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Ka0 posted:If you're into grognard stuff, war simulators, empire simulators or just play civilization, anno, whatever, a decent laptop would be ok. Anno 1404 is pretty processor-dependent, in my experience. Turn-based stuff should be relatively fine, though.
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Dec 19, 2010 22:25
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A question for the benefit of a friend of mine: What's a good mainland European equivalent to Newegg?
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Dec 20, 2010 01:20
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abigserve posted:3rding this, also never ever ever ever buy anything that has the word "gaming" on the box I'm pretty sure Logitech G4/5 mice have been advertised that way, and they're perfectly good products.
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Dec 20, 2010 04:04
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:I've used friends' gaming mouses before, but never really noticed a big difference between them and my $5 3-button Logitech besides number of buttons and being marginally more comfortable. Is a slightly higher DPI really ever gonna make a difference in anything but fine skill contests besides absurdly talented players? It's not a huge difference, but you don't have to be "absurdly talented" to notice it. It's most useful when you need to pick out lots of tiny little targets in a row, so like selecting individual High Templar in Brood War, or poking people with a shock rifle from across the map in UT. If you don't play RTS or arcadey FPS games it's probably not going to change much but they're also just really comfortable, sturdy mice.
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Dec 20, 2010 05:30
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systran posted:I have a ton of fun with League of Legends because you can play with five friends on Skype and the game just demands a mouse and keyboard basically, it simply would not work on a console. Does LoL have Chinese servers? If you're playing DotA clones across oceans anyways, you should give HoN another shot; they finally added working team matchmaking and I'm trying to put a team together again.
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Dec 27, 2010 08:08
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Taffer posted:Because of its simplicity and hard-counter style, there's little room for improvisation or the strategic unexpected, almost every move is a memorized tactic or counter, and that makes the primary difference between players to be how fast they can execute the memorized moves. No offense, but you don't understand StarCraft at all. Both games have one of the least hard-counter oriented models in the entire genre, most counters are dependent on upgrade level, the number of units involved, positioning, etc. The UI and unit comp decisions that you claim make it "simple" actually do the exact opposite; every aspect of the game is designed to force you to make more discrete decisions, which is pretty much the definition of depth and complexity in an RTS. The only reason "improvisation" works in something like Supreme Commander or C&C and not in StarCraft is because people haven't played those games at a high enough level to discover ideal strategy. If those games were deep enough for there to be any interest in it, people would hammer out memorized counters and tactics pretty quickly - if they haven't already and we just don't know about it. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Dec 27, 2010 |
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Dec 27, 2010 08:23
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Mooktastical posted:This makes no sense. Why would a Logitech mouse turn you off of Razer products forever? I assume he means "so much better I wouldn't consider Razer again."
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Jan 3, 2011 01:01
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Aenslaed posted:Crysis was more of a tech demo than a game. It was all about selling CryEngine 2 and reaping the benefits of licensing. Just like the holy grail that is Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Tournament 3. Nobody liked UT3 but everybody uses UE3 ranging from Gears of War to Mirror's Edge to Mass Effect. I liked UT3. 
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Jan 5, 2011 00:06
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El_Matarife posted:What's the best pure PC news site these days? I'm getting really sick of reading Shacknews as they're becoming more and more of a console gaming site with PC as an afterthought. Rock Paper Shotgun seems alright, but I'm trying to figure out if there's something bigger out there with more daily updates. Rock Paper Shotgun is the savior of PC gaming news/journalism, unless you're just plain not interested in indie games, in which case they're merely good. I've read Blues News once or twice and can't say I was really blown away, but if they have more regularly updated content that might be what you're looking for.
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Jan 17, 2011 17:04
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Samurai Sanders posted:Source-based games I have (Half Life 2, L4D2, TF2) have native support for gamepads. The problem is, whatever console-based FPSs do to make precision aiming possible, those games aren't doing it. No matter where I set the sensitivity, aiming is just impossible, and I can't put my finger on why. Because you don't have auto-aim in PC games.
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Jan 23, 2011 22:28
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systran posted:If I have never played Vampire the masquerade and want to check it out this late in the game, what mods are essential and poo poo? Just the unofficial patch, although I think there are two of them so you might want to check the VtM thread (if it's still around) to make sure you get the right one. EDIT: Think this is the good one: http://www.patches-scrolls.de/vampire_bloodlines.php
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Jan 26, 2011 19:24
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RagnarokAngel posted:In fact, the humble indie bundle was a perfect storm that refuted all the major justifications of pirating. As I recall pirating the Humble Indie Bundle actually costs them less than buying it for less than ~75 cents or so, due to Paypal fees.
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Jan 27, 2011 03:41
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StarCraft 2 will never be ported to consoles in a recognizable form. It's not just improbable, it's physically impossible unless one of the major consoles suddenly decides to implement full mouse support.
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Feb 1, 2011 04:05
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Death Himself posted:I may be the odd one out but the two kinds of games seem to be aimed at a totally different sort of gameplay. Both are FPS games but I don't see anything to be gained in trying to compare them except some publicity. The difference is that one of those types of games is superior, the other kind is the one that's still being made. 
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Feb 2, 2011 23:38
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Vertigus posted:"It takes itself too seriously" is the most moronic complaint in the history of criticism and it's a shame people actually say it. Only when meant literally, and not as shorthand for "takes itself more seriously than it deserves to."
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Feb 3, 2011 05:25
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Zapf Dingbat posted:I'm back in the PC gaming game after like 5 years of being pretty much out. Getting married, buying a house and being semi-unemployed for a couple of years will do things to your upgrade budget. At least in that time I racked up many hours of TF2 play. Thank god for the Half Life 2 engine, or else I wouldn't have been able to do anything. STALKER (SoC or CoP, either is fine, don't bother with Clear Sky), StarCraft 2, Heroes of Newerth, The Void, just to cover PC exclusives. Bad Company 2 isn't exclusive but is a breath of fresh air as far as good console to PC ports go.
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Feb 14, 2011 21:06
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Speaking of GFWL, has anyone succesfully tied a Paypal account to an XBox / GFWL Marketplace account? I'm trying to buy the PC version of Blazblue, and XBox.com itself claims that it's possible right in the FAQ and in the forms, but no matter what I try it isn't actually adding it as a payment method.
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Feb 16, 2011 19:42
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"Godsend" to solve... what, exactly? Do people actually yank their mice so hard they run out of cord, or somehow get stuck on a cable attached to the opposite side of the device from your hand? I get the appeal of wireless peripherals letting you mouse or type from across the room, but the idea that the wire itself is a problem outside of range boggles my mind.
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Feb 17, 2011 19:31
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Amrosorma posted:Obviously nothing trumps M+K for FPS aiming, but head tracking would be an awesome way to augment the mouse and keyboard. I think you mean shooting and looking in the same direction, because running and looking in different directions is trivially easy to implement (and to do) unless you're Capcom.
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Feb 23, 2011 00:08
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Amrosorma posted:I'm just thinking of sprinting in Call of Duty or Battlefield games. You can't look around while sprinting without stopping your sprint or changing your body's orientation. Right, but that's not a technological limitation, that's just the developers picking an awfully boring way to implement a tactical decision. If you want the player to be able to look in a different direction while sprinting, all you have to do is not disable strafing while sprinting. The only thing motion tracking adds to that equation is a second analog control, so if you desperately wanted to sprint at an angle not divisible by 45 degrees while also freely looking around it would be handy. But you could achieve that just as easily and probably a lot more precisely by just giving the player a joystick or a wheel or some other form of analog control that goes in your hands. Plus that way you don't get whiplash trying to look 180 degrees behind yourself.
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Feb 23, 2011 00:40
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Amrosorma posted:Crysis multiplayer featured omnidirectional sprinting, but I honestly think it just made the game's gunplay worse than it already was, particularly with the Maximum Speed mode. Just about every UT / Quake-style game in existence lets you run and look in any direction you want. A lot of them just plain don't have sprinting, but only because they have even more involved ways of making yourself go faster. (Bunnyhopping, powerups, skiing, etc.) Amrosorma posted:What about the mouse and keyboard then? I'm saying that the only benefits you gain from having two separate analog controls (mouse + whatever) are incredibly marginal for FPS games, but if for some reason they were important you could just do it by sticking a gamepad-style joystick onto a keyboard or some kind of analog equivalent of a mousewheel onto a mouse. It would be clunky, but so is looking at your monitor through peripheral vision in order to control the game. The simple and elegant answer is not to bother. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Feb 23, 2011 |
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Feb 23, 2011 02:21
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Not the fact they put Starcraft 2 instead of Starcraft? Though I totally agree with Warcraft 2 instead of Warcraft 3. I know most people like 3 more, but heroes suck. If 4 was just 3 without heroes, I'd rank it higher than 2, but they honestly ruined it. StarCraft 2 over StarCraft is probably actually a good choice. It gives them an entry from the best competitive game series ever made, but without picking the one that achieves its depth by flipping new players the middle finger.
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Feb 25, 2011 21:01
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Taffer posted:Isn't it pretty much an accepted fact that any decently competitive game will poo poo on new players? I could talk about this forever, but the short version is SC2 has two things going for it: a pretty decent matchmaking system (Brood War has none, it barely even has an adequate ranking system unless you're playing on third party servers) and a lot of the mechanics shift the weight of expertise from "things you have to do to play, period" to "things you can do to play better, which only become essential at mid- to high-level play." It's not that better players won't stomp newer players, it's that they don't meet them until they get better and getting better is a smoother curve without (at least necessarily) having a lower skill ceiling.
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Feb 26, 2011 02:08
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spasticColon posted:My biggest concern is when will games start to require quad-core processors. I'm thinking a year or more but BF3 may be the first game to do so. I've had a quad-core for the past three years, I can't wait for this to happen. I mean, it's more "I wish we had games at current hardware levels but actually optimized for multithreading" and less "I wish games were even more demanding" but still.
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Mar 4, 2011 21:35
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Hoodrich posted:Planning on buying a new gaming pc in the next few weeks. how much money should I be looking spend? Right now I'm looking at around two grand. Will this be enough to futureproof my system for a few years at least? There's no such thing as (effective) futureproofing and a reasonable amount would be less than half that much, especially if you've already got peripherals and an operating system. Echoing "see the SH/SC thread:" http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3371605
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Mar 6, 2011 04:44
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Node posted:It's like Stalker, stashes (or the item you mindread about) and passwords won't show up until you've mind read the person. This prevents you from mindreading to get the location and just reloading to save exp. Is there a finite amount of XP in the game, or is it just a bit of grinding debt?
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Mar 7, 2011 00:48
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The trouble with any kind of gun or Wii type aiming is that they're always going to have precision at an inverse proportion to the distance between the user and the virtual screen they're aiming at. (Which isn't necessarily the same as the actual monitor or TV screen, but usually is.) Or put it another way, a minute finger movement on a mouse equates to a much more minute movement than moving the same distance on a Wii or lightgun, because the surface the mouse is measuring distance against is directly beneath the mouse. Probably the only things that have ever come close are trackballs, which put all the control in your fingertips instead of in your wrist. I've never used one so I can't speak to their overall accuracy or how much of a pain it'd be to relearn muscle memory you built up for a mouse, though. Bobfromsales posted:Mouse and keyboard I'm sure isn't anyhwere near what is technically the 'best' control setup, but it's versatility is what makes it the dominant control method. Except for the vast majority of genres, yes, they actually are. The only real exceptions are games that require multiple forms of analog input - basically flight simulators, racing games, and arguably Devil May Cry style beat-em-ups although frankly you could probably make those entirely mouse-friendly if the developers ever bothered. For everything else the kb+m is either superior (FPS, RTS) or doesn't make any real difference either way because all the input is digital (fighting games, platformers.) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Mar 11, 2011 |
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Mar 11, 2011 01:11
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Tufty posted:How are you shooting at something in the centre of the screen using your mouse if your eyes are in the corner of the screen looking at your health or ammo? Normally or using the proposed vision-tracking system? In the latter case, you can't, that's why it's dumb. In the former, very easily - you do it all the time, just quickly enough that you don't consciously notice it.
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Mar 11, 2011 22:11
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Mu Zeta posted:Try Titan Quest. It was some neat physics and 3d graphics. I tried to play Diablo 2 again but I couldn't stand the random levels. Titan Quest is a really fun game. You're obviously some kind of mutant and that's okay, it's good that somebody can enjoy Titan Quest, but don't be giving terrible advice like that to poor unsuspecting newbies. For the original question: anyone who enjoyed Torchlight and doesn't mind the massive step backwards graphically should have fun with Diablo 2. If you're just playing casually you don't even really need a full eight-player team, just grab a friend or two and play Normal and half of Nightmare and then mix your classes up.
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Mar 13, 2011 21:05
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MvC3 specifically is a case of Capcom having piracy paranoia, though they may eventually port it a year down the road (probably once an updated version of the game has made it completely irrelevant, because Capcom is dumb like that.) More generally I suspect it's just because they just don't see the PC as profitable. I've also heard a few developers say that they hate the idea of somebody buying their game and not being able to run it, which is technically a concern if you're releasing on PC... but only if you assume your customer is an idiot or if you're lying about hardware requirements, which one probably shouldn't do.
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Mar 18, 2011 18:21
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The Gunslinger posted:The PC hasn't exactly been known as a great environment for fighting games in the past. They tend to be highly competitive which is not great combined with an open platform and until recent years we didn't even have decent standardized input options. It's a fair bit of effort to port one to what is likely a very niche audience. Actually since the advent of GGPO it's been consistently better than every other platform, except in terms of recently released games. You don't need standardized input options when you're dealing with a genre that only uses non-analog input (and can handle virtually any USB-based controller, these days) and you've got by far the best online play over any of the alternatives. EDIT: Wait, you were talking about it as a development platform, which is probably another story. Although it's worth pointing out that many of the doujin fighters got their start on PC, modern arcade machines are literally Windows XP machines in a custom container, and Capcom develops most (all?) of their games to run on a PC and then ports them to console. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Mar 18, 2011 |
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Mar 18, 2011 18:39
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Maxwell Adams posted:A lesson that Capcom learned when they hired some no-name company to port Resident Evil 4 to the PC. Yeah, when Capcom ports games to PC, and does it themselves, they're usually pretty good. At least from a performance standpoint; their settings / options pages are usually pretty embarrassing (variable framerate in SF4, the uselessly low mouse sensitivity in Lost Planet, everything about control configuration period in DMC4, not to mention the decision to use GFWL) but the games themselves run better on worse hardware than most major game engines.
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Mar 18, 2011 18:45
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Das Butterbrot posted:Being highly competitive isn't compatible with PC? Are you joking? StarCraft (Brood War, at least) has had huge problems with maphacks and other third party exploits, though, only barely ameliorated by a combination of third party anti-exploit tools and good communities. Neither of these things are possible when you try to use locked-down, matchmaking-based multiplayer systems (like Capcom fighting games use) so you end up with all the disadvantages of being on an open system without any of the upsides. And it's not like Capcom is going to make a lobby- or dedicated server- based system just for a PC re-release. GGPO is literally the best place for competitively playing fighting games online, with the important proviso that really competitive online barely exists at all in the genre. VVV Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Mar 18, 2011 |
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Mar 18, 2011 18:47
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I don't follow racing games nearly as closely as my (SA lurker) friend does, but there's DiRT and Trackmania as well, plus a couple of ultra-realistic driving sim titles that IIRC still get occasional updates.
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Mar 18, 2011 19:56
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RagnarokAngel posted:Isn't more the problem with fighting games on PC that the platform is less known for 2 people gaming on the same screen but rather online play/LAN gaming? Fighting game fans are the absolute most anal people about input lag and that's a major reason it's unappealing prospect to a lot of developers? They're not just anal, the genre is far more affected by and intolerant to the slightest lag than any other genre - especially variable lag. It gets even better when you realize that Capcom owns the license to really good third-party fixed delay netcode, but hasn't used it in any of their games (except HDR, which uses their imitation of it from before they had the license) and instead goes with a godawful variable delay system that makes the gameplay practically unrecognizable online vs. off.
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Mar 18, 2011 20:45
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nickhimself posted:It'd be cool if for the next gen of gaming consoles, microsoft said "welp, we're done with the console market. start buying poo poo on the PC because that's all we're supporting anymore." Yeah, I'd love that. Also I want a pony, and a red sportscar, and Bobby Kotick's head on a pike.
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Mar 19, 2011 02:24
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ductile escapist posted:It sucks that Capcom's PC ports have not sold better, because they've done an incredible job ever since DMC4. None of the complaints about the controls are really legitimate in my mind because all of these games, even Lost Planet 1-2 arguably, are better off being played with a X360 pad or some other dual analog USB controller. No. It's a shooter. There's no such thing as a shooter that isn't better with a mouse. While we're on the subject (more for DMC4 than LP2), no game with freelook, on PC, should ever be without mouse control. Expecting them to redesign DMC4 would be unreasonably demanding but in the LP2 scenario there's literally nothing stopping them from capping the mouse sensitivity someplace more reasonable than where they did except sheer ignorance. You can't even blame it on laziness, because that shouldn't take much effort at all. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Mar 19, 2011 |
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Mar 19, 2011 19:34
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ductile escapist posted:Also, Tuxedo Catfish, you're straight-up wrong dude. Maybe if the game revolved purely around strafe-and-aim like a classical Western shooter then you'd be right, but with all the dodge-staggering and VS rocket boosting in this game (which are more intuitive on a dual analog stick pad), you're basically close to saying Virtual On is better played with a gamepad than with Twinsticks. Furthermore, all bullets have a stunning effect that usually has to be cancelled out by going into roll animations. This is not Unreal Tournament, or even Gears of War, where even with the latter being a TPS, I would agree with you. "Intuitive" is a function of what you're familiar with. If you're doing analog aim of any kind, assuming everything else is equal, a mouse is always going to be better. The game may be designed to make it much less of an issue than it would be otherwise, which is sensible considering its primary platform(s), but there's no mechanical advantage to aiming with an analog stick, and the same disadvantages as with any other shooter. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Mar 20, 2011 |
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Mar 20, 2011 01:51
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spasticColon posted:I bought it because I'm a cheap bastard but its a 14GB download so I'll be waiting a few hours for it. I like fantasy RPG games but only the really good ones and I've read that this is one of the good ones. The Witcher has hands down the worst combat I have ever seen in a post-2000 RPG. Encounters alternate between utterly boring and non-interactive and every once in a while a rare "welp I got stunlocked by fifteen enemies time to sit here while my health goes from full to zero." That said everything else about it is awesome. It's worth ten bucks.
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Mar 23, 2011 08:25
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Node posted:Do you guys want to hear a paradox? Funny thing is I'm inclined to agree; RPG stories are going to be trash no matter what you do, so gameplay should be their saving grace. But for whatever reason I found The Witcher really compelling trash, so YMMV I guess. It's better than anything Bioware has done in recent memory, I'll leave it at that.
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Mar 23, 2011 08:42
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