Now Gaming: ... Created 13 years ago2010-12-11 02:04:50 UTC by AJ

I started the download around 10 pm last night, and by the time I got up this morning at 6 am, the download was long complete.

I loaded up the game briefly this morning just to make sure it works, and it does.

The annoying thing is that it prompts me to log into the Social Club every time I start the game. I don't plan to play multiplayer, but I still need to cancel the login every time. How annoying.

It's console tastic.

I sometimes make my games taste like consoles too, but that's probably because the DVD case is plastic, like most consoles.

@satchmo: If you haven't played GTA 2 before, I recommend it. It's not like the more recent GTA games. It's fun playing alone and great fun playing with others.

GTAIV is absolutely fantastic in terms of characterisation. The plot is decent and the gameplay is fun enough to support it. It falls short by trying to include too many pointless things like maintaining friendships and dating. Tedious.

It absolutely shines online, though... Well, so long as you can put up with the completely atrocious Games for Windows Live requirement. And by online I don't mean deathmatch or any of the other stupid modes. Get a mate, get on teamspeak and get in free mode. Just run around all of Liberty City with a mate doing stupid shit and having epic stand-offs with the police. It's stupendously good and utterly, shamelessly hilarious. Me and Urby play it, and Bad Company 2 online more than any other game.

NOT RIGHT NOW ROMAN, I'M BUSY.

GTA4 is basically making friendships, then destroying them, then moving to another place. Missions include: kill Mr. X, bring things to Mr. X and kill y numbers of bad guys. And getting called 500 times a gaming session by Roman.
If you like this kind of gameplay, you will love it!

There's also this thing with the "online" part in the game, which felt somewhat boring. But it diversifies the game a bit, which is good.

I didn't like how horrid everything felt, particularly after San Andreas (or rather, the 'third' games in the series). Driving was one of the things I loved in the previous games and in this one, it feels awful.

URBY
What game will you first install on your new Rig!?

I really enjoyed Vice City. Anything afterwards just felt... I dunno... like it tried too hard. Or didn't try at all. One of 'em.

@Unbreakable: I'm thinking I'll benchmark it with GTA4. Then I'll be downloading all the new games I got around Xmas that I couldn't run. (Mafia 2, Dragon Age and some others)

Right now, I've really only been playing Grand Chase and Starcraft 2 (with the occassional switch up to starcraft 1, for the custom map nostalgia)

I really like the editor for sc2, it's practically a make-your-own 'Mod' executable. Really fun to splice different units together, chreating a custom set of abilities for them and other junk.

I was playing Perfect World International for awhile. However, gameplay gets pretty repeatative and maxing your character's level costs an unreasonable amount of time, in my opinion. The graphics are pretty, though.

Replaying the old Splinter Cell's (except Pandora Tomorrow, it's not as good, and not on Steam), working my way up to Conviction. Figured it was time I played it, despite not liking what I've seen.

On the PS3 I'm about the play the first DLC for Costume Quest. That was a fun little game.

Playing Gran Turismo 5 at the moment on the PS3.

Got back into New Vegas after not playing it for a couple of months. This time with mods

I see you got improved blood effects. Where'd you get the mask?

Just entered this game because of nostalgia, thought I wouldn't stay even 30 seconds but..

At first my city was like:10 minutes after it was like:immigration. It's super effective!

Where'd you get the mask?

It's Boone who's wearing it - not me :3
And he got it after we butchered a doctor. It's not a mod. (although dressing companions is.)

Been playing more Left 4 Dead and Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter now that my brother's at home (and brought his computer). Also been indulging myself in Burnout Paradise. I didn't think they still made good racers
The game is epic! I often find myself crashing just cause it looks so cool!

I have been on Kongregate alot lately so I haven't actually played anything since I downloaded Left4Dead2.

Been working in Hammer alot as well. It doesn't help that I am married with children and work so I don't have alot time.

It's either map or play....so I choose to map most of the time.

How exactly do you get a custom title around here?

How exactly do you get a custom title around here?

Hmm, I would answer by "it's hard", but the question just reminded me I've been a regular member for 4 years now on TWHL. By that I mean I rarely didn't visit everyday TWHL. And when I didn't, I was gone from home. I think I deserve a custom title :D.

They're automatically enabled when you get a tutorial award I think.


Although I know several were enabled in special circumstances.

How exactly do you get a custom title around here?

Any kind of profile award (MOTM, tutorial, etx), being a moderator, or other random conditions that the admins decide on. For example, everyone who entered compo 27 is allowed to use custom titles as a sort of apology for the results taking several months to get posted.

You can also bribe me.

I desire a custom title.

With?

In response to Strider, not striker

Hmm, I would answer by "it's hard", but the question just reminded me I've been a regular member for 4 years now on TWHL. By that I mean I rarely didn't visit everyday TWHL. And when I didn't, I was gone from home. I think I deserve a custom title grin - :D.

I think all of you fail to realize that I have been a part of this community for quite awhile; probably about 4 years or ever since this new version of the site came out. The banana site just doesn't cut it for me.

And I believe I log on like, everyday, sometimes multiple times a day.

At least there is some clarity on it now. I thought it was a little more random than all that. I will try and enter the next compo.

Original DoD
Harvest: Massive Encounter (just started playing this again)
wordfeud (droid app)
T3:Rise Of The Machines (2003)
Star Trek: 25th anniversary (dosbox)
Advance Wars 2
Starcraft 2
Minecraft

For the past week I finally started playing BC2: Vietnam which I bought when it was on presale. It's loads of fun.

I've had a lot of fun with BC2:V so far but what do you think about the maps? They seem abit unbalanced in places. And one of them is a complete clusterfuck for the attacking team.

I've been playing SimCity 4 (in multiplayer o_O)

I forget the name of it, but I know it has rice fields, but yeah I know what map your calling a cluster fuck. I played it last night attacking. Possibly the worst map I've ever played in a battlefield game. It's impossible.

Operation Hastings is easily the best. It's really fun and pretty balanced.

The rest of the maps are great, too, but like you said can be kinda outrageously imbalanced.

I don't remember SimCity 4 having multiplayer.

But, it's possibly because I never really checked, lol.

i recently tried installing bf:vietnam and bf:2142 on windows 7 but i couldn't get them to work on my machine... anyone able to play those games on their systems?

For Strider, and anyone else wondering about Frictional Games' (amnesia devs) unsure financial status earlier in the thread: http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/2011/01/four-months-after-amnesias-release.html

"we can happily announce that things are looking better than ever for us."

"we are in incredible good financial situation right now."

Great news! looks like we can expect more from Frictional.

Awesome. I read they're thinking of trying a different genre for their next game. If they put as much effort into it as the put into survival horror, it can only mean good things.

EDIT:
Finished Chaos Theory today, moved on to Double Agent. I remember it being scrappy on the 360, but it's even worse on PC. A terrible port of an already dumbed down game. Why did Ubisoft ruin this series. :<

Yes! Normally when someone finds a formula that works and works I'd say more power to them, but I bet whatever they do will be great. They remind me of a younger Valve.

i played might and magic v: tribes of the east and let's just say in the campaign the typos and mismatching audio and text dialogue is a major turn off. What can I say, it's a Russian game. Each campaign level takes over three hours.

get on steam 2muchvideogames

Been playing DOOM a lot recently with Potatis and just myself at times... Evilution FTW!

joe is that free on steam?

So, playing through GTA IV.

It's so disappointing. Everything in the game feels like it's wallowing through thick mud: the animation, the controls, the shooting and the driving all feel slow. The driving in particular is crazy. The cars steer horribly and the physics engine is just ridiculous: the cars will occasionally just float through the air when you hit a tiny bump. As well as that, what the hell kind of super PC did Rockstar have in mind when they ported this game?

I really don't understand how GTA IV got such rave reviews. It has so many problems, problems that affect the core parts of the game. If the problems were just ancillary, I could overlook them, but they're really not. Rockstar put this effort into making the game 'realistic', but so many aspects of it aren't. Also, the voice acting is atrocious.

Woah, woah, woah.
Hold on, there.

The shooting is pretty awesome. Gunshot impacts look great with the euphoria physics and it's damn satisfying.
The driving is pretty good, actually. Want an example of bad driving? Play Mafia 2.
I've never had floating car problems, and it runs absolutely fine on my PC with max settings at 1920 x 1080. (And I mean max everything. View distance, detail distance, night shadows - everything.)
And the voice acting in GTAIV is also nowhere near atrocious. It's not great, but it's damn sight better than a lot of games out there. Try Just Cause 2 for atrocious.

Edit:
Just a thought - don't you use a mac? That probably explains everything.

It explains nothing, you fool. Native dual-boot into Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

It's a crap game. Plain and simple. Over-hyped to the hilt and nothing to show for it. While the engine tech is great and the world itself is very well detailed and alive, the game itself is plodding and shows next to no evolution from GTA 3. The story itself, while far better written than previous games, is still vague with Niko rolling from emotion to emotion without any context between them.

For a third-person cover based shooter, it's rubbish. You clearly haven't played games like Uncharted that do it right.

I'm with Ant. I think the GTA games are largely overrated sandbox shite that lost their appeal after Vice City. Rockstar just throw a heap of half-working crap into a bowl and tell you to have fun instead of building a proper game with some actual focus and drive.

Come to think of it, it's the same with Bethesda.

Native dual-boot into Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

The software is not what he was referring to, it's the hardware.

I also fail to see how you can compare uncharted 2, to a fully open sandbox game such as GTA IV. You were referring to the cover system, nevermind.

2x Intel Xeon E5620 (Quad core) @2.53Ghz per CPU, 6GB of RAM (expandable to 32GB) and 1TB HDD. Real let down for Mac hardware, isn't it?

Granted, my graphics card isn't the greatest, but still. ATi 5700 series.

Why does Rockstar assume that I want to walk everywhere too? Niko's walk speed is abysmally slow and in combat, it's ridiculous. Snap movement just can't be done, unless you're holding down shift...while you've got WASD going, Q to stick yourself to a wall, plus left and right mouse buttons, and the mouse itself. That's not intuitive, it's just ridiculous.

Ant's mac is one of those expenso-supermacs so there's no issues with his hardware.

While I don't hate GTA4 as much as Ant or Strider, I also think that the gameplay is severely lacking in many places. The tech is awesome, but the gameplay itself leaves much to be desired.

I'm of two minds about the driving. On one hand, the cars feel like they're made of jelly. On the other, when you pull off that perfect jelly powerslide, it's awesome. Another example of truly awful driving to add to Huntey's example? Saint's row 2.

They took a bunch of the good stuff from GTA3/3.5/3.75 and replaced it with stupid crap that nobody likes. ("Hey cousin, want to go see some BEEG AMERICAN TEETIES?")

Still. It's better than Fallout 3. (Since Strider brought up Bethesda)

Crollo: Uncharted 2 can be compared to ANY game. And it always wins!

I don't see how you could get the impression rockstar wants you to walk anywhere, as with all the gta games i imagine the emphasis would be on jarcacking, and driving around? Still, I've honestly never played the fourth as don't have a machine to run it, and when I did it wasn't released yet. :/

Why does Rockstar assume that I want to walk everywhere too? Niko's walk speed is abysmally slow and in combat, it's ridiculous.

You can sprint by repeatedly tapping one of the keys. I forget which.
And Rockstar doesn't think you want to walk everywhere. They think you want to drive everywhere, which you should be doing.

It's also not necessarily a 3rd person shooter. You'll be doing just as much driving in the game as you will shooting, if not much more, and it's closer to some kind of life sim in many respects than a 3rd person shooter. I won't argue with the sloppy shooting mechanics, but I get the impression that you're making the shooting out to be more important than it really is.

When you're forced to enter buildings and take out enemies, you're doing it on foot. You hold Shift to run, which makes no sense. I don't want to walk at any point at the game, so why do I have to press an extra button to get Niko to do something he should be doing by default? Yes, I get that you drive a lot, which I do, but when the game forces you to go on foot, it's rubbish.

Still, it's way better than Far Cry 2, my undisputed 'worst game of all time'.

Haha, sorry, I didn't mean for you to take the mac comment seriously. That was just me having a go :3

I have played Uncharted and I enjoyed it. It is a good adventurey shooter, but you can't seriously compare GTAIV to it. You just seem to be entirely missing the point of GTAIV. It's not meant to be played like Uncharted - a series of mostly linear encounters. It's meant to be messed around in. They deliberately make it ridiculously easy to lose your wanted level (go to safehouse and sleep) so that you can fuck about as much as you want and do generally awesome shit as a nice break between story missions. They then tried to expand on this with friendship maintaining which was a dreadful call, but you can just ignore them. Only problem is you miss out on some sometimes genuinely hilarious dialogue if you do.
Going back to the earlier mentioned Mafia 2, I think you'd actually prefer it to GTA, because it has a big sandbox city which then offers NOTHING AT ALL TO DO IN IT other than the story. The shooting in it is spectacular, especially if you have a physx enabled card and it's a game you could reasonably compare to Uncharted. Both good, fun, solid shooters but absolutely nothing more.
I prefer my games to take themselves less seriously for the most part. Exceptions being the HL series, Mass Effect series and Dragon age, all of which are held expertly together by gripping narrative and extremely identifiable and likeable characters.
Uncharted and Mafia 2 are more like Mirror's Edge in my view - they're great to play through once, but they had no lasting effect on me and I'm probably never going to play them again.

tl;dr:

GTAIV doesn't take itself seriously. Neither does the Fallout series. If you accept that and just enjoy messing around with them, you'll find a great deal of enjoyment.

Huntey's top 5:
1. Fallout 3/NV
2. Mass Effect 2
3. Half-Life 2 & Eps
4. Dragon Age
5. Bad Company 2 (Online only. Singleplayer was a bad joke.)