Be Excellent To Each Other

I rule that photo inconclusive and submit an application to strike out.

Hang on, you can turn that shit off? Do they shut the fuck up too?

What?!?!?!?

Are you somehow unable to see the colour gradient in that inch an a half? Really?

Eh?

What colour gradient you mental?! It's a black bar! Similar to what you get on most DVDs.

Look at the first photo you've taken : the blue begins almost where the screen begins.

That's just the camera blurring the light off the text! It's a solid black bar of nothingness.

Don't worry WTB, I can see the black bars on the second pic, you aren't going mental

Phew!

But you can see the problem, right? That's a large amount of screen real estate! Apparently it is for performance reasons, by the way. There's sub-HD and then there's this!

Those tiny bars? Only some sort of obsessive nutcase would even notice them, never mind get worked up about them.

That's almost a sixth of the screen area blacked out. That's not tiny in my book.

I reckon WTB has his TV set to widescreen. It's nowhere near that on mine. Or has he been messing around with the screen settings in the game? Hmmm...

(if there are any)

Ummm.... it's a widescreen tv, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was set to widescreen.

AHA! Problem solved.

So anyone else played it?

No, I don't play betas as they cause cancer and kill babies.

It's nothing to do with my TV settings. Every other Xbox 360 game uses every last pixel on the same setting.

Admittedly the pictures aren't great and maybe you can't tell how big they are because the TV itself is black, but they're far from tiny. As Gaywood says it's nearly a sixth of the screen. They're an inch and a half each. Grab a ruler, that's not tiny.

Capcom: "In times of austerity we're cutting back on pixels"

Capcom: "Extra pixels to be released as day 1 DLC"

I reckon I'm still getting it. Enjoyed the demo more on second playthrough. Just wish those black bars weren't there!

Shhh...

Reviews are out and generally positive. 7's and 8's across the board or thereabouts. It was never going to be a Dark Souls beater after that demo, but it looks like there might be plenty of fun to be had.

After the gaming lull at the beginning of the year, there's lots to look forward in the next two months:

This is out on 25 May
But before that Max Payne 3
Before even that there's the awesome demo Sniper Elite v2 (co-op is bound to be aces)
Then at the same time as Dogma there's Ghost Recon Future Solider (Cracking baby-eating Beta, by the way. The cover system has a bloody good idea that needs to be copied)
Then in June? Lollipop Chainsaw (Comedy again though? Does Suda not remember why people even know his fucking name?)
Resistence on PSV (Fuck. Only Mr Dave will be playing this. I, for one, would fancy a crack at that)

So that's 6 games in 2 months worth checking out, probably.

This is pretty good, I have to say. It's nothing whatsoever like Dark Souls, though it is bastard hard in places. It's basically Skyrim with combat that isn't shit and companions that aren't a total waste of space.

I'm not really noticing the black bars.

I'm gonna pick it up when it bombs in a few weeks.

I quite like the online interaction. You have 3 companions ('pawns'). One of which you create, the others you summon from the rift. The ones you summon are other people's created pawns. If someone's using your pawn, the pawn learns about quests and areas that you may have not been to yet. They also earn you Rift Crystals, which you can spend to hire higher-level pawns than you normally would be able to. It's quite neat.

This is a brilliant idea!

Very interesting.

Good chance of then.

I'll wait to hear more Bezzie Opinions first.

I will try the demo later....

The demo is pretty awful. By all accounts, the game proper is a lot less shite.

I thought it was okay.

Mind you, I didn't start going fucking mental at teeny-tiny black borders on the screen

By the way, when that first came up I was thinking about making the forum so you'd see black borders around the page, but I can't be bothered. Can you pretend I did and shake your finger at me knowingly?

You evil genius! You perfectly wonderful bastard! You diabolical man!

Yeah, the demo is basically two boss fights, one has a tiny bit of dungeon before it, but that's it. Considering the boss fights are my least favourite bit of the game, generally speaking, it's a poor choice for a demo.

Tellingly, this has kept me playing long after I should have gone to bed for the last several nights. With this and Kingdoms of Amalur, it's a great time for western-style RPGs.

Nicely done.

o/

YeeeHAAAAAAW!

It seems to be implemented really well. If your pawns have explored an area or done a quest with someone else, when you come to do it, they can give you helpful hints like appropriate shortcuts, and stuff. Really clever.

That's really cool. I love these clever little uses of online connectivity (yes, Dark Souls!). Once again proof that the Japanese are still the best when it comes to ideas.

The best Western developers can come up with is a tacked-on multiplayer mode. Whatever the game.

Call of Duty?

What the fuck is this rock track that is burning out of mine ears since I loaded this up? Christ, that's the worst introduction to an RPG I've ever witnessed and I haven't even pressed start.

You shut up.

Pawns should shut the fuck up. The endless natter is pissing me off. And the voice acting? Oh. So. Bad.

Plus this must be the glitchy-est Capcom release I've played.

I've not seen a single glitch. They do talk too much, certainly. You've turned off the on-screen dialogue for them, right?

They say stupid things too. Like, when you're heading away from town, and they say "Now we're about halfway to town!"

I learned my lesson from the demo and turned all that dialogue shit off straightaway and minimised the HUD to as little as it'd let me. The fuckers still talk over the top of other folk who have something to say though. Grrr.

I caught one little sod battling it out with a harpy in the corner of a dungeon clearly where they shouldn't be. Then when I was fighting the dragon at the start I thought I had to clamber up it and was aimlessly jumping about having scored zero hits and it cut away to a scene where I'd stuck the dragon in the hand with my sword. Sloppy.

Hang on, it's getting good.

There's some neat little touches in this game. The character creation stuff that is normally just aesthetics in other games actually affects how you play the game. Bigger characters have higher carrying capacity. Smaller ones can fit through small gaps to find loot. Female characters get on easier with certain others (avoiding spoilers), but they make ogres horny which enrages them

Capcom! Brilliant, genius, wonderfully imagined games, original ideas, with a sprinkling of "what the fuck were they thinking?". I love them.

It's much better on the open road, monsters to fight and stuff, but there are some annoying glitches: monsters appearing at predetermined points so if you get there early they appear out of nowhere. Wandering NPC have a weird tendency to pop up out of nowhere as well. And one pawn was getting so eager he couldn't stop running around a cart. He just couldn't stop. He loved that cart. Strange stuff.

There's some pretty horrible pop-in on the 360 - NPCs and monsters both appearing out of nowhere very close. Was probably that.

I'm obsessed with this game, and I can't work out why.

How dare you say that ! The Xbox 360 is a remarkable feat of engineering and I won't have you say anything bad about it !

Actually, I think mine lasted for about an hour before I sold it on...

http://motormouthbipolar.blogspot.co.uk ... -care.html

Shortly after I wrote that I decided to give it one more try. I got to the NCR prison full of powder gangers and the crawling ensued. There's a scrap in one of the prison blocks with about twenty powder gangers. I gave up shortly afterwards.

Yawn.

You bought a 360 in October last year and compared it to a current gaming PC! This generation is already over - nobody is pretending otherwise.

I compared like for like basically. New Vegas against New Vegas. Even if I had gone back to 2005 and compared NFS Most Wanted vs NFS Most Wanted it still would have been the same.

Still, at least I tried it. It proved quite costly too, because to my disbelief they are actually incredibly hard to sell.

I tried Ebay and got messed around by a liar (won the item then said her son bid on it). Then I put it on Gumtree and got offered £50 for it with four games and a new faceplate) and finally I sold it back to the guy I bought it from for £60.

As I say, at least I tried it.