june gloom on 2/12/2011 at 07:28
Step 6: Come back down from the mountain 20 years later with a feeling of unfinished business, formulate a group dedicated to finding and destroying any and all images, video, memories and thoughts of Koki, upon the completion of which the group destroys Koki himself and commits suicide
Volitions Advocate on 2/12/2011 at 08:12
I agree with everything Sulpher has said in this thread.
Bakerman on 3/12/2011 at 09:33
I'll do my duty and plug the first STALKER, which I played without mods and loved. Maybe that makes me a masochist. Or an elitist. Yes, CS is really that bad. At least, it was when I played it on Master difficulty. But playing a STALKER game on anything less defeats the purpose. COP is good and probably the most mass-market friendly of the bunch.
I can only speak for myself, but I found the first STALKER game to be a very emotional experience. Pretty much every underground sequence filled me with dread. The aboveground sequences I really enjoyed just for the loneliness of the Zone and the slow-rush of exploring these tumbledown abandoned buildings and towns.
And the gameplay.
CCCToad on 3/12/2011 at 10:38
For the fighters, Street Fighter 4 takes the cake in terms of popularity but in terms of quality BlazBlue is currently the best. It is easier to get into, has more depth than street fighter, and every character is somewhat more unique than the usual Range/Power/Rushdown archetypes most fighting game characters fall into.
Mass Effect fits your description mostly. The first one has a fairly good atmosphere of exploring a lonely, large galaxy but has a bit of a "grindy" feel due to sidequests recycling the same few building designs. The second one is almost perfectly what you're looking for.......on the first playthrough. After that the artificial "choices" and forced gameplay mechanics become transparent and the game ceases to be as enjoyable.
Look at L.A. Noire. If what you're looking for is immersion, that game has it in spades. One reviewer put it perfectly by saying that the game "sucks you into the 40's and doesn't let you go", as the only thing that's going to break your immersion will be if you try to adjust your settings. They also added the ability to skip most of the downtime by making your partner do the driving, which will skip to your destination as soon as any story-related conversations finish.
Psychonauts is a must.
If you're open-minded and have a PS3:
Of the various suphero games, the one I've found that best fits the description you're looking for is the original inFAMOUS. There's some fair criticisms to be leveled at it, but most of those won't be noticed by a player who bought the game for a story rather than expecting a GTA clone "sandbox" game. The city is the setting for the story, not the main feature.
EvaUnit02 on 3/12/2011 at 16:05
Quote Posted by Koki
64bit and more than 2GB of RAM will not be necessary until next generation of consoles rolls out, and by next generation I mean "Not Wii U"
Pffft, congrats on being fucking clueless. 64-bit OSes have mattered since at least 2008 and if you're going to upgrading your PC and/or OS there is absolutely no reason to buy a 32-bit OS, they're utterly redundant.
4GB is the absolute bare minimum if you're building a PC these day, 2GB RAM won't cut the mustard. Eg Battlefield 3's loading times are quite long with 4GB, having 6GB+ will give a dramatic reduction.
32-bit EXEs can patched to be Large Address Aware to take advantage of a system's entire pool of RAM. Eg Running Skyrim under 64-bit OS and running the game with LAA loader hugely improves the game's stability (and is essential if you're wanting to run high resolution texture mods, the same goes for the likes of the Bethsbryo Fallout's and the STALKER 1 trilogy).
Quote Posted by nose
Then there's freeroamers. I'm looking mainly at Skyrim, New Vegas, Mass Effect and the 3 S.T.A.L.K.E.R games. I have not played the first two, but it seems to me (wrong?) Bethesda/Obsidian and Bioware appeals mostly to casuals, instead of thrill and challenge? There's mods, but the core game remains the same... Also, many battles seem very "messy" and at times very onesided. Haven't played any of the STALKER games either, but they're said to have challenge and an unique, engrossing and at times scary feel. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, does one actually feel very emotionally lively while playing them? Also, does Clear Sky really suck so bad in comparison to to SoC and CoP? I haven't so much checked Saints Row, GTA and the like but they don't seem to go well with the first paragraph?
Obsidian make casual games? I completely disagree. Fallout: New Vegas is a very immersive game, especially with Hardcore Mode enabled, where you have to worry about hunger, tiredness, hydration, etc.
Another thing that makes New Vegas so immersive is the literature component crafted by Obsidian's superb writers - they're a league of their own, Bioware's and Bethesda's are very poor in comparison. In a RPG, good writing can contribute greatly to creating a believable, living world for one to lose themselves within. NV is a case where this is very true.
Some exceptions withstanding, FO3's Capital Wasteland is populated by 2D cartoon characters and everything is governed by blatantly black and white morality. The majority of the time there is next no middle-ground in Fallout 3, you're either a total saint or a moustache-twirling villain. Hmmm, should I blow up Megaton or not? HARD CHOICE, EH?
NV on the other hand feels like it's populated by realish people, with their own sets of opinions and politics. Nothing is completely black and white either. Contrast FO3's separatist sect of the Brotherhood of Steel with the NCR. FO3's BoS are saintly knights, crusading to protect the people of the Capital Wasteland against the East's unknown strain of green Supermutants that seem unstoppable - that's all there is to them, nothing more. NV's NCR model themselves after the democratic ways of the old USA and have all of the flaws too. Sure they're idealistic as a whole, but like current American politics there is some corruption, agendas influenced by "Big Money"/Big Industry (i.e. the Brahmin barons). For example, the quest "Return to Sender" and the motivations of the character at the roots of it. The NCR's intentions of bringing stability to the Mojave Wasteland and protecting them from Caesar's Legion are noble, but their methods are harsh, by means of steam-rolling through and taking control of the entire area and imposing NCR law upon everyone.
At one point during my first playthrough I was trying to play as a good two-shoes but was torn between two factions to back in their bid for control of the area. Both seem to be the lesser of evils and they both give compelling arguments of why they should have power, but what leaves me stumped what they may do once they're in control. Until I shed more light on this issue and their respective faction's agendas, my game had more or less ground to halt.
Quote Posted by Koki
First two STALKERs are bad without mods, third is good.
Stalker: SoC is great without massive gameplay overhauling mods. You don't need any mods sans the ZRP unofficial patch.
Koki on 5/12/2011 at 06:22
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
Pffft, congrats on being fucking clueless. 64-bit OSes have mattered since at least 2008 and if you're going to upgrading your PC and/or OS there is absolutely no reason to buy a 32-bit OS, they're utterly redundant.
Of course there's no reason to buy a 32bit OS
if you're buying a new one. I'm on 32bit and DX9 and I can count the games I can't play on fingers of one hand. It's actually even worse because devs are usually too lazy to release a 64bit .exe at all.
Quote:
4GB is the absolute bare minimum if you're building a PC these day, 2GB RAM won't cut the mustard. Eg Battlefield 3's loading times are quite long with 4GB, having 6GB+ will give a dramatic reduction.
Mine's cutting the mustard pretty well, thanks. And I have no idea what memory size has to do with loading times, but then again you're fucking clueless so I don't think you do either.
Womble on 5/12/2011 at 08:01
Quote Posted by Koki
Mine's cutting the mustard pretty well, thanks. And I have no idea what memory size has to do with loading times
lol
I have to agree with nose in that FO3, Oblivion, Skyrim and the like are pretty casual games. Especially when you consider how bad the writing is for these games.
Sulphur on 5/12/2011 at 08:39
Quote Posted by Koki
Mine's cutting the mustard pretty well, thanks. And I have no idea what memory size has to do with loading times, but then again you're fucking clueless so I don't think you do either.
So there's this thing called a pagefile which is used when your PC runs out of memory, and it's drastically slower than RAM? And if your game decompresses assets on the fly or loads entire texture chunks/gameworld data that doesn't fit on what you've got, it has to read/write to the hard disk? Which sort of happens a lot because with 2 GB of RAM, at least half of it goes to the OS? Yeah. That's kind of pertinent to the whole conversation.
Koki on 5/12/2011 at 20:26
Quote Posted by Sulphur
So there's this thing called a pagefile which is used when your PC runs out of memory, and it's drastically slower than RAM? And if your game decompresses assets on the fly or loads entire texture chunks/gameworld data that doesn't fit on what you've got, it has to read/write to the hard disk? Which sort of happens a lot because with 2 GB of RAM, at least half of it goes to the OS? Yeah. That's kind of pertinent to the whole conversation.
Yeah, it's normal for a game originally developed for a console with 512MB of RAM, which doesn't even have 64-bit .exe to address more than 3GB
at all to do that.
Sulphur on 5/12/2011 at 20:44
Hahahahahaha, omg. Clearly every facet of the code base stays the same while the porting's done.
After all, you can just transplant the entire file/memory caching/graphics subsystem code for the consoles onto the PC and it'll all click together and work just dandy with nary a change to the performance. This explains why all these console ports over the past 5 years work so well on systems with 512 MB of RAM.
