P4: Gritty Reboot

Dean/Ethan, I present to you Lazarus, a text-recovery extension for Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/loljledaigphbcpfhfmgopdkppkifgno

Growing up, I didn't have a cutting-edge console. I had an NES near the end of the SNES's life, and I had a Gameboy. So I did what any reasonable boy would do, and filled every last inch of my father's 256 MB hard drive with games: Sim City 2000, Myst, Theme Park, Asteroids, Might & Magic, Front Page Sports Baseball 94, Flight Simulator 5, and of course TIE Fighter. Well, time passed, I grew older and wiser, and I asked for a bleeding edge console for my next birthday present: the Nintendo 64. Receiving the system along with Diddy Kong Racing as a wide-eyed fifth-grader, I felt like, well, the N64 kid himself. I wore that system to the ground, playing dozens of games over the next several years, even highly anticipating Nintendo's next entry, a goofy-looking purple cube. But it wasn't to be - a studio called Westwood Studios pulled me back from the dark side with a title called Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. Now, say what you will about RA2, it's a blast to play with friends. That's right, while my poor little 64 sat twiddling its RDRAM modules on its now-dusty Expansion Pak, I was experiencing what consoles would not have widely available for years to come - online play and HD-level graphics on my family's shiny Windows 98 machine. The rest was legend - p4warrior became a PC gamer for real, building my own system, tweaking, upgrading, and following all the latest releases. I did buy a Wii in 2006 and still play it, but only for Nintendo first-party titles and the occasional fun, quirky game. --- On a less melodramatic note, I do agree that the console model is outdated and ought to be reconsidered. Even an all-in-one console collaborated on by the Big 3 would be better than the fractured, fragmented mess that is our current situation. Imagine if several large movie studios came out with 3 or 4 competing home media players costing $300-$400 USD each, the movies of each studio being incompatible with the other players, and the studios fighting over smaller studios' support for their format. We all would agree that that would be a disaster, yet we put up with it with video games for some reason.

Gamecube controllers have rumble.

Build my own arcade cabinet Get past disc one of FFVII Design a video game Collect every home console released in the west Beat a co-op game with my sons Attend Megadeth concert Learn to play cricket Learn the cello

Why? I found it enjoyable.

I wish MS would bring Halo 3 to PC so I could give it a try. Also, I never played the original MGS on PlayStation, but I did play Twin Snakes on Gamecube years later and it was quite good.

Oh, IGN. Facepalm image is appropriate.

How long did it take you to type that post?

Indeed, Saturnine. Indeed.

To me, that pretty much guarantees it's going to feel all wrong, no matter what else it has going for it. Halo 1 on Legendary was a frickin' cakewalk on the PC, because it was (obviously) designed for a gamepad. Targeting a gamepad throws a whole host of gameplay elements out of whack on the PC, just as targeting a WASD setup exclusively would mess up its implementation on consoles. Ugh.

All DLC for The Witcher 2 will be free, according to the developers. Neoseeker

You look like Andy from The Office. --- My most recent purchase, other than The Witcher off GOG, was the below burrito. I put it in spoiler tags because I know a lot of people get grossed out from food pictures. Anyway, it's a gigantic carne asada burrito that has two taquitos inside the burrito. It's called the Wicho Loco and it was amazing. --- Great buy. Boston's one of the bands with whom you can really get away with just the Greatest Hits, because only their first 2.5 albums were really classics.

$5... yeah, definitely worth a shot at that price.

True, but the Wii version rectifies this. If you leave the game and return to the Wii Menu, it suspends where you were at.

Awesome! Check out Video Card Benchmark for a straightforward comparison, though it's not very detailed. I've got the 4870, so I'll probably be good for another year+ before I'll want to upgrade.

And here are the three write-ups on the different playstyles by PCG: The Psychopath The Hacker The Thinker

THIS. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, THIS. It was a pretentious non-game that had no real story to speak of and only deserves credit for its advances in physics implementation. People complain that Portal is just a tech demo? Seriously people, HL2 is a game built ENTIRELY around the gravity gun, and then sprinkled with a tiny narrative and gobs of ambiguity. At least the Portal gun is fun consistently. The Gravity Gun is fun for about the first twenty minutes. I don't know if you're just trolling with the story comment, because it has a great story; it's just not told through pre-rendered cutscenes or title cards. And if Half-Life 2 was built entirely around the gravity gun, then why was it not introduced until the 5th chapter? Seems kinda silly if that was their intention. We're muckin' up this thread. Maybe we oughta carry over to an HL2 thread if we want to continue.

DORF ME

I don't, to be honest. I've heard reasons, but none of them make any sense to me. People expected either something bigger than, or equal to, the carnage and insanity present in San Andreas. I may make others angry by assuming what they didn't like about the game, so I'll just say that some weren't happy with the overall change in tone and increased focus on realism. Some of us were just angry about the crippling PC performance that rendered the game unplayable.

I just fired this up. It's so much fun so far; really reminds me of just sitting in front of old PC games and poring over 200 page manuals trying to figure out what key does what.

Yeah, Combine and Resistance alike were pretty poor. I always switch HL1 & HL2 in my "top 10" list, because both do things really well but it's hard for me to say which is better. Right now it's HL2 for me.

The can and box sections were in-game tutorials very early on to teach the player how to interact with the world. The infamous see-saw puzzle I never had complaints about, but I can see why some would. I'm not saying I can't see why some people wouldn't like the game, just that it would be equally silly to say that one can't see why some people do like the game.

You can't figure out why anyone in the whole world would hold Half-Life 2 as his favorite game? Even if you don't like it, there are gobs of reasons someone might love the game. For me, it's the world that's shown and the world that's hinted at, the vastness of City 17, though the player is only given glimpses, the depression of its citizens and the cruelty of the Combine, and of course, the gravity gun that many games have tried to emulate since.

This is interesting: the guys at PC Gamer are doing three separate run-throughs, each based on a different character type, of the first ten hours of Human Revolution and writing up their impressions on each experience. Should be cool. They are also very enthusiastic about the game, much like RPS. http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/11/deus-ex-human-revolution-hands-on-the-first-ten-hours/ This made me happy:

Indeed. Let us not buy into the hype. Let us await the day of release, yea, verily, even the weeks following, and let us make our judgments then. I shall be renting this bad boy. The prophet GOH hath spoken the truth, amen and amen.