What game are you playing now?

[Kojack]

It would probably be cheaper to pay for a US bank account and sign up to steam with that

But I wonder if the inflation is due to export and import duties + local tax?

In australia import duties and tax are only paid on shipments valued over $1000.
Anything over $1000 being imported gets hit with 10% GST (goods and services tax) and 5% duties.
The GST is paid on almost everything within the country, but not on things we import. So generally it's much cheaper to buy things from overseas.
The current problem is that the exchange rate between us and aus dollars has reversed. We used to be better, now we're worse.
This has also caused australia's last AAA games company, 2K Australia (they did Borderlands Presequel) to close 2 days ago. It's no longer cheaper to make games in aus than to do it in america.

Although even when the dollar was much better, we still had the "australia tax", which is the nick name we gave to overseas companies adding huge markups to anything they sold here for no particular reason (higher markup than the cost of shipping and real tax). Like 2 years ago when it was cheaper to fly to america and back to buy adobe software than buy it locally. Adobe CS6 master Collection was $4344 here but $2513 in the us, you could get a return plane ticket with Virgin to Los Angeles, but CS6 there and still save $680 over buying it locally.


Anyway... GTA V.
I've done 3 missions so far.
Lamar is already pissing me off. It seems all GTA games have annoying characters that you have to put up with instead of telling them to STFU. And I bet he'll turn on me at some point.
The game runs fine and looks ok, pretty damn detailed city. But fun wise... I'm already wishing for a Sleeping Dogs 2, now that was a GTA clone that brought in new concepts. I didn't know what to expect in Sleeping Dogs and the lack of guns, focus on detailed martial arts combat and desire to not harm civilians or property because of us being an undercover cop really made the game feel unique. GTA V just feels like more GTA. I never finished GTA IV, I found it too boring compared to the great Vice City and San Andreas. I got into Saints Row instead. Hopefully GTA V will hold my interest longer.

First Person works ok. I don't like it for driving, too hard to see. On foot it's good for guns, but movement is laggy (since you are still moving like a GTA character, just viewing from first person).

[cybereality]

I think I'm like the only person that doesn't like GTA. For some reason I could never get into it.

[mkultra333]

I have never played the GTA games, but this one looks fun. Big city, very detailed sandbox, and apparently even 3DVision support.

They always complain about Australians being terrible pirates, then charge like wounded bulls for any media.

I almost bought GTA V the moment it became available, but since I'm still on Dying Light I couldn't really justify shelling out so much for new release games. Glad I didn't, given the install problems.

Speaking of Dying Light, I really am enjoying it now. Those first two training missions are the worst, not really a good example of what to expect from the game at all. The "parkour puzzle" type problems are few and far between, and tolerable. Missions are usually pretty straight forward. I love that it's so focused on melee combat, the violence is quite satisfying.

Although it sometimes seems to take a ridiculous amount of time to beat a sick person to death with a common hammer.

The environment is so realistic, I kinda wish they'd stuck with more realistic gameplay. Get rid of the plagiarized "special" zombies that spit goo and explode, replace them with other "tough" zombies like the firemen and workmen. Missions are a bit formulaic, go to get something from someone, they demand you go get some other things first, rinse, repeat. But I guess that's pretty standard.

I'm liking it a lot though, look forward to trying co-op once I've finished lone-wolf.

[Kojack]

I think I'm like the only person that doesn't like GTA. For some reason I could never get into it.

I never really liked the story line of the GTA games, the combat controls tended to suck, movement was annoying, but they all have a huge world with lots of vehicles. I used to love the races in Vice City, or getting a few stars and trying to ride a motorbike along the highway in San Andreas. GTA IV didn't interest me as much.

Some cool GTA alternatives:
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[youtube]Ya-VGgmcl5M[/youtube]

It's fascinating seeing how much the visuals of the Saints Row series have changed over time. Here's the trailers for Saints Row 1-4:
[youtube]mg_VgPwL4J4[/youtube]

I have never played the GTA games, but this one looks fun. Big city, very detailed sandbox, and apparently even 3DVision support.

Very detailed, but it should be, the game is 60GB. That's as large as X-Plane, which contains the entire earth height mapped with every street (using open street map).

Glad I didn't, given the install problems.

Apart from slow downloading, I didn't have any install problems. I guess I was lucky.

Despite being bored with it initially, I've spent the entire day playing. It grew on me. I still don't like the characters though, and it's not really original (if you've played the previous ones).

The environment is so realistic, I kinda wish they'd stuck with more realistic gameplay. Get rid of the plagiarized "special" zombies that spit goo and explode, replace them with other "tough" zombies like the firemen and workmen.

Yeah, the goo spitting zombie is becoming rather cliche. Are there any movies that feature them, or is it just games?

I was happy when I heard about State Of Decay Year One, until I found out it's just a remaster of State Of Decay, not a new game.
It will be hard to play a zombie game without parkour now.

[Klaim]

I don't like GTA either. I mean I'm not against playing it but it definitely don't appeal to me at all.

[mkultra333]

I've had Sleeping Dogs sitting untouched in my steam library for ages. Must be at least a year, I got it on special. I keep telling myself I should play it but never feel in the mood. It looks really good... but no zombies or monster, so...

GTA V doesn't have zombies or monsters either, AFAIK, but for for some reason I still feel drawn to it, though I've never been interested in the other GTAs. I think it's because it looks the most realistic graphically.

Edit: Self control failed. Bought GTA V on steam. I have spent way too much money on games recently.

[Kojack]

It looks really good... but no zombies or monster, so...

Then take a look at Sleeping Dogs' dlc Knightmare In North Point.
[youtube]v7Zxw70BBV4[/youtube]
(I got the dlc free with the game when I bought it in the steam sales)

The Zodiac Tournament dlc is cool. It's a tribute to the Bruce Lee movie Enter The Dragon.
[youtube]sG5-MDbz1u4[/youtube]

[mkultra333]

Ha, I like the smiley faced demon. Reviews are not so good, but it does make me more interested.

[mkultra333]

Been playing GTA V for the last several hours. Or, more precisely, starting, crashing, reloading, alt-tabbing, changing settings, and watching the 40+ second studio promos at the start over and over again. Occasionally I get 10 minutes of play before it starts glitching out. Those 10 minutes are quite fun and look really nice.

First it was crashing because it was running out of memory. Since I have 8 Gig, and a 4 gig graphics card, this seemed odd. Google reveled the problem was needing to set more virtual drive space. That issue fixed, I now attempted to play, using stereoscopic mode. It's nice to have a game support 3D Vision natively, but unfortunately something is very wrong. It'll work fine for a while, then suddenly shadows will get messed up, or 3D will just suddenly fail and it'll just be 2D with various visual errors. Doesn't seem I can save the game, so restarting means ruining whatever mission I'm on. Looked on the GeForce forum, seems to be happening to most 3D Vision users.

Odds are poor Rockstar aren't to blame. NVidia is infamous for its contempt of 3DVision users, and has probably indifferently borked the drivers.

That said, in those moments where it works, it is a thing of beauty. So atmospheric. I liked just walking down the busy city streets at night, or driving into the sunset listening to the radio, or crushing people on the beach in my shiny stolen dune buggy. Simple pleasures that feel like a dreamworld come to life.

[NotCamelCase]

I started playing Deus Ex series with Human Revolution after having seen the awesome trailer of the upcoming sequence. Even the endless fan talks of my friends for years hadn't convinced me to play it before as I'm not too much into kill-and-save-the-world stuff. But now I'm glad that I installed it, such a game! Love the musics. I rushed to get the soundtrack after playing.

[Kojack]

I've had GTAV blue screen my pc once, but that's the only glitch in 3 days of playing.

8GB of ram might not be that much when you consider the game is 60GB. All the files are also encrypted (not just a plain archive format), so streaming data in fast while driving around would need a fair amount of memory.

Or so I guess.

[mkultra333]

8gb is their recommended. The problem with memory happens if you don't have any virtual memory set. I had 2-4 gig set for my SSD C: drive, but I install games on my E: drive and it had none. After I changed E: to have 2-4 gig as well that problem vanished. People with 32 gb ram were having the same problem if they didn't have any virtual memory.

The 3D Vision problems are a whole different kettle of fish. God knows what the problem is, and god knows if they'll fix it. It's probably at the bottom of both NVidia and Rockstar priorities because it's a niche market. Which sucks because the 3D Vision support is entirely the only reason I bought the game, and it does look exceptionally good in stereo when it works.

[mkultra333]

Just finished main storyline of GTA V.

Even though I wrestled with 3D Vision related crashes all the way, having to restart the game every 30 minutes or so on average, and even though I had to repeat many missions because it crashed halfway through... I really enjoyed it.

Seems like GTA V is in a league of it's own as far as open-world graphics and interactivity goes, a significant step above everyone else. The detail and richness of the environment is incredible. And the way people react and the animations are excellent. And all the shiny cars, reflecting the world.

I also found it really funny. It's a black comedy, treating the appalling things your character does with total glibbness. I constantly found myself laughing out loud as I accidentally ran over another pedestrian as I raced from one location to another. The satire of the TV shows and radio station ads is also well done. Puerile at times, it's still often a very sharp commentary on modern society.

Characters are well fleshed out, and missions are usually much more interesting than the stardard "run back and forward between points A, B and C". When you collect items, they really mean something, they are useful and functional in larger mission objectives, and often have cutscenes and and special one-off activities accompanying them.

There is a lot of driving. The world is huge, and there's no fast travel. But because the scenery is so nice, and the radio stations so much fun, it's almost always enjoyable. Even relaxing, until you rob an armoured truck you spot on the way and end up shot down in a hail of police bullets.

The criticisms of misogyny are overstated I think. Sure, there's strip clubs and prostitutes, and you can kill them. But you can kill everyone. The only criticism I think hold is that it could really use a strong main female character, especially a playable one. Women should have the same access to sociopathic, murderous destruction as men. I hear the online mode does have plenty of female characters to choose from.

I've yet to try the online component. I hear mixed reviews. That it's a good idea, and fun when it works, but with long loading times, bad matchmaking, and lots of griefers and cheats. I'll have to see.

[cybereality]

I'm about 15 hours into Watch Dogs. It took a little while, but I was able to get it working nice on my setup.

Unfortunately I did not have good luck with Nvidia Surround or 3D Vision. I'm playing on a single monitor, in 2D, but with G-Sync it looks pretty nice on 1440P.

[Kojack]

The only criticism I think hold is that it could really use a strong main female character, especially a playable one. Women should have the same access to sociopathic, murderous destruction as men. I hear the online mode does have plenty of female characters to choose from.

The original GTA had 4 female playable characters (and 4 male). Since then it's been male only.
At least they have a bit of race diversity.

GTA 6 definitely should have at least 1 female character. Maybe Taliana Martinez, the getaway driver you can save.


Damn it Franklin, stop putting up with Lamar!

[Transporter]

I'm playing GTA 5, too. And I like it. It has a much better performance than GTA 4 - it's running on my old hardware. Of course not in 4k but I can play on 1920x1080.

[mkultra333]

GTA 6 definitely should have at least 1 female character. Maybe Taliana Martinez, the getaway driver you can save.

Yeah, now that you mention it, I wonder if they're setting her up in V for a bigger role in the next game.

Damn it Franklin, stop putting up with Lamar!

Would it kill him to say thankyou? Ungrateful SOB.

I'm playing GTA 5, too. And I like it. It has a much better performance than GTA 4 - it's running on my old hardware. Of course not in 4k but I can play on 1920x1080.

Playing in stereoscopic mode is a serious performance hit, since it pretty much doubles the render times. Plus the bug that causes 3D Vision to crash seemed to hit faster the better the framerate, so I deliberate had everything turned up high to kill the framerate. I was often in the low teens for FPS, especially if I had a long, unobstructed view of the city. But it was worth it. Of course, in normal mode the frame rate was silky smooth at 1080p.

4k gaming leaves me cold. Maybe if I had a monitor the size of a living room wall I'd see the point, but otherwise it just seems like diminishing returns.

[Kojack]

GTA 6 definitely should have at least 1 female character. Maybe Taliana Martinez, the getaway driver you can save.
Yeah, now that you mention it, I wonder if they're setting her up in V for a bigger role in the next game.

That would be cool. She's the only female in the game (that I can think of) who isn't some kind of stereotype.
Or maybe DLC for GTA 5.

Damn it Franklin, stop putting up with Lamar!
Would it kill him to say thankyou? Ungrateful SOB.

I just did the mission where you save him from the mill. I want to set trevor on him.
"Hey T, Lamar says canadians suck"

He's a bit like Lance in Vice City, or Carl's brother in San Andreas, keeps whining all the time but there's nothing we can do to slap some sense into him.
I'd love it if GTA had a Skyrim style system where most npcs can be killed.

[Kojack]

Witcher 3 releases in 29 hours!

But now I'm a little sad. I've just been reading about how the game's visuals on pc have been nerfed due to the limited ability of "next gen" consoles.
The earlier trailers were made on PC before the xbox one and ps4 were out. It was later found that neither could handle what the devs were doing on PC. So they went with lowest common denominator. Here's the things that were cut or reduced on PC to match consoles:

Level of horizon detail (essentially the draw distance had to be completely tuned down to tax the consoles less)
Volume based translucency
Ambient occlusion and foliage density / tree count
Flexible water simulation / tessellation we resorted to a (script texture effect similar to most games than physical based simulation)
Ground/building tessellation
Forward lit soft particles (this is the fire, smoke, fog that you would encounter while going through thick terrain into open space)
Real-time reflections in the water are completely off and replaced with a cheaper render solution estimator (this is a primary reason blood splatter was also removed from water)

http://whatifgaming.com/developer-insid ... en-out-why

In the mean time I'm back in Divinity Original Sin. 133 hours in and I'm still only 49% through the achievements.

I've done a bit of Spec Ops The Line too. Damn helicopter keeps killing me.
It's interesting, but I don't like the combat mechanics that much and I've already read about the twist stuff.

[Klaim]

I'll wait to get a new desktop computer for this one. For some strange reason I can't run the first The Witcher smoothly, no idea why.

[mkultra333]

That's awful the way they've nerfed the PC version. What is the point, why not just accept that a hi end gaming PC is going to have extra graphics that consoles won't? I much prefer the way they did GTA V, release console versions then later release an improved PC version.

[Kojack]

Apparently with only 250 staff, they couldn't afford to work on more than one version of the game.
Is it really hard to maintain two draw distance settings? I can understand that testing needs to check both (so important landmarks aren't culled on a console), but it's still annoying.
What about the water reflections? They had it in 2013, then replaced it with a console friendly alternative. That means they still developed two solutions! It's not a gameplay affecting feature.

I try to avoid conspiracy theories, but changes like this make me wonder if Sony/MS are really bribing developers to not make pc games superior to console.

It's Watchdogs all over again.

At least gfx aren't the most important aspect of a Witcher game.

[Klaim]

I guess the true reason is that allowing the PC to have better graphics by default would hurt sells of console vendors, which the devs rely on to get the most important part of their benefits.
I'm almost certain that there will be a easy tweak to activate better graphics on PC by changing some config files. Like for Bethesda's Oblivion at launch.

[Kojack]

Quick Witcher 3 thoughts (I've only killed 4 monsters and ridden a horse for a minute).

The starting menu screen is very laggy, the mouse looks like it's 10-20 fps. Cutscenes feel a little like that too. The actual 3d world is faster than the simple stuff.

Movement feels odd. I'm using keyboard/mouse, but I may need to swap to xbox controller (shudder). The problem is when you press a direction key Geralt starts walking, then 1 second later starts jogging. It's a jarring motion. I see something on the ground very close by, I start walking to it, then suddenly Geralt kicks into jogging mode and I overshoot. He takes time to stop running too, and feels like driving a car at times (changing direction while moving is probably closer to real life, but that doesn't feel right in a game).

Sadly it looks like yet another game (like 95% of them these days) that doesn't support any analog device other than gamepads. All games that feature a character with variable movement speeds should support analog axes to control them. My Logitech G13 is great for that.
The best two examples of this are the Riddick games and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (not the later ones). They allowed analog character control while still using keyboard/mouse. That's how things should be!

Some weird hints popups. It told me to move using W S Left Right. Of course A and D work too, but why mix them up?
I got to a ledge in the tutorial. It said to press S and Space to climb. I pressed S and Space. Geralt turned around and leaped over a railing behind me, falling to his death. That's to be expected I guess, but it did tell me explicitly that backwards plus jump is for climbing obstacles.

The camera keeps auto correcting, fighting with my mouse, when doing things like climbing ladders. That's fine for consoles, but when I have direct camera control with the mouse the game doesn't need to assist me. Maybe there's a setting for it.

I'm playing on difficulty 3/4. Apparently that means I can't heal by resting, I need food/potions. Considering I lost half my health just running beside my kid through a castle, this might not last long.

Collectible plants show up on the minimap. It's hard to not get stuck in a never ending collection cycle. Makes me think of James Woods in Family Guy. "Oh, piece of candy. Oh, piece of candy. Oh, piece of candy. Oh, piece of candy."

[Kojack]

What a guess.
I just started Fraps, it says the menu and movie cutscenes run at exactly 20fps.

Maybe cutting graphics features isn't so bad, I've got a geforce 980 and a hex core cpu and I'm only getting 47fps in the world at 1680x1050.

I just had a wolf open a door of a house.