Oblarg

How much does an unsilenced pistol ruin your chance of stealthing at all? Will you have to gun your way through the rest of the mission? Reason I'm asking is I don't particularly like silencers and would rather play without one. Guards nearby will hear the shots, come looking for you. But if you can shift your position and stay out of sight, they'll eventually stop hunting (although their guard will be up). If they do spot you, they'll eventually hit an alarm that will alert everyone in the level. But if you manage to kill them before they hit the alarm, or find a way to shut off the alarm such as finding the computers and hack the alarm system or use a radio mimic gadget (they have a cooldown), then things go back to normal. So you can play without a silencer, it just makes things tricky. Or you can just rely on steath takedown, sneak up behind someone, shove a knife through their spine That's cool, that's kind of the response I expected. I'll be having fun being a combat specialist with unsilenced pistols.

How much does an unsilenced pistol ruin your chance of stealthing at all? Will you have to gun your way through the rest of the mission? Reason I'm asking is I don't particularly like silencers and would rather play without one.

I'm going to wait for the official release date (maybe a bit after that), partly because I'd like to stop my computer from crashing every four hours before I play the game, and partly because I'm going to be taking a short trip soon anyway and would like to play the game from start to finish uninterrupted.

Can you line up chain shot while in cover, or do you have to pop out into shooting position first? Also, what are the stat changes like on silencers? Are pistols more effective without them?

Ok, so I have devised the following procedure to attempt to isolate the problem: It's most likely a memory issue, based on the sudden and random nature of the crashes. First thing I'll try the next time my computer crashes is pulling a RAM stick, then using it again until it crashes. If it doesn't crash, I've isolated the bad memory. If it does, I pull another RAM stick and repeat. If I get down to one RAM stick and it still crashes, I'll start swapping out single RAM sticks. If it crashes on all of the RAM sticks, I'll assume that it's not memory and move on to plan B... If it's still crashing, I'll replace my video card with the cheapo one from my mom's computer which happens to use the same video drivers, and run until either the computer crashes or I'm convinced that it won't crash and the video card is at fault. If that fails, I'll keep my mom's video card in the computer and put a different power supply in (the only one I have isn't high enough wattage to keep my 8800 gts running). Run until crash, or if it doesn't crash, then it's the PSU. If that fails, then I guess I'm ****ed. I suppose I could try putting a different hard drive on the computer and reformatting it (I really would rather not lose the data on my current hard drive, I have 40gb of music). Sound good?

How is chainshot? Is it appropriately awesome?

Entered.

I'm using a pair of sennheiser hd280 pros. They're great.

Alternatively, I could spend a day using the computer in safe mode. That'd be fun.

I've already used up more than half of my drive, and dual-partitioning is a bitch. It could very well be the PSU, though. It gets pretty hot at times. I wish there were an easy way to isolate the problem. The best thing I can think of is nabbing my mom's cheap nvidia card which happens to use the same drivers as mine for a day or two, and seeing if it fixes the crashes. Not sure she'd be willing to do that, though.

Could be. The volume of the buzzing is controlled by the volume knob, however, and if the speakers are off it will not buzz.

I never yank the power, I hit the reset button on the front of the case. I used the windows disk to check all the protected system files, it didn't find anything wrong. Not sure what reinstalling the drivers would do, as they've been installed for months with no problems, but I'll try it. I'm somewhat limited on my driver choice, though - any newer version kills DVI output, it's a known bug that nvidia will most likely never fix.

So, my computer is homebuilt, and it performed admirably for about two years. Then, without warning, it started bluescreening. Daily. Eventually I vacuumed out the case, and the bluescreens stopped - it's a relatively cheap case, so I assumed that the issue was simple overheating. For the past six months or so, I've had to vacuum out the case every month or two or else the bluescreening starts up again. Annoying, yes, but manageable. The most recent time it bluescreened, I went and got the vacuum, and cleaned out the case as usual. However, the computer then started crashing in a way I hadn't seen before: Seemingly randomly, the screen will lock up, the speakers will emit a loud buzzing sound, and I will be forced to hard reboot the machine. No BSOD, no minidump to debug the problem, just a frozen computer. All the fans keep running normally. This occurs about once or twice a day, and has been going on for the past three days or so. I have a nagging suspicion this is a problem with my video card (nvidia 8800 gts g92), as the last bluescreen before I vacuumed out the case was the following error: THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER caused by nv4_dsp.dll (nvidia display drivers). I think it's a hardware issue, as I haven't made any software changes to my video drivers in a looooooooooooooooooooong time (I can't update from driver version 180.48 because nvidia hasn't fixed the bug that kills dvi output on some of the older cards yet). 99% of the bluescreens I had seen before were page faults, which were most likely caused by overheating RAM from the information I could gather. The card isn't overheating (most of the crashes occur when it's not under much stress, around 75 degrees). My CPU temps are fine, as well: 52 degrees according to the BIOS. Eventviewer shows absolutely nothing going wrong prior to the crashes, and, as mentioned earlier, I have no minidump files because there's no bluescreen. Any suggestions on what this could be, or how I could go about fixing it? I'd really rather not RMA my video card before I'm 100% sure that will fix the problem.

You could beat ME1 in 6, that doesn't mean much. Average playthrough length will be 20-30 hours, and you'll need at the very least three playthroughs to see all the content.

Yeah, Word 2003 is such an outdated tool. You can't do jack **** with it. Which, surprisingly, is exactly what they spend most time doing at the EP. edit: beaten to the punch Yeah, that's pretty ****ing pathetic. Oh noes, word 2003! It only has a better interface than word 2007, and has almost no compatibility problems. The horror! Oh, by the way, I'm still using word 2000. And it's fine.

Just wondering, but is the gameplay smooth or is it kind of rough around the edges? I've been following the game for a while and the concept seems interesting, but in some gameplay videos, the combat seems kind of unnatural. It feels smooth to me. There have been some minor issues where guards have and haven't been able to shoot me behind cover. I like the way the hand to hand stuff works and it has gotten me out of a lot of bad situations. It depends on where you put your skill points. I went for a hand to hand pistols guy but have had to go to the assult rifle a few times when things get hectic. Overall I'd put the combat somewhere between Mass Effect 1 and 2. It's a lot more polised than ME1 but isn't quite up to the smoothness of ME2. But then, there are skill that have an effect on your shooting here. Do you have to carry two weapons around at all time, even if you're only going to specialize in one?

Actually, this is completely rational behavior on the part of the North Korean government. They can't ever risk establishing even lukewarm relations with their southern neighbor, since that would remove the underlying principles the regime is based upon. This sort of behavior also demonstrates to their people (even though it is not actually true) that the North Korean military is unmatched, since this sort of provocation can happen without serious retaliation. You still haven't given any opinion on what should be done about it.

And devs aren't going to stop using UE3 because of a minor bug such as this one. It happened to me maybe once during three playthroughs of ME2, and I was able to recover from it.

This song was a pain in the ass to find. After two hours in google, the best I could get was it streaming through flash player on some random website, so I ended up using audacity to record it. At least the bitrate was decent, I don't hear any noticeable artifacts. Damn the Japanese and their bonus tracks.

Scanner - Warp 7 Gotta love 80s German speed metal.

That's all fine and dandy, but the current North Korean state is not serving the North Korean people particularly well. It doesn't help that their leader is bat**** insane, too. What would you propose?

Omen - Don't Fear the Night

This will likely never happen. I really don't have much faith in our public school system. Unless it's completely reworked, it will continue to be awful. This is always an odd statement from the perspective of a public school teacher. Probably because I have public school success stories every year, and I have parents going to great lengths to get their children into the US so they can attend our schools. The system is far from perfect, but it is a gigantic and unique one and it has served many people quite well. As someone who relatively recently was in the public school system, I feel obligated to rant. The quality of an educational system cannot be measured by examining the best performing students. Smart students from well-off families will perform well, regardless of the quality of the educational system, because of the comparatively immense amount of support they have from their families. Thus, the people whom the system has "served well" most likely would be well served under any system. American public school curriculum has several fatal flaws that severely hinder its ability to serve the students. Students need to be in different classes based on their academic strengths and weaknesses from a much earlier point, and these classes have to be exclusive to those students who have the talent to be in the class. Any attempt at tracking students based on their academic talents is crushed in our educational system because the parents have too much sway over the system - if a parent complains enough, his kid will be placed in a higher level class. This is not smart design, and cheapens the educational experience for everyone in the system. And, for the above to work, schools need to be able to identify the academic strengths and weaknesses of the individual students. This is a lot more complicated than it initially seems. The obvious method of identifying a student's academic strengths would be to look at his grades. However, currently grading is not at all indicative of mastery of the subject - it measures work habits. In fact, if anything, grades become a worse measure of a student's aptitude of the subject if a student is better at that subject, because the practice work which makes up a significant portion of the grade loses importance if the student understands the material, and thus the student is less likely to do the work. In fact, grading policies usually aren't even clearly defined - much of the grading is dependent on the teacher, and thus the accuracy of grades varies greatly from teacher to teacher. Test grades are a better method, but test design is a challenging problem and current standardized tests are not particularly effective. Current multiple choice tests are great for measuring if a student is capable of answering a problem, but terrible for measuring whether or not a student actually understands what he is doing. The latter is what is important in determining which class a student should be in, not the former Similarly, class design needs to be focused on the ability level of the students in that class, and students should not be forced take classes in subjects in which they are not skilled and which they most likely will not need. The average student will not need math past algebra, yet it is almost universally required for all students to take at least precalculus. English classes need to teach literacy before they teach literature. Grammar is almost completely absent from English curricula, yet students are expected to write essays and perform literary analysis. You can do neither without understanding how the English language works. Foreign language, as well, is almost impossible to learn without the framework of grammar. I could go on, but I'm getting tired of typing. I'm very disappointed with our educational system.

This will likely never happen. I really don't have much faith in our public school system. Unless it's completely reworked, it will continue to be awful.

Did they omit the "The Espionage RPG" subtitle in the Spanish version, or something?