Be Excellent To Each Other

*makes loads of car noises*

Wooo just found Drag ! I thought they hadn't put it in.

I am waiting for this to go cheap on Origin.

Is that CD key thing you bought it from legit JC? I don't understand how you can buy an EA game for like, half the price that they're selling it for on Origin. How do you install it with the key you buy?

It's an Origin code dude. So you just load up Origin and insert the code the same way you do with Steam. Sadly the game has rocketed in price and is now over £40 on CDkeys and G2A want £43 for it

When buying from key sites just make sure they do not specify Russia, so you would need worldwide. Basically some guy in Poland buys a shat load of them and then sells the keys. You used to be able to use Russian keys (they cost about £12) and just activate the game using a Russian proxy. I only ever did that once, and sod's law Steam changed the rules so that you had to be in Russia all of the time to play it so I got a refund from G2A (who use Paypal so you're safe).

I've probably bought 50 or so games from G2A Kinguin and CDkeys and only ever had an issue with Borderlands TPS which I knew was Russian. I just contacted Steam and asked them to remove it from my game list after getting the refund from G2A.

http://www.kinguin.net/product/340003/n ... in-cd-key/

£34.64 on Kinguin. There's a small charge for Paypal (surcharge) and remove their buyer protection (you have Paypal). I would say the game is worth just over £35 tbh. I rarely get any pleasant surprises in gaming these days but this one has surprised me.

I know people have griped about the always online and it being annoying to upgrade your car (because you have to go through all of them to see what is available) but my only gripe with the game is that you really do need to set up the car properly for drift, meaning you need to go back to the garage and change the handling around so it's best to pick them all off at once.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Need-For-Speed- ... 1_1&sr=8-1

£39.99 on Amazon.

Ever wondered what Superhot and Hotline Miami mashed together would be like? Superhot but overhead of course.

SHOOTER INC.

You can download it for free/name your own price here: https://albatr.itch.io/shootout-inc

But if you're wondering what it's all about then play it in a flash game here! https://albatr.itch.io/superhotline-miami

Surprisingly difficult but also awesome for a flash game.

The developer behind Paper Please has released a very early demo for his new game 'Return of the Obra Dinn'. I don't know anything about it myself but the Eurogamer article bills it as, "a little like the first-person mystery of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture transplanted into a different era with a unique aesthetic". You can grab it from here:

https://dukope.itch.io/return-of-the-obra-dinn

Ta!

Reading through this week's releases on Kotaku, a game called Jalopy caught my eye.

A procedurally generated roadtrip. As Kotaku describes it:

"Take your beaten up old car and try to drive hundreds of miles across the former Eastern Bloc, repairing its engine and fixing its tyres all the way."

Sounds like it will be up a few people's alleys here.

Some videos on RPS.

Yessssssss

Sounds good!

Currently stress testing my resolve to not buy more games is the new Humble Bundle which is one of the best they've put out in a while with quite a few things I had my eye on plus a voucher for 50% off The Talos Principle. With that voucher and stuff like Shadow Warrior currently sitting at £40 on Steam it's pretty bargainacious. Full list of currently included games:

Pay what you want

A Fistful of Gun
RONIN
Gods Will Be Watching

Pay more than the average, currently $4.48

NOT A HERO
Shadow Warrior (Special Edition)
Dropsy

Pay more than $10

Titan Souls
Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star

Classic 1998 PC game Battlezone has had a redux version put out. Pretty much the same as the old, only with some-what souped up graphics. By no means a bad thing, as the original was pretty excellent. Basically it's a first person RTS with you flying around on the moon or Mars or Venus in a tank, building base defences and factories and leading charges against those meddling Space-Ruskies. Lots of thinking about terrain, good combat and pretty good enemy AI. The re-mastering job is odd as it makes you think it always looked like that, and then you see the before-and-after shots. It's currently £11.99 on Steam, which I feel is slightly too much, I'd call it a £7.99 game. But I loved the original and after playing the three surprisingly tough opening missions last night, I'd say it's still very much a winner. Just make sure you save frequently mid-mission if you play it, the game has a habit of sometimes throwing scripted events at you that make a mockery of your planning, forcing your unexpected defeat.

Woo-hoo!

Battlezone '98 was an absolutely brilliant game! As well as great gameplay there was a really good story that was revealed mission by mission. (There was at least one nice easter egg in there, too.)

Fun fact: I bought the big-box version of the original from a department store when it first came out. When the lady scanned the barcode the till said "£1.20", so that's what I got charged for it! An almost-literal steal!

It's endlessly brown. It makes Quake look like the most colourful experience in gaming.

Just a heads up. If you are on Windows 10 you can get a couple of free games from the app store. First up is Killer Instinct, which was a Xbone game. I've downloaded and installed this (20gb or so) and it runs wicked and looks stunning. You can also get Forza Motorsport 6 : Apex beta for free too. It too is around 20gb or so.

Not tried that yet, think I will do that now

Stellaris is out today. I looked at some of the videos on the Paradox game website. It looks like Iain M. Banks the game. And awesome.

Really buying more PC games this year than I originally anticipated.

Humble Bundle is selling a "Narrative Bundle".

Her Story

Read Only Memories

Cibele Cibele

Pay more than the average of $3.56 to also unlock!
Broken Age

80 Days

Sorcery! Parts 1 and 2

Pay $10 or more to also unlock!
Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

Deep Silver have just released Dead Island Definitive edition and Dead Island Riptide Definitive edition. They both have massively improved graphics, which sounds good seeing as they were some of the best looking games even on the old engine.

I bought both in a pack from CDkeys for £18. I'm a big fan though and have played the original through three times. Also a great co op romp if you get into it with a chum

No other Dead Island fans then?

I've now played it for about six hours and I gotta say, hats off to Deep Silver. They've improved the graphics enormously and I like how they have refined the combat so it feels smoother and more responsive. The upside is that I die a lot less than I used to which is fantastic, as some of the enemies in DI were so hard I would die a few times just to take one out. The graphics are not all for show though, the improvements in steam and transparent things is so much better now. In the original game they were rather blocky and a bit of a mess so when a zombie was hiding in the steam you could not see the shadows. Now you can

Obviously the graphics are what makes up 99% of this but another reason I'm happy I bought them was that it gives me a good insight to what Dead Island 2 will look like. It seems to use the same new engine that Dying Light used (which was also fantastic btw) only even better.

I wish all devs would do this. I would love to play through Fallout 3 using the Fallout 4 graphics engine or better. I'm sure that like these Dead Island games the difference would be so massive that it would almost be like playing a new game. I know there are the Redux of the two Metro games but the improvements are absolutely nowhere near as massive as this.

I played a little of the first two on the 360 but they never really grabbed me.

The reviews of the remastered games are a bit mixed and I've plenty of other stuff to play right now so maybe a cheap buy later.

I played the first one for a bit and it was hilariously broken. The good bits reminded me of Oblivion with zombies though.

I got the 1st in a bundle and instinctively hated right away. I didn't found any fun to be had with it.

I'm playing Broken Age now. It looks wonderful, but as far Point & click adventures go, it's pretty mediocre.

The idea never really appealed.

I've long since passed the point that zombie games are new and interesting.

I will admit it's very repetitive. I guess if you're autistic then your luck's in and if not it would be a bit shit

I just love exploring the island though. They really nailed the look and feel of the game. I never really bothered much with modded weapons before but this time I have modded nearly every weapon I have. The 'leccy is so much fun, they dance like Michael Jackson does in thriller if you catch them right

The newest Need for Speed game which was discussed a bit earlier in this thread is now half price on Origin, this makes it €34.99 for the Deluxe Edition, which for me with Paypal worked out to £28.61.

That's the sort of price I was waiting for so I've snagged it, downloading now.

There's also a big Origin sale on at the the moment, so possibly worth taking a look to see what's on offer.

Oh cool you got it let us know what you think. I haven't played it in ages due to my monitor change, GPU shuffle and so on. I kinda got caught up in Fallout 4 DLC and now Dead Island but I have the game saved on the Origin cloud so can pick it back up. Still got Doom to finish yet but I'm finding Dead Island a good way to escape the bs going on with the flat etc.

Well that was slightly alarming for a short while, I was getting regular and catastrophic framerate drops which were rendering the game unplayable.

However, what pointed me off in the right direction for a fix was:

1) The intro missions had worked perfectly

and

2) It didn't matter what resolution and graphics settings I was running at, the same regular, brief drops down to 1-5FPS were happening.

(On top of that, CPU and GPU temps were in control, so it wasn't some crazy throttling thing going on.)

So I decided to try going into 'play alone' mode, rather than the default 'open world' mode the game runs in. (This was where '1' had given me a clue, as the intro missions are before you go into the online game, and they'd been fine.)

And yep, that fixed it, rock solid after that - so clearly some weird lag/hack/shit thing going on with other players in my game.

Unfortunately I can't quite pimp it totally out at 2560x1440 and maintain a solid 60FPS with v-sync on (dropping into the mid 40s on a fairly regular basis), so I've decided instead to go for 1920x1080 with everything on maximum pimpage and v-synced up.

It is indeed a gorgeous looking game, and now I'll get a chance to actually play it - PC gaming eh? Lol. As ever these days though, controls wise it's 100% perfect right out of the gate with a 360 pad.

Oh yes I quite like the cheesy FME stuff as well, it feels pleasantly NFS to me. Also, Amy is cute.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/zotac-ge ... 90-zt.html

It happened....

oops wrong thread.

The new NFS game is great, if you liked the original NFSU then this is basically that game again but in splendid modern-o-vision.

It has its flaws, the lack of any meaningful tutorials or explanation of many of the game's mechanics has left me Googling a couple of things, but these are things you only need to find out once.

There seems to be some sort of compensation going on, so I have a beast of an E43 M3 for when I'm in the open world, but the same car in a race situation suddenly gets a lot slower, I don't mind this though as it keeps the races interesting.

It's spectacularly pretty too, one of those games that you actually step back from a bit just to admire how lovely it is - nice to see the Frostbite engine being used for something other than a BF game.

Around £25 on PC now direct from Origin, not sure what's happened to the console prices but well worth a look if you're into your arcadey style racers and like admiring shiny cars and sticking loads of extra bits on them.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

viewtopic.php?p=489949#p489949

There's literally no point typing out a new post, when I can link to a nearly six year old post about NTS Hot Pursuit and have it be entirely relevant to the new NFS game.

Except I will do a new post as well, now I come to think about it.

I've been stepping up to the HARD events the last couple of nights, and deliberately doing so in cars that are up to the job, but not pimped out to the max either. In particular there was a pretty long race against seven other cars, over a long, twisting course that traversed a good amount of the map. The difficulty level was such that even slowing down a bit, or fluffing a corner but not having a smash, was plenty enough to get overtaken by a car or two.

So what's the last thing you want in this sort of scenario? Yes, that's right, RANDOM TRAFFIC.

It took me six attempts to get the win, four of those were lost because of horrible random traffic encounters, one was where I did actually fuck up, and then I finally got the win on the sixth attempt.

Why have other traffic on the roads at all during the race events? By all means have them there when you're in the free roaming mode, but in a race situation, just...... no.

NFSU did that too dude. Errant box van last corner of a ten minute adrenaline fueled race.

Need for Speed franchise: An unbroken line of wet excrement.

I don't understand why anyone above the age of 16 plays them, myself.

Because they're fast, fun and exciting.

As far as arcade racers go they're up there with the best, like, Outrun 2006 Coast2Coast levels of good. (Well, almost.)

I find the likes of the Gran Turismo games, and Project Cars, and all that 'sim' stuff incredibly dry and boring, but I can understand they appeal to some folks.

Give me an NFS game over a Forza game any day of the week. Or a Burnout game, I loved all the Burnout games.

I also love the Burnout games (except Revenge which also has too much rage inducing randomness). NFS is nothing like them. And comparing them to the Out Run games just boggles the mind.

Great arcade racing games include:
Burnouts 2, 3 and Paradise
Split/Second
Outrun 2 and C2C
Ridge Racer Type 4

Not Need For Speed. They are utter gash except for the one Criterion did, and that's because it was just Burnout Cops v Robbers.

I enjoyed NFSU2 on the OG Xbox. Probably because it was the first game of that type that I'd ever played.

They're all broadly what you'd call 'arcade style racing games', and I like the genre. The new NFS game is an arcade racer. Outrun2 and Outrun2C2C are arcade racers.

In the simplest terms I'd say you have ARCADE and SIMULATION albeit not as black and white as that, but I like stuff at the arcade end of the scale.

The new NFS game has a lot of Burnout Paradise about it, (mostly the free-roaming world peppered with all sorts of events and challenges and things to find), which is a thoroughly good thing.

You're talking to us like we don't like arcade racers. We do, just not shit ones.

As far as I'm aware only me and JC here have actually played the new NFS, so calling it a shit game is pretty ignorant.

Stop white-knighting for EA. They won't sleep with you.

Your mum did though.

Oh I don't know it's had its moments. The original Road & Track magazine one with the annoying rival was great fun and the Underground series were amazing. Anything in between those and after (apart from the latest NFS) has been toss though. I never liked the police chases in the first instance (the old PSX game) and IMO they have ruined what could have otherwise been great games (like Carbon and Most Wanted).

This new one though almost goes back to its roots. Apparently it's by Black Box? the team who did the original NFSU. And it shows. It's great fun, it looks beautiful and you can avoid the police if you so wish.

Underneath? the gameplay is exactly the same as NFSU. So rubber banding, unfair placement of vehicles (you can't win a race until the AI decides you can win it*) and so on. However, all of the magic from the original NFSU (annoying things aside) is there IMO.

* I noticed in the original NFSU that certain events seemed to be rigged. Most notably a couple of drag races very late in the game. The only way to win was to keep restarting the event until the AI cars crashed. Otherwise they were simply too fast to catch, even on a perfect run. And this was with the best car maxed out.

There was also another race about four races from the end of the game that was as Hearthly described. One wrong turn = fail. One crash? you'd be left so far behind that you may as well just quit. Random objects thrown into your path etc. In NFSU this race I talk of was a real cunt. You had to make a 90' turn right before the finish line and it met with a junction. A white box van would pull out. It was almost impossible to dodge, and if you hit it every one whirred past you. It was extremely annoying.

I guess that is Black Box's difficulty AI. Make the race close to impossible, and only let the player win after they've attempted it X times.

Now in NFSU that wasn't a problem as you could reload the race almost instantly. But in the new one you can't. You have to quit and exit the race before restarting it and the load times are far longer than a few seconds.

There's a restart option, just bring up the screen that has the mobile phone style icons on it, there's a restart option in there. (It's the little 'back' button on a 360 pad IIRC, next to the big green X in the middle.) This is an instant restart of the current event and only takes a few seconds.

It's another one of those things in this game that isn't in any way explained to you, and doesn't appear in any logical sort of place, so you have to find it yourself.

That said I had another blast with this game last night, it's not perfect but aside from the random traffic all my other complaints are just niggles really, when you get a properly good run and are chaining the nitrous and the drifts perfectly and you get to a near-zen sort of 'zoned in' state, it's a thing of real beauty.

Great soundtrack too, not in a GTA style 'Oh another song I recognise' sort of way (although there are some like that), the tunes they've chosen just fit the game very well.

Got a 1976 Mark 1 Golf GTi nicely tricked out at the moment, that's fun to drive, although I don't think they were really designed to have 250hp on tap

Would you not include Daytona in this list? I would, in fact.. I would replace Burnout Paradise for it. I never got on with it you see.

Yeah I agree it's terribly documented and reviews were non existent which is a shame as it's a decent racer underneath it all.

Not sure I'd count OutRun 2 or C2C as a "racing game", as you're not really racing so much as looking at the pretty cars and landscapes.

You clearly haven't delved properly into C2C's COAST TO COAST career mode and the hard Flagman/Girlfriend challenges!

Heart attack ftw!