Dreamcasts go for $50 or less around here. I don't think I paid more than $30 for mine. Bought the cheaper games I wanted (none were over $10) and pirated the rare and expensive ones. I'm on a torrent right now getting some of the more obscure ones to see if they're any good (I expect at least 3/4 of them to blow, and that's after narrowing it down based on "best of" lists online and reading the descriptions to see which ones suit my taste).
For that matter, there's at least one Dreamcast emulator for Windows. I've never used it, but it's there in the torrent I'm on.
I think it's this one if anyone's interested. It's slow as hell because there aren't many seeders, but set one game at a time to high priority and you'll get it in a day or so and be able to start playing. Seed when you get done!
Yeah, Magneto ought to have a "send every bit of metal in my opponent's body flying in random directions" move that insta-kills those guys.
Also, they should have Xavier, with a "kill yourself" special move that works on almost anyone and is unblockable.
Great game--just pretend all the really strong guys are having their powers dampened or something silly like that:) Hell, that's a very comic-book sort of device anyway.
Bittorrent, webserver, whatever--it's Linux, put whatever you want on it. Runs on tons of routers, though the lowest end ones are usually a little weak to both keep up with routing and do downloading. Has a web config and torrent interface, I think.
Instead of the complicated "cache, wake computer, transfer, sleep computer" thing, just plug an external hard drive in to the router and share it with Samba or something.
Yeah, no kidding. I mean, it's not like they're coming after you for scamming them if they get whisked away to Jesus-topia.
If they're wrong, there's no reason to actually have a system in place--but if they're right, there's still no reason to have a system in place.
Free money (well, there's the cost of the website to sell the service and a fake "login if the rapture hasn't happened yet" thingy, but it's practically free)
The story was very good, by FPS standards. Not Deus Ex good, but good. A couple levels were well done. Good atmosphere throughout. The gameplay was average or a bit below average.
If any of that strikes you as being a reason to give the game a good review, then that's probably why. I would say it's one of those shooters you don't really play for the shooting, if that makes any sense.
I do think that the gaming press in general is prone to praise anything that doesn't completely suck, and often pushes games that are OK at best as if they were truly great. I also think it's gotten worse since console gaming took off, for whatever reason.
Now, load up Fallout 2, and spend all of your time fighting in the wasteland, ignoring the main questline. Or do just enough of the main quest to get your power armor. Go theorycraft on your skills. You can make yourself into an unstoppable juggernaut that one-shots every enemy with just a power fist.
Yeah, but that same character probably won't have 250% Doctor and 230% Repair skills, right? I didn't play anywhere near all of the side-quests in F3 (well, I reloaded a save after I'd finished and did them, but not at first anyway) and I did zero power leveling, but by about 3/4 of the way through I was running out of places to put new skill boosts so I just started loading up on ones that I hadn't intended to level up at all in the beginning. I was pretty damn good at everything, which was something that was hard to do in Fallout 2, and certainly wasn't something you'd do by accident. You might be the best sniper/boxer in the wastes, but you weren't simultaneously going to be a quantum physicist/physician.
Mine crashed shortly after I left the Vault on my desktop machine, every time I tried it. I ended up having to play it at super-low graphics settings on my laptop. What a buggy piece of shit. I mean, Bethesda's known for releasing games that are horrendously broken until the third patch or so, but I figured this time since they were just using an existing game system it would be different... NOPE. They still managed to screw it up, somehow.
Agreed. Oblivion is dreadful without mods, which is why I can't fathom someone wanting to play it on the Xbox. It's even worse pre-mods than Morrowind was, and the vanilla version of that game sucked compared to a well-modded one, though at least it was playable. The fucked-up leveling system alone was enough to ruin vanilla Oblivion.
In Fallout and Fallout 2, there were a lot less locations to visit, a lot less characters to interact with, and less quests.
Huh? No. How long has it been since you played Fallout 2? There may be more dots on the map in F3, but many of them aren't important, and I seriously doubt there were more sidequests. Further, nearly all of the quests in F3 were inconsequential, like the extended fetch-quest for Nuka Cola. I'm not against those, but they can hardly be considered a replacement for things like playing politics between NCR/New Reno/Vault City or any of the other major branching sidequest arcs in F2--hell, there was at least one in every city, and sometimes there were 2-3. I was very disappointed when I discovered that Megaton wasn't just the starting city, but also the most interesting one in the game. It was marginally better than The Den in F2, which was one of the minor cities in that game.
Aside from that, you had the stupid Towers with a moderately-interesting but stiflingly-limited quest (plus some more minor quests if you were evil, I suppose), the dull aircraft carrier with a couple of crappy quests, and a handful of gimmick towns (Republic of Dave, the one with the "super heroes") that were, I want to emphasize, fine, but not a replacement for the cities in F2. Big Town, oddly enough, was the best of the non-Megaton cities IMO, but it was still barely deeper than Klamath Falls. The bit with Harold was nice, too.
Unfortunately, most college professors do not interact with students. Lectures were made obsolete by the invention of the book thousands of years ago, but still today we have professors lecturing from yellowed notes.
Oh, god, that was the worst. Bonus fail points if they turned the chapter in to a powerpoint presentation, then said nothing other than what was on the powerpoint slides. Then they'd require attendance, but be surprised that no-one was bothering to do the reading.
Im getting bored of those RPG games in which the main plot is about 10-20 hours long, and the subplots about 200
In the first two Fallout games (especially the second one) the vast majority of your time was spent on sidequests. You could rush through the game, but each new town drew you in to its problems and made you want to fix them (or make them worse, or find their enemies and agree to help them destroy the town, etc.) and helped you to prepare for the next area.
IMO, the biggest single problem with F3 was the lack of interesting sidequests that matter. Any two major towns from F2 had at least as much meaningful, deep quest content as all of F3. F3 was starved for content, and that alone killed most of what I love about the series.
To me the major downfall of Morrowind/Oblivion was they stuck with the enemies level with the player.
Not in Morrowind. Go exploring in some of the tougher caves/ruins or run around inside the Ghost Fence for a while at level 1 and let me know how it works out for you:)
Being first person doesn't somehow diminish anything.
Of course it does. F3 is tiny compared to F2, both in terms of total world area (duh) and, more importantly, the sheer number and size of (interesting) quests. The cause of that is a combination of the move to first-person 3D and using voice actors for practically every line in the game. It's a trade off, and not one I'm terribly happy with. I thought I wouldn't mind it and was really excited about the game, but after playing it and thinking about it for a few months, I don't think it was worth it.
Don't forget the leveling system, which let you become godlike at everything by the end of a normal game without really trying to. That's 100% Oblivion, 0% Fallout.
In addition to removing the level cap, I hope they re-do the whole leveling/skill system to be more Fallout-like. IMO it was the one thing that pushed F3 over the tipping point from "Fallout in a new skin" to "Oblivion with guns and some Fallout references". If they'd gotten that right, it would have been a content-starved but true Fallout game; as it is, I reluctantly have to side with the "Oblivion with guns" folks.
Hell, I wish they'd change it for the next Elder Scrolls game, too. The fact that you become godlike at everything by the end of a normal game made sense in Morrowind for plot reasons, but IMO didn't in Oblivion. In Fallout 3 it was a complete break from the earlier games, in which you'd only have time to master a couple of skills (and be good at a handful of others) by the end of a normal game, unless you did a shitload of grinding.
You had to pick you skills that you wanted to excel at, and focus on those to the exclusion of most of the others. In Fallout 3 you will be a god and have stats at or near the top in every category, even if you don't try to (I didn't).
L4D isn't dark at all. In places where it would be dark, they have a light-colored fog instead. It's something I didn't even think about until someone pointed it out, but now it kind of bugs me:)
Anyway, no, it's not a dark game. The fog succeeds in making some areas feel darker while not actually being very dark.
If you listen to the developer commentary, they say that they came up with the idea when they found themselves regularly firing up a Counterstrike game with a few human players on one team and a whole bunch of knife-only bots on the other, and loving it.
My friends and I have been doing similar things since the N64. We'd play Perfect Dark against a bunch of melee-only bots, or play three players vs. one raptor in Turok: Rage Wars (we'd have played vs. a dozen stupid raptors, but that game only let you have four players no matter what, so we just had to set its AI to max). On the PC, we'd play one of the AvP games (I can't recall whether it was the first or second one) as marines vs. as many Alien bots as the game would allow, and just play to survive.
I'm sure many, many others have done similar things. For us, this is one of those "dream games" that we've always wanted; maybe we've even imagined it in our heads in some detail. I fired up the demo for this game, played a level, and was blown away because it was so close to what I'd wanted for years. I'll occasionally play a game like that, though usually it's some kind of RTS for whatever reason (Hearts of Iron II, Rome: TW, and Sins of a Solar Empire all come to mind, as does the Hoth level of SW: Battlefront). Every time it happens, it's like being a kid on Christmas morning, times ten.
L4D was one of those sorts of games. The Versus mode has proven to be where its long-term value lies for me, but the campaign is the part I'm in love with. That's the game I've wanted for the better part of a decade, and Valve read my mind and made it.
Aw, c'mon. Back in the day I've bought Doom3 for more when it was just released
Oh, god, I'm so sorry. I pirated it and felt like I'd been ripped off. I can't imagine what you feel like. *shudder* The only scare that game gave me was the lurking dread that I'd click the.iso, hit "delete", and the powers of Hell would cause it to re-install itself instead.
I'd feel like Valve had done right by their customers if they'd give us the two existing non-VS campaigns as VS--which they say they will do, but goddamnit Valve, that should have been done at launch or a couple weeks after--and at least two more official campaigns (for both VS and Coop). A new game mode is fine, but more maps are what I really want.
I'm less upset by the small number of campaigns than many are, I think, as it seems to me like 20 maps is quite a few for a multiplayer-only game, but given the nature of this one it just feels like there should be 6-8 official campaigns rather than 4. I'm sure we'll get some great community content, but Valve is just so damn good at what they do that I want more of it straight from them.
Maybe part of the reason it bothers me at all is that the game was so clearly rushed. The fact that only two of the four campaigns were ready for Vs. play was one sign, but others abound in the interface and menu system. Hell, it still (AFAIK) kicks you back to the menu if it tries to connect to a server during a server search and fails, rather than just re-trying with the same search terms which is what pretty much everyone expects it to do. They clearly tossed the game out to the public before it was polished on even such a basic level, so I find it hard to believe that they didn't cut some planned content for the same reason. That's what I want--the stuff they cut to ship it faster.
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Wait...
Where does the heat in the water go?
Dreamcasts go for $50 or less around here. I don't think I paid more than $30 for mine. Bought the cheaper games I wanted (none were over $10) and pirated the rare and expensive ones. I'm on a torrent right now getting some of the more obscure ones to see if they're any good (I expect at least 3/4 of them to blow, and that's after narrowing it down based on "best of" lists online and reading the descriptions to see which ones suit my taste).
For that matter, there's at least one Dreamcast emulator for Windows. I've never used it, but it's there in the torrent I'm on.
I think it's this one if anyone's interested. It's slow as hell because there aren't many seeders, but set one game at a time to high priority and you'll get it in a day or so and be able to start playing. Seed when you get done!
Yeah, Magneto ought to have a "send every bit of metal in my opponent's body flying in random directions" move that insta-kills those guys.
Also, they should have Xavier, with a "kill yourself" special move that works on almost anyone and is unblockable.
Great game--just pretend all the really strong guys are having their powers dampened or something silly like that :) Hell, that's a very comic-book sort of device anyway.
You underestimate the size of HD video, I think.
Fine for discographies and DVD-Rips or even SD TV shows (a season or two at a time), but HD TV shows and movies would be out of the question.
DD-WRT is what you're looking for.
Bittorrent, webserver, whatever--it's Linux, put whatever you want on it. Runs on tons of routers, though the lowest end ones are usually a little weak to both keep up with routing and do downloading. Has a web config and torrent interface, I think.
Instead of the complicated "cache, wake computer, transfer, sleep computer" thing, just plug an external hard drive in to the router and share it with Samba or something.
Oh, right, links. All links go to screenshots page, unless the home page has some.
Linux:
1. Transmission (Linux, OSX, BSD, Solaris)
2. Deluge (Linux, mediocre Windows port available)
Windows:
1. uTorrent (Windows, Mac beta port available)
Transmission is my favorite. Really doesn't get any better IMO. Light, looks good, does everything I want.
Deluge is my second favorite. Not as light, not as snappy, a bit ugly, but about a thousand times better than Azureus.
I use uTorrent (muTorrent) on Windows.
Yeah, no kidding. I mean, it's not like they're coming after you for scamming them if they get whisked away to Jesus-topia.
If they're wrong, there's no reason to actually have a system in place--but if they're right, there's still no reason to have a system in place.
Free money (well, there's the cost of the website to sell the service and a fake "login if the rapture hasn't happened yet" thingy, but it's practically free)
Guns and ammunition also retain their value very well, so if things get way better you can always sell them, possibly at a small profit.
The story was very good, by FPS standards. Not Deus Ex good, but good. A couple levels were well done. Good atmosphere throughout. The gameplay was average or a bit below average.
If any of that strikes you as being a reason to give the game a good review, then that's probably why. I would say it's one of those shooters you don't really play for the shooting, if that makes any sense.
I do think that the gaming press in general is prone to praise anything that doesn't completely suck, and often pushes games that are OK at best as if they were truly great. I also think it's gotten worse since console gaming took off, for whatever reason.
Sounds like a job for... OCR!!!
Yeah, but that same character probably won't have 250% Doctor and 230% Repair skills, right? I didn't play anywhere near all of the side-quests in F3 (well, I reloaded a save after I'd finished and did them, but not at first anyway) and I did zero power leveling, but by about 3/4 of the way through I was running out of places to put new skill boosts so I just started loading up on ones that I hadn't intended to level up at all in the beginning. I was pretty damn good at everything, which was something that was hard to do in Fallout 2, and certainly wasn't something you'd do by accident. You might be the best sniper/boxer in the wastes, but you weren't simultaneously going to be a quantum physicist/physician.
Mine crashed shortly after I left the Vault on my desktop machine, every time I tried it. I ended up having to play it at super-low graphics settings on my laptop. What a buggy piece of shit. I mean, Bethesda's known for releasing games that are horrendously broken until the third patch or so, but I figured this time since they were just using an existing game system it would be different... NOPE. They still managed to screw it up, somehow.
Agreed. Oblivion is dreadful without mods, which is why I can't fathom someone wanting to play it on the Xbox. It's even worse pre-mods than Morrowind was, and the vanilla version of that game sucked compared to a well-modded one, though at least it was playable. The fucked-up leveling system alone was enough to ruin vanilla Oblivion.
Huh? No. How long has it been since you played Fallout 2? There may be more dots on the map in F3, but many of them aren't important, and I seriously doubt there were more sidequests. Further, nearly all of the quests in F3 were inconsequential, like the extended fetch-quest for Nuka Cola. I'm not against those, but they can hardly be considered a replacement for things like playing politics between NCR/New Reno/Vault City or any of the other major branching sidequest arcs in F2--hell, there was at least one in every city, and sometimes there were 2-3. I was very disappointed when I discovered that Megaton wasn't just the starting city, but also the most interesting one in the game. It was marginally better than The Den in F2, which was one of the minor cities in that game.
Aside from that, you had the stupid Towers with a moderately-interesting but stiflingly-limited quest (plus some more minor quests if you were evil, I suppose), the dull aircraft carrier with a couple of crappy quests, and a handful of gimmick towns (Republic of Dave, the one with the "super heroes") that were, I want to emphasize, fine, but not a replacement for the cities in F2. Big Town, oddly enough, was the best of the non-Megaton cities IMO, but it was still barely deeper than Klamath Falls. The bit with Harold was nice, too.
Oh, god, that was the worst. Bonus fail points if they turned the chapter in to a powerpoint presentation, then said nothing other than what was on the powerpoint slides. Then they'd require attendance, but be surprised that no-one was bothering to do the reading.
In the first two Fallout games (especially the second one) the vast majority of your time was spent on sidequests. You could rush through the game, but each new town drew you in to its problems and made you want to fix them (or make them worse, or find their enemies and agree to help them destroy the town, etc.) and helped you to prepare for the next area.
IMO, the biggest single problem with F3 was the lack of interesting sidequests that matter. Any two major towns from F2 had at least as much meaningful, deep quest content as all of F3. F3 was starved for content, and that alone killed most of what I love about the series.
Not in Morrowind. Go exploring in some of the tougher caves/ruins or run around inside the Ghost Fence for a while at level 1 and let me know how it works out for you :)
Of course it does. F3 is tiny compared to F2, both in terms of total world area (duh) and, more importantly, the sheer number and size of (interesting) quests. The cause of that is a combination of the move to first-person 3D and using voice actors for practically every line in the game. It's a trade off, and not one I'm terribly happy with. I thought I wouldn't mind it and was really excited about the game, but after playing it and thinking about it for a few months, I don't think it was worth it.
Don't forget the leveling system, which let you become godlike at everything by the end of a normal game without really trying to. That's 100% Oblivion, 0% Fallout.
In addition to removing the level cap, I hope they re-do the whole leveling/skill system to be more Fallout-like. IMO it was the one thing that pushed F3 over the tipping point from "Fallout in a new skin" to "Oblivion with guns and some Fallout references". If they'd gotten that right, it would have been a content-starved but true Fallout game; as it is, I reluctantly have to side with the "Oblivion with guns" folks.
Hell, I wish they'd change it for the next Elder Scrolls game, too. The fact that you become godlike at everything by the end of a normal game made sense in Morrowind for plot reasons, but IMO didn't in Oblivion. In Fallout 3 it was a complete break from the earlier games, in which you'd only have time to master a couple of skills (and be good at a handful of others) by the end of a normal game, unless you did a shitload of grinding.
You had to pick you skills that you wanted to excel at, and focus on those to the exclusion of most of the others. In Fallout 3 you will be a god and have stats at or near the top in every category, even if you don't try to (I didn't).
L4D isn't dark at all. In places where it would be dark, they have a light-colored fog instead. It's something I didn't even think about until someone pointed it out, but now it kind of bugs me :)
Anyway, no, it's not a dark game. The fog succeeds in making some areas feel darker while not actually being very dark.
If you listen to the developer commentary, they say that they came up with the idea when they found themselves regularly firing up a Counterstrike game with a few human players on one team and a whole bunch of knife-only bots on the other, and loving it.
My friends and I have been doing similar things since the N64. We'd play Perfect Dark against a bunch of melee-only bots, or play three players vs. one raptor in Turok: Rage Wars (we'd have played vs. a dozen stupid raptors, but that game only let you have four players no matter what, so we just had to set its AI to max). On the PC, we'd play one of the AvP games (I can't recall whether it was the first or second one) as marines vs. as many Alien bots as the game would allow, and just play to survive.
I'm sure many, many others have done similar things. For us, this is one of those "dream games" that we've always wanted; maybe we've even imagined it in our heads in some detail. I fired up the demo for this game, played a level, and was blown away because it was so close to what I'd wanted for years. I'll occasionally play a game like that, though usually it's some kind of RTS for whatever reason (Hearts of Iron II, Rome: TW, and Sins of a Solar Empire all come to mind, as does the Hoth level of SW: Battlefront). Every time it happens, it's like being a kid on Christmas morning, times ten.
L4D was one of those sorts of games. The Versus mode has proven to be where its long-term value lies for me, but the campaign is the part I'm in love with. That's the game I've wanted for the better part of a decade, and Valve read my mind and made it.
Oh, god, I'm so sorry. I pirated it and felt like I'd been ripped off. I can't imagine what you feel like. *shudder* The only scare that game gave me was the lurking dread that I'd click the .iso, hit "delete", and the powers of Hell would cause it to re-install itself instead.
I'd feel like Valve had done right by their customers if they'd give us the two existing non-VS campaigns as VS--which they say they will do, but goddamnit Valve, that should have been done at launch or a couple weeks after--and at least two more official campaigns (for both VS and Coop). A new game mode is fine, but more maps are what I really want.
I'm less upset by the small number of campaigns than many are, I think, as it seems to me like 20 maps is quite a few for a multiplayer-only game, but given the nature of this one it just feels like there should be 6-8 official campaigns rather than 4. I'm sure we'll get some great community content, but Valve is just so damn good at what they do that I want more of it straight from them.
Maybe part of the reason it bothers me at all is that the game was so clearly rushed. The fact that only two of the four campaigns were ready for Vs. play was one sign, but others abound in the interface and menu system. Hell, it still (AFAIK) kicks you back to the menu if it tries to connect to a server during a server search and fails, rather than just re-trying with the same search terms which is what pretty much everyone expects it to do. They clearly tossed the game out to the public before it was polished on even such a basic level, so I find it hard to believe that they didn't cut some planned content for the same reason. That's what I want--the stuff they cut to ship it faster.