Far Cry 1 for the first time, what a good looking game! Unfortunately per my ongoing habit I won't play it all the way through, instead will buy the next game that interests me just to check out the graphics and on and on it goes.

buckeye wrote:

Far Cry 1 for the first time, what a good looking game! Unfortunately per my ongoing habit I won't play it all the way through, instead will buy the next game that interests me just to check out the graphics and on and on it goes.

Which is just as well because the game goes to complete shit halfway through.

appiah4 wrote:

buckeye wrote:

Far Cry 1 for the first time, what a good looking game! Unfortunately per my ongoing habit I won't play it all the way through, instead will buy the next game that interests me just to check out the graphics and on and on it goes.

Which is just as well because the game goes to complete shit halfway through.

Yes it does, as does Crysis IMO. The first half of both games are awesome though.

Now that I finished Realms of Arkania Star Trail, I can focus my spare time on Wolfenstein: The New Order. Been playing this guy for nearly 3 months now and about 2/3 through it. I'm really annoyed by the limited save points. I let me son play around on the U-boat level after I got a couple of checkpoints in, and he got through it while I watched. But I have no way of going back to where I left off, other than completely restarting the level from the beginning. Your options are: continue, go back to last checkpoint (which was the same as where he left off), restart the level, or restart a previous level. I know this is par for the course for moderns FPS's, but I hate it and just have to deal with it.

Planned next games after I finish Wolfenstein:TNO
-Eschalon Book 2 (I beat Book 1 last year)
-Dark Forces

Preliminary plans for next games after those:
-Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
-Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
-Wing Commander: Prophecy

iM1A2 Abrams on my 2.6 GHz Athlon II PC. The game is entirely playable (and winnable) from map view, you don't need to jump into the tank to win the game. In fact, I won the quickstart scenario many times using the map alone. Though I believe the game could be more exciting when played from inside the tank. Problem is, iM1A2 Abrams runs way too fast on a 2.6 GHz machine. I remember playing it in 2002 using 1.8 GHz laptop, and it runs too fast as well, certainly too fast to play it from inside the tank.

Also, when I tried to screen cap the game, the picture becomes like this:

Dafuq.

And no, FRAPS cannot capture the game's screenshot either, I had to use PrintScreen button.

Is there any way to slow down individual Windows application without slowing down the entire PC?

Entirety of my playtime in the last month has been on Lichess.org

I should go back to playing Freespace 2 at some point, but it's such a fucking chore with a gamepad..

Are there any decent and affordable flight sticks/ joysticks in the market?

appiah4 wrote:

Entirety of my playtime in the last month has been on Lichess.org

I should go back to playing Freespace 2 at some point, but it's such a fucking chore with a gamepad..

Are there any decent and affordable flight sticks/ joysticks in the market?

Some time ago I was looking for a joystick precisely for FreeSpace and Thrustmaster T16000M was recommended to me. I haven't actually bought it myself yet, but that seems to have a good quality/price ratio.

Though you might do fine with some even cheaper stick if you just need it for one game.

That's nice but the ambidextrous design seems to have put the throttle control at a very awkward position. Regardless, it's also out of my price range 🙁 How is Logitech Extreme 3D Pro I wonder..

appiah4 wrote:

That's nice but the ambidextrous design seems to have put the throttle control at a very awkward position. Regardless, it's also out of my price range 🙁 How is Logitech Extreme 3D Pro I wonder..

You could get that with the separate hands on throttle, but that would double the price 😵

You should only go full speed or matching speed in FreeSpace anyway!

appiah4 wrote:

That's nice but the ambidextrous design seems to have put the throttle control at a very awkward position. Regardless, it's also out of my price range 🙁 How is Logitech Extreme 3D Pro I wonder..

If that's what I think it is, I'm using the exact same Logitech Extreme 3D. It's pretty worth it. Has all the range and minimal deadzone you'd need. The throttle knob is the only bad part of it, it's flimsy and cheap.

There's also to my knowledge no left handed or ambidextrous version, so unless you're right handed using it is going to be a problem.

Navy Strike, an obscure game I've just acquired.

I have to admit dogfight is less exciting than, say, Jane's ATF, but the strategic part is tempting --although I have to test it yet.

I felt like putting a sports car o̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶r̶o̶o̶f̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶t̶c̶h̶ through its paces on a windy backroad, so I dusted off an old favorite:

At first I installed it on my K6-2 500/Voodoo3, which was the system I used to play this game on back in the day. Unfortunately it didn't run very well (12-15 FPS), and I wanted a better experience, so I threw it on my Shuttle XPC (Athlon XP 1700+/S3 ProSavage8) instead, where it runs nice and smooth at 800x600x16.

I'd love to say this game holds up, and in most ways it does - the track & environment design is great, the music is still awesome, and while the graphics engine is very dated, they used it well. It still manages to look good and convey a pleasing sense of speed.

Unfortunately where it falls apart is the vehicle physics, especially car-environment collisions; the cars just don't behave how you'd expect and tend to bounce around like pinballs if you hit a bit of overly-angular terrain wrong.

On the plus side, it has my favorite feature in any racing game: unlock everything with a single cheat code. So if you dial back your expectations of realism a bit, it's still a good fun game to blast down insanely-tight Scottish backroads or rip along the Welsh seaside at 200km/h for a few hours.

This is making me think of picking up a more modern equivalent. I just noticed Dirt Rally is on massive sale and even has native ports for OS/X+Linux. Tempting...

@xjas - You do realize that is one of the most configurable rally games out there? You can adjust the physics and pretty much everything else.

I posted about this a long time ago, but this site has everything you need. Patch 6 lets you dig into the physics quite a bit. Still my all time favorite rally game.

Possible fix for Mobil 1 Rally Championship a.k.a. Rally Championship 2000 !!!

^^ oh sweet, I vaguely knew there were some mods out there but didn't realize you could do anything in-depth. I'll have to dig in & see if I can make the cars feel more substantial. 😀 To be fair I was also playing with the keyboard, which makes things pretty twitchy; I think I used to "drive" with my flight stick back in the day.

I ended up pulling the trigger on Dirt Rally too - it looks like a hell of a game for $7.99, so why not? I'll let you guys know if it's a worthy successor in... 32h, which is how long the 25GB download is going to take to finish through my DSL drinking-straw. Yikes. This is why I don't buy "triple-A" games very often.

Rally Championship is and absolute blast over LAN and if you are ever up for some VPN LAN play let me know. Although I don't know if your DSL would have enough bandwidth actually.

liqmat wrote:

I posted about this a long time ago, but this site has everything you need. Patch 6 lets you dig into the physics quite a bit. Still my all time favorite rally game.

Thanks for this - I'm a big Network Q Rally (1996) fan so set out to try the rest of the games in the series a while back; Rally Championship didn't impress due to the crazy physics and narrow roads. I'll have to revisit it.

blurks wrote:

Need for Speed Porsche, great game. It hasn't aged well in terms of graphics but I remember that it was a very beautiful game when it launched and I was seriously impressed by transparent windows (!), animated driver models and a damage system that even worked and gave visual feedback. That was hot shit in 2000.

The attachment nfsp.jpg is no longer available

After hex-editing the porsche.exe I "unlocked" the higher-res textures. This seems to be a common problem with modern systems above 2.1 GHz.

Now that I'm done with Realms of Arkania, I can focus on finishing Wolfenstein: The New Order. Such a good game! I just got to the Nazi lunar base. I'm loving this storyline. I'm not a plot nitpicker and have a pretty easy time ignoring plot holes, life is too short to nitpick that kind of stuff. Just really enjoying this one. It's a great game for stealth and exploration too, lots of secrets to uncover. 😎

My trusty ole' 750Ti handles this game well for the most part. There are sections where it gets a little chunky in the 30-40 fps range, but for the most part it stays close to 60 fps. Using custom graphics settings to get mostly high details and still keep the VRAM requirement <2GB.

clueless1 wrote:

Preliminary plans for next games after those:
...
-Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl

I got to thinking about Stalker SoC after watching some of that HBO series 'Chernobyl' recently - the show was too much for me but I always fancied SOC's sci fi take on it all. I'd tried to replay it a while back and oh my eyes, it really hadn't aged well, but fortunately it's well supported by the community - people are still doing amazing work on it.

I tried to stay as vanilla as possible while making it feel a little more 2019, but I did end up tweaking a few gameplay elements to make it a little less brutal - the notes I took during the process are included below if that interests anyone. I'm amazed at how good it looks and the gameplay is pretty fantastic too - it always had atmosphere, no trouble there, but the gunplay and RPG-lite elements are still pretty satisfying too. I don't know how long I'll stick with it, it's pretty bleak and I'm still dying a fair bit on 'novice', but so far I'm enjoying myself. I like that the enemy AI doesn't always just rush you; you have to spend a lot of time checking behind you to ensure some nasty mutant thing hasn't circled around.

I'm using the original DVD version of the game but I assume this mod list will work with any of them (with the exception of the NO-CD crack perhaps). Note that I tried the version of XpressTuning that includes SweetFX and thought it looked like arse, so I went with the 'non' version.

patches / mods I'm using:

1- run stk-ww-10005.exe
2
3- run stk-sck-efigspc-patch-5-6.exe
4
5- copy exe in to /bin from STALKER.SOC.V1.0006.ALL.VITALITY.NOCD
6
7- change the launch icon destination to be: "C:\Games\S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl\bin\XR_3DA.exe" -nointro -noprefetch	
8
9- Run the game, set the render to Full Dynamic Lightning.
10
11- Exit the game.
12
13- There's a file called "fsgame.ltx" in the main game directory. Open it with notepad, make sure that the game_data line is set to 'true', for example:
14$game_data$   		= true|		true|	$fs_root$|		gamedata\
15	
16- copy contents of XpressTuning_Non-ENB.7z into "C:\Games\S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl"
17	
18- use Modifer.exe in C:\Games\S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl\gamedata to:
19
20	- turn off head bob
21	- ABC sleeping bag
22	- Diary, ZRP version
23	- Flashlight, ZRP
24	- Earthquake prevention
25	- Fire illimination
26	- ZRP main menu
27	- Outfit information
28	- Radiation Whiteout
29	- Trade and search screens (ZRP default)
30	- Sell guns / ammo to NPCs
31
32FOV switcher 17
33- Installation:
34	Copy it to the game folder.
35	BACKUP your original xrgame.dll somewhere. In the case of problems just copy it back.
36	Run fov_switch.cmd
37	Enter '17' and press enter
38	
39- use Nvidea control panel to do antialiasing (4X) and anisotrpic filtering 16X (vsync doesn't seem to work with this engine)

Playing Planetside 2 on my main PC and enjoying Mario Kart on the Game Cube with my 8-year old son.