Posts tagged rants

Re: Deth’tilac

gayhab:

sinnyo:

“It didn’t occur to me that they’re put there purely for hunters to claim them.”

what are patch notes

what is checking the internet

‘Egads, I’m too busy leading an adult life to bother checking a backcatalogue of all the patch notes which have passed since I last played World of Warcraft. Not only that, but I enjoy the game so much that when I finally come to play late at night, after a day spent designing the intricate systems within my own games, I prefer simply to immerse within it, cradling myself in the chore-like rhythm of Firelands dailies and the game logic which Blizzard have built up to this point: that a silver portrait denotes a rare spawn, who will grant nifty rewards after its tougher-than-usual defeat.

I am some kind of child. How dare I attempt to point this out in a light-hearted, self-mocking tumblelog post. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways, o wise troll.’

(via gaycthulhu)

‘I love Tumblr, but sometimes the tags can be excrutiating.

“Here, Tumblr - have a moody photo of Loki/Maura Isles/Gabrielle under a slew of poorly-executed grunge textures, along with a choice of:

• a quote from the show, ideally spoken by an entirely different character;
• or a random song lyric;

.. rendered in cursive font.”

I’m all for expressing fandom, but some of these tags would make DeviantART proud.’

</bitchiness>

‘I’ve ranted at length on Facebook and Twitter about some of my recent experiences with PC games, as while the past month’s sales made it a delightful time to be a Steam user, some of the games which finally became affordable turned out to be gunshot wounds to the knee as far as my enthusiasm for this platform goes.

I’ve spent a couple of years away from consoles, having been priced out of the Xbox 360 and PS3, and being left wanting by Wii’s more lightweight games catalogue. World of Warcraft took up a lot of that slack, and so too did Triumph Studios’ Overlord, which I am now nearing completion on. WoW is a solidly-built MMO to which I took quite naturally on a standard keyboard and mouse; Overlord is an action game which allows the use of an Xbox 360 controller - something I didn’t have when I started, but which really opened up the game’s finer controls after hving tried it with a mouse.

There are a number of other games which work brilliantly on PC, such as anything in the strategy genre, and the charming, controller-enabled Cave Story. But there are also some stinkers, and these are thoroughly bringing my mood down:

• Bioshock is my biggest bugbear. I bought it (boxed) for PC years ago because it was the biggest thing I wanted on 360. I have never managed to get it running on my PC. Even before Take Two launched a patch for it, I found that the game would not load past the menus. Weeks of slow and painful emails went to the publishers’ support team on my second attempt, but no solution was gleaned, and eventually I gave up. Now though, I cannot even install the game because setup requires me to connect to the patching server. That’d be a lot easier if the connection weren’t constantly timing out. I even wondered if buying it via Steam might solve the problem, but I’m not that free with my money.
• There’s also Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Again, I’d gotten quite excited about it in the 360’s early days, and so when I saw it on Steam’s sales I bought it at long last, not realising it’s purely a keyboard-and-mouse affair. This setup does work for some games, but not Oblivion. Selecting spells feels clunky and selecting your attacks is not at all intuitive, leaving my poor character to die the first time she met a hostile in the wider game world. And yet it was a highly successful Xbox 360 title. So why can I not use a 360 controller? There are solutions available, making use of two emulation programs (ControlMK and JoyToKey), but even this long-winded process yields dodgy results. I failed in combat again and promptly uninstalled the game.

The main anguish I feel, apart from feeling cheated as a customer, is that I never had these problems with consoles. There’s a lot to be said for standardised hardware - and in saying that I may even be sympathising with Mac users, though they’re often left in total darkness when it comes to PC releases.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask, to add support for a couple of mainstream controllers like those for 360 and PS2/3 (which I understand can be used with USB adaptors), and names like Sidewinder. Sure, no-one’s going to bother for strategy games and FPS where the keyboard and mouse layout is superior, but I feel a real loss when it comes to action games -particularly when I could have gotten it on a console instead. It’s put me right off buying the PC versions of future games, and I think that a shame because of the many other, unique features you get from a PC gaming experience over a more streamlined console.

Anyway - rant over, hard disk space reclaimed…’