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I didn’t hate it, but nothing hooked me after I put in about 10 hours and I just ended up forgetting about it. It wasn’t particularly challenging but it was a huge time sink for the amount of progress I made. The social features detracted from the immersion.
I like the idea of meticulously planning for a trek in a highly atmospheric, apocalyptic, and dangerous wilderness, and having to make difficult decisions about gear/loot that weight limits impose, but I feel the STALKER games do this much better.
Jailbreak.
Important to note: this exploit is not persistent, meaning you’ll have to redo it anytime the console is shut down or crashes. The 360 doesn’t suspend, so unless you leave it on you’ll be doing the exploit a lot.
In addition it’s only successful 30% of the time, so you have to try the exploit multiple times each time the console boots.
Great progress though - hopefully it leads to something more permanent.
I played Shadow Warrior back in the late 90s on DOS. Granted, it was only the demo because I had no money and no internet to pirate things.
It was a pretty decent Duke clone from what I remember. Gory kills, interesting weapons, corny toilet humor, some sexuality, and interesting little tidbits that made the levels feel more alive than your standard shooter at the time. You could watch the rabbits bang and multiply, stuff like that. Pretty entertaining for me at the time. I’ve had it and the reboot in my Steam library for years now, maybe this is a sign to finally check them off the “to play” list.
When I was putting together my NAS, WD was selling their NAS grade drives without disclosing they were SMR. They got hit with a class action for this.
They’re all trying shady shit, no HDD will run forever, no corporation cares about you, so use whatever you want and backup your data.
I have 114TB of Seagate drives right now and they’re fine. I’d use WD too, or HGST. The fanboyism around HDDs is so strange to me.
While doing some research on Sega Channel (I was a SNES kid) I found this article which has a lot of cool info.
Don’t forget the mods! You didn’t have to download anything, it was all server side. I forgot which mod I played most but you could set up all sorts of sensors, automated turrets, forcefields, etc using models and textures already in the game but repurposed.
Also, the net code was extremely good, it was very playable even on my 33.6k modem.
HL2 didn’t feel like a it has a technical leap as big as its predecessor
Gotta disagree with you on this one. Half Life was basically the Quake 2 engine with different textures and models. It was applauded for being a good game, it did not really set any technical benchmarks.
Half Life 2 was absolutely mind blowing with the physics, facial animations, and shaders. It’s the first game I can recall with that level of physics realism, and set the stage for many games to come. The Source engine was a massive technical leap from Quake engine.
Seeing the HL2 E3 demo was a peak moment in my gaming life.
Give the Deus Ex series a try, the story in the original is IMO one of the best, and the later games have awesome stealth and cool world building.
Hmm. I haven’t played with the sniper rifles yet due to the extremely short range spawns, but I’ll give it a shot later.
One thing to keep in mind is the game is not realistic in terms of weapon damage. You can fire the same bulllets out of different tiers of weapons and they’ll have drastically different damage due to the penetration values. To me, penetration seems to be the key stat for weapons.
I drop people in a single shot often. Skif’s pistol, silenced with AP rounds, is OP as hell and nearly free to repair.
Only recently near SIRCAA have I noticed it being much harder, now that enemies have better gear. It takes 4-5 headshots with mid tier rifles for some of the armored/exoskeleton guys, using AP rounds in one of the unique mid tier 5.45mm guns.
I dunno. Personally it doesn’t feel much different than any other STALKER game in terms of enemy difficulty or how the guns work. Lots of damage falloff over distance with the early game guns.
I desperately miss A-Life though, and some of the bugs in SIRCAA are really bad, it took me quick saving every 10 seconds and many, many reloads after a CTD to get past that area.
I honestly don’t think the mutants are unbalanced or too tanky. One of the first things you have to do in STALKER is know when to GTFO and run away. This is even demonstrated in the first bloodsucker encounter when there’s a ladder only you can climb nearby and escape.
It shouldn’t be easy to take out bloodsuckers early game. They’re trivial once you’re 10 hours in and have a good shotgun. You close distance, mag dump in their face, and that’s that. It’s even easier if you can backtrack into a corridor.
You’re supposed to feel weak and scared of engagements early game. You can run away from many encounters, or lure them into a favorable position. Jump on something. This has been the vanilla stalker experience since I started playing back when SoC came out. If you’re really stuck, just toggle it to easy difficulty for a couple minutes.
IMO all that needs tweaking for balance is the repair costs, those are exorbitant.
It’s not online/offline like the internet, it’s just referring to how the AI is doing open world stuff. A-life has two modes. Online which is a bubble around you where enemies are rendered with models and doing things in the world, and offline where they’re basically just numbers on a spreadsheet. They have simulated activity offline, like walking around, looting things, sleeping, etc. but aren’t actually spawned into the world until your online “bubble” is nearby.
I ran it on default recommended settings (High, 3440x1440) and it’s smoother than any of the originals were, even after they had years of patches. I experience some mild stuttering when I approach a hub area with lots of NPCs but it’s not terrible. I can’t really complain. 3090 and 5800X3D.
Pretty fun for me so far. There’s some weirdness with dudes spawning too close and A-Life AI seems to be missing but I’m enjoying the zone so far after 15 hours or so.
It’s way better than any of the prior games were years after release. Granted, I do have a powerful computer (3090/5800X3D) but I haven’t had any significant performance issues nor crashes. A mild bit of jank but nothing that’s totally broken, just some occasional glitching corpses or debris.
Really, really enjoying it so far. Had a classic STALKER experience while exploring, got ambushed, found some really cool mega-anomaly, thought I was safe and got owned. 10/10 would die again
According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.
This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.
Proper spatial audio, ie not the DSP effect that upconverts stereo, but something like Atmos or DTS:X that’s sending object based audio to an arbitrary number of speakers, does sound better to me on headphones in the few games that support it. The only game where use it regularly that I can think of is MSFS, but it does sound better than headphone stereo. You do have to pay Dolby to use it, or buy headphones that come with it, however. Sounds best on my 5.1 home theater, but also does a good job with binaural headphone output.
I had this on my “to play” list for years and finally did a full play through as the first game on my new OLED monitor. It holds up incredibly well so many years later. The AI, sound design, and lighting really carry the game, and when I went back to watch Alien I realized how true to the source material it was. 9/10 game for me, had my heart racing numerous times but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I could only do an hour or two a day but wow, very glad I pushed myself to finish it. Probably the most fun I’ve had with a game’s AI since STALKER’s A-Life or FEAR’s AI.
I really doubt they’re listening to your microphone. Constantly uploading your audio would be noticeable in bandwidth and constantly analyzing audio on device would kill your battery - at least currently.
What this demonstrates is how good tracking by other methods is getting. You don’t need to listen to someone’s microphone when you know what they and their friends/coworkers are looking up online and likely bringing up in conversation. It’s trivial to fingerprint someone and track near everything they’re looking up online, and even if you’re privacy conscious, many of those you associate with share their contact list with every app that asks for it. This makes suggesting things your friends are looking up pretty easy. Add a bit of confirmation bias to the mix and you’ve got this “listening to the microphone” theory, because you’re not counting the number of times an ad isn’t something you’ve been recently discussing.
I hate
embracereraser group, fuck em for cancelling the Deus Ex game.