Bartimaeus

The division between "my own kind" and "not my own kind" is pretty arbitrary. Should I bother dwelling on and feeling empathy for someone horribly murdered who was my next door neighbor? How about someone in my district? City? State? Country? Continent? Some people go all the way, some even beyond. Others don't even do the first. Similarly, some are so concerned with political ideology they don't consider those of the opposite ideology to be their own kind. Same with religion, race, and probably a veritable plethora of other such factors. I think it's abnormal to presume everyone shares the same values of what constitutes as "their own kind". Why should I necessarily feel a natural affinity for all those born in the same country as me - a country that's larger than all of Western Europe with some parts of Asia thrown in? I don't think it'd be bad to, but...for some, national identity is trumped by other factors - or might not be a factor at all.

http://www.phonopath.com/ WARNING: Requires Audacity (or some other audio editing program) to play. Pretty cool idea for a puzzle game. Unfortunately, I've always really sucked at understanding words coming out of regular people's mouths under even normal conditions. So...yeah, I really suck at this. :<

Haha at people saying 4GB of VRAM is "typical". Here, take a glance at Steam hardware demographic figures: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey 33% of people only have 1GB; a further 20% below that; 30% above, but still below 4GB. Roughly only 2% have 4GB, and finally, the remaining 14%, (well, actually, there should be 15%, but rounding curtailed a single point...), are something else - not sure what, given how uncommon 4GB is, it'd be weird if 6GB was several times greater. But yeah, if your game requires, at minimum, 4GB of VRAM, you'd be cutting out at least 83% of the potential market, (assuming these stats are good, which they probably are). Not the greatest idea, I would warrant. There's a reason minimum specs are typically low.

One of two 16-20s, apparently - kind of depressing, as I feel old already! I also fall into the 11-15 years of PC gaming. My first PC games were Age of Empires 1, Baldur's Gate 1, and Diablo 1, at roughly age 5.

Well, actually, we do allow it in the real world, (to some degree, anyways - depends on how it's said)...just not in the PROFESSIONAL real world, and you're generally ostracized and/or banned from offended places as a result...which, hey, players and admins still have the freedom to do, respectively.

Obsidian Forum Community -> Obsidian Community -> Computer and Console

It must be weird for you at times to realize you should be feeling some emotion about an event that has upset everyone else but you just don't feel anything? Discussing something else more pertinent to you that's related to the topic at hand =! you don't feel anything at all towards the topic at hand, Mr. BruceMcAssumptions. For example, my post here. ;p Because there's no way to suspend your empathy, or look at it from a different perspective that doesn't involve empathy, or simply ignore anything your empathy might be conjuring up, or...

I don't know who William 2 is, but I hope he's an alright fellow

I think the major problem is that Spooder, (the guy who got his game removed), is in a position of power to do harm to Steam's reputation...a platform under which he is essentially subservient to. It's roughly the equivalent of going on a verbal rampage about your boss and your company to your co-workers, your family, your friends, their friends, the rest of the world...and your boss himself. Your boss, (and the company you work at, through him), having heard all of this, is understandably going to be unhappy, and might not want to work with you anymore - especially if you made death threats against him. I think this is completely justified, but hey, you're free to think what you think, too.

My only regret about the situation is that it was a two-man team - though based on the other guy's tweets, he doesn't seem exactly like a paragon of wisdom, either, but still. How many more careers are people going to self-destruct because they can't stop acting like spoiled brats on Twitter? That guy was completely and utterly ridiculous - if he hates Steam so much, then don't release on Steam. Simple as that - if you don't like to play by other people's rules, thankfully, you are not forced to. Just be prepared to not have them help you, either. This is all in addition to the reported criticism banning they were doing shortly before this all blew up. So yeah, all in all, I don't really mind how the situation ended, though, again, I do feel a little bad for the other guy.

I don't even see said game on Steam's store, anyways...

How do they expect to keep load times short, I wonder...(for those playing off of HDDs, anyways)

It still is, from a gaming perspective, anyways... Glad I only paid $100 for my i7-4770k. Anyone have any idea how expensive the GTX 960 (or equivalent) will be? $150-$200 is my ideal price range for GPUs...

I tried Rome II, which I just could not get into so it wouldn't be proper to rate it, and I didn't get even halfway through Dark Souls 2, the only other new 2014 game I tried to play. I don't play too many new games.

If I hadn't played with the Cheat Engine speedhack hooked into the game constantly, as well as have hotkeys to change the speed while in game, there's no way I would've gotten to even Port Llast on my last playthrough.

I read some book called...A Far Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier? "Multicultural" Literature class. Dreadfully boring, particularly the first half. Bleck. Would recommend only if you hated yourself...or if I hated you, maybe. House on Mango Street - same class. Not as bad, but still kind of bad. I should read a book I'm actually interested in one of these days...I don't read as much as I used to.

Given that a 270X only draws...what, 150W at max? ...I kind of doubt the "minimum" power supply needed is 500W...you could probably get away with 400W. That is, if there were any decent 400W power supplies to begin with - seems like all good consumer grade power supplies start at 500W, at least for brands found in the U.S. 850W is surely a bit overkill for two. (e:) I was slightly mistaken - the 270X can consume up to about 180W, not 150W. So I guess the minimum would be around 450W...at which point it might as well be 500W.

*twitch* Hey buddy, they're EMPERORS! And, uh, empresses, too, I guess - I got one or two Theodoras while playing, which I thought was pretty neat, even though it wasn't entirely grounded in history for the Romans. I'll try and give the game another try with your suggestions in mind. It did ruin Total War for me, after all. Thanks. wot

The problem with these kinds of plots, is that they're never player-driven, but rather obviously-stupid-protagonist-driven. Like I said before, I wouldn't have done all the horrible things to begin with, because it's obvious from the very basic tone of the game that this isn't, y'know, your normal military action shooter. Because if you make it freaking clear to the player that hey, let's look at this from a real world perspective and realize it's horrible, so please don't do it...you know what? The player has a tendency not to do those horrible things and instead try to work around them as best as they can...alternatively, they might think harder about their options and maybe realize, yeah, this is absolutely horrible, but it still has to be done - but at least I realize that it's horrible and that there might well be consequences. The game allowed for NONE of that. There's never any choice in the game - it's, "protagonist tells you to do horrible thing after horrible thing that are obviously horrible things that you're gonna be yelled at later for, so you do it because you have literally no other choice to progress the game, and then the game gets mad at you". It's predictable, it's boring, it's preachy, and it's, quite honestly, a little pathetic. This is so painfully obvious pretty soon into the game. A good game it does not make, however. There were so many other ways to do what the game was trying to do, but it took one of the worst options to try to do so - a completely one dimensional, railroaded, linear third person corridor shooter. You know what they could've done for that white phosphorous scene? Make a save right before the "decision" to use it, and let the player *decide* what they want to try and do - use it, or don't. The game is supposed to be more realistic than most other military shooters, right? So have the militants completely overwhelm the player each and every time they try to fight the camp head on...or let the player try and sneak through, but allow for there to be no actual passage to get through so the player always gets caught and butchered. Something along those lines so that the player organically *wants* to try and use the white phosphorous - preferably without really thinking about it beyond "I'm frustrated and this seems like an easy way out" - and isn't just railroaded into using it. At THAT point, the game is justified in showing, "holy crap, look at what you just did!". An important part of making that work, though, is making sure the game doesn't look like it's obviously rigged in the game's favor for the other options, but rather, just simply too hard for the player to pull off realistically. That can be tough, but at least I'd understand if they failed on that part.

That's because I didn't much see any. You know what was really annoying about that whole white phosphorous thing, too? I didn't want to do it from the get go. It's not like doing the whole shooting bit was exactly hard, so why would I start shooting white phosphorous at what were clearly not combatants on the radar? You could literally see that they looked like normal citizens or refugees or whatever right on the radar thing where you were aiming the white phosphorous! But you're not given a choice - I didn't do anything at first, but the game won't progress if you don't start shooting the stupid thing. And, like I said, it didn't help I didn't like the basic gameplay. I also loathed the characters and the overdone voice acting - the main character was especially ridiculous. Everything he said felt so forceful and over the top...like he was shouting to a huge audience. And the things he said were just...stupid sounding. And that's never minding the obligatory fairly stereotypical black guy. All three of those guys drove me insane. So, er, what the heck did you like about it? lol

Narrative? Compelling? Uh...yeah, sure. We killed hundreds of militants to get to where we are right now, but, hey, there are like maybe three dozen more dudes ahead, and there's this neat white phosphorous cannon sitting over here...how could we resist? Also, we're not actually going to take a look to see if they're actually really militants, even though they currently haven't even spotted us yet! "Oh my gosh, we are such horrible people! The indiscriminate killing of the other hundred dudes before this clearly did not show that maybe there's something wrong with war and possibly us if you pay any heed at all to our normal societal values!" In my books, this kind of narrative would be laughable, not compelling. It's the kind of narrative almost any action game could show if it really wanted to, but it doesn't because it'd be ridiculous, not to mention tedious and preachy...all three of which the game very neatly exemplify. The fact that the basic gameplay was pretty boring didn't help much either. That seems to be true of every corridor third person shooter I've ever played, though, so maybe I'm a little biased.

I have a G400. It's essentially a clone of the MX518 with a different paint. *shrug* Not sure if they sell it anymore - probably replaced by a newer, slightly crappier model, knowing Logitech's recent trends with their mouse sensors.