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Video Games: Dawn of Waaaaagh!


Werthead

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Let's bring it (and keep off-topic discussions on paid holiday leave in GC please!).

Notable games out in the next few weeks: Thimbleweed ParkDreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey, Mass Effect: Andromeda (natch), Persona 5, Full Throttle Remastered, Outlast 2, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, Syberia III and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III. Also Prey, but I suspect we'll be on our next thread by then.

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Just a little over an hour of time left in my Andromeda free trial. As far as I can tell, I've run through all the single player content permitted in this abbreviated version. My updated observations:

  • I am hooked on the main storyline. When I hit the "thanks for playing" brick-wall end of the free trial I was disappointed I'd have to wait a few days to see what happened next. Without giving too much away, it's a story grounded in pure discovery, with an effectively alien feel. One thing they seem to have nailed with this game is the vibe of the Milky Way colonists as struggling, clueless outsiders; strangers in a strange land who really have no business being there. Really neat.
  • Exploration is fun, almost as much fun as combat. While not particularly groundbreaking, the NOMAD vehicle is pretty cool and easy to use. Just tooling around the 2nd planet I managed to uncover plenty of side areas and a few off-track missions.
  • Speaking of the 2nd planet, rumors that it's essentially Arizona with some emergent alien architecture are in fact true. Beautifully presented, though.
  • Thus far there's plenty of lore and backstory evident in the form of data logs, terminals and the scanning system. I don't believe depth will be an issue with this game.
  • Having gone through all the available cutscenes I can safely say that my initial impression was about right. Some of the visuals and animations are great and some are awful, making for an inconsistent experience. @Fez was correct in saying that some species are presented better/more convincingly than others. I don't know what the hell they did to the Asari but I would like for them to un-do it. 
  • Squadmates - I really like Vetra (the female Turian). Very cool character with a lot of personality. Cora seems cool and has a neat backstory. Liam is the Kaidan Alenko of this game for me, at least thus far. I haven't heard him say one interesting thing yet.
  • Despite the overall good impression I got from exploring the world, exploration is also the source of my biggest gripes. First, while the scripted dialogues you encounter at certain points are nice and add a lot of flavor to discovery, the fact that many of them get repeated verbatim when you revisit those areas, isn't and breaks the fuck out of immersion. They need to fix this.
  • The other gripe has to do with the "invisible boundary" system in this game, which at this point far consists of a radiation spike that drains your life support at a noticeable clip. You get no advance warning this is about to happen (i.e., that you're about to stray beyond the boundaries the devs have set in place), it just happens, and you have to scramble back to relatively safe ground. It's stupid and impacts the fun of exploration in a big way. This may be mostly a limitation of the free trial, so I'll reserve judgment for now.
  • It still feels a lot like DA:I in space, although the side missions appear to be more straightforward, more interesting and fewer in number, all of which are positives IMO. 

 

 

 

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40 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

My son picked out For Honor--he loves it. I'm kind of interested to play it as well--I mean, Vikings and all. I'm interested to see how the ME Andromeda thing turns out. 

For Honor is a lot of fun, but the networking code is hot garbage and the revenge system is currently broken at high level play.  I just wish I was more convinced the devs were going to fix any of that when they're so busy selling cosmetic items and taunts.  It kind of reminds me of Valve with TF2, but at least Valve largely fixed the game before they shifted to the pay for cosmetics set up.

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Persona 5 is the game that could force me to get a PS4. Having access then to Yakuza: 0, Nioh, and Horizon: Zero Dawn (jeez Sony's had a lot of exclusives lately) would be nice (plus older titles like Uncharted that I've never played), but Persona 5 is the one I really want.

I can't justify it though. There's just too many other good games as is that I already have access to for PC. And now that I also need to save up for a big vacation later this year, I just can't do it. Maybe I'll look into again around the holidays, if there's a good enough deal out there.

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21 minutes ago, Fez said:

Persona 5 is the game that could force me to get a PS4. Having access then to Yakuza: 0, Nioh, and Horizon: Zero Dawn (jeez Sony's had a lot of exclusives lately) would be nice (plus older titles like Uncharted that I've never played), but Persona 5 is the one I really want.

I can't justify it though. There's just too many other good games as is that I already have access to for PC. And now that I also need to save up for a big vacation later this year, I just can't do it. Maybe I'll look into again around the holidays, if there's a good enough deal out there.

Give Nier Automata a chance. I got Horizon and Nier this month, both were well worth the money.

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24 minutes ago, Red Tiger said:

Give Nier Automata a chance. I got Horizon and Nier this month, both were well worth the money.

I was planning on it, but then I heard some not great stuff about the PC port; so I'm waiting to hear more. Also, I'll be playing Mass Effect (and Stellaris) probably exclusively for at least the next few weeks

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So I've decided I want to make one more upgrade to PC, which is the RAM. I have 8GB, I want 16GB. That's the recommended spec for ME:A, and the fact I don't have it makes me think that's why I'm having a couple stuttering issues I haven't mentioned elsewhere. But as with my previous upgrades this leads me to some questions:

I know I have 8GB now; how can I tell if its 1x8GB or 2x4GB (where on the CPU is the RAM)? Can I just add an additional 8GB of RAM or do I need to take out the 8GB I have now put in 16GB of new RAM? Assuming both are options is 2x8GB better or is 4x4GB better? 

What are the good brands when it comes to RAM? 

I have an i5 4690k. Should I be looking for DDR3 or DDR4? That's something I don't understand at all. Thanks.

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Finished up FemmeShep Renegade run on the ME Trilogy at about four AM.  I was slow to commit to the kid and kept picking options that said "But I don't wanna do that!"  I really did mean to eventually pick one of the three options; but then the kid turned and said the cycle would continue... that was kinda depressing. :lol: 

@Ferrum Aeternum 's write up gives me a renewed sense of excitement.  I'm ready for Tuesday now!

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30 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Finished up FemmeShep Renegade run on the ME Trilogy at about four AM.  I was slow to commit to the kid and kept picking options that said "But I don't wanna do that!"  I really did mean to eventually pick one of the three options; but then the kid turned and said the cycle would continue... that was kinda depressing. :lol: 

@Ferrum Aeternum 's write up gives me a renewed sense of excitement.  I'm ready for Tuesday now!

What kid? What options? Mass Effect 3 ends with the injured Sheppard and Captain Anderson dying together appreciating the view of earth. Everybody knows that.

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43 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

What kid? What options? Mass Effect 3 ends with the injured Sheppard and Captain Anderson dying together appreciating the view of earth. Everybody knows that.

Well, it was four AM... I might have hallucinated the kid.  Honestly, that's really the only thing that makes sense.

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3 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

What kid? What options? Mass Effect 3 ends with the injured Sheppard and Captain Anderson dying together appreciating the view of earth. Everybody knows that.

What do you mean? Everyone knows the game ends with Shepard either overcoming indoctrination or succumbing to Reaper assimilation. 

 

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8 hours ago, Fez said:

I know I have 8GB now; how can I tell if its 1x8GB or 2x4GB (where on the CPU is the RAM)? Can I just add an additional 8GB of RAM or do I need to take out the 8GB I have now put in 16GB of new RAM? Assuming both are options is 2x8GB better or is 4x4GB better? 

RAM isn't part of the CPU, it's located in separate slots on the motherboard.

In Windows, to find out what kind of RAM you have installed and how many memory banks are in use open a command line prompt and type in

wmic memorychip

That gives you all the information the system has about your RAM.

The output is probably going to be hard to read, you can have it print out specific fields by doing something like

wmic memorychip get capacity

You can have it print out more than one field by using comma separation like this

wmic memorychip get capacity,partnumber

 

Hope that helps.

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So, decades late I have finally played and finished the greatness that is Final Fantasy Tactics War of the Lions. Have been pretty obssessively playing it for the last couple of months on my iPad, done everything, unlocked and tried all classes, etc.  And finally reached that ending... heh. I have to say that the plot has impressed me as pretty ASoIAFish throughout, which was a surprise, because in my limited experience older JRPGs don't have much of a plot, leave alone something as involved as this, but the ending cements it as

 

Spoiler

 Littlefinger's rise to the throne

, the game. I wish there were more SRPGs like this, but alas...

 

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3 hours ago, Jon AS said:

RAM isn't part of the CPU, it's located in separate slots on the motherboard.

In Windows, to find out what kind of RAM you have installed and how many memory banks are in use open a command line prompt and type in


wmic memorychip

That gives you all the information the system has about your RAM.

The output is probably going to be hard to read, you can have it print out specific fields by doing something like


wmic memorychip get capacity

You can have it print out more than one field by using comma separation like this


wmic memorychip get capacity,partnumber

 

Hope that helps.

Thanks; I'm still not totally clear on the differences between the CPU and motherboard. I've opened up my PC a few times now in the past several months to make upgrades and I understand the basics of most of it now; but not that. I ended up just opening my case to see what I got in there, and its 2x4GB DDR3 by Ballistix. So I guess I'll just pull that out and replace it with 2x8GB DDR3. I'm gonna buy in person so I'll ask the good folks at Micro Center about brand quality and speed.

1 hour ago, Maia said:

So, decades late I have finally played and finished the greatness that is Final Fantasy Tactics War of the Lions. Have been pretty obssessively playing it for the last couple of months on my iPad, done everything, unlocked and tried all classes, etc.  And finally reached that ending... heh. I have to say that the plot has impressed me as pretty ASoIAFish throughout, which was a surprise, because in my limited experience older JRPGs don't have much of a plot, leave alone something as involved as this, but the ending cements it as

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 Littlefinger's rise to the throne

, the game. I wish there were more SRPGs like this, but alas...

 

Final Fantasy Tactics is a fantastic game, up to and including just how fun it is to break the combat systems. Finding an SPRG that is its equal has been my white whale of gaming. There are some with better stories, though not many. But there are none where the combat is even close to as good. There is so much more variety in what you can do than most others; and I've never seen another that had the same dedication to maps filled with elevation changes (and having those changes being so important).

The only nitpick I have with it is how characters drop out of the narrative once they join your party full-time. I know its because they could then die at anytime; but I wish there were at least a couple characters where either they stayed as guest characters forever or they got the same restriction the main character has, and the game ends if they crystalize.

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