Be Excellent To Each Other

Sinster Agent!

Please tell me that you're playing the massively overhauled, astonishingly-better-in-every-department remodelled graphics with loads of new features? It's a big download, but it's incredible. Shinemaps, new shockwave effects, bump-texturing thingys, proper engine glows, metallic surfices, hi-res textures, more polygons - everything is overhauled. The entire thing is easy to install and you can get it from here:

http://scp.indiegames.us/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeSpace_ ... de_Project

You'll find the mods and forums here:

http://www.hard-light.net/ and http://www.hard-light.net/forums/ - these are the main ones.

http://www.game-warden.com/forum/index.php - Lots more great mods hosted here.

There's an excellent Babylon 5 total conversion, with music, sound etc from the show. Very impressive, with pretty much every single ship from the show:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=105.0

There's been a BSG demo as well which is really good, involving dogfights in an asteroid belt. It was called 'Beyond the Red Line'. Regretably, the project was run by a shirty idiot who had a real nark on like, and drove the community and fellow developers away. Fortunately, they reassembled with most of the stuff saved under a new group and a new name, called 'Diaspora'. The full release is not too far away. Find it on the Hardlight web.

The first Colony Wars did that. That was a good game.

I really enjoyed Freelancer, but it's not quite the same thing.

This is likely because you forgot to play Project Sylpheed on the 360.

Picked up Oblivion cheap, about to play it for the first time. Quite excited. Any recommended mods, dudes?

I played it on Xbox so can't help with the mods but just remember to stick with it-the start is a tutorial through a dungeon and i found it a bit boring and also picked up everything I saw since I didn't know what was important. Ended up carrying around about 20 skulls and bits of ribcages and stuff before figuring out they were useless!

Millions, frankly. Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul changes the game completely, and almost entirely for the better - I'd leave that until the disillusionment sets in though. Otherwise... there really are far, far too many to list. You could spend longer finding, installing and trying to make work a set of mods that you like than you could playing the game.

I'd prioritise levelling alterations, performance tweaks and combat mods, though. Stealth, also. And Modular Oblivion Enhanced - basically a set of mods with parts you can set on or off at will. The Main Quest Delayer is particularly good. Things like hunger effects can make the game much more immersive, or simply extremely fiddly and annoying, depending on your playing style.

I've spent longer modding that game than playing it, for sure. It's a brilliant, vast, massively and stupidly broken game prime for the mod community. I wouldn't touch the 360 version with a barge pole.

Or, just play U7 parts I and II.

A levelling mod is a really good idea actually. When I played Oblivion (and I'm doing it in Fallout as well without noticing) I always did the sidequests first, so as my available quest screen is nice and neat and organised without tons of quests to be done. The problem with this in Oblivion is that the levelling system was terrible so by the time I attempted the main quest line, it was literally impossible due to the strength and types of bad guys I was facing. I ended up never going back to it which is a shame.
When my other half played it, I told her to to do the main quest first and not let her characte sleep (which prompts levelling up if you have enough xp) so as the bad guys stayed at a normal level. Since this meant the quest wasn't broke up with side quests it made it feel like a bit of a grind but once the main quest ends it feels like the game begins properly. She still like to play it now and then even if it is just to go and have a wander looking for rare plants for a potion. I owe Oblivion for turning her from someone who would play games just because I was a gamer, into a gamer in her own right.

Oscuro Overhaul is mandatory, but it makes levelling much slower, and the game quite hard.

I also highly recommend Deadly reflex. Makes combat much more interesting and dynamic.

Streamline - This is very nice. You can fix the fps you want and the game auto-adjusts to keep up with the desired framerate. There's also some other advantages like choosing the moments where the game autosaves.

There's also loads of graphical mods

EDIT: Also, use Darnified. Greatly improves the UI.

Including the obligatory NAKEDNESS mod. Mmmm, naked dark elf chicks.

Stripping dead bandits of their stuff and leaving them lying naked in the road is far more fun than it should be.

Heh. While wandering around the Imperial City ring road (I can't think of what else to call it) I encountered my first spriggan and then the burnt-out ruins of that necrophiliac dark elf's old alchemical shop.

I then met a nasty highway(wo)man, and after killing her and stripping her I propped her up against a signpost. I intended to come back later and see if her corpse was still there. I don't think it was.

Jearl, meanwhile, did stay. In fact, I got so disturbed by her corpse STILL lying outside her house and the locals not seeming to mind that I had to drag her into a seating position on her porch so it wouldn't look so grotesque.

Go Go Go!!!

http://savygamer.co.uk/2009/10/mirrors- ... ies-2.html

Mirror's Edge, Dead Space and Mercenaries 2 for free.

Wonder how they've managed to arse that one up. Not quite sure why I tested it to confirm it showed up as £0 here as my PC won't run any of them

Keep em for the future

I just want to play Fallout 3 again. Now that would really be something.

That is cool 3 new games for nothing!!

I bought some games from D2D the other day as they were £5 each. I bought:

Titan Quest Bundle
Civ 4
Mirror's Edge
Company of Heroes Gold
Titan Quest Bundle


wait, 2 TQ bundles?!

I put 4 games in my basket, when all the way through the checkout process with it saying £20, but on the final screen find out that it'd sold me 2 TQ bundles and charged me an extra fiver! TSK. I then spent 15 fucking minutes trying to email them about it. You have to log into some bullshit help system where it patronises you, and even then you must use some online form that demands to know your connection type etc, even though this is a sales issue. Anyway, because of this I sent a pretty hot headed email. I finally got a reply today (about 20 hours after sending). Woot, -£5. I tried to reply to their email to apologise, but THE FUCKING THING DOESN'T WORK. I imainge that if this was a technical issues and I wanted a follow up discussion I would have to use the stupid fucking ticket system again or something? fuck that.

As for the games? Civ 4 downloaded at 150kb/s, everything else is downloading at 32. One of them enjoys not going above more than 5. [nb: at any point I can just start downloading something from bbc.co.uk and rack up a 1MB/s. :/]. I've used D2D before: I bought WIC and Spore:CC from them. Both were an exercise if fucking pain. I was getting similiar download speeds for those -- and this was 1 & 2 years ago -- and sent a fucking "ticket" then as well asking if I was downloading from the US or something, and wether they could provide me with european mirrors. Once again I had to use their shit patronising system and there "help" team were fucking useless. I also had to email them when my activizations on WIC "ran out" (it was the 2nd computer I'd installed it on, ever... :/). They took 2 days to sort that out as well, the cunts.

So why did I buy games from them again? 'Cause they were cheap and I'm a sucker :/

In future, I'm definately refusing to buy anything from them. I'll refuse even if they balls up like EA just did and it's free. Mirrors edge? I get to play that 300 hours from now. COH? 124 hours! Not bad. Steam all the way, IMHO. Never had a problem with them, ever. I don't want to try gamersgate, as I imagine that's just as terrible.

Anyone else used D2D?

ALSO:
I saw John_Coffey playing Insurgency the other day. Same guy?

Nah. What's Insurgency?

Wow. There's more than 1 of you? (Is your name a reference to something, or your actual name?)
Also: It's a mod for HL2. Marine's vs Iraqi. It's takes the 'serious' approach. It kinda sits between COD4 and ArmaII in the 'serious & realistic' scales.

Also: Fun fact. The last time I had to deal with the d2d ticket system a year ago (about activiations), I had the same guy (Rich Metcalfe) solve the problem then! Does the D2D helpdesk have only 1 dude? I can't find the email about the transfer speeds, but I bet it was him as well.

It's from the Stephen King book/movie The Green Mile.

Johncoffey is a rather large black man who appears to be really dumb but actually posesses healing powers and is like, an angel in disguise.

He's on death row for a murder he didn't commit. Amazing movie, have to see.

Might want spoiler tags there

Er, spoilers?

They're not spoilers, surely. More or less every single scene in that film can be seen coming from a mile off. It's not so much foreshadowed as sledgehammered repeatedly into your face.

Oddly enough ever since that first Avatar, I still think of Coffey as hulking great big bloke from Green Mile.

*Ahem*. Er I have been several times telling you all about the brilliance of Freespace 2 and it's fine, fine mods and yet I have had no feedback from any of you as to how great and life changing the experience is, which it is you will find, what is this the meaning of this? Hmmm? /Not-The-Real-Rod-Hull-Voice

I haven't played Freespace for a couple of weeks. I'd install the pretty mods, but the whole point of getting Freespace was that it's old enough for my PC to run it at high levels, which are already pretty and nice. I'm not going to add a load of stuff that will be out of my computer's league, it's depressing.

Payday on Thursday, and I shall be buying a shiny game for my shiny computer. Can't decide what though, but I have narrowed the choices down a little:

Empire Total War

Pros:

My fave historical period.
Nautical mayhem.
I like the series.
Patches are supposed to have resolved most issues.

Cons:

Bit suspicous as to the easiness of the AI.
Patch installing to be done.

CitiesXL

Pros:

I love City Builders, and I've tired SC4 out a bit.
Looks lush.
Online element looks interesting.

Cons:

Heard there's not quite enough building variety.
Half of the people on Simtropolis really seem to hate it, and their an authority on these games.
Heard lots of reports that its unfinished, essentially.

Left 4 Dead

Pros:

It's L4D

Cons:

Kieron has it on X-Box
Already doing occassional 4 player system link.

Tropico 3:

Pros:

Fun premise.
Enjoyed the demo.
Me be an dictator.
Quite pretty.

Cons:

Not sure about its lasting appeal
Not quite so keen on some of the building design, some of it doesn't feel that 50's Cuban-stylee.

I'm leaning towards ETW, getting Tropico later and waiting a few months on CitiesXL to see how it evolves. I'll be certainly getting L4D2 when it comes out though.

Also, single malt whiskey. But which? Hmmm.

I've had Empire since launch and have put very little time into it. There's nothing I can point to as being The Problem, it just hasn't quite grabbed me the way MTW/RTW did. YMMV, obv.

Of the lot, I'd go for Empire. Although I'm not sure the game lends itself so well to ranged warfare.

I'm waiting for it to have the usual price drop before I consider buying it though.

Actually, does everyone here still like Sims 3? I guess that's an option too.

Do you have Half Life 2 Pete? Apologies if you have mentioned that you do..

Either way if you do then you can get some fantastic mods for it for free. This one is supposedly the latest and greatest

http://www.moddb.com/mods/neotokyo

I'm still liking Sims3.
And after spending most of my time saying "wah wah wah I've never had a PC game not work" it appears Cities XL wants to disagree. I'll just wait for a patch, though.
Also, World Of Goo is available for 1 cent.

Empire is agonisingly, borderline unplayably slow even just to load up the main menu. I finally got the bloody thing working without arsehole DRM, and got sick of watching it load by the end of the evening. I've uninstalled it and installed Empire Earth 3 instead, and that's much better already. Really quite pissed off, to be honest.

Sims 3 is a lot of fun. Appealed to me a lot more than the first two. I'm not still playing it, though.

I hear a lot of positive things about Tropico 3, and I'm tempted to investigate it - didn't think it was out until later this month, though?

Problem with Cities XL seems to be that they need people to buy it and subscribe for the game to develop - but a lot of people have looked at the released game and gone "Fuck that, I'll come back in a few months and see if it's any good", which means that they're not going to get the subscriptions they need, and... Well, you know the rest.

There is a demo of Tropico 3, which gives you a fair chunk of game.

It's a top demo that, gave me a few hours of good fun. At a gig it's a hefty download though.

Don't have Paypal so can't get Goo that way. Might get ClickandBuy and Steam it sometime though. Why can't more games and websites take Maestro eh? Eh? It's money, ain't it?

Parm, that's what I've heard is happening with Cities XL too. I think it needed to be another six months in development at least from what I've heard. The UI looks a little primative and not particularily attractive either. The game itself looks very pretty, I just have concerns as to the imagination and art design behind it, beside the city building gameplay.

Been playing Resident Evil 5. It's so glorious. Absolutely gorgeous and steady 60fps at 1680*1050. Exception made for the simpler levels, it brings many improvements over 4, like the inventory management, and map on the HUD. And strafe.

My time has been consumed by Titan Quest.
It's like a very pretty Diablo II.

clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick

Off to have chorizo and pasta, should be about for the 8:00 fest!

See, I raved about this when it first came out but nobody paid any attention. Okay, it could really use the random maps stuff from Diablo, but it's stacks of fun as it is, and it's really very pretty indeed. Simple, well made and compulsive in that clickclickclick sort of way.

Also, the editing tools are excellent, but nobody really did anything with them

I liked it, loads of fun. Especially co-op.

I'm only a lvl9 peasent, but we should do some co-opin of bosses.

I really should go back and finish Titan Quest. It ate my life for about a week then I got distracted by shiny objects.

Titan Quest was pretty but boring and pointless.

Aren't all games?

So all evening I have been playing....

No no, wait for it....

The graphically intense, jaw droppingly good amazing fantastic....

Chuzzle.

haha. Forgot how bloody addictive it was.

Also been playing World of goo which I got for 1 cent.