Captain Red

"In my experience, we could really use more volunteer..."

I wasn't trying to or anything, it just sort of happened.

So far the only thing I've noticed is that I'm not as good at being hung over anymore.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9105-Extra-Punctuation-Golden-Era-of-PC-Gaming

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw said:
I was in idle conversation with someone recently when he caught me off guard by blaming Half-Life for the current state of overly cutscene-heavy gameplay. And it seemed like he couldn't get any wronger, because like most Valve games Half-Life very deliberately has no cutscenes and almost never takes control from the player. But then he pointed out that there are several moments in Half-Life - and more so in Half-Life 2 - when you're trapped in a single location and aren't allowed to leave until the non-player characters have finished talking at you or among themselves. Which is fair enough, I suppose, but these pseudo-cutscenes never bothered me too much.

That was meeeeeeee! I was the one having the idle conversation! ^_^
Choo Choo! Is that the internet fame train pulling into my station?

It's also a pretty interesting collection of words. It's kind of hard to explain why the late 90's and early 00's where such good times to own a PC and like FPSs, and any effort to make people look them up is doing good works. Even if it's just for the asshole physics.

Anyone played that Goldeneye remake yet? If so, how much is it like Call of Duty?

It's probably just my fondness for the N64 game talking but the remake looks kind of interesting to me, and I haven't brought a game for my wii in months. The thing that gives my pause is that people have compared it to the Call of Duty series. I hate Call of Duty's campaign for reasons I'll get to later in this rant, and I'm not interested in paying almost $100 for Modern Warfare with James Bond and blurry graphics, but I am interested in playing a touched up goldeneye with better graphics, better controls and a few modern features.

I've heard some good things, apparently it uses the nunchuck pretty well, manages stealth in a similar way to the original game and you can switch off recharging health in favor of the classic "find a bullet proof vest or fuck you" health management, but it also looks to have some of the dumber modern FPS features...
Now, I can deal with Quick time events (why publishers have such a hard on of for these things we may never know), I can deal with a cover system (the original game sort of had one as well) and I can deal with parts of the games being so scripted they may as well be one of those rail shooter FMV titles from the mid 90's. but I never really cared for the way the Call of Duty games handle the running around and shooting parts of the game for the following reasons:

First of all, I work alone. I don't need back up, I'm James fucking Bond! Why on earth would I want to share the glory with some other prick? I want to take my time to line up perfect nut shot on that particular guard without my AI 'buddies' shitting on my fun by killing him for me with some boring head shot. Fuck you asshole! Quit playing the game for me!

Secondly, I don't want to constantly be sticking to a narrow path and being directed the whole time, Let me explore a bit will ya? I want to poke around the villains lair on my own. Sticking to a tightly controlled path so the level designers can show me "bitchin' scripted sequence(tm) #21" makes me feel less like super secrete agent man and more like I'm on action themed carnival ride. *Yawn*. I'm not asking for Deus Ex or anything here, Scripted sequences are fine, but this is an interactive medium here, let me fucking interact. let me see that beautiful structure the level designers probably spent days perfecting from more then just the one angle. Let do a bit of backtracking if I want to, let me take my time and shoot every console, break every window and smash every crate in the level, you know, like I could in the ORIGINAL game!

and finally, constant respawing enemies; no, No, NO! I fucking HATED modern warfare for this bullshit! What is the point of shooting a guard if he's just going to be replaced by another one immediately afterwords over an over till I step across some arbitrary trigger? Give my maps with a set number of bad guys to kill and let me go about killing them at a pace I see fit. I know the orignal goldeneye had respawing enemies, but it was only if you fucked up, it wasn't %90 of the damn game.

I'd imagine that all these elements I've bitched about will be in the game at some point (it IS made by activation after all), but what I want to know is will most of the game be like that? Surly one of you has the game by now. So I ask, If some hated Call of duty, will they hate the goldeneye remake? Would you recommend this game?

PS I don't care about multiplayer. Not in the original or the remanke.

Yay b-day thread!

ect.

Anywho, the twist in this thread is that *YOU get to decide how I spend it!

The choices are:

a) Drunken' Guitar hero. Always a blast, cost almost nothing but I may end up doing it alone on account of some of my so-called 'friends' thinking Guitar hero is lame :(

b) Mexican themed restaurant I've wanted to take a look at, but haven't really had a reason to. looks decent. Can by Budweisers (I'm Australian) but will probably cost a bit. but a little lass sad then option A

I'm 24 BTW.




*if I decide to read this later.

Shitty quality due to the camera's batters running out before I worked out how to use the damn focus. I'll get a better shot when I get a god damn working camera

you'll just have to take my work for it that it level 97 with 961 lines.

w00t!

...of cancer. He was a red healer that was adopted as a pup from a cattle station just out side Mt Isa in march 1995 (got him for my 12th birthday) named 'Stubbie'.

? Febuary 1995 - 14 August 2006

He'll be missed. I'm going to try to get him cremated.

is there a way to discreetly and temporally disable a wireless network? I have to share my Internet with a couple of chatty teen girls, who tag-team the Internet 24 hours a day hogging up all the bandwidth, and if I want to play Battlefield 2 or Call of duty 2 with a ping of under 400, I'm going to have to find a way to keep them both off it for a few hours a day.

now, while they use a wireless network cards, I use an old fashion cable, and I'm thinking, there's *got* to be a MacGyver-esc way to use that to my advantage.

Here are the guidelines:

*I am not a 1337 |-|4c|<3r. and my IT skillz are only a few steps above "total n00b"

*Accesses to the computer they are using is limited. I might be able to get at it for a few seconds, but actually 'using it' will be tricky. as it is a slow ass P.O.S. (due to miss use rather then hardware).

*NO PERMINATE DAMAGE. I need to swatch it on and off like a light bulb. (so I can just say "Oh dear. Telstra must be acting up again, nothing we can do come back to it in a little while" >:D)

*has to be discreet. for reasons stated above

ok, put your thinking caps on.

...first time out of the contry. And the only Vietnamies I know I lernt from Battlefild Vietnam. I somehow doubt the phrase "Enemy spotted!" is going to come in handy.

So if you don't here from my after a week, it would be safe to assume I died from a horrible venereal disease or chose a bad time to quote "The deer hunter".

cheers.

WWII FPS. What the hell? remember when for like 8 years the only WWII FPS was Wolfenstein? then medal of honour had a PC release, and they where all over the freaking place.

I like killing Nazis. I really do. I liked Wolfenstein. it was fun. I LOVED Medal of honour on PSX, sure, the levels where basically a big line, it couldn't handle more then three badguys at a time, it was almost always night time, or inside a dark warehouse, or some place where you couldn't ten or so meters in front of you, an d AI was... strange... (they weren't sure how to handle grenades... sometimes, the kicked it back at you, sometime they laid down on top of it to sheald there comrades... even if there weren't any around, sometimes they ran away from it into a wall. they always stopped shooting at you until it exploded.) Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a blast (I loved the Indiana Jones inspired plot), and Medal of honour: Frontline was awesome!

After that it started to go down hill. allied assault was OK, but Frontline was way more fun. probably because Frontline didn't overdo it with scripted sequences. and the superhuman inviable snipers, and the annoying D-Day landing mission.

Critics hated Rising Sun. I didn't. but again, it wasn't as fun as previous MOH titles.

then this Call of Duty bullocks started. first off, it has that retarded growing cross hair. you know, if you want to be more accurate, you have to sit still for for a few seconds? that bugs the crap out of me. Is that supposed to be realistic? it's bullshit. I don't want to sit still to hit what I'm aiming at, I want to run across the room and hit five Nazis in the head in five shots.

Secondly, annoying sudden death. you seem to have the same health as the bad guys do. so there many instances where you're going to have to die a bunch of time just to figure out where the bad guys are. that's not fun or challenging. that's annoying "load and learn" bullocks. you might as well have a mission where you have to find your way through a mine field. and why can you're squad mates survive 8 or 9 grenade blasts?

ah yes, you're squad mates. well I can't really complain about them, mostly because they did the job for me on the 'annoying sudden death' bits. seriously, I just found a place to hide and waited for baddies to die/reinforcements to arrive /building to get cleared. Meaning that I didn't really play the game.

To tell you the truth, Call of Duty for me is like counter-strike online.

*sigh* counter-strike... Why is everyone in the world better at this game then I am?

I'm not the best gamer in the world. but I'm OK. I can hold my own. I can win the odd skulltag and halo deathmatch online, when I play LAN Unreal Tournament ageist my friends, I do pretty well. sure, I don't own them, but I'm always near the top of the ladder. But when they switch to counter-strike, suddenly, I suck unbelievably. I can't hit shit. If I meet somebody it's pure luck if I can take them down. And sniper rifles? Forget it. Even that n00b cannon (AW/P).

Is there some kind wired secret to playing counter-strike? why is it, that at medium range I can unload entire clips and hit nothing, while my opponent can get the fabled 'Headshot' in one or two clicks?

Why can everyone else master that horrible growing crosshairs type gameplay while I'm stuck in pre-1999 FPS mode? I donno. The problem is that with my LAN buddies, I REALLY have to fight to play anything other then counter-strike. Typically, for every hour of any non-counter-strike game, well spend three hours on counter-strike (and mostly on de_dust FFS). It might sound a little self-centered, but I don't like games I'm not good at. Geez, I don't mind not winning, but getting ass kicked over and over is a bit demoralizing :(.

Battlefield 1942 is awesome
Battlefield is the kind of game I always wanted ever since I knew multilayer existed. Sure, its got that retarded growing crosshair, but I can forgive it because I can camp like a little bitch near planes with my anti-armor, and blow the shit out of would be pilots on theBattle of Britain map. Tanks are fun to. Especially on the deserty type maps when you can form squads of tanks and rush capture points.

Still, there are things that bug me about it:
That fucking growing crosshair bullshit that everybody mastered except me. It's not too bad here, but I'd be happier without it.

Rifles are useless if you have any lag at all. I know that's the case with almost all games but here epically on account needing to lead your shots. It really annoys me here because of people with great connections hitting me all the time.

Spawn point camping. LAME.

Helicopters are a bitch to fly. I'm mostly referring to DC, but it also applies to the ones in secret weapons of WWII. It that another retarded attempt at realism? LAME.

Being a lone assault trooper and being jumped by a tank. You're fucked. You can hide from planes, you have a fighting chance ageist infantry , but unless your an anti-amour or engineer, you're fried chicken if you meet a tank. And even if you're anti-amour or engineer, you're still fucked.

I'm not a big WWII buff. Battlefield 1942 is just a good game. The fact that it's set in WWII means shit to me. What I'd like to see is a mod for it that's set in the Command & Conquer Generals universe (or something like it), with ultra arcadey style handling for the tanks, planes, and helicopters. Think mercenaries, but with wacky toxin tractors and lazer tanks. Well I'd think it's be fun.

Alright. Just had to get that out of my system. Feel free to ignore it.

Or give me some CS tips. I really need them, like how am I supposed to hit shit with that messed up growing crosshair.

KTHXBYE

When I was growing up, everybody I knew had a Sega master system 2 with Alex kid in miracle world built in... Well everyone except me. I had my crummy old CGA computer. yay. I used to be over my mate across the rode house all the time where I played Alex kid all the time, I have such fond memories of that game. I think got as far as that forest. You know, the one with the bear in it? Yeah. For some reason, I remembered it as a really fun game. And by the time I got enough money to afford anything, the master system was long gone.

I was also obsessed with this top down shooter called “Fireshark”, I’d only ever played on a coin operated machine at the local super market. I remember many a day stealing 20 cent pieces from me mums purse to play that game. I memorized the first level music (mostly because that was as far as I ever got). I soon discovered that this game was also available on Megadrive! Ahh holding that box in my hands and wishing like crazy I had a Megadrive.

So here I am at the dawn of my adult years, and access to a wad of emulators and roms of games of old. So the first thing I did was download the to above mentioned games...

Wow. Father time really took a beating to these guys. Maybe it was the face that these where among the first games I ever played, or maybe save state took the edge off them, but I really didn’t find them that interesting this time around. After raptor, Fireshark really wasn’t that impressive. And Alex kid? Man, what was I on? I still finished them both to make piece with my inner child, but I have no idea what made me think they where such brilliant games. I guess they weren’t terrible, but the symbol of my youth and innocence was a bit of a let down

Anyone else been through something like this? That is, loved a game as a child, not had access to it for years, and when you finally get another crack at it, discover that the child version of yourself was a bit too easily impressed?

I'm trying to backup my bookmarks for mozilla but I can't find the bloody things. can sombody help me out?

• Playing doom for the first time.
  
• Beating doom for the first time.
  
• Playing Jdoom for the first time with the PSX sounds and music.
  
• Angel (the TV show).
  
• Vice city played for the first time.
  
• System Shock 2 played for the first time.
  
• Victory after a very completive game of Quake 3/Unreal tournament (only on LAN though, not on-line)
  
• That wonderful feeling you get when you beat an impossibly hard game/level.
  

One day after sniffing some glue, i decided to fiddle with the jumper less clock settings in that blue screen whatsit just to see what would happen and now that my computer won't even start, I need to reset my CMOS, so there are one or two things I need to know:

is there any advantage to messing with the jumpers over just popping the battery out?

And I'm problby going to need to reinstall windows aren't I?

Just watched the final episode of Angel about 2 hours ago, and I still haven’t started to wind down from it.. Who have thought a spin-off could be so fucking awesome? No TV show ever before (no likely to every again) gets me this pumped. Screw Alias and 24, THIS is what good TV looks like. I’m not going to spoil anything just in case you haven’t got it yet, but I will say that the last few episodes are the closest thing to perfect TV as you are ever going to get (although it was a little rush, there is no doubt that they could have a hell of a lot of mileage from it, but you cant blame them for being cancelled). I mean Jesus!

I just wish I could have seen the show from the beginning, instead of seeing if from the start of season 4. *sigh* I I am really running out of good TV shows. atleast I have Spaced and six feet under to look foward to... an I'll problby grab the firefly DVDs one day...

So yeah. Again, sorry to gush.