http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6c0mSjHEs8

Beautiful piano rendition of the Jolly Roger's Lagoon theme from Banjo-Tooie. This guy is so talented! The dynamics are wonderful. Starts out full of life, soundingjust like the tune from the game (but on piano), then it gets all sad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80eFXnb9Uro

Same guy, same kind of thing. Beautiful.

N & B is just terrible. I already posted Jon Tron but everything he said is correct.

Must say I don't agree, Ryudo. I probably love N&B just as much as the first two, which is saying a lot as they're two of my absolute favourite games. I said elsewhere more-or-less my opinion of N&B, why I think people don't like it, and why I love it and think it's totally Banjo-Kazooie.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. After having 100% on the first two on 360, it's finally time to beat this one. I must say, even though BK fans tend to diss this one, I love it. It's basically classic Banjo-Kazooie, except the transformations of old are replaced by building your own 'transformations'. The platforming element is much reduced, but that's OK. In my opinion, most of those who decry Nuts & Bolts for not being a platformer probably haven't played Banjo-Tooie. That game took the old BK platforming formula to it's ultimate extent.

Aside from the graphics, there's really nothing they could have improved. 'Tooie is massive, and the later levels are ridiculously-complex. The levels are all interconnected, and some jiggies require a lot of work. I remember one in Jolly Roger's Lagoon which requires work in three different worlds to get. Nuts & Bolts is awesome, I don't care what anyone says. Not just a great game, but a great BK game. Such immense fan-service in N&B.

In short;

N64: Large hub world. = 360: Large hub world.
N64: Large sub worlds. = 360: Large sub worlds.
N64: Complete tasks to get jiggies/other collectibles. = 360: Complete tasks to get jiggies/other collectibles.
N64: Learn moves as you progress. = 360: Earn vehicle parts as you progress.
N64: Use new moves to get things you couldn't get earlier on. = 360: Use new parts to get things you couldn't get earlier on.
N64: Mumbo transforms you. = 360: Mumbo runs the garage where you transform yourself into whatever you want.
N64: Awesome humour and likeable characters. = 360: Awesome humour and likeable characters.
N64: Awesome music and overall sound design. = 360: Awesome music and overall sound design.
N64: Beautiful visuals for it's time. = 360: Beautiful visuals for it's time.

I think if people want more pure BK platforming, then they probably just haven't played the second game, and almost certainly haven't gotten the most out of the first two games. It's good that they twisted the BK formula slightly. At the start of 'Tooie you have all the moves from the first game. Keeping track of all of them was one thing. By the end of 'Tooie you got an insane amount of moves to remember. There's literally not enough buttons on N64 or 360 to keep track of them all, with some having slightly obtuse combinations to initiate.

That and the overall pant-shitting complexity and difficulty of 'Tooie in terms of real completion. 100% completion in Banjo-Kazooie was very difficult. Merely getting enough jiggies to face Grunty in the final battle of 'Tooie is just as difficult. 100% it is.. well. Let me just tell you that my 100% file of BK is 11 hours, whereas my 100% of BT is 22 hours. Banjo-Tooie is one hard fucking 3D platform game, and in my opinion, one of the ultimate examples of the genre. It's an insanely tough game to complete.

I wish before people write-off Nuts & Bolts as some kind of travesty to the series and fans, they'd make sure they've gotten the most out of the first two games. Every drop of gameplay (it is a collectathon, after all!). After doing that, I can't see how anyone what want the same thing again, just with better graphics and even higher levels of complexity/difficulty. As I said before, where the hell would all the new moves go? Not have new moves? That's lame.

I'm rabbiting. I love N&B, but it's OK to think it's shit as well if that's what you really think. Can't see why, personally!

Not liked a single thing Rare has made since N64. N & B looked pretty but hated it. I ave the first on N64 always have had Tooie on the list. Just not seen it in the wild yet.

It's an expensive game on N64. I had it on PAL (sold it for £70), but still have a loose NTSC cartridge. Selling all my PAL stuff. The loose cart cost me £30ish, I believe. OK deal.

Get it on 360 if you can. Better and cheaper. Nothing wrong with the original version of course, just the price.

Apparently they took to the stage half an hour late, and that's why they didn't get to complete their set.

Has anyone played the demo yet?

Yeah, I played it on Sunday. Downloaded it off PSN since the 360 demo is Gold users only. Don't know if there's any difference between the respective demos. The one I played has three scenarios; Leon, Chris, and Jake. I played all three of them (an online user even jumped into my game on the Chris scenario). I don't have much to say that I didn't already say on the series. To me, everything since RE4 has been Resident Evil in-name-only. Everything since RE4 could quite easily have just been a new IP. Not that I 'dislike' the post-RE3 stuff, I thoroughly enjoyed RE4 and 5. But they just weren't RE.

Anyway, onto the demo. Seemed very much like RE5, just with some tweaks. Co-op gameplay throughout. It seems Capcom is set on making RE a massive multiplayer franchise. To be fair to them, RE5 was a fucking good time with a second player. In single-player, it was shit. RE6 seems much the same. A great two-player action game, a bad single-player action game. I found 5 was OK with an online player if they had a mic and you had a good connection to each other, but otherwise it was split-screen all the way for me. Haven't had a chance to split-screen this one (can you even do it?), and the one online experience I had in Chris' scenario wasn't all that. Some dude joined without a mic and died a lot.

The actual scenarios themselves.. meh. I really didn't enjoy any of it. In Leon's scenario I spent a lot of time just sprinting past the zombies to the clearly-marked objective, barely shooting off a round. Even on the bit in the alley with the weird human/dog things. Rather than try and kill them, just sprinted past, got to the waypoint marker, continued on to the next section. When I did shoot, I was getting a lot of headshots, and popping lots of heads. Yeah, the reticule moves about. Wasn't really a problem. With Chris' scenario, I just hosed everything down with my weaponry, hot-footing it to the objective. Much the same in Jake's scenario.

All in all, a pretty forgettable experience in my opinion.

They're just never effective. They always look like a bunch of commercial actors trying too hard, rather than being movie-like, they way they're intended. The worst I've seen was really recently, for Borderlands 2. The live-action commercial looked like a bunch of idiot cosplayers running around a playground somewhere. It's just... bad.
Use game footage, or don't do a commercial at all, I say.

This!!

It's my firmly-held belief that the Dreamcast would not have suffered it's infamous fate if the advertisements for the console actually showed the games, which were (at the time) so far beyond anything else. There's literally never been such a huge jump in graphics since. Even the best looking PSone or N64 game couldn't hold a single candle to what the Dreamcast was bringing to the table.

I imagine if they had advertised Shenmue on the TV, with in-game footage, people would have been totally blown-away. This place would probably be a lot different! We'd be talking about a franchise we all hold dear to our hearts that was finished many years ago, not left un finished for many years.

I digress. I totally agree with you, here. Live-action adverts have no place in computer gaming, unless we're talking adverts for a Tetris-like game or something. Not an FPS like Borderlands 2.

I was just looking at videos for the full game yesterday, and now it seems really weird to me that they used the sequences that they did in the demo. The videos I was watching were much, much cooler in the way they were set up.

Maybe the bits you speak of are the only good bits? Just playing devil's advocate, here!

As some of you know, I have been playing GoldenEye 007: Reloaded on PS3. I'm now about halfway through the campaign (decent size game!). I'll just get it over with now; it's not earth-shatteringly revolutionary like the N64 classic is. It's an all-round solid shooter, with great poroduction-values, and the shooting feels great. There's a sense of 'fun' in the shooting that I'll get into. In this game, it's really fun to gun people down!

Now, I've been playing on 007 Classic difficulty, which emulates the N64 original settings of no health-regeneration and sparodic, hidden body armour. There might be two, maybe three in each level. All added objectives. I wanted the give the game the best chance I could give it. No regenerating health on it's own is quite a big difference, in addition to the hardest difficulty (AI are crack shots).

On a few levels, I was too careless in the early stages, and laboured on through the rest of the level with a spec of health, living off my body armour. Having to be extremely stealthy, eliminating cameras, shooting guards silently in the head. Just about scraping past the finish line alive. Had I been as careful in the early stages, the home stretch would have been way easier.

I digress. The point is, that reminded me of the N64 game. It's a good feeling to have eked your way through a level on three bar because of a careless mistake early on. That tension, then sense of relief as you complete that level. The AI on 007 Classic will kick your ass if you're not careful, as well.

What doesn't remind me of the N64 classic are the levels, and the mechanics. It's not all bad news, either. Gone are the N64 GoldenEye controls, in come COD copy-pasta mechanics. Sounds grim, I know, but it's actually not. Although it controls the same, I've actually heard it doesn't run on any COD engine/variant at all, but a proprietary one from Eurocom. Easy mistake. Controls the same, runs at 60fps.

It's not actually the same as COD to play , though. All those skills will be useful (007 even as the 'snap-on aim' from going out of and into RDS). The game itself is slower, though. Not much, but it's palpable. The shooting feels oddly different from COD. Again, not bad. Different. I have to say, this game has some of the most fun shooting in-game! People falling over railings all the time, destructible environments (cover gets worn down). It's a blast.

The other difference is levels. They're not completely linear lines filled with cutscene markers like COD is, but we're not really talking the playground-esque trappings of the N64 classic, either. There, you were given (a sometimes huge) area, told to complete x amount of objectives, and sometimes one or two no-nos ('Minimise scientist casualties' etc). It was up to you what route you took through the level and what order you did everything in.

Here, it's more mini, interconnected areas. You might start on the top floor of an office complex. You might head for the objective (waypoint marker.. joy), or you might explore an often surprisingly large amount of optional rooms, etc. These searches often yield Janus symbols (shoot them for some reason), weapon crates, and if you're lucky.. blessed body armour.

There's usually some bullshit thing that happens when you go from one major area to the next which makes it impossible for you to go to the previous area of the same level. So you better make sure you search everything your side of the waypoint marker if you want to complete all those objectives! You might lose one to a self-locking door. Cunt. Then there's the radar, which shows you where all the bad guys are.

That's probably all the bad things. The area thing is just a result of how games are more cinematic, now. The radar isn't bad, either, I guess. It promotes stealthy gameplay. This game actually reminds me of Black on PS2, believe it or not! Same general sense of 'awesome' and similar structuring of levels. As I said before, the shooting is very fun!

This game rewards you for being a good marksman more than most. Now, a quick kill with a silenced weapon doesn't alert anyone to your presence, unless they were in close proximity to the recently-deceased. Headshots are a one-hit kill even on 007 Classic difficulty. The controls are smooth, and shooting the guns feels great.

The best part about the shooting is the fucking Bond audio cues that the game rewards you with for being badass! A headshot gives the player a gratifying 'crack' sound. A headshot from your silenced PP9 gives that same sound, and an addition Bond music cue. Two guys near talking to each other. You headshot one in said fashion, get said audio treat, you quickly (and silently) kill the other one quick enough before he alerts anyone, you get another badass bit of music!

In other words, it feels great to be Bond in this game, even if it doesn't feel like the N64 game it has stolen the identity of. The game lets you know that you're living up to the Bond persona when you pull off nice shots. It's not things the game is telling you to do, either. Eurocom build good shooters. In fact, this isn't even their first Bond FPS. Their first was on the N64! Anyway, that I compare it to Black isn't an insult. Black was a totally badass game.

So if you liked Black, wouldn't mind a very similar thing with current-gen graphics and James Bond accoutrements.. get this game! Even if not, consider it if you fancy shooting some stuff. It's like playing COD, bit a little slower with slightly 'heavier' guns. The enemies often die in comedy ways, and cheesy movie set-pieces, explosions everywhere at times, etc. All with Bond characters, music and stuff.

It's pretty awesome. Just don't expect it to be the N64 game. If you imagined a Black 2, canned and reskinned as Bond.. you wouldn't be far off!

Edit: The other bad thing is the load times. They're not horrendous , but they aren't nice and snappy. In COD when you die, you're generally back in the saddle in moments. In this, it might have to load for ten or fitteen seconds. A problem if you're stuck on one bit.

For me, the 'next-generation' begins with the PS4 and Durango, and the current one will only then start coming to an end. The Wii U is to the PS3 what the Wii was to the PS2 - slightly better graphics, new controls. The new generation does not begin with the Wii U. It doesn't even really begin with the PS4/Durango. It begins when consumers show more interest in the new stuff than the old stuff, and stop buying the old stuff.

I don't know anyone chomping at the bit to get a Wii U, nor to upgrade from their current consoles at all, for that matter. I imagine that for the next two years, it'll be Wii U, PS3 and 360 battling it out with mainly very similar games.

Let's have this topic when it really is time.

I distinctly-remember being blown away by the 360 when it came out. I also distinctly-remember feeling that the Wii's graphics were those of old console from the previous gen. I feel the same towards Wii U. Mildly more capable than what we've had for years, different controller.

When the latest GTA/Call of Duty/Big Name Franchise of Your Choosing fails to appear on PS3/360, we can say that this generation is ending. Let's have this topic in a couple years, when all the cards are on the table. Next Christmas we'll still be getting huge AAA games for our PS3s and 360s, for fuck sake!

I don't think COD has seen a release on PS2 in some years. The myriad EA Sports offerings don't really count. They put those games on everything! Everything except the Dreamcast.

The point, as you well know, is that this generation is not over and the arrival of the Wii U doesn't change that. When the others arrive and make the 'U look like last-gen stuff (and all the PC games stop using PS3/360 as lowest common denominators).. that's the end of this gen, and it'll be a couple years yet.

Here's one to ponder - RE5 vs RE6. I've only played the demo of RE6, but didn't like any of it. I love RE5.. in two player.

Anyone played both? What's the better game?

You can bet one if not both launch at the end of next year.

I bet neither is released by Christmas 2013. MS have only just gotten below the £200 mark with the 360, and Sony haven't really shifted their price at all since the first PS3 Slim came out. There were some bigger HDDs and some nice bundles available, but that's basically it.

I would guess that the whole idea behind the PS3 Super Slim is that 1) It reignites interest in the product. Sony have always done this, and every time they've had a best-seller. PS3 Super Slim will probably be a top product this Christmas. 2) It's cheaper to produce, so for now they make more money, and in the future there's a margin for aggressive price-reductions.

Just because new systems come out does not make the previous systems dead. DS still had some new IP's and games released this year. Big name ones. Fatal Frame 2 remake and Epic Mickey 2 still on Wii. PS2 many games after PS3. Won't be any different. Dvelopers already have durango kits and had them about a year.

Well, those games came to the Wii are not a sign of anything that you're saying. The Wii is currently Nintendo's most-recent console. So, of course, if you're releasing Nintendo home-platform games any time before the 'U comes out, your game will be on Wii.

As for the dev kits, so what? For all you know they were/are beta kits, and the hardware for Durango was not/is not finalised. Often kits do go out in this state, long before their target platform has yet to even be finished itself. I believe I saw some Dreamcast games well over a year before the console was released in Japan, for example.

To reiterate: This thread, so-named "This Gen is in the twilight so it's time to reflect" is wholly-redundant at this time . The prices are still kind of up there, there's tons of big games still coming out, and Durango/PS4 have yet to even be announced by their respective owners. I imagine they may well like to see how the 'U performs, maybe so they can copy it's controls/improve on them? In addition to being a lot more powerful.

As I said, we can't start calling it quits on this gen just because Nintendo finally decided to release a current-gen console. I totally expect nothing but marginally-nicer looking games on Wii U than on PS3/360. No big deal. Every time I play Wii, I just feel I'm looking at a GameCube game. Which is probably the same feeling I'll get from this new one. Just replace 'Wii' with 'Wii U' and 'GameCube' with 'PS3/360', and voila.

Unreal Engine 3: PS3, 360 and Wii U.

Unreal Engine 4: PS4 and Durango.

;-)

So let's have this thread when it's actually time to have it. You know.. when Call of Duty is no-longer being made for 360/PS3, when the respective online services get removed/replaced/integrated. When magazines like '360 Magazine' put out their last ever issue. Most of all, when PS3 and 360 stock incorporate a tiny part of shop space/website space. That's when the doors are closing.

I looked it up, the last COD game for PS2 was some variant of World at War (by far my favourite of the series!) in 2008. Sounds about reasonable. The PS3 had been out two years by then, the 360 for three. In the end, we'll see. I strongly believe that this is a useless thread as of now. As it's mainly been four solid pages of everyone going "Too soon Ryudo, this gen isn't in its twilight yet", perhaps I'm on to something, eh?

The BBC News channel just
displayed images of the three
women who claimed that Jimmy
Savile interfered with them
sexually. They showed a current
picture of each of the women
and a picture taken of each of
them from the 1970s.
The caption read: Now, then.
Now, then. Now, then.

GoldenEye 007: Reloaded - PS3

Nearly completed this one. Very enjoyable FPS game. It doesn't live up to the original N64 game, but that's OK. I've been playing on 007 Classic difficulty, which tries to emulate the N64 game. In short, no regenerating health, occasional body armour, and guards who could shoot a peanut off your head at 1,000 yards.

I don't know what it's like on the lower difficulties, never will. On 007 Classic, it's a great romp! Sort of quasi open-ended levels. A lot like the levels in Black, in that sense. It's not a straight line littered with cut-scenes like COD, but it's not the totally-open levels of the N64 classic, either.

The feeling of being Bond is awesome, the music is awesome, and the sound design in general is great. Shoot a dude in the head and you get a little Bond audio cue. Kill someone before he can raise the alarm (and without alarming others by killing him), and you get another Bond cue. Awesome sauce! Additionally, it's a nice-looking game, and the controls are good.

There's two things I'm disappointed by. FIrstly; the loading times. They're not 'big', but when constantly dying on a level and reloading checkpoints, they can become a significant annoyance. Given that the game has a 3.5GB install, I would expect better than that. COD doesn't install at all on PS3, but reloading checkpoints is instantaneous.

The other thing I'm disappointed by, regrettably (especially given the N64 heritage), is the multiplayer. Specifically, the online multiplayer is dogged with lag in a way I don't think I've ever seen in a shooter. The framerate itself chugs away down to single digits. I have no idea why this is. The game runs beautifully in single player at 60fps. Multiplayer levels have worse graphics for a start, and then it lags horribly.

I'm gonna put that down to shitty net code. Inexcusable given that the publisher has extremely robust net code in it's repertoire. Even when I barely have any signal at all in COD, the game itself still runs just as smooth as ever. Damn shame, as I did have one good game with no lag, and it was a blast. No cruise missiles coming from nowhere and killing you. No chopper gunners. No UAVs. Just you, your gun, and the enemy.

PROTOTYPE - 360

Was hankering after an open-world game. I'd never played this before, but have played inFamous on PS3. Anyway, I thought I'd give it a whirl since it got OK reviews and it was cheap. Have to say I've enjoyed the game very much. The sense of total devastation in this one is probably better than most of the other open-world/sandbox games I've played over the years.

Mercer's powers are very, very cool. The level of gore is tremendous. You can literally cleave people into bits with your blades. The way he moves about New York is amazing. Running up buildings, flying, falling thousands of meters to leave your own impact crater in the road. The sense of carnage is huge, and at times there's so much action going on, with some very tough enemies.

Prototype does a lot of things right. The graphics are good. I think this might have the largest number of pedestrians of any sandbox game I've ever played. Don't quote me on that, but New York seems densely-populated in this game. The powers are all really cool, as is upgrading them. Grabbing a pedestrian and sprinting up the side of a building with your hand round their neck is really cool.

Which brings me to my favourite feature; the 'consume' power. Basically, you hit B/circle near something, and you pick it up. If it happens to be a human, you can 'consume' them by pressing Y/triangle. This gives you some health, and allows you to assume their identity by pressing left on the D-pad. This 'disguise' is remembered, and you've always got your last human consumption to hand as a disguise.

You can don it and take it off repeatedly, whenever you like. If being chased by the military, you can duck behind cover and don the disguise to throw them off. If they see you do it, then obviously it doesn't work. Military personnel give you perks for consuming them and being disguised as them, too. As a soldier, you can commandeer tanks without having to cause a scene by killing the dude in it, walk into military barracks, and you can call in airstrikes.

In short, I love this one so much because 1) I don't think I've ever seen anything like this. Certainly not done in this way. Adds some nice depth/options to gameplay and missions. There's a few ways you can do things. Mercer is certainly powerful enough to go in and tear everything up, but you can use subterfuge if you like. 2) It reminds me of The Thing.

As for bad stuff.. well. The storyline is dog shit. Which would be OK if it was in a 'shit and I know it' kind of way, but it appears to be taking itself seriously very often. The 'web of intrigue' is a nice idea, but it should have been given a better story. I guess while I did say the graphics are 'good', it's in a 'quantity, not quality' kind of way. Lots of stuff looks kind of bland, but then there's a lot on-screen, and it barely ever slows down. Uh, there's no weather system. It's just sunny days and clear nights. I guess some people might think it's an ugly game?

I like it, anyway.

I'd like to make my SNES region-free at some point. Haven't even looked up how it's done, but I guess you just snap off some tabs inside of it? I'd be afraid of breaking my console, so I might see if the local game store does things like that.

You simply disconnect the region lockout chip on SNES/SFC. This will make a couple of games unplayable, such as Star Ocean and later copies of Super Mario RPG. There may be one or two others, but that's about it. Basically, right at the end of the SNES' life, Nintendo cottoned-on to this practice of disconnecting the region chip, and so a few of the last games actively looked for the absence of the chip.

You would want to do the 50/60Hz switch mod if you wanted to play PAL games. I wouldn't bother, personally. In that era, most PAL games were very slow, with few exceptions. It makes more sense for a PAL gamer, since you might want to be able to play PAL games as you can pick them up for cheap in this region. Yeah it might be slow, but 99p for Mario All-Stars is not to be sniffed at - even if it's 17% slower. For you, you'd literally be going out of your way to get hold of a PAL game. So not worth it for you.

Just grab a retron 3. It plays multi region carts even for Genesis I believe.

That's certainly an option, but those clone consoles are much like PC emulators, except not as good. They don't run the games completely accurately, and often exhibit weird peculiarities with many games. In a lot of cases, these 'peculiarities' (weird graphics, incorrect sound) are bad enough to be called glitches. Some games are ruined.

Personally, I see those devices as a decent addition to a serious collector's range who's always playing those games. For example, I have hundreds of Mega Drive/Genesis and Super NIntendo/Super Famicom cartridges of all regions. A Retron 3 would mean that I don't need two consoles set up, only one. But still, they're not accurate and you're always better off with the genuine article. Plus it's not often that I play an old game, so the Retron would just be gathering dust like my old consoles.

If your advice is for him to get a clone console, I say he may as well just use an emulator, connect it to his TV and be done with it. It'll cost him nothing, and not take up any extra space. He wants to play his cartridges (and apparently get more), and so in my opinion he'd be better off modifying his SNES. It'll cost him nothing to disconnect the region switch.

^

That is way too funny! I say he's not drunk, but on drugs. My guess would be ketamine.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mbWRf_fxPY[/youtube]

If a black guy was literally stealing chicken from me it what be so funny that I would forget to be mad. That sounds like a parody they might do on Boondocks.

Hah, I see what you mean. You have to keep in mind that it wasn't some random black guy, it was a cunt that I had to endure often complaining of racism in lectures and in the library. You'd be down the lab working on a project, two days before it was due in stereotypical black guy would show up, procrastinate a lot, look at Facebook, and listen to shitty tunes on YouTube instead of doing his work (which he'd left himself two days to do from scratch).

He'd then have his face in his hands whilst doing his work, often phoning friends to moan about how he's going to get a bad grade and that everyone around him is racist, and that the uni was a racist institution. Everything about him made me want to kill him. Even the fact that he's sitting there being really loud and annoying in a room where everyone else is wearing headphones and working quietly is totally unacceptable.

When his other many annoying features are taken into account.. yeah. Needless to say, breaking his face in my kitchen was extremely satisfying. The best part about it is that he couldn't really accuse me of being racist. For the next three years he didn't even look at me, and if I came into the lab when he was there, he'd leave.

Martin did you make that shit up? :P

It's true, I'm afraid. Except I didn't literally 'break his face', of course. He could still eat and stuff after lol. He did have a very swollen face for the next week, though! He also must have had problems with his nose after since that's what erupted with the red water. I don't think anyone had ever beaten him up before. I get the impression he'd never even been in a fight. Quite something given that he was apparently a 'gangsta rappa'.

When I became violent, the look on his face was priceless. I threw him around the kitchen a little bit, punched him twice and headbutted him. The girls came downstairs, walked in on me and an unconscious, bleeding gangsta rappa and did the whole "WHAT. THE. FUCK." sort of thing. I explained the situation, and we all had a good laugh about it. He came to extremely embarrassed (the girls were all there), and left vowing "You're a dead man, fam! A DEAD MAN!" then couldn't look at me or be in the same room for the next few years.

Such a shame. People like that give black folk a really bad name. Perhaps I shouldn't have been violent, but as far as I'm concerned the little faggot deserved it. I could easily have been so violent to him that I could have killed him. I so wanted to stamp on his head when he was out, but instead I sighed and put him in the recovery position so that he didn't swallow his tongue.

Outrage on behalf of homosexuals is the new Christianity. Every few thousand years or so, people need to attach themselves to a morality so they might enjoy the feeling of righteous outrage and feel better than other people... etc etc

Nice post, but I only agree with the part I quoted. I don't think homosexuality is the world's last remaining dogma or the plight of homosexuals being of any real importance to most people. As far as I'm concerned, it's on a similar level to racism. Most people I know aren't racist, and it's really not that big of a deal now.

Of course, you'll get the odd gay who still has his panties in a bunch over prejudice, but then you get the odd black person who similarly has his panties in a bunch.

As a matter of record, I actually find that it's lesbians who tend to piss me off with their rhetoric about how hard it is to be gay, not gay men. This is just from personal experience of course, but I've met probably two gay blokes that piss me off, whereas that number is probably around 10 for lesbians. Most lezzers are cool as well, just saying.

Maybe it's because it's the gay men that have gotten all the love and sympathy, whilst the carpet-munchers have been left behind :lol:

Kiba, did you copy & paste that speech?

I'm one of those people who will buy anything that I come across, that happens to have the Sega logo on it. They just make such awsome games. Like at my work, there's a Megadrive joypad, that plugs directly into your TV, that has six Megadrive games on it! Now how cool is that!! I got Headhunter: Redemption the other day, too.

From Mankal 's ' What the hell is going on? ' thread. On page 2 of 2, you will find the above post. It seems I never introduced myself here, I just started posting.

Without further ado - Hello! My name is Martin, I'm 26 and from the UK.

Good man.

You guys..

Or it's nothing to do with the developer, and is just old and therefore cheap. Still, £10 for the limited edition with all the DLC content isn't bad at all, old game or not.

Right, well there's two things to be said, here.

Reading some forums some people seem to hate their 360/PS3 because it's stuck on 720P. Now being totally new to having HD the top I have seen on my TV is 1080i from Programming. However it was compressed due to being a basic cable. PS3 to me looks great in 720P but again not seen full 1080P yet on this TV. Wii U is native at 1080P and sure all next gen systems will be.

If that's true, your television is not a 1080p set, only a 1080i set. Huge difference. 1080 p refers to 'progressive-scan', whereby the entire screen is refreshed all at one. No alternating lines, no strobing, combing or flickering. Just a whole new image every frame. 1080 i refers to 'interlaced', whereby half of the image is refreshed every frame in alternating lines. So, row 1, row 3, row 5, etc etc. Then on the next frame, the rows of pixels that were not updated in the last frame have their turn.

Interaced video was developed in order to save bandwidth when television was an emergent-technology. This produces the famous 'combing' effect. Now, there are various 'de-interlacing' algorithms about (your set almost certainly has one, Ryudo), but in this day and age they're meant simply to clean up broadcast television, the vast majority of which is broadcasted as interlaced video, and also serve to make some older interlaced DVDs prettier.

You'd be better off setting your TV to 720p, Ryudo. 1080i sounds higher, but really you're only getting half that in every frame. At least with 720p you're getting a pure image, without having to worry about extra processing being done to deinterlace the image, robbing you of valuable response time.

Combing;

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Interlaced_video_frame_%28car_wheel%29.jpg

As a matter of technicality, LCD and OLED screens are incapable of displaying true interlaced video. All such televisions convert the image to progressive scan in order to display it. The question is one of processing, and if so, the quality of that processing. No deinterlacing or bad deinterlacing means that you'll still see the combing, it'll just be sent to your eyes as two interlaced, combed frames being sent as one.

Of course, regardless of the quality of processing, there is always artifacting from deinterlacing. Another reasons why 720p would be the better choice for you, Ryudo.

Question is does it bug you that consoles are still 720P?

Nope, and I own a proper 1080p set. There's something crucial here that you must understand in order to make sense of any of this. There's 'native rendering resolution', and 'final scaled resolution'. Now, both 360 and PS3 can upscale any resolution to 1080p. This is why there's always a "Supports 1080p" on the back of every game box. It doesn't mean the games are 1080p, it means that they can scale to that resolution.

For a ballpark figure, most retail/disc games for PS3/360 render natively at or around 720p. In the early days, the PS3 version of the same game would sometimes incur a drop in native resolution (GTA IV on 360 - 720p, on PS3- 640p). This is less the case, now. The point here is that retail games for those consoles almost never render natively at 1080p. I can think of one occasion where a disc game did - Virtua Fighter 5.

Call of Duty is an excellent example. Ever since COD4, it has rendered natively at 600p. Probably the lowest this gen has ever provided in a retail game (and a big reason why it runs at 60fps). So you're playing your 600p game on your console set to 1080p, on your 1080p television. The game leaves the rendering phase producing a 600p image, the console than upscales this image to 1080p. Your television displays it, being none-the-wiser.

Now, it's not quite that simple. The 360 has a dedicated scaling component, whereas the PS3 does not. Some people prefer to set their PS3s to 720p, believing that their television does a better job of scaling. Which they will do, by the way. Your TV scales everything that does not fit it's resolution.

It's still good to have a 1080p set, though. Blu-rays are native to this resolution, and look amazing. Also, while true 1080p 360/PS3 retail games are thin on the ground, the same cannot be said of XBLA/PSN games. Many of the simpler ones or 2D ones are the full-fat 1080p. Even some polygonal ones. WipeOut HD is one of the top of my head. Oh, Tekken 5 Online Edition is 1080p native, as well. Perfect Dark XBLA, the Banjo-Kazooie games from XBLA. The list goes on.

In short, no I'm not bothered that the majority of my games aren't using my television to it's full potential. Why? Because a nicely upscaled 600p still looks way better than a blurry 480i, if you ask me. A large chunk of my PS3/360 stuff (when taking the downloadable games into account) does in fact render natively at 1080p, and so I'm glad to have a nice set which supports that. Which is to say nothing of Blu-rays. Blade Runner on Blu-ray in 1080p looks so gorgeous.

It's been such a long time since I laughed so hard, man. Thanks. Why you didn't just post this in the 'Things That Made You Laugh Today' thread, I don't know. The bit where he bangs his phallus against the bar had me in stitches.

This would only ever be funny to an elite few. You guys just so happen to be that elite few, so I thought I'd share it. The funny moment in question occurs right at the five minute mark until the end. You have to be a bit of an old softy at heart for this one, boys.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCCYCgCrDZM

Also it happens automatically at the end of the game when Ryo has to find a way to get to the harbor for a special event that I don't want to spoil if you havent played that far .

It also happens when you have to look for a way to get to the harbor in time (the motorcycle part). I think you can look round for about an hour or 2 before you have to go look for one.

I thought when you had to rescue Nazomi was the only time?

:lol:

Love you guys.

Also that could break down to the whole what came first chicken or egg debate.

The egg clearly came first. Birds, along with reptiles are the only living descendants of the dinosaurs (not counting insects and the like that are still about). As such, the egg was always present. What came out of the egg slowly evolved into a chicken.

So the egg came first.

Becoming mod can carry a brief elation, though it is shortly lived. It can fracture friendships, as well as the way people you never had a problem with personally look at you. There comes a point were the fatigue from having to be "the decider" in matters of unending drama can take their toll. And it's never the black and white situations that are complicated, it's the thousands of shades of gray in between. There will be times when your knee-jerk reaction to snot faced members trying to call you out leaves you wanting to bop them in the nose, but you can't. A mod always has to be above fanning the flames of drama and has to be reserved in their responses. I think being given a mod title can be associated with prestige, or it being an honor in most regulars minds. But at the end of the day, putting out fires and taking flack for doing so can gradually over the years make you a little bitter to the point where there is no such "status" with being a mod any more, it's only worth it if you really love the community and want to help keep it healthy even if people come to resent you for doing so. The effect is subtle over time I suppose, but it is cumulative, like a snow ball effect. Think of it as being Batman, only not as cool. :P

:lol:

There's no "prestige" to it in my mind. Just means you have a couple responsibilities that you didn't before, that's all. If people behave differently around you once you're a mod, that just means their normal behaviour isn't up to scratch. I don't know, I think people are being way too dramatic about mod status. It literally means nothing other than 'janitor'. You're the care-taker of the site of you're a mod. Walking around in your overalls with your bucket, mopping the halls. If someone's action literally piss you off - you're taking internet in general too seriously. I've done that in the past, but I'm 27 in a month. Won't be doing it any more.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brsI6z13Su8[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lCEZJ2XDvQ[/youtube]

Here's to Henry. I hope you find your happiness again. In a way , I know what it's like when your best friend kills themselves. I know that you are currently probably feeling very guilty, that you could've done something, etc. It probably happened without much warning, and you've been going back through the past while in your mind trying to identify the warning signs.

Life goes on for those who want to live it. I hope to see you on the boards again one day, but the main thing is that you don't lose yourself. It wasn't your fault.

I once contemplated suicide. Hell, even now life is and always will be tough with exceptionally little in the way of reprieves. But when my world came crashing down all around me and I had no choice but to stop being in denial over feeling like a woman on the inside, that brought me to a dark place I was not prepared to deal with or preserver through one little bit. Even after being in denial, feeling trapped, like in a prison with no hope for parole or escape very nearly pushed me over the edge. A lot of people think taking your own life is cowardly. It practically means nothing to say you're thinking about it. I hear people say things like that all the time. Ironically I never told anyone, until now, and probably came a lot closer than those that did. Personally, I think it takes an awful lot of nerve to suppress that natural instinct of self preservation and go through with finally pulling the trigger than most would imagine. Ultimately though it's because of cases like this, when everyone you touched in your life loses it in their own downward spiral in the face of your demise that I think I could not see it through.

Indeed, it's those who never even threaten to kill themselves that suddenly do so. Most threats of self-harm are just cries for help.

My question about religion is simply "why are there so many?". They can't all be correct, yet the followers of each one believe their specific doctrine, and no other.

You are not authorised to read this forum.

Been playing Doom 3: BFG Edition on PS3. I'm a big fan of Doom 3, and Doom in general, so I had to get this! It's an awesome package, so much content. You get; Ultimate Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, Doom II: No Rest for the Living (by Nerve, previously exclusive to the XBLA version of Doom II which they ported), Doom 3, Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, and Doom 3: The Lost Mission.

So obsessive am I about Doom, this is one of the few games I'm determined to get the platinum trophy for. Trouble is, there's so much content in the BFG package that nearly all the trophies are bronze, but there's 66 of them! I got the Doom 3 multiplayer trophies out the way first thing, as lobbies/players are already thin on the ground, and the game's only been out a week. It'd be torture trying to get them probably even a couple weeks from now

Doom 3 is a little different to the original version. The flashlight is now mounted to your armour, can be used whenever you like, with the only limitation being it's battery (which charges when you're not using it). Also, ammo seems more plentiful. I'm playing on Veteran difficulty (to unlock Nightmare), and I'm at Delta Labs 2b, six hours in. It's definitely easier than the Xbox 1 version (which I still have). I don't know if ammo actually is more plentiful. Perhaps it's just easier because it's 60fps, and therefore my response times are better, I'm putting more shots where I want them, wasting less etc.

Xbox 1 Doom 3 will always have a place in my heart (awesome port by Vicarious Visions). I even have RoE on Xbox 1 as well. Still, BFG on PS3 blows it out of the water. Gone are the truncated levels, more frequent loading points and other changes for performance reasons. It's a match for the PC experience, this time round. I never knew even the beginning was cut off on the Xbox 1 version! The levels are bigger, for sure. I think I'd be in Hell by now on Xbox 1, but here I'm only just over half way in. I've yet to even see a Baron of Hell.

If you like Doom (and don't already have it all on PC), get this! I'd say it's not worth it if you already have the original Doom 3 and all the rest of it on PC. If you played Doom 3 on Xbox 1 and liked it, definitely consider going back to it via the BFG edition on PS3/360. It still holds up, and even on PS3 which is probably the worst version, it's a silky-smooth 60fps which rarely falters. In addition to the bigger levels in line with the PC original, that snappier controller-response makes all the difference.

I know some real hardcore fans want this simply for the previously XBLA-exclusive Doom II: No Rest for the Living, which is nuts. I've also been playing some Ultimate Doom. Works nicely. It's better on PS3 than 360.

For me, Doom, GoldenEye and OoT are all absolute genius games. Of course there's a large portion of nostalgia involved, but I don't think you can say it's all nostalgia. All three of them were genuinely ground-breaking when they released, for their technological accomplishments, as well as rock-solid gameplay and quality design.

None of them were the first of their kind, so that's not the reason why they were revered. There wouldn't have been a Doom without Wolfenstein. There wouldn't have been an OoT without Mario 64. GoldenEye was first designed as an on-rails shooter, in the same vein as Virtua Cop (vestiges of this period in it's development can be found in the aiming system).

OoT took the gameplay formula of Mario 64 (even to the point of being built upon the Mario 64 engine) and gave the world the first playable 3D adventure game. If you play the original Tomb Raider now, it sucks balls. Lara is a cunt to move around. If you play OoT, you'll find that it's still relatively-effortless to manoeuvre Link through the world, thereby strengthening the player's handshake with the game.

The technology was revolutionary, as well. I certainly had never seen a sunrise in real-time in a game before, while I was playing it. It was the first believable little 3D cartoon world that had ever been presented in a game. Hyrule seemed a vast expanse, the dungeons were myriad and the bosses iconic. Again, the way in which you had effortless control over Link meant that you were never distracted from these things. Just an awesome game, through-and-through. There's nothing bad about it.

GoldenEye is the first FPS where you had objectives . It wasn't necessarily a run-and-gun game. It could be if you wanted it to be, but it could also run deeper. You could be stealthy if you wanted. The guards could trigger alarms, employ grenades to flush you out, and they patrolled routes.

Additionally, it's the first time where carefully-placed shots can give you an advantage. Previously, you just shot enemies. In GoldenEye, you shoot parts of enemies. Localised hit-detection. Shoot a guard in the hand, and he recoils clutching it in pain. Shoot him in the shoulder, he agonises over his stricken body part. Shooting them in the head does the most damage of all. Apparently this system is another carry-over from when the game was an on-rails title. And of course, the multiplayer was something console shooters only dreamed of before.

Where they kicked ass is what they brought to the table, bringing well-rounded experiences in respective genres for the first time. As undoubtedly-cool as Wolfenstein was, the levels were just grids. Grids that were uniformly-lit, with textures only for walls, basic weaponry and a bare-minimum of enemies to shoot them with.

Doom took this premise and injected a real sense of atmosphere and style. The technology behind it allowed for varied lighting, sloped ceilings and floors, textures everywhere. Crucially, the technology also allowed for complex level-designs, bolstered by an impressive variety of enemies and an array of exciting weapons. Even the sound of the thing was a big advance!

The gameplay was fast and ferocious, with enemies that could even get pissed off at each other and begin scrapping it out amongst themselves. All of these things were huge advances, and the game remains playable and fun today. I would argue that your touch-screen device doesn't exactly do it justice. Not to look at or run, but to play. Also, it was a revolution in multiplayer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjM7420xuIk

It also has the best pump-action shotgun in video game history.

http://i48.tinypic.com/33zfrko.gif BOOM *chk chk* BOOM. http://i47.tinypic.com/a3j9xj.gif

I'm sorry, but Doom kicks ass.

Thats not bad for the 1080p and it being 40' but its only 60hz.. Thats pretty low. The standard these days is atleast 120hz. It makes a big difference with motion in gaming, action scenes and watching sports. I have 240hz and things move like butter.

You're wrong. 120Hz would be good for a top-of-the-range gaming PC, i.e. something that can potentially run games at that frequency. Blue's consoles won't give him that. I know they 'create' the intermediate frames for stuff at 60 and 30, but that introduces input lag. Not a problem at all with TV, film, non-interactive stuff. Would be a problem with something like Bayonetta.

Also, let's say you had a 'game mode' on your 120Hz TV. Let's say you play a 60fps game on that TV with game mode on. You wouldn't get those interpolated frames since the TV is cutting out all non-essential filtering, processes and whatnot. What it would do is similar to what cinema projectors do. It would simply display the exact same frame twice, 60 times a second.

So you'd just be getting 60fps anyway, with absolutely no illusion of 120. I guess there'd technically be less 'flicker' (the reason why cinema projectors work like that, since a completely straight 24fps would flicker to the human eye), but I'd say that you'd never notice any flicker from 60fps progressive scan, anyway. In fact, I'd bet on it. Those extreme framerate sets are good, but as far as console gaming is concerned they don't improve anything.

Example: Imagine you are playing COD on console, and it runs at a perfect 60fps all the time (it doesn't quite). Imagine it's a 1 v 1 between two clones with the exact same skills, weapons, everything. Imagine clone 1 is using a 120Hz TV without 'game mode' on, so he gets his illusion of 120fps. Clone 2 on the other hand is using the same set, but with 'game mode' on, and only getting 60fps. Clone 2 would win, since his controller inputs arrive on the screen faster.

I tell you one thing, if Shenmue III is ever released, I damn well expect a shout-out to the 'Dojo during the credits or something. There's usually a 'Special Thanks' in gaming closing credits. Shenmue Dojo should be in there just for being the primary hub of Shenmue fandom for the past decade. It's been so long that we rarely even speak of Shenmue, and viciously shoot down any random noob who dares to do so.

You want to talk about Shenmue? Not on my fucking Shenmue fan-site, you don't!

Those rumors are just total BS. Nothing will have 16 cores and shit otherwise be 3D0 all over again.
What I posted is what's reported on the recent Dev kits. Dev kits are not final but at least gives something to base a rumor on. Those BS rumors of 13 billion cores and shit are just BS.[/color]

You don't know that. They're only bullshit as much as this rumour is bullshit. 16-cores is possible, and that particular rumour came from a manufacturing leak. Doesn't mean it's true, I'm just saying. I know Epic are pushing MS and Sony to deliver platforms which can run something like this..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oamN5uWrcDw

.. in real-time . You'd need a lot more than a PS3, 360 or Wii U to run that. Anything near that, in fact. That's totally FMV-territory for the aforementioned consoles. If they were just going to offer mildy more-capable consoles, then why bother at all? Why not just carry on with PS3 etc forever?

To be fair PSN is the same PSN on Vita that it is on PS3. It's cross platform.

Exactly. The account you have now will be usable over the next platform, for sure. They (as in Sony and Micrsoft) know that there would be a massive uproar if they forced their end users to start all over again at additional cost.

Well yeah, but that's just the store interface. Things on the store can only be played on certain platforms. I'm done buying all the same games again and again. I want to migrate all my old content over to the new console and be able to use it. That was what my question concerned - the content, not the store-front.

And why, in retrospect, the 360 was able to go toe-to-toe with the PS3 and win on many grounds. Had the RAM been 256MB, all these Face-Offs on Digital Foundry would be a very different story.

Got done with Doom 3 a couple days ago. Get this - I got the 'Speed Run' trophy (complete Doom 3 in under ten hours) with only seconds left on the clock. Not a great achievement until you understand that I was being very meticulous for 90% of the game, soaking up all the atmosphere. I was trying to get the trophies for finding all the PDAs and video discs. Failed at that, and knew I had. So while in Delta Labs (already over 8 hours in) I decided to try for the Speed Run. I must have done the bit leading up to Excavation, and the latter itself a million times. With less than ten minutes left, hoardes of demons, two Vagaries and the Cyberdemon had to be killed. Not easy! I was on Veteran, as well. Fuck my life, but I did it.

I've been playing Ultimate Doom since then. I'm on the second map of the fourth episode, called 'Perfect Hatred'. It's completely kicking my ass. Hats off to anyone who's done this one! It's been a while since I've played old Doom. Been getting lost a lot. Shows you how hard these old games are. It's been awesome playing it, though.

I'll just own up to it- I harassed them both via private message, asking them for photos and stuff. At first I tried to be sly about it, just asking if they have Facebook and whatnot. After that failed, I just threatened them with abuse and violence if they didn't send me naughty pictures of themselves. There was SpringChick and the other one, what was it's name? Anyway, it all proved too much for them and they left. Sorry boys, I'll get my coat.

I'm with Sonikku. I think good practical effects stand up way better than any CGI. For all kinds of reasons.

1) Light falling on a real object is real light falling on a real object. Thus, it never looks in any way out-of-place. Lighting CGI elements on otherwise real footage almost always looks weird to me.

2) Actors actually have something to look at/visualise.

3) I find CGI elements are often over-beautified. Like, I dunno, a car will blow up. Forgetting the fact that it's obviously-fake for multitudinous reasons, I'll know it's fake because of the impossibly beautiful ballet-like way in which the car explodes. Shards will attractively spew out like a swarm of doves taking off. Parts cascading into surroundings with implausible choreography, ending with a lone type pirouetting towards the audience, coming to a stop like a penny. Things like that.

But as others have mentioned, practical effects aren't always capable of doing what's needed. Animatronics can be a cunt to work with, and cost a fortune. It's way cheaper to just do it on the computer.

Still, I think there's times where a practical effect will always look better. Going back to the exploding car example. I'll always take a real car really exploding over CGI.

MiTT3NZ wrote: What, you think coz I read Batman comics that I put a bat silhouette over my screen when I'm watching porn???

Fuck you man, she's fit.

Nevertheless, there are more indications that next-gen is going to be a big leap again than not. All Ryudo can point to is a couple of articles, one of which is just pure rumour. Meanwhile, Epic and Square are showing real-time footage of 'next-gen' stuff that's way beyond Wii U, 360 and PS3. There's also manufacturing leaks and so forth which, while rumours, arguably substantiate this point further.

It's too simple a point-of-view to say "they're making losses, so the next batch won't be much of an upgrade". That's just dumb. They study the market a lot, and one conclusion is that they have to offer another substantial leap, or people won't be interested at all. What's the point in me getting a PS4 if it's just PS3 Deluxe? None. Also, they have to maintain interest over a whole generation.

Nintendo's challenge with the Wii U is that a large portion of the casual Wii userbase probably won't upgrade to the 'U, just like they stuck with Wii Sports and Wii Fit and didn't buy any other games. Which is why Wii software was consistently being trumped by PS3/360 software in the charts (especially hardcore games), while the hardware sales were a different story. Why would 35-year old mothers get a Wii U when they have a Wii? They don't care about graphics at all.