinked my SteamApps folder to a different drive so that the steam application itself resides on the SSD whereas the games are on a different platter with lots of space.

[Ominous Gamer]

Battlefield 3 (Origin) for $7.50 when you buy through amazon and use the code OCTOFUN1.

Child Play link:
http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Art...ildsplaycha-20

[Khendraja'aro]

Anyone want a key for Planetside 2? Though it's Beta, it's also quite playable already

[Flixy]

I finished portal 2 before, but now I started the multiplayer with a friend. It's fun!

[Ominous Gamer]

I finished portal 2 before, but now I started the multiplayer with a friend. It's fun!

I require a response after the first time you spam the "look here" command because of frustation or the will to be an ass.

[Flixy]

I require a response after the first time you spam the "look here" command because of frustation or the will to be an ass.

well we did kill eachother a few times, and I think I'm a bit quicker to understand it at times