Evening Reading
by Nick Breckon, Oct 23, 2009 6:00pm PDTA pot pie, a bottle of wine and the rest of Mad Men season one await me. Perhaps a little bit of late-night Torchlight, as well. Tonight will be good. How are the rest of you spending this wonderful weekend?
News:
- Dragon Age: Origins gone gold, shipping on PS3/360/PC simultaneously
- Modern Warfare 2 adopts Steamworks
- Uncharted 2 DLC out before 2010
- First DirectX 11 benchmark released
- R.U.S.E. trailer demonstrates multitouch
FileShack: Unity of Command, Skyjacker
Daily Filter: Planetside 2, Deadlight
Weekend PC digital deals: strategy-o-rama
38 Studios, Harry Potter Kinect - Shacknews Daily: May 25, 2012
Minecraft for Xbox 360 dev working on 'Adventure' update
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"Close everything you have running. Once you are sure everything is closed, open up word and see if you get the error now. But make sure everything is closed."
"Ok, yea, still getting the error. What the hell is going on?"
At this point I'm confused as hell because there is no way he should be getting the error. I'm racking my brain. So to buy time, I do the old stand by. "Ok, go ahead and reboot and once you do we will..."
"Ok, now it is working. No error."
To make a long story short, when I said close everything he didn't close everything. As I was telling him to reboot he decided to try to go ahead and close everything and see if that did the trick. Well la-de-fucking-da, it did. This same cock sucker earlier in the the week was whining about how he couldn't send e-mails in Outlook from home. I was racking my brain because 3 times I asked and 3 times I was told Outlook says he is connected. When he finally sent me a screen shot, Outlook clearly said Disconnected.
People like this give me gray hairs and cause me to come here and tell people to kill themselves (since I can't tell this guy to chop his own head off).
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I was out in downtown Dallas tonigh tand stumbled across this:
http://www.shackpics.com/files/IMG_0224JPG_88ktkcpswk3smthtx9il.jpg
http://www.shackpics.com/files/IMG_0227JPG_5vetmkbq63g6u5obgogp.jpg
Thats right motherfuckers -- that's no 9, that's a god damn S. A fucking Aston Martin DBS.
So. Fucking. Hot.
How many of these are even in the US???
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http://www.monstunes.com/images/mons/mons-coverart.jpg
What do you think?
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Gotta say, this trailer seems pretty cool even though it was recorded off a movie screen. Its definitely better than the teaser that's up right now.
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1) The entire game is built around a crutch: the VISR system. There's no strategy involved in using something if you just turn it on once and never turn it off. It lets you see enemy and environment outlies, invisible/stealth enemies, weapon drops, collect-a-thon pickups, and story items. If you turn it off you see... darkness. Why even make a tool like that selectable? And why build an entire world where you can't NOT use it? At least they could have put an achievement or something in there for getting kills without it. But nope, there it is, optional but compulsory.
2) The hub world itself is nothing but a maze of identikit prefab piles of random rubble and faceless buildings. There are no distinguishing marks to set one place apart from the other. Every few blocks there's an open area with a raised platform featuring some kind of bland landmark and usually a pile of enemies hanging out, presumably convincing each other to smoke. And since one area is virtually indestinguishable from the other, the map is nearly useless as well. In fact, the map even prominently features areas that are impossible to get to, in order to make it seem like a bigger world. Doesn't work in their favor. You spend the majority of the game in this area (in the aforementioned darkness), and it strikes me as very strange that this, of all things, would have fallen by the wayside for such a big release.
There were a few things about the game that I really liked though:
First and foremost was the music. I've been a fan of the Halo soundtracks since 1, but the stuff here really is impressive. Considering we've had 3 games of gung-ho ass-kicking anthems, the soulful saxophone and piano melancholy tunes give the game a sense of loss and lonliness that I didn't think was possible to achieve while still sounding like Halo. That on its own is occasionally able to lift the game above the drab setting.
And the collect-a-thon hint system, though it took me an incredible amount of time to really figure out, is extremely clever, and easily the most subtly intuitive hint system I can think of in a game. It may have taken me a while to figure out how it worked, but I realized that for the entire game up to that point I had been following its orders to the letter and not even knowing it. Great job on that!
Ultimately, it's a fair title with some weirdly major problems. On balance it's good, but certainly not $60 good, unless you're a Halo diehard. Wait for the $40 pricepoint and you'll get your money's worth, I think.
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http://www.shackpics.com/files/fuuuu_8x68xm0unuttsz8cahhq.png
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I've got Sailor Jerry with a splash of Coke Zero going at the moment. Also, to liven up this thread a bit, my soon to be wife tried on her Halloween costume tonight, she's a bad referee.
http://www.shackpics.com/files/IMG_0912JPG_yau73kkw1qcblyzz0jzm.jpg
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That is what DirectX 11 does, and it runs very fast to, a lot faster than something like parallax occlusion mapping (what you saw in Crysis). I can only imagine what the next Mass Effect or Heavy Rain will look like on the xbox 720 or whatever. Combined with skin that looks like this: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_humanhead_home.html and the animation capture from Avatar and Benjamin Button, and you'll have near photo real, perfectly believable NPC's, Half Life 3 here we come!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ft-9K-k_Y
:(
turn it up. loud
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I remember when installing the beta on a freshly formatted drive, that my other drive with my apps and other stuff on it had every file and folder set to Read Only and having nothing but problems try to assume ownership of them.
Is this still and issue with Win7 Retail? It's a NTFS file-system and I am currently running XP SP3. I'm worried that if I buy Win7 and install it, my drive will get changed to Read Only again, and I'd really rather not fight with it again anytime soon.
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I bought Chronicles of Riddick on the D2D sale last month, and I just am coming around to installing it today. A little past halfway the installation, there's a popup asking for data4.cab There is no such file in the zip I downloaded or anywhere i can find. What's wrong ?
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http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2009/10/23/dragon-age-origins-unboxing/
I mean it may not have much effect if the game is shit, but if it was an average game all the extras might bias some reviewers.
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http://www.giantbomb.com/ratchet-clank-future-a-crack-in-time/61-25673/reviews/
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Last night I got a "Replace Ink Cartridges" message on my Epson CX8400 printer. I was puzzled because if ANYTHING, maybe the blank ink cartridge needed to be replaced, but it was asking me to replace all four. Furthermore, I never noticed faded text leading up to this; it printed one document perfectly, and then refused to print anything more.
Turns out the geniuses at Epson require you to replace all four cartridges, regardless of whether all four are empty, when even one of them (including black) is deemed "empty". They go so far as to actually set a bit on the cartridges themselves that make them completely unusable. I can't believe they would do something that dirty.
With that being said, does anyone have a recommendation for a good, non-Epson printer? Doesn't need to do anything fancy, just print in black and white and occasionally color.
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Lets have a story thread here since my ps3 is currently dead.
Mine shall be in reply...
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TL;DR - I'm in over at my head at work.
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'Suicide Blitz' v1.0 is a custom Left 4 Dead campaign that you can download at L4DMaps.
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MediaGo is fucking awesome, right now, simultaneously I'm getting all the unknown information (art, year, album, etc.) for my music from their servers, downloading The Warriors and installing Vice City Stories, have a queue of 11 albums transferring, and have 2 movies transferring. And look! No slowdown checking out how each transfer is doing, and using the program in general.
I can't even put an album on my iTouch through iTunes without it taking a shit and freezing on either my laptop or desktop. Fuck.
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http://www.thewindowsclub.com/ultimate-windows-tweaker-v2-a-tweak-ui-for-windows-7-vista
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhQ4dE_RGnQ
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
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http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/new-mac-vs-pc-ads-feature-windows-7
All i have to say is, FUCK OFF, APPLE! Fucking sick of these retarded ads.
I the same vein, check this shit out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXrSiqryg5E
http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/4035513827/sizes/l/
tag political?
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With no dedicated servers, what happens when Activision eventually doesn't want to keep their servers around?
This is part of what I don't like with todays gaming world. Everything seems to be built around games that is not meant to be played for longer periods.
Also, no mods for MW2? This is done purely to sell DLC.
Even as one who haven't bought a PC game for a long time (basically because I got tired of upgrading my PC) I don't like this console mentality. Also - new isn't always better people. Far from it.
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