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Great thread! As much as I love PC gaming, my biggest bugbear with PC gaming is DRM. Steam is ok, as are some basic disc checks, but limited activations or always-online DRM are a major dealbreaker for me. Might be worth mentioning that in the thread as DRM can cause all sorts of headaches, and potentially cost money if you have to contact the publisher to get activations revoked or fix other DRM problems. I'd echo some other points here: Always use a decent PSU, and good quality headphones > PC headsets. Can we add Beat Hazard to the music game section please?
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Dec 19, 2010 23:45
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Der Luftwaffle posted:Are there any good soundcards priced below $50? I've never bothered going beyond onboard sound before and am pretty horrified when looking online and seeing sound cards at the same price points as top line video cards. Asus Xonar cards are very reasonably priced. If you use headphones the Xonar DG is exceptionally good value, has a built in headphone amp and supports Dolby Headphone virtual surround, which married with a good set of phones sounds better than 'proper' 5.1 headsets.
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Jan 2, 2011 23:24
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Samurai Sanders posted:Through the Steam sale I bought a bunch of stuff, including some PC ports of games I had played on consoles before. One of them is Dead Space (which I rented before but didn't finish), but I swear that the PC version has some serious lag in the input, relative to the console version (whether I use a m+k or my 360 pad). Am I just imagining things? The proper way to fix it is to turn off vsync in the game and to force it on in your graphic card control panel. Also for some retarded reason the arrow keys amongst others aren't bindable but luckily someone found a way to hack the control file: http://www.kennynet.co.uk/2008/12/22/dead-space-with-arrow-keys/
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Jan 5, 2011 16:11
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Chortles posted:I hear EVGA's lifetime warranty replacement/upgrade policy makes them THE best brand for NVIDIA. (If going with ATI Radeon, go do whatever.) I'm just making use of that now (well the EU equivalent, a 10 year warranty). My 4 year old 8800GTS 512 recently started displaying artifacts on the screen, even during boot. I returned it via their RMA process and EVGA are just about to ship me a replacement. It'll be interesting to see what they're going to replace it with. I'm hoping It'll be something better, since it's an old card that's not being manufactured any more. Very good customer service on EVGA's part.
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Jan 10, 2011 18:28
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Chortles posted:EVGA's reputation from the lifetime/10 year policy probably helps keep them afloat. I for example recommend them to anyone who specifically wants or will only pick an NVIDIA card, though I'll be more flexible for Radeon cards (i.e. mine is from MSI). Strangely my last card purchase was a Gigabyte GTX 460, which only has a 2 year warranty. I wanted to buy an EVGA card, but for some reason they went with a much noisier cooler than the Gigabyte card. It's not always worth the extra warranty to buy an inferior product unfortunately.
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Jan 11, 2011 14:28
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..btt posted:Hot? Yes. Loud? Yes. Overkill? For DX10, sure. For newer, graphically intensive DX11 stuff, not so much. For example, Metro 2033 in DX11 mode brings my GTX 460 to its knees (1920x1200). I had to drop the resolution significantly to get a decent framerate. And that's with AA turned off. Either way, it's a very well specced machine, I'd just enjoy it and not focus on the price. I can get very playable framerates in Metro 2033 on my GTX 460 by turning off one option - Ambient Occlusion, which made no appreciable difference to the visual quality, but vastly improves the framerate. Ravenger fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Jan 12, 2011 |
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Jan 12, 2011 11:34
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Bats posted:One of the recent problems with the new Nvidia cards was the horrible noise, tho I am sure 3rd parties have hopefully remedied this by now, it's been months since they launched. My Gigabyte GTX 460 is virtually silent. That uses a custom cooler, but the standard Nvidia cooling solution for that card was also very quiet.
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Jan 17, 2011 09:33
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Blues News.
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Jan 17, 2011 16:47
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Pr0phecy posted:Lucky dog. My 8800GT was made by BFG and they went under 1 week after my card died. Fast forward to now and I just ordered an EVGA Nvidia 460 GTX over an MSI just because of the warranty. I just hope EVGA doesn't go under too! My EVGA RMA replacement card turned up today and it's a GTS450! Ok, it's not a top end card, but it's a good replacement for the 8800GTS 512, and my spare rig (which my son uses) is now fully capable of running modern games. Saves me having to splash out on a new card, which is good - it only cost me postage back to EVGA.
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Jan 18, 2011 21:40
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Devil Wears Wings posted:I have a tech question regarding Dead Space for PC, if anyone can help me. I tried to run the game last night and every time I do, it just gives me a blank screen and nothing else. Not even any intro videos or anything. Google has yielded nothing helpful, and my video drivers are all up to date. Please help me goons! If it's the retail version make sure there's an exception for it in your firewall, as it'll try to contact an activation server on launch.
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Jan 21, 2011 18:16
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spasticColon posted:drat. How far would a single 460 get me for graphics settings in the game? Could I have tessellation turned on or is that out of the question? I don't really care about PhysX. Metro 2033 works fine at nearly max detail on a GTX460 as long as you turn SSAO/Ambient occlusion off - for some reason that option kills the framerate for a minimum increase in graphics quality. I also tend to play with AA off to increase performance because at high resolutions it's not really needed.
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Jan 24, 2011 09:26
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Dr_Fever posted:Back in the olden days (1998), I thought Thief sounded like the gayest thing ever - an entire game based on...sneaking around? But I played the demo out of sheer boredom, and it converted me completely. Thief I/II are two of my all-time favorite games, and I never would have even bothered with them if there hadn't been a demo. Playing the Thief demo ranks as one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've ever played. I'd never been so tense and on edge playing a game before. It completely sold the game to me and I became a lifelong fan of the series. The L4D demo also sold me the game. Until then I'd not really had any interest in it - I'm not a big zombie fan. But when playing it and listening to all the comments from the AI team-members I got that fantastic feeling you get when you know you're playing something special and unique. I remember thinking 'this is just like being in a zombie movie'. Without the demo I probably wouldn't have bought it.
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Jan 24, 2011 21:45
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The biggest weapon Steam has versus the pirates isn't DRM, it's convenience. It's easier to get a game by clicking a few buttons in Steam than to wade through the unofficial channels. This is why the other DRM methods ultimately fail, because they ensure the legit customer gets a worse service than the pirates. Steam gives a better service than the pirates, which is why it's doing more to support PC gaming than any of its rival platforms. That's not to say it's perfect of course. It isn't - there are issues about customer support, no refunds for broken games, and their hair trigger willingness to lock you out of your game collection if they suspect something dodgy, but it's still the best system so far for fighting piracy, simply by being better and more convenient. They say you can't compete with free, but Valve have conclusively proved that wrong.
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Jan 27, 2011 15:08
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GreatGreen posted:Isn't piracy largely inconsequential to any given game's success anyway? Wasn't there some study done a little while back which concluded that with almost any given game, no matter how many copies are sold or pirated, usually loses due directly to piracy only add up to about 1-5% of total sales, most other instances of piracy being "wouldn't have bought it either way" cases? My opinion is the only really damaging piracy is zero day piracy. If a game gets leaked before it's officially released those gamers who are desperate for it might be tempted to pirate it to get it early, and then not buy it when it's actually released. I've had direct experience of that. I'm a game developer and a game I worked on got leaked via the supply chain about a week before release. It was massively pirated, and we missed our sales targets by quite a huge margin. Now you can't say that all those were lost sales, but the game itself was very favourably reviewed so quality wasn't an issue, and it was expected to be more successful than it was, and I believe zero day piracy had an impact, as did the company I worked for. One bit of Steam DRM that does work very well is that it stops zero day piracy by not shipping the executables with the game, instead downloads them on release. You can't pirate a game you can't run. It does annoy the heck out of me when I can't get to play a retail version of a Steam game because the game hasn't unlocked online yet.
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Jan 27, 2011 21:27
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Manac0r posted:The joys of pc gaming... Of course the irony is that an xbox version of the game he's playing in that strip would probably run at 21fps, and he wouldn't be able to do a darn thing about it. 
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Jan 29, 2011 22:26
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spasticColon posted:I came across The Witcher: enhanced edition on Steam the other day and I remember playing the demo but being put off by the menu/inventory system in the demo. Did they improve/streamline it in any way in the enhanced edition? If they did, I may buy it off Steam because I liked the gameplay but the menu was a clusterfuck. The inventory was improved, but I can't remember the exact details.
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Feb 3, 2011 09:54
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I did like my Medusa 5.1 surround sound headphones, but they proved to be fragile, and the speakers kept breaking. Over the years I went through a few sets, but I found that the most recent versions have terrible sound quality compared to the first couple of sets I bought. Recently I decided to avoid 5.1 headsets and bought a pair of Goldring DR150 stereo headphones, and I cable-tied a microphone to them. The sound quality is absolutely amazing, though you need an amp to drive them properly. The surround sound effect is pretty good if you enable dolby headphone or Creative's CMSS 3D surround system - at least as good as 'true' 5.1 phones.
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Feb 4, 2011 17:33
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Master_Odin posted:No, it stills has GFWL. Even when it works perfectly it's still annoying - for instance the save game encryption feature to prevent achievement hacking works perfectly. So well that my save game became 'corrupt' when I re-installed Batman on Windows 7. Turns out it's tied to your OS as well as your gamertag. 
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Feb 16, 2011 17:26
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The Gunslinger posted:The only thing you really need to replace during that period may be the videocard and those are cheap these days. The only component I've had fail on me (that wasn't DOA when I bought it) was my 4 year old 8800 GTS 512 graphics card. Luckily that was under warranty (EVGA FTW!) and was replaced by a GT450. I've still got the PC I built in 2006 (AMD Athlon XP 3500+) and that's still going strong.
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Feb 16, 2011 21:21
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RagnarokAngel posted:No he's right. It's not due to ACHIEVEMENTS! like he said but the rest is right. Saves are tied to your registry because GFWL was coded by monkeys. I was under the impression the GFWL save games are encrypted to prevent achievement and gamerscore hacking, since gamertags are usable on both GFWL and Xbox Live. The thing is they could have easily just tied the savegames just to your gamertag so they were portable as long as you used the same login, but for some retarded reason decided to make every instance of your profile on a different OS/Computer use a unique key, essentially tying your saves to a particular OS install. Allegedly you can transfer the saves if you transfer your profile folder as well, but of course it's hidden away in a system folder, incomprehensibly named, and I never managed to make it work anyway. Oh, and of course for GFWL games with limited activations there's no way to revoke them, or even find out how many you have left, or even in many cases to find out how many you have in the first place! The only way to get more activations is to beg Microsoft for a new key and they will only do that once for a game, ever. Contrast this with Steam - save games that follow you around via Steam Cloud and no limited activations (except on retarded games that use extra DRM).
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Feb 16, 2011 21:31
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Devil Wears Wings posted:E: Oh god, Kinect is heading to PC. I really hope this doesn't catch on, since the PC is pretty much our last refuge from motion-control gimmicks. Don't knock it - it'd be amazing for head-tracking in sims. Head tracking without having to wear a silly hat? I'm in!
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Feb 22, 2011 17:06
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KoB posted:How do you figure? Either people give in and buy on consoles or they wait. Ubisoft just gets the money later. Because releasing a single SKU of a multiplatform game months after the other platforms gets no benefit from the marketing campaign and hype of the original release.
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Feb 22, 2011 23:13
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:DRM update, a couple hours ago I got the ubisoft rep on twitter to confirm that it's just a one-time activation after install then you can play offline whenever. I hope they patch that into AC2. I can finally get around to buying it then. I don't really want to get Brotherhood without playing AC2 first. I know they toned down the AC2 DRM (but didn't tell anyone), but it still requires internet every time you launch, and has a habit of eating save games.
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Feb 25, 2011 12:00
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almighty_monkey posted:I am now onto my 3rd restart trying to get Red Faction; Guerrilla going. Tried xliveless? Disables GFWL in Red Faction: Guerilla. Works fine for me. It disables multiplayer so it's not a 'files' thing. The game activates through Impulse so that's still required. I've just restarted the game after not getting into it before, and I'm really enjoying it this time round. Performance is excellent, and the destruction mechanic is really good fun.
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Mar 20, 2011 00:32
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Corbeau posted:Just look at retail stores for examples. Console sections are still around, and usually still large, but PC gaming sections? They're tiny, almost insignificant, and it's because there flat out isn't demand. Until and unless Valve makes some sort of enormous blunder with Steam, digital download is simply better for the consumer. I'd make the case that one of the reasons that PC games are becoming increasingly hard to find at retail is that high street retail is really glorified pawnbroking specialising in games these days. You can't sell PC games second hand due to DRM, so it's simply not as profitable as console games where they can sell the same copies over and over again, cutting out the publisher and developer from subsequent sales. And of course the same retailers that have done their best to kill off PC gaming at retail are crying foul of Steam, but are really acting like spoiled kids who threw away an unwanted toy then screamed when another kid picks it up to play with it.
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Mar 20, 2011 15:26
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Geralt is also sterile, so for the women in the game he's an ideal one-night stand - he's handsome and athletic, can't get you pregnant, and because of his immunity he won't give you any diseases either. I can see why in that fantasy world women would go for a Witcher, and why it makes sense in the game.
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Mar 23, 2011 18:48
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Davincie posted:Reselling pc games hasn't been a thing for ages thanks to cd-keys, but I'd say around 25% of games have steamworks or GFWL integrated. I'd reckon the non-resellability of PC games has as an unintended consquence directly led to the decline of PC games at retail in favour of console games. That's simply because modern high street game stores are no longer retailers - they're pawnbrokers for games. They're so skewed towards second hand games that selling a PC game once isn't as profitable as reselling the same used console games over and over again, making a fat profit each time.
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Mar 24, 2011 22:30
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I too prefer ME1. The story is more epic in ME1 - the second is basically The Blues Brothers - 'We're putting the band back together', and is 90% companion quests. They removed the mako in ME2, which I really liked on the PC due to the revamped controls, and instead of improving the planetary exploration and bases they just removed them altogether, The second game may be more slick, but all the missions seem to follow the same template, and you always know you're going into combat because you'll walk into a room or open area with loads of waist high boxes. I really enjoyed it the first time through, but during a second playthrough the faults become all too apparent and I just couldn't continue playing it.
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Apr 6, 2011 16:15
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Fil5000 posted:There's apparently dialog for having one of the final characters you unlock in earlier missions, so yeah, does appear that the mission structure was supposed to be different. It's because of disc space. The 360 version is split over two discs, so to prevent you having to swap the discs multiple times they made it so that half the crew were only available in the second half of the game, which is all on the second disc.
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Apr 7, 2011 14:54
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HotCanadianChick posted:Take it slow, follow the directions, double check your connections, and handle everything carefully and anyone should be fine. That's my method. Take it slow, and test as you go. It can take me a couple of days to put a PC together properly because I do it step by step, and testing at each stage: Stage 1: put the PSU motherboard, processor, RAM and video card together outside the box and power up to see if it posts, detects the ram properly and the CPU temps are ok. Stage 2: Put the components in the case, along with the hard disk and DVD drive. Power up and see if it posts, detects the drives properly. Stage 3: Run Memtest86+ for a few hours to check the RAM is ok. Stage 4: Install the OS. Stage 5: Run a Prime 95 full torture test for a a few hours to check the machine is stable and the CPU temps are ok. If it looks OK I'll often run a check overnight too. Stage 6: Final cable tidy-up. The only scary part of putting together a custom PC is the CPU, because of the chance of bending the pins on the CPU or fitting the cooler incorrectly. Luckily with modern CPU thermal protection it's much harder to fry a chip if the cooler isn't on right these days.
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Apr 17, 2011 08:31
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K8.0 posted:If you buy Intel this is basically as unscary as possible because since late Pentium 4s Intel CPUs don't have pins (they're on the motherboard which makes them a ton safer since you get the CPU in place and drop it onto them without ever really being able to bend them) and the coolers mount in such a way that it's almost impossible to damage the CPU. Very true. Of course you have to be careful not to damage the pins in the socket instead, and the crunching sound you get when you push the lever down to lock the CPU is very scary too. So it is sort of scary 
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Apr 17, 2011 11:32
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The Flying Milton posted:That clip on Athlon Xp coolers still gives me nightmares. I damaged a motherboard once trying to clip on an Athlon XP cooler. I didn't spot that the spring clip had got stuck in the central groove of the heat-sink, and applied too much force with the screwdriver trying to get it on. The clip suddenly gave-way and the screwdriver slipped and scratched the motherboard! Luckily all it did was knock out one of the memory sockets - it worked fine otherwise.
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Apr 17, 2011 17:46
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poptart_fairy posted:I'm really behind the curve but I fixed the problem I had with Crysis and I've been playing it for a couple of hours. I feel so boring though; the game has given me all these lovely options to dispense people, and I just stroll on through with maximum armour to shoot everything in the face, then flick to maximum speed so I can get to the next bout of carnage quicker. Play on Delta difficulty. It's almost like playing a completely different game. You can't go charging in guns blazing and have to be stealty and use tactics.
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Apr 21, 2011 22:13
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Space Cadet posted:It's the same as right handed people? As a lefty myself I do not know a single actual lefty that uses the mouse with their left hand and I assume that those who do have simply never tried it before or for a long enough time. Upon first using the computer I tried the mouse on the left hand and it felt natural but as a new gamer who was pretty much terrified to change any settings in case it broke the game I simply adapted to what my friends all used. Mouse goes on the right, WASD for the left hand and in the end I became just as good as my friends. Give the right handed mouse a try for 30 days and you will never go back. I'm a lefty and use my mouse in my left hand. I've been doing that ever since the days of the Amiga. I'm not planning to change any time soon. Ironically though, I use a joystick with my right hand, because originally there were no left handed multi-button flight sticks.
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Jun 26, 2011 22:38
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Liberatore posted:Vastly different level design thanks to the different PoV. Things like enemies coming from all directions or wide open environments are often found in third person shooters, but rarely seen in modern non-Eastern European developed first person ones. Also, third person shooters often need rooms which are way bigger than normal to allow easier player navigation and to accommodate the camera and FOV. There was a very interesting Gamasutra article about Max Payne 1 that discussed this. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2992/gdc_2002_realistic_level_design_.php quote:In an FPS realistic room sizes would be pretty much what they are in real life, in a TPS they're closer to double that of real life. If your average bedroom is 4x5 meters and 2.5 meters high, in a TPS the size would be 8x10 meters and the height 4 meters; the great thing about larger sizes is that the characters are easier to control and the spaces don't even feel too big!
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Jul 6, 2011 10:30
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