Keyrock

I'm playing Portal Stories: Mel. It's pretty good so far, it's more Portal and I certainly don't mind that. I love Portal and Portal 2, they're amazing games. The voice acting is decent and the humor is a bit hit and miss, but it's definitely on the very high end of what I expect from a free community effort. Seems relatively meaty for a community mod too, I mean, I haven't even finished chapter 2 yet and there are 6 I think. At this pace, I could be looking at 8 or 10 hours of gameplay. Obviously gameplay time will vary wildly depending on how quickly you solve the puzzles. This ol' brain isn't as sharp as it used to be, but I solve the puzzles eventually.

Thomas Beekers did exactly that in Update 11:

Aha, just when things seemed darkest I was delivered from the anguish of boredom. A free Portal 2 mod called Portal Stories: Mel just released. I love puzzle games and I love Portal, so I'm all over this. Hopefully it's good.

Tell me that to my face! Shots fired! Me, I got nothing to play. I finished all the games I've been really wanting to play, I'm taking a break from Strife (waiting for an update to address the massive balancing issues), and nothing is jumping out at me. I might break down and *gulp* try to play an RTS during the Total War free Weekend.

Well played.

But, I thought they weren't coming for our games?

Likely with Pascal in 2016. Pascal will also be the first line of Nvidia cards with 3D memory.

Without doing any research, I'm going to say yes, I'm sure someone out there is saying that the console manufacturers paid off WB Games to cripple the PC port. The far more likely scenario is that Iron Galaxy, the company that did the Windows port: a) were not given suitable time to do a proper port and had to throw it together slapdash b) were not given the proper resources to do a proper port c) were not competent enough to do a proper port and were hired because they were the lowest bidder d) all of the above

Well, we are talking about IGN, a place where "journalism" means "we take what the publishers tell us at face value and regurgitate it to our audience with disgusting levels of staged enthusiasm". While Nintendo will likely never give us another F-Zero... *sniff* Hold on... Give me a moment... /sobs uncontrollably //tries to compose himself ///takes a deep breath I guess we'll have to make due with this: This looks a lot more like Wipeout than it does F-Zero, but the prospect of a Wipeout spiritual successor is pretty appealing in and of itself.

It looks like a good card. It's not the hammer blow to Nvidia that AMD fans had been hoping for, but it's not a bad deal either. It basically goes blow for blow with a 980Ti at the same price, so if you're looking for a card at that price range, it basically comes down to brand preference (or form factor if you happen to have a really small case).

Everything being massively sped up didn't bother you? Hm, nothing actually came across as massively sped up compared to most games over the last decade. It was stable, and nothing jumped out as an issue.Hell, the last time I replayed SR2 was about.. hm. 2-3 years ago now thinking about it. Not everyone had problems with it, the performance of the port was all over the place. I guess that is true of all games, to some degree, with a game running like a dream on one computer and having problems on another (with similar level hardware specs), but Saints Row 2 is a very extreme example. It's been a while, but I think the game's speed was actually tied to framerate and there was no way to cap the framerate (I remember games having issues like that in the past, but that was the 80s). So, if you had a beefy rig that could run the game at 120 FPS, then everything in the game was going at hyper speed. There were graphical glitches, keybindings not working, crashes to desktop. It worked fine for some people and was COMPLETELY unplayable for others. The Gentlemen of the Row mod fixed a lot of the problems, though some required weird workarounds as some of the problems were hardcoded into the game. One issue I had with the game, though I'm not sure if this was a PC only problem, was how insanely twitchy the vehicle steering was. You could tweak an ini to lower the steering sensitivity and make the cars much more driveable. Unfortunately, tweaking the steering sensitivity did so not just for the player, but for every vehicle in the game, and the driving AI was hardcoded to the original steering sensitivity, so when you turned steering sensitivity down all the AI drivers constantly crashed into each other causing massive pileups at every intersection. This was pretty hilarious for a while, but got annoying after a while, especially since it broke driving missions, so I had to put the sensitivity back to original and just deal with how twitchy the handling was. It's too bad because it's a very good game that I never got to really enjoy because I've never been able to get it to run well on any machine I've owned. I suppose I should give it a shot on my current monster desktop rig, though running it through WINE isn't likely to help me out in getting it to work properly.

Saints Row 2 says hello. I guess this is one case where the Linux port coming later might be a blessing in disguise. Hopefully Feral Interactive do a much better job on the Linux port than Iron Galaxy did on the Windows port.

Looks interesting. I hope by "survive" it means "dodge dangers while you explore an alien and potentially hostile planet", not "whack rocks with a pickaxe for half an hour, build a wall, lather, rinse, repeat".

I think people should just leave them be. Let them crawl up their own ***holes in peace.

^ Yeah. It's one of the myriad of reasons I stay away from social media like the plague. I've left a job on bad terms before. My blow up wasn't quite as spectacular nor broadcast nearly as loudly, but I still regret it and it did cost me. I'd like to think I've matured a bit since then (some might beg to differ), but I know I am still capable of losing it and having a really stupid outburst. I'd like to keep said outburst contained to as small an audience as possible. Broadcasting it to the entire world would be less than ideal, methinks. Twitter can be a really terrible tool when used impulsively, which is, ironically, exactly how it was designed to be used.

Burning bridges - Always a smart exit strategy. They did a Kickstarter campaign, got in over their heads, lost their shirts when their project ultimately failed, and now it's everybody else's fault but their own. I've seen this movie before. I'd feel bad for them if they didn't go out full on ***hole style. They were trying to make games that were different, more emotional, more, for lack of a better term, artsy. I frankly don't think they made very good "games", but I appreciated their attempt to go down a different path and use the medium in a more unconventional way. The thing is, there's a reason the term "starving artist" exists. The VAST majority of artists fail, that's true now, that was true 1000 years, that will be true 1000 years from now. I get that telling your customer base to **** off and demonizing them can be cathartic, but it's extremely short sighted. You may never intend to make another game right this moment, but what if you change your mind a year from now? Guess what's going to haunt you?

Revelations 1 wasn't episodic. The "previous episode" thing was just ...for fun I guess? Wasn't it episodic for the gamecube (or whatever system it originally came out for)? I know the XBox360/PS3 port wasn't episodic, but rather the complete game. It was originally for the 3DS and it was not episodic, it was divided into 15-25 minute long chapters (which makes perfect sense for a handheld game) and you got the "previously on" intros before every chapter to make it seem like a TV show, but you got the complete game all at once.

Heh, I made a screenshot of the same vista. For me it was the single prettiest moment of the game.

I think Total Warhammer looks and sounds great, and if I was into RTS I'd probably be creaming my pants for it, but I don't do RTS, so no interest.

It seems the biggest disappointment of E3 was Star Wars: Battlefront. Literally every single person that played the demo and commented on it that I've seen said they were underwhelmed. The consensus seems to be that the ground combat is solid but unremarkable while all the vehicle stuff is flat out awful. Hopefully they get it straightened out before release.

Yeah, I have a bad feeling this game is going to be a major disappointment. I really hope I'm wrong. From the moment this game was first revealed (two years ago?) to them showing it now, my response to it has gone from "Whoa, heck yes!" to rather tepid.

So, now that E3 is over and we've had a few days to get over the initial hype and the seemingly endless stream of marketing buzz words, what games from E3 are folks looking forward to the most (I'm talking both games we knew about previously to E3 and games newly announced at E3) ? My most anticipated games from E3, in no particular order: Super Mario Maker - Far more robust tools than I had originally expected. XCOM 2 - It's more XCOM with expanded abilities, I already liked XCOM. Still bummed you can't stand, crouch, or go prone anywhere, though. Shadow Warrior 2 - I love Shadow Warrior and this looks much better. My only concern is how it will play in SP with it being designed for co-op. Just Cause 3 - I expect ridiculous mayhem. I like ridiculous mayhem. Deus Ex Mankind Divided - The fact that it was revealed that it would be possible to completely ghost the game from start to finish gave me wood. Genei Ibun Roku ♯FE - This game looks insanely Japanese, insanely wonderfully Japanese. The battles taking place on a stage with a cheering crowd watching on is a cherry on top. The combo mover are hilarious too.

I finished Shadow Warrior (2013) again. I had forgotten how infuriatingly long the second to last battle in the second to last chapter was. Besides that one disgustingly long battle (seriously, I had to pause a couple times because my hand was cramping up), though, I had a ton of fun playing the game. I have no idea what I'm going to play now. I had hoped to be playing Shadow of Mordor (so many "Shadow" games) by now, but the Linux port isn't out yet. Feral Interactive stated "Spring 2015" as the target release for it, but obviously they missed that target since spring is over. Hopefully it's out soon.