What is the last video game you played?

[King Mark 3,631]

Dark Souls director thinking about adding easy mode

I'd be happy just with checkpoints that actually check your point.

Adding an easy mode would greatly diminish the accomplishment of finishing the game. The difficulty is also the reason these games have become legendary.

[Koray Savas 2,251]

But it wouldn't change anything. People could still play on the standard difficulty level while giving others that have an interest to actually complete the game and explore its well designed world.

I personally don't have a problem with the difficulty. It demands patience and light feet. I just can't stand being pulled back to the start line when I've ventured off into an area for more than an hour.

[King Mark 3,631]

I think that was more a problem with Demon's souls

In Dark Souls once you've lit enough bonfires you don;t have to go too far back. At some point in the game you can even teleport between them.There's also a lot of shortcuts you can activate

Hmmmm, Witcher 2 difficulty ramped up again. I guess the last chapter is gonna be hard

[Quintus 5,399]

Currently playing through B-game Conan, Alan Wake's American Nightmare and I need to hurry up and send the unfinished by me Spec Ops: The Line back to my rental company and swap it for the bound to be awesome Fall of Cybertron.

[Wojo 2,453]

Between a free-to-play Battlestar Galactica Freespace 2 mod that has been released, and both the long-awaited release of FTL (Faster Than Light) and the REALLY-long awaited debut of the first part of the Black Mesa Half-Life 2 re-imagining that arrive this weekend, I'm not sure I'll see the light of day this weekend.

[Quintus 5,399]

Yeah, like you'll ever get around to playing more than five minutes of it

It'll be nice to finally get to play the damn thing, though.

[Wojo 2,453]

Oh, I'll play it.

[Koray Savas 2,251]

Finished Jak And Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. All in all, a great platformer that I really enjoyed.

I loaded up Jak II, and sweet mother my jaw dropped. Gone was the cartoony village and volcano and cave settings from the first game. I was in a metropolis, with other people, and vehicles, and guns. The controls were more refined, the animation less Crash Bandicoot and more down-to-Earth, the music less bouncy and more low-key melody driven. The free roam was infinitely expanded, there was a minimap, I could commandeer vehicles and kill pedestrians. Jak now had a voice, and there were real cut scenes and what seemed like a more refined and interesting story.

It's very clear where Uncharted came from. Props to Naughty Dog. I've only played an hour or so of this one, but I have a feeling I'm gonna love it. Can't believe I never played this on the PS2.

[Maglorfin 196]

I have a little problem and I hope maybe somebody will be able to offer some opinion and/or advice.

Since I installed CoD: MW2 last week, I got the infamous BSOD when starting the PC the next day, first only once and again two or three days later. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit which later was kind enough to let me know that "Your version of Call of Duty isn't compatible with this version of Windows." I find this incredible since I've been playing CoD 2, MW1 and MW3 perfectly normally for almost a year and I've never had any problems. My PC is less than a year old, it's a pretty fast machine (Intel quad core i7 2600, 16 GB RAM ...), I have never played with overclocking my video card (it's a Sapphire Radeon HD 6770) and all my software (W7 and all games) is legal. As far as I know, all my video drivers are updated on a regular basis (I use AMD Catalyst Control Center).

Does anybody have any advice on what to do and where might the problem be? The stop message I seem to be getting is SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION 0X0000003B. I've done some googling on that but haven't come up with anything particularly helpful so far. Thanks in advance for any help!

[Wojo 2,453]

Hmm, that's a toughie. At least it gives you a stop message when your computer crashes. When my Fallout: New Vegas won't load in Windows 7, it doesn't give me any kind of useful info.

Google searches on SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION 0X0000003B point to everything from "turn off your screensaver" (who uses them anyways? I just tell the monitor to shut off after so long) to "reinstall Windows, you clearly have a corrupt and/or illegal installation," which is overkill and a lot of hard work.

For starters, I would recommend you try installing WhoCrashed in order to get more information on your crashes. "This program checks for drivers which have been crashing your computer. If your computer has displayed a blue screen of death, suddenly rebooted or shut down then this program will help you find the root cause and possibly a solution."

What I find aggravating is many games will not work at all in Windows 7 but work just fine in Windows XP, on the same machine and thus using the exact same hardware (albeit perhaps on different bit versions of OS).

[nightscape94 965]

I've been having a strange and urgent desire to play online multiplayer for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. I know the game is like a decade old, but I have fond memories of playing for like 6 straight hours. I wonder if people still actually play.

[The Psycho Pianist 216]

If we're talking about old games, then look no further than James Bond Nightfire for original Xbox. Absolute classic, undoubtedly the best JB game ever made (even surpassing Goldeneye) and it actually had some really good music, albeit fully synthesised. The composers did a really good job of imitating Arnold but adding their own touch which was consistent throughout the game.

[Koray Savas 2,251]

Nightfire was terrible, like most Bond games actually, but their multiplayer is just downright hilarious fun. I've bought every Bond game since Goldeneye. Haven't yet picked up Goldeneye: Reloaded since it's still a bit on the pricey side. I'll wait for Legends to go down too.

Goldeneye 64 and Agent Under Fire ftw! No gravity + grapple hooks + trip mines = Good times

Best part about Nightfire was being able to throw Oddjob's hat, the toy tanks and helicopters, and the stupid bots getting stuck in glitches.

Classic line from my childhood:

"According to my radar, he should be riiiiight here." *Sees nothing. Looks up. Scaramanga running in place on top of a mountain.* "Scaramanga!!!"

[The Psycho Pianist 216]

Nightfire was terrible, like most Bond games actually, but their multiplayer is just downright hilarious fun. I've bought every Bond game since Goldeneye. Haven't yet picked up Goldeneye: Reloaded since it's still a bit on the pricey side. I'll wait for Legends to go down too.

Goldeneye 64 and Agent Under Fire ftw! No gravity + grapple hooks + trip mines = Good times

Best part about Nightfire was being able to throw Oddjob's hat, the toy tanks and helicopters, and the stupid bots getting stuck in glitches.

Classic line from my childhood:

"According to my radar, he should be riiiiight here." *Sees nothing. Looks up. Scaramanga running in place on top of a mountain.* "Scaramanga!!!"

Yeah I concede Nightfire did have a lot of flaws but the fun you could have playing the multiplayer, as you said, locally with a friend was just limitless. The joys of playing 1 vs 1 with 6 AI Bots (Baron Samedi was my favourite because he looked ridiculous) on a map like Skyrail were so brilliant. The helicopters were hilarious as well, especially as the bots had no mechanism to shoot them down in game.

It's depressing how poor the recent Bond games have been though, or perhaps my expectations have been exacerbated by high budget games like CoD recently. Quantum of Solace was truly dire, especially the online multiplayer which is one of the most ridiculous online elements of any game. Every player runs around with bike helmets on (head protection) and they just fail to recreate the magic that came with old generation Bond games.

[Koray Savas 2,251]

Skyrail was the only map my friends and I ever played on

Bond campaign modes have always been shoddy, but I actually found Quantum Of Solace's multiplayer to be superb. It was classic Bond, revamped. I've always said that COD was modern day Goldeneye. There are gold guns, blood splatter on your screen, and that noise you make when you jump off someplace high is the same from when you got shot on N64. It's all derivative of Goldeneye, the most influential FPS of all-time. Quantum Of Solace was able to reapply those influences back into Bond (Activision owns it now), so it felt the same but new. I played a lot of Golden Gun mode in that game, and always ended up being first place lol.

Blood Stone's multiplayer just wasn't fun. I played a couple matches and then traded it in, didn't want to stick with it. The 3rd person didn't help.

[Jay 37,374]

Either Wolfenstein 3D or Doom is the most influential FPS of all time

[Wojo 2,453]

Word.

[Jay 37,374]

Goldeneye is the most influential console FPS for sure, though

[Koray Savas 2,251]

Doom, and to a certain extend Duke Nukem, are very influential as well. But nearly all characteristics of Call Of Duty can be traced back to Goldeneye 64, and COD is the single most profitable entity in all of entertainment.

[King Mark 3,631]

I have a little problem and I hope maybe somebody will be able to offer some opinion and/or advice.

Since I installed CoD: MW2 last week, I got the infamous BSOD when starting the PC the next day, first only once and again two or three days later. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit which later was kind enough to let me know that "Your version of Call of Duty isn't compatible with this version of Windows." I find this incredible since I've been playing CoD 2, MW1 and MW3 perfectly normally for almost a year and I've never had any problems. My PC is less than a year old, it's a pretty fast machine (Intel quad core i7 2600, 16 GB RAM ...), I have never played with overclocking my video card (it's a Sapphire Radeon HD 6770) and all my software (W7 and all games) is legal. As far as I know, all my video drivers are updated on a regular basis (I use AMD Catalyst Control Center).

Does anybody have any advice on what to do and where might the problem be? The stop message I seem to be getting is SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION 0X0000003B. I've done some googling on that but haven't come up with anything particularly helpful so far. Thanks in advance for any help!

Nothing beats an unexplained and catastrophic system failure to put you in a mood to play a game

no seriously, shit like this still happens in this day and age on a new PC??

[Wojo 2,453]

Doom, and to a certain extend Duke Nukem, are very influential as well. But nearly all characteristics of Call Of Duty can be traced back to Goldeneye 64, and COD is the single most profitable entity in all of entertainment.

I don't play COD and never played Goldeneye so I can't say what aspects of games I do play came from those games, because I have no frame of reference. I would love to hear specifics if you've the time to share.

But Duke Nukem 3D (not the side scrollers) definitely was influential. It added complex level design with multiple paths through a level. A speaking main character, even if he just quoted Evil Dead and played up pop culture. The level of interactivity was unprecedented, and I don't just mean the sexy stuff either; the toilets and fountains for health, the pool tables and arcade games, the switches and secret areas, etc. The shrink ray and mirrors. It even permitted some degree of sector-above-sector level design so long as the cells were not in the same viewpoint from a third cell, and used sprites in clever ways to build floors when they had to be. I used to not design levels for Duke3D but modify them, so I appreciate the game's technology. It's just a shame that it arrived in the twilight years of Doom-like first person shooters, which were never 3D but really a 2.5D that showed whenever you looked up or down. The new kid in town had arrived and his name was Quake, because Quake gave rise to Quake II, which was heavily modified to make Half-Life, and the rest is history.

~*~

KM, Maglorfin may be the only person in the world with that specific set of hardware and software, and so nobody in that game's coding department considered that their game might not work with that set. At this point, none of us PC gamers are going to waste words on explaining why we choose to game on PCs because all you see is the bad.

[Jay 37,374]

Dude, you gotta play Goldeneye, its brilliant!

[Wojo 2,453]

Well if my friend has it on her N64, then I'll play it. Otherwise I'll go emulator hunting.

[Jay 37,374]

My original cartridge was stolen in college, something that still irks me to this day. I still have my original box and instruction manual and have picked up a used copy of the cartridge since, but man, how annoying

[Wojo 2,453]

I hate thieves. Kill 'em all, I say.

[Jay 37,374]

It's never the same with a used cartridge, there's always sticky residue from teh price sticker on it you can never get off

[Wojo 2,453]

Goo Gone?

[King Mark 3,631]

KM, Maglorfin may be the only person in the world with that specific set of hardware and software, and so nobody in that game's coding department considered that their game might not work with that set. At this point, none of us PC gamers are going to waste words on explaining why we choose to game on PCs because all you see is the bad.

But I used to do all that shit. Deal with games that won't install because it's missing some file in DirectX (which won't install anyways even because you already have the "current version") Games that crash every few minutes because you put one graphics setting too high. Spend a week tweaking one by one the graphics settings, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and trying to come up with the "least worst" option for your game. Installing a new card and pray to god the computer will at least boot up and drivers will work. Manually edit game folders to gain a few extra frame rates (like the grass draw distance and density in Oblivion). Check every fucking Windows process to see what's taking up precious ressources. "Optimizing" your PC with an online "guide" and turn off stuff in Windows your not sure you should be turning off. Spending hours reading obscure message boards for clues on some error message

[Wojo 2,453]

So you won't do all that, but you'll spend years of your life splitting audio files from DVDs and video games to the tenth of a second just to get a few bars of music to line up and build what you perceive to be a complete film score. We all have our passions, king mark. The existence of consoles permits you to take the easy way out to play the games you want on six-year-old hardware and feel good about yourself because it's a foolproof and failproof method, while the existence of PC games and their own nutter fans and devotees does not threaten your hobby in the least. The people who play games on PC know what they're in for when they sign up, and the ability to add fan-made content, modify the game oneself, use keyboard and mouse controls, play 20+ year old games (yes, there are some out there that are worth it) without having to re-buy them, and squeeze every last drop of graphical glory out of contemporary hardware far outweigh any inconvenience brought on by not knowing what you're doing. It's not like PC gamers don't know where the XBox and PS3 are in the toy store.

[Luke Skywalker 1,796]

i'm aslo getting annoyed at PC games

It seems that without a new PS or Xbox the quality of the graphics does not develop... yet consoles can handle new games while older PCs have more difficulty (still on the other side sometimes games work in old PCs because the graphics are not advancing...)

What i dont like about consoles is that right now, i can currently play 90% of the games i bought.

With consoles you dont usually have retro-compability. If the PS4 will play ps3 games i may get one, as there are a few ps3 games i would like to play, nad the new games too...

[Brónach 1,302]

So you won't do all that, but you'll spend years of your life splitting audio files from DVDs and video games to the tenth of a second just to get a few bars of music to line up and build what you perceive to be a complete film score. We all have our passions, king mark. The existence of consoles permits you to take the easy way out to play the games you want on six-year-old hardware and feel good about yourself because it's a foolproof and failproof method, while the existence of PC games and their own nutter fans and devotees does not threaten your hobby in the least. The people who play games on PC know what they're in for when they sign up, and the ability to add fan-made content, modify the game oneself, use keyboard and mouse controls, play 20+ year old games (yes, there are some out there that are worth it) without having to re-buy them, and squeeze every last drop of graphical glory out of contemporary hardware far outweigh any inconvenience brought on by not knowing what you're doing. It's not like PC gamers don't know where the XBox and PS3 are in the toy store.

Very well put together.

I love toying around with computers.

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[Koray Savas 2,251]

i'm aslo getting annoyed at PC games

It seems that without a new PS or Xbox the quality of the graphics does not develop... yet consoles can handle new games while older PCs have more difficulty (still on the other side sometimes games work in old PCs because the graphics are not advancing...)

What i dont like about consoles is that right now, i can currently play 90% of the games i bought.

With consoles you dont usually have retro-compability. If the PS4 will play ps3 games i may get one, as there are a few ps3 games i would like to play, nad the new games too...

It's honestly hard for me to piece together what you're trying to say here, Manuel.

You don't like that you can play 90% of the games you own? The first run of PS3s were backwards compatible, but keeping that functionality hindered performance of the system itself, so they got rid of it, thus opening up a market for great profit: HD collections and PSN Classics. Other than Nintendo changing formats every generation (cartridge, minidisc, normal disc), Sony and Microsoft consoles have been backwards compatible. I still don't understand why it's a deal breaker for you. If you had a PS2, why would buying a PS3 suddenly make it disappear?

As for graphics not changing, that's primarily the responsibility of the developer. The PS3 and Xbox 360 provide the hardware capabilities for games to have spectacular graphics, but it's up to the developers to utilize that hardware.

[Luke Skywalker 1,796]

i wrote it badly. i dont have a ps3. i meant that i can play 90% of the PC games i own. if i had been a PSX, PS2, PS3 owner... most of the games would not work actually (since its possible the old console could have stopped working...)

[Koray Savas 2,251]

Older consoles are more reliable actually.

[Wojo 2,453]

My original GameBoy from 1988 still works.

[Luke Skywalker 1,796]

yeah but if it brokes (things fall to the ground, etc...), goodbye to your games.

[Wojo 2,453]

Uh, yeah. I've never dropped my GameBoy, but the internal memory to my Donkey Kong and Mario II: Six Golden Coins carts no longer holds data, so turning the unit off will erase my savegames. Fortunately, I have both games on an excellent GB emulator that lets me play them on the big screen with a gamepad...and it's awesome.

[Marian Schedenig 8,211]

I expect I'll replay Super Mario Land once I get my Ouya. And I'll probably pick up Tetris again. And certainly Bubble Bobble (though not the GameBoy version for that one).

[King Mark 3,631]

Finished witcher 2 . I wouldn't rate it as high as the reviews. The main story was boring and confusing to the point where you don't give a shit

A few fight were tough, but the controls felt floaty and not too precise.

The areas you could explore were pretty limited

I could re-play half the game siding with another character and with different quest lines but I don't feel like it

[Wojo 2,453]

FTL (Faster-Than-Light) is one of the most interesting, fun, and charming games I've played in a long time. The fact it's made by two individuals based out of Shanghai is remarkable. The game is also brutally difficult, and my game usually ends once I'm boarded and can no longer concentrate enough on putting out the fires to keep my ship's crew from suffocating once the O2 generators fail.

[King Mark 3,631]

So, next up for me is Rune Factory, Tides of Destiny

[Ren 75]

Can I just say I fucking love emulators?

[Wojo 2,453]

Of course you may! My new friend would agree with you; she loves her emulator and old-school USB Nintendo gamepad

[Jay 37,374]

Emulators are fucking AWESOME

[Marian Schedenig 8,211]

For emulators and stuff, this looks like a really cool idea.

[Maglorfin 196]

KM, Maglorfin may be the only person in the world with that specific set of hardware and software, and so nobody in that game's coding department considered that their game might not work with that set. At this point, none of us PC gamers are going to waste words on explaining why we choose to game on PCs because all you see is the bad.

But I used to do all that shit. Deal with games that won't install because it's missing some file in DirectX (which won't install anyways even because you already have the "current version") Games that crash every few minutes because you put one graphics setting too high. Spend a week tweaking one by one the graphics settings, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and trying to come up with the "least worst" option for your game. Installing a new card and pray to god the computer will at least boot up and drivers will work. Manually edit game folders to gain a few extra frame rates (like the grass draw distance and density in Oblivion). Check every fucking Windows process to see what's taking up precious ressources. "Optimizing" your PC with an online "guide" and turn off stuff in Windows your not sure you should be turning off. Spending hours reading obscure message boards for clues on some error message

Haha, gotta love your post, KM Been there, done that, I guess most everybody can say thart. Wojo, thank you for offering helpful tips, in the meantime the problem somehow seems to have resolved "by itself" since I haven't had the blue screen for some time now. Maybe it's because I installed Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in the meantime.

And now for something completely different ...

[Wojo 2,453]

My new friend would agree with you; she loves her emulator and old-school USB Nintendo gamepad

Last night we played Nintendo (JNES) from 10 till about 1 in the morning. She used the gamepad that I mentioned above, while I used my X360 gamepad (the D-pad buttons worked much better than the left stick). I got the first warp whistle in Mario 3's level 1-3, though we didn't get the second whistle in the first castle, or the third whistle in the second world, so we finally quit once level 7-4 kicked our combined arses. Then I sat and watched her beat Chip'n'Dale once my character died and didn't return, since she never got a game over again. Fun!

[Maglorfin 196]

I did this comparison just for fun, but seems they actually put some effort into "reproducing" London faithfully in CoD: MW3.

[Bellosh 3,419]

edit: broken link