SomTervo

Appreciate that. But again, even re the encounter design, that doesn't fly with me. It is 100% a valid criticism of Uncharted 1, where literally every fight is enemies coming from different angles in (often way too many) waves which is repetitive by the time you're four hours in. But in Uncharted 2, only six of the 30+ fights follow that template. Most of them are shorter fights you quickly move past, or a long chain of fights over a long area. And even in those rarer wave-based encounters, the arena itself is dynamically changing and developing the whole time (eg the train wreckage fight where a blizzard comes in, where a fire spreads, where a group of one difficult enemy type come in, etc), so it stays fresh regardless of the wave-based nature of those fights. Also you can all-stealth most of the fights in Uncharted 2, and in several cases doing so skips out the following 'waves' of enemies, in the same manner as The Last of Us. Uncharted 2 invented and perfected the 'action stealth' mechanic before TR2013 was even on the horizon. IIRC this happens even less in Uncharted 3, where every fight (bar perhaps a couple) are a bunch of enemies who you kill then move past. However, Uncharted 3 has some really bad encounter design from a level design standpoint (bad spawn positions, terribly placed cover, etc), which totally fucking sucks balls. (Worth mentioning I agreed with you (that the encounter design was sub-par) until I played Uncharted 2 on Crushing, where it becomes a legitimately challenging, well-designed TPS, rather than a solid adventure game. On Normal/Hard, the games are far, far more dull and it's easy to complain about. I wish Naughty Dog would shift the difficulty labels down one so more people experienced the gameplay mechanics to the fullest :/) Really looking forward to RotTR's fights though. I heard it's a great game all around. With a bit of refinement TR2013 could have been amazing, there were moments where it clicked and it definitely surpassed Uncharted.

Don't want to derail, but in every Uncharted game almost every enemy goes down with 1 headshot (only enemies with helmets don't - which is usually 2-3 headshots). Plus Uncharted 2 has some god-tier encounter design. In that Uncharted 4 video, the person is narrowly missing the headshots. That happens a lot in Uncharted because there's so much movement. I replayed Uncharted 2 two weeks ago and in the best mid-game fights I was seeing enemy behaviours and dynamic situations I had never seen before, after 5-6 playthroughs over the years. Guys cornering me by flanking on both sides of cover, guys grabbing me from behind unexpectedly, guys accidentally hitting explosives and killing half of their team (all only on Crushing difficulty where it shines). In-between these great encounters are run-of-the-mill encounters, but that's fine. 95% of the fights in TR2013 were run of the mill, imo. Same goes for Uncharted 1 and 3. In Uncharted 2 probably 45% of them are. That's worth adding to the thread on-topic: I finished Uncharted 1 on the Nathan Drake Collection about 3 weeks ago. Really good game, the worst bits aren't as bad as I remember but the best bits aren't quite as good as I remember. That fight halfway through in the flooded underground pillar-room is horrid.

I finished The Witcher 3 last week. That was a thing. Wow. Absolute classic. I finished it for the first time mid-last-year. So fucking good. That writing. I'm really excited to nab RotTR on PC in the next month. Feel pretty confident it is going to singlehandedly slap Uncharted 1 and 3 silly. (Nothing can slap Uncharted 2 silly - it's a masterpiece - and TR2013 was better than UC1 but not better than UC2 or 3.) Dig is a'ight - I hear Heist is a step above and is a really excellent game. I've got a 3DS too nowadays so I'm excited to get that once I've finished a few more 3DS games.

The Raid 2 Finished watching it the other night. To be honest, if it wasn't called "The Raid", it would have been a better film. Part of what killed it for me was that it was so far removed from what made the first one great. A simple one-set martial arts + crime action movie. It's like when Die Hard started moving away from single sets/locations in the third one (I think?) They break the formula, but not in an intelligent way. The Raid 1 = Perhaps five dialogue/story-heavy scenes in the whole thing. 20+ protracted scenes of great action, set in one oppressive, dangerous location with great, if blunt, justification for it. The Raid 2 = Perhaps eight scenes of action (with a far weaker sense of place/motive - still brill choreography). 20+ dialogue/story-heavy scenes. Set over 10+ fairly mundane locations with a couple of nice highlights thrown in.

Unlocked the final mission last night. Will report back. 70 hours or something total. Wtf.

How are you finding it, MEth? Feedback sounds good on this.

I have to disagree with all the grinding complaints. IMO you can replace the word 'grinding' with 'playing totally awesome badass missions with some of the best gameplay mechanics ever designed'. Practically none of it is repetitive - the only arguably 'repetitive' aspect is travel, and dull travel is easily surmounted using either A) cassette tapes, B) cardboard box fast-travel, C) deploying with or calling in cars/horse, D) choosing the 'Return to ACC' from the pause menu as a last resort. So I don't really get it when people say, to paraphrase: 'I hate all the [playing totally awesome badass missions with some of the best gameplay mechanics ever designed] in this game, especially when it forces you to do it to progress the story.' I would agree, however, that many of the Main Missions/Episodes could easily have been relegated to Side Ops status. It would have been much nicer if there were only 15-25 Episodes and the other 20 or so, which have minimal/no impact on the overall plot, were moved into Side Ops. The problem is that Main Missions/Episodes are structurally different - they have defined play areas and 'hot zones'. That's the only functional difference between Episodes and Side Ops. Which is pretty arbitrary. [Edit: Oh, and I really like the story so far. I'm over half way through, past 'Chapter 1'. It's very toned down, and there's only one thing which stands out as poor (of course it relates to Quiet). There are a few underplayed aspects which I'm worried will turn out to not go anywhere. But I'm almost at the end so I'll keep y'all posted with any thoughts. Also I love cassette tapes.] MH: Water Pistol doesn't do anything to Man on Fire I tried it and Ocelot's like "Good idea, but I'm afraid that won't be enough". It just makes a hissing noise. AFAICT, Water Pistol is to do your own wet bikini parties with Quiet. Yep. Dude, the tapes are made for mid-gameplay. Do some side missions and listen to them. It's literally what they're made for.

A friend and I watched the video taken by the shooter. He walks up to them, points a gun at them, waits for a moment, then shoots them "FPS style". Just... come on

Yeah, I aint watching that thing due to alleged spoilers. Will watch after I've completed MGSV and cry.

Thanks for the advice. I can easily afford to go i7 and 970/80 a year or two down the line. At this point, financially, I'm going no further than i5 and 960. However, I'm interested in overclocking. I had to buy my i5 from a brick n mortar store at short notice, and the guy said the one I chose is made for overclocking. How does one overclock? Well, the only professional software I'll be using will probably be Unreal 4's SDK. Maybe other SDKs in due course, but hopefully I won't need to do any too-intensive asset-loading. Dwarf Fortress is a classic processor-killer. I remember it's one of the few things I could play back on a girlfriend's new laptop - it had integrated graphics, pretty mediocre RAM, but a boss processor. DF all the way. PS with Windows 10 on the machine now, things are going much smoother! Plus it looks fucking nice. I think I actually prefer this layout to any Windows I've used before, and even to most Mac OS's. Which I did not expect. It's lovely.

Haha, apparently 'Windows isn't activated on my PC'. Even though I put in the code and everything at installation. No Windows 10 for me. PC is fun. Edit: wasn't a big issue at all, but still just another road block on the block of roads. Had to call MS and activate, yadda

Legend, thanks, I'll try that immediately when I get back home.

The freedom is quite incredible. I daresay fully worth it. But I would happily have managed on with my PS4 and other consoles if it weren't for these PC-intensive projects I'm working on. Good call, GOH, about things not being fitted properly causing much larger issues. I needn't really worry about that. I worry that maybe some foreign body got on my CPU while I was fitting it (hair/dust) but that would probably cause bigger issues, too. A lot of things certainly feel like an unknown quantity. Bear in mind that at this stage I'm basically a layman. Imagine I'm a housewife who doesn't know much about tech (I'm not that bad, but... the perspective). I've plugged all this stuff together, it seemed to turn on okay, but I feel like at any moment something could break in a oner. Software side, shit is haywire as fuck, too. "Oh, this very old game isn't running as well as it should. Why is this happening? I have literally no idea and don't know how to start finding out. There are 10 settings I can adjust which affect it but all of it feels like unhappy compromise and doesn't shed any light on the core issue." "Oh, Windows update is repeatedly failing to configure updates. For one thing, this is turning my boot-ups into half-hour affairs rather than the 7 seconds it takes without updates. But more importantly, is this impacting my drivers or something else to do with how everything is running? Does this tie to my first concern? Is it affecting my games directly?" "Oh, I thought my drivers were up to date, but then it said I needed to update windows before I can install the newest ones. The updates are struggling along, but does this mean with my new Windows errors are getting in the way any new driver updates I can't install?" "As far as I can tell, Windows 10 would dodge quite a few of the issues I'm having, and I think I'm entitled to the free upgrade. But with all these Windows Update errors, I'm not getting the 'Upgrade for free' notice yet. Can I ever get this with these update failures blocking my way?" "So from Ethan's post above, it looks like my i5 is probably a bottleneck. How do I identify this, categorically? Is that even possible? Down the line, will I have to shell out £300 for an i7 then go through the nightmare of dismantling everything to fit a new CPU? None of these are really killer questions or big problems. But when I could just (for argument's sake) buy a console in one hour from a shop (rather than 3 days delivery + a whole day building), for less than half my PC's cost, run many of the games just as well, and not have a care in the fucking world... It's not such a clear-cut thing. Obviously I'm not hating on the whole thing - all these posts are basically 'Kenshi's First World Problems'. With a PC you obviously just get so much more of everything in one box. And this thing could last me yonks, far, far longer than a console (although that i5 is worrying me now). I just have a very low level of tolerance, and very low patience, for PC problems, due to past experiences (in the darker ages of PC gaming) when things would work less often and be much harder to troubleshoot.

So, yeah, I just jumped in on this age-old bandwagon. A few of my suspicions and past experiences confirmed: 1. PC gaming is in no way comparable to console gaming in terms of ease of use. Like, it's actually laughable saying that. I would never recommend it to someone who is in any way worried about handling tech or setting things up. Even if they're a tiny bit worried, I wouldn't recommend it. 2. PC gaming still gets stupid errors and things are just generally more complicated all the fucking time That said, it's great having a machine that can do everything, and do it really well. My rig: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 GPU (4GB) 16GB DDR3 RAM MSI Z97-GAMING motherboard i5 4690k processor (quad, 3.5GHz) 250GB SSD 1TB HDD a wee wireless adapter All-in like £800 or so. The only weak link, as far as I can tell, is the processor. Running some things at very high res causes issues for me – like the Talos Principle, everything maxed and at highest res, or Crysis with everything maxed and at highest res. Should my machine be running these without issue? They occasionally drop to ~30FPS. Not sure if I should be worried or not. It was quite hard putting the thing together and I'm worried a couple of things might not be well fitted. Also, Windows 7 update is totally fucked. 100+ updates to do, and every time like 60 of them fail to update and the machine has to revert the changes. The only way to fix this, far as I can tell, is to do a fucking system restore, which I don't want to do. Dafuq man. On the one hand, fuck PC gaming. Everything is an unknown quantity. And this is exactly why I've avoided it for so long. On the other, the breadth, choice, quality and price/availability of games is staggering. I'm using it a lot for work though - helping a team develop a game so I need something that can breeze through high-end Unreal 4 stuff.

Kenshi hit me up, bitches

I heard about Cyclades years ago and I am still dying to play it. Looks so good. It's a big list for me... I feel so dirty buying so much But so good

Uh... quote from Dean that isn't showing right: Yep, immediately after I made that post I thought, 'Hang on... They completely know what they're doing. Fuck it'. Anyway. Housing is a shambles. We all have to shack up with frustrating, problematic or crazy people at some point in our lives. Woohoo!

I'd rather play one of the 6 or 7 other incredible-looking games that come out later this year. All respect to Bungie, though, it sounds like they're really sorting shit out with Taken King, and it does genuinely sound like it would get me back on board. Just not when there's MGSV, Mad Max, AC:S, Fallout 4, yadda. Not to mention all the great games still about from the rest of the year. Especially when TTK costs almost the same price as one of those full games. The cost takes the fucking piss. FYI I'm pretty sure your level will not get reset to 20. You keep your level. It's just certain gear that changes/becomes obsolete, IIRC.

That's what I meant by 'thanks, Thatcher!', Gerb! She is 100% to blame for the '90s housing bubble, which we're still very much buoyant with today. Was it just recently that the tories announced they're going to sell more council houses, yeah? Total crock of shit, they have no idea what they're doing.

Yep, every house I've been in has a washer, and only one has a dryer – my parents, who only got it because they run a catering business on the side and need to dry lots of bedclothes. Same goes for every flat I've ever been in, though quite a few houses have had dryers. There was a great article a while back on how the UK has the worst housing space:cost ratio in all of Europe, and even across much of the world. It's insane. The amount of space we have compared to how much land costs per square foot, tied to the general cost of housing and how small houses are, is insane. IIRC Germany has relatively less space for housing but the cost of land is like 1/5th what it is in the UK. And against less space all the housing is also far cheaper, and there's more of it. I'm fairly certain the same went for France, Spain, Italy, etc. Thanks, Thatcher!

Yeah, isn't this the video where the player spends a solid minute turning on the spot looking at the surrounding environment? Because that entire environment is explorable and open world. The show floor demo allows people to run about in it. Things only get linear once they're inside the mission building – which is perfectly reasonable, imo.