Be Excellent To Each Other

I just played through The Park

A very interesting explore-em-up similar to Ethan Carter (though much better I feel).

It's short, but there were a couple of moments where it caught me off guard and made me jump

Info here.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/402020/

I have finally gotten round to playing Wasteland 2, even though I've had it in my Steam library since early access was available but I never actually played it...and since they were nice enough to release the Directors Cut I though it was high-time to start it up.

I like, it's an interesting mix of old school Fallout (obviously) with a bit of Jagged Alliance mixed in. I recommend (even though the random encounters can be a chore, they are easily avoided with the right skills but I always think I might be missing out on some cool guns). I also believe it is also available for those next gen console thingies I am hearing about.

At this rate it will be this time next year before I start on Divine Divinity.

Interest piqued.

I'm enjoying it a lot, even though it's quite an ugly game. The combat is excellent. Better than XCOM 2 and probably the best since JA2. The game has more in common with the old fallout's than Wasteland 1.

No matter how many times you try to calibrate the Xbox 360 pad The Beginners Guide will not invert, and there's also no invert option.

-5 points already.

I didn't have that problem because I play games the right way.

Huh. That's incredibly poor in this day and age. And weird given that The Stanley Parable worked fine, I think.

Holy sweet baby Jesus.

BROFORCE is absolutely incredible. So. Many. Explosions. And. 80s. Action. Heroes.

I've just found my new favourite game since Not a Hero.

I can't get on with The Escapists: The Walking Dead. I don't actually know what kind of game it is. The first level was a straight forward adventure (which I wanted) but then the main game started and, um, it just leaps ahead in time from Rick waking up to being at the farm and Rick having a kip. Then it wants me to have breakfast and do some fucking laundry. I've no idea what's going on but it's not actually a great start.

I has the Steam Controlller for Crimbo.

It's quite a snazzy piece of kit to hold although the stick and the buttons seem too close to the centre of the pad away from a comfortable grip.

Quite looking forward to trying it out though and seeing what it does.

Plugged it in and it's doing what my mouse used to do. I might just pack the mouse away and see how long I can cope with the haptic trackpad thing.

And, yes, I've no idea what haptic feedback is but I can described it now I've been playing with it for a bit: your pad makes a noise as you run your finger over it like a creaking door and you get a weird bumpy feedback under your thumb/finger no matter where you are on the pad.

So there you have it, haptic = bumpy feel and creaky door noise. Sorted.

Mind you, now it's being a bit spazzy when I go into and out of Steam. If I close steam it just stops the controller working altogether.

There's no keyboard when you're on the desktop neither so I can't do away with lugging my keyboard onto the sofa which is a bit of a shame when I just want to boot up the PC or just scroll over to the files and click on a film.

Hang on, I've sorted it with some firmware.

A quick doss around in the controller configure setting reveals that you can arse around with everything for different things. So since I'm only interested in navigating the desktop at the minute there's a "desktop" setting that I've mucked around in and it's ace.

Pretty impressive this controller thing is. Apparently there's a gyroscope in there an' all which you can configure for some games, which reminds me, I might even play some games with it at some point!

Yeah I'm thinking of getting one.

Me too. I'll probably wait until I get to a PC game that only needs basic controls but has no pad support at all and pick up a Steam controller so I can sit on the couch.

Do you like Phoenix Wright games and beautifully illustrated pictures of animals wearing suits? Well, you'll probably quite enjoy Aviary Attorney.

Crysis.4k.wow.

So today I really felt like playing Crysis. The first one, like. I already had it on DVD but I remembered it uses Securom or one of those other really nasty DRM things so I figured I would just stick my hand in my pocket (for the third time !) and buy it on Steam. I managed to get it on G2A for about £6 which I was happy with.

At first it didn't want to play ball at 4k. It seems the game only goes up to 1920x1200 or something similar to that, so a couple of hacks were required. After editing the CFG file I managed to get it up and running, only to find that for some reason it is detecting my refresh rate incorrectly and if I turn VSYNC on it locks to 24hz. Harumph. I've had the issue before in newer games and apparently it's something to do with how Displayport works (60hz Displayport = two 30hz signals strapped together or something like that I don't remember exactly how it works) so I had to play the game with VSYNC off which kinda sucked. It's especially bad running Crossfire as the tearing is really noticeable when the FPS spike as they often do.

However, I decided to press on and I am glad that I did. It's incredible to think that the game came out in 2007 and actually has the Intel Core 2 Duo picture on the loading screen.

They must have really fitted this game out with some savagely large textures because if you played it today and had never heard of it before you would easily let it pass as a modern game running on modern engine. And as usual it's a fine game, but 4k really does make it better to play. Targeting foes far off into the distance for example is so much easier at such a stupid resolution. I ran the game at 1080p just for a laugh and it really did look like a completely different game.

It's not often that I feel happy to be running 4k. Usually when it stutters or farts or something I just get really bummed out about it. But today was a good 4k day

Even better is that I have a friend who works for AMD so he has sent them a request to fix the 24hz issue

DARKMAUS or 'a top down Dark souls with mice'



Game link (£6.99) - http://store.steampowered.com/app/406130/

That sounds shit.



I WANT THIS NOW. Looks quite atmospheric. Me likely, and for £7 I'm in.

Well I would be but apparently the minimum specs are an i7 according to Reddit. I might try it still but it's a bit of a worry.

That's wrong. i3 is min spec:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/rise-o ... 0-6433519/

It might be the recommended spec. If my PC didn't run it I'd be very pissed off! I have an i5

I was talking about the Dark Souls with Mice game.

Dark Maus minimum specs...

Oh right, sorry. I've been skim-reading today!

I refuse to believe that the game won't run on a CPU without hyperthreading.

An i5 is (mostly) just an i7 without hyperthreading.

haha, I7 as a minimum yet it runs on Vista with 4gb ram ! Vista doesn't even support the I7

For anyone wondering how your PC working in light of this information, you'll be pleased to hear that Vista does, in fact, support the i7.

I think JC's getting at hyper-threading doing silly things on Vista. Certainly it did early on and negatively impacted performance, may have been patched later though I suppose.

And yes I know this is from 2008 - http://www.techradar.com/news/computing ... own-480468

[edit] Turns out the second comment on that article said the same as me but much better, ie "Dear Lord, do some research".

I'm glad we've got PC "experts" on this forum.

Even today HT can hurt more in games than it helps, my i7 runs with it disabled in the BIOS. Battlefield 4 for example micro-stutters with it turned on, at the end of the day a hyperthreaded core isn't a real core.

That stops on Windows 8 and onward The core support has been completely rewritten.

I did a few tests last year with a 6c 12t CPU (A X58 Xeon) and found that Windows 8 is far, far better at supporting more threads than 7. Even though Vista is pretty much EOL now I decided to install it any way (I installed a couple of Linux, XP, Vista, 7 & and my findings were that core support in 7 and below on highly threaded CPUs was erratic at best. Windows 8 though seemed to support them all and spread the loads very evenly, even at just a 'desktop'.

Of course you can 'core park' an I7 in Windows 7 and you can disable HT completely but that doesn't exactly fill you with confidence about an OS far older that was pretty much shit any way.

But hey, as some one said the other day why take my word for it when you pretty much have the entire internet at your fingertips

It depends very much which exact i5 we're talking about since there seems to be a huge range with very varying capabilities, which I guess is the problem with using it as a recommended spec.

Edit: I've got a i5-4670K which is pretty snappy and quad core, and it should be as good as an i7 for games, I would hope. I don't think any game will max it for the foreseeable future.

I would say that even the very first generation of I5 (Lynnfield?) should still be more than good enough to run games on.

I have a feeling he has a later one though

The problem is I suppose there are mobile i5s which are only dual-core.

Specifying the number of cores required might be a better bet but even then you have AMD who have a slightly 'individual' way of defining what a core is, plus even 'proper' AMD cores aren't equal to Intel cores anyway....

The desktop i5s have always been quad-core though, and the first generation of them are indeed still perfectly adequate for modern PC gaming. (If my first gen i7 is anything to go by, which I'm basically running as an i5 anyway, and is capable of delivering enough grunt along with a GTX970 to chuck GTAV around at 2560x1440.)

I also have an old i7 that's served me well, but sadly it might not be chunky enough for a Rift.

Firewatch is something to think about, Bamba, Sat et al: http://store.steampowered.com/app/383870/

Although i might wait for a few updates. The launch version has been frustratingly buggy for some.

It's also three hours long, so I'm not paying £13 for it.

It looks beautiful, that's for sure. I've seriously gone off the old "walking simulator" at the minute though. I really want something to captivate me, but if it goes cheaper then I'll have a dabble.

The Talos Principle is doing that for me at the moment. Beautiful and captivating.

Yeah, I've had it on my 'maybe' list for ages and meant to mention it here when it was released to generally positive reviews but I totally forgot. I can't even remember where I heard about it originally (some random RPS article I suspect).

NO. I'm sick of random puzzle games too. I don't like puzzles for puzzles sake. Begone with your puzzles.

So you don't like Portal then? There's a good story to Talos.

I've finished Portal. I'm sick of playing puzzle games 'now'. I reckon Antichamber ruined those types of games for me, y'know.

Antichamber is inherently unfair though. The Talos Principle is glorious.

Antichamber was balls. I enjoyed it for a very short amount of time before hitting the point where I felt I was just wandering around like a tit.

Especially as it has a countdown which seems to do nothing at all when it hits zero. Some of the puzzles were fun but it was an exercise in frustration, certainly.

As always, Portal 2 is the best example of a mix between 'pure' puzzling and a proper game structure. Obviously a lot of it's still based in sort of stand-alone puzzles but there's enough of a narrative, atmosphere and changing level design to give it a sense of progression that carries you through it.