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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Ahhhhhhhhhhh Skyrim is taking over my life help.

Oops.

How's it running for you, Chris? I know you've got the same graphics card as me and I'm getting a solid 60fps at 1920x1080 on Ultra with AA at 4x (8x has no noticeable difference other than putting more strain on the computer) and Shadow Quality moved from Ultra to High (other than improving performance I think it looks better).

Another little tip is to set 'bTreesReceiveShadows' to '1' in your SkyrimPrefs.ini (in your My Games folder in Documents) to make the trees look a LOT better with no performance hit. I dunno why it wasn't enabled as default because the only way you can tweak it is through editing the .ini.

An ini setting which was giving some people problems (it appeared after a patch) was 'bShadowsOnGrass' being enabled in SkyrimPrefs. Disabling helps some people quite a bit with performance although I think it might now be disabled by default after the latest patch.

There's also a mod which optimizes the HD textures DLC - Link

The HD Textures DLC fix (Link) is included in that mod. Bethesda really were weird with that one - The DLC had some noticeable bugs (bright purple tree stumps and burning logs etc) and they never patched it. The fix replaces the bugged textures with their SD counterparts from the vanilla game.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Always another hill to climb eh

(PS at some point, genuinely going out and climbing hills to escape the game may be required )

Nah, buy FM2013 instead of potentially catching yer death hill climbing. Skyrim is becoming a distant memory ... until Dragonborn comes out, I guess.

Seems to be running fine. Little to no lag, really. Memory card only gets up to about 61C immediately after exiting the game, so the card seems to be handling it nicely. I'll have to remember to check the framerate, but the auto-detector thing set me to "Ultra," so I guess it's going well. And it looks lovely most of the time. Like any massive sandbox game some of the textures can look a little meh up-close, but overall I'd say it's pretty gorgeous.

The fact that there's a setting for shadows on grass is pretty much the definition of insanity. I love it.

By the by, I think I was having a little trouble because I went into some dungeons right around the time I hit level 20, and that's when a lot of stronger creatures start showing up, so I might have just had some bad timing. But I'm fairly impressed with how, for all my adventuring outside of the main story quest, I still find a lot of this stuff pretty challenging.

I still haven't really used magic at all. But I'm going to the College soon and I'm starting to use more of my leveling up for Magicka. Gonna give myself a crash course in some of this stuff, too. I seem to be running into more enemies that would be better disposed of with magic.

Stop faffing around with Skyrim : RPG LITE

Pshaw! You can save whenever you want? A child's game! The mobs don't kill you in 1-2 hits? Playground material! The bosses don't take hours to beat? Hand-holding galore!

Dark Souls, on the other hand... My friend Seth was reduced to a gibbering sack of tears by this game. My friend Patrick's hands still shake when I bring it up. His face turns red and a litany of curses emerges that would make Andrew Dice Clay blush with shame. He never made it past the first boss.

Step up! if you dare....



Yeah...good luck with this!

Probably one of my favorite games of all time, and I just can't stop playing it. Even with the ridiculous levels of punishment the game keeps delivering, I just MUST go on. It's so compelling.... I am way into it at this point, but i feel like there is still a ton of content for me to explore and unlock. The entire game world is a puzzle that you slowly unlock.

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My brother's high on that. He finds sheer difficulty fun. I do not, or not as much. I don't like stake-less nerfed games either, but I like the challenge meted out, and tend to prefer the atmosphere and story with just enough challenge for it to feel occasionally dangerous. Too stressful otherwise.

I dig the idea and get why people like it, but I want a more tempered challenge, personally.

Same here. I used to throw my controller playing Street Fighter, so I'm not at all averse to games that strive to be a little easier on the 'ol blood pressure.

That's not to say that I don't like a challenge; I love playing the Halo games on Legendary. But if I feel like the game is holding me back from experiencing the story, I'll quit playing. Books aren't interactive, but at least you aren't required to dispatch an impossible-to-kill boss at the end of every chapter before you can proceed.

Aside from being rpgs in a quote/unquote Fantasy setting they're two different types of game. One's basically a do-what-you-like-when-you-want sandbox and one's a superbly atmospheric dungeon crawler.

I do agree that battles in Skyrim are too easy, though, especially dragons. You seem to plateau around level 25 and that's when dragons start to become a routine source of souls and not the grand battles they were surely meant to be. I must give SkyRe and Deadly Dragons another crack sometime because ramping up the difficulty in the vanilla game is less than satisfactory, for me.

I like the Souls games *and* the Bethesda games in the same way I like DIRT and rFactor. Or Sonic and Cave Story or Spelunker.

Have I tempted you into any mods yet, Chris? You've surely gotta be hacked off with the UI by now, at the very least.

Me? I've been playing KOTOR 2 with the TSLRCM patch which fixes the litany of bugs and restores some content hidden in the game code. When it was released I wanted to like KOTOR 2 even more than the first game but the unfinished feel of it stopped me.

That's not a problem now.

Gotta find that difficulty sweet spot, if you ask me. Too low and it feels too easy, and I'll get bored and quit however good the story or gameplay is. Too high and I get frustrated and end up feeling like the story really isn't worth going through all that trouble for.

I do like a challenge, though. I'll usually play through the game once and if there's any merit to going back to it at a higher difficulty then I will. I love revisiting CoD games on Veteran, for example. But only when I've experienced the narrative at my own pace.

I tend to stick with whatever the developer deems as 'Normal', even on multiple playthroughs (which I mostly do to either discover new content or I found the game so damn enjoyable to begin with). The exception to this are racing games and I'll remove the driver aids immediately.

I'm not averse to changing the difficulty in other games though - Much as I love it (still my GOTY), Sleeping Dogs is rather easy and there's no way to change the difficulty.

Not yet, but I get really paranoid about screwing with any game files the first time through. But I think I'll bite the bullet and get that UI replacement in there. It actually hasn't bothered me that much, but that's probably just because I haven't tried an alternative yet. That one I saw--on the top files list--looks pretty great.

It's dead easy to install with NMM but you'll also need SKSE installed for full functionality. The updates planned for SkyUI are pretty neat (I'm using an Alpha build of v3.0) because they include a built-in interface for adjusting other mods.

Using NMM also means that when you uninstall the mod your game files revert back to their vanilla config.

Waiting for the new Hitman to come out on Xbox. Played that sob on the PC and loved it.


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"Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback."

It's out now here in the States. Are you elsewhere?

I'm itching to play it, too. Those games are great fun.

OH! lol...In my down time, I have my head buried in the new Call of Duty. I'm hitting up Santa for HitMan.



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"Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback."

Whoops, stayed up til 4am scuffling with Incubation aliens last night. I'm on lates, but still :S

Liking the slidey-platform 'puzzles' in the last few maps. Adds a semi 'chess like' feel to flanking. Plus weighing up whether to trick dummer beasties into falling to their death, or getting the xp. Simple choices really, once you've got past the head-scratching first attempts, but old-school satisfying at the mo

Just ordered Dishonered (25£)and Syndicate (10£) off Amazon. I like black friday. Toying with the notion of buying a 360 and Halo 4. What do you reckon? Wait for the 720? Thing is, I really want to try those 360 exclusives like the Halos, Trials and... Well those are the ones I know of... Wait, that game with all the orbs. Crackdown! Yeah. Fable III. Dunno why, I hear it's awful, but I loved the first two. Gears of War, maybe. Would be nice to check out ME1 as well, see where it all started. I like the idea of having both consoles (deliberately excluding the Wii here). I just love games and another platform is another platform, know what I mean?

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The Freedom Roads

Yeah, you'd definitely get a lot out of the 360 exclusives, most specifically the ones you mentioned. I know some people are bothered by the aging graphics on some of those games, but if you're not a graphics purist, I say go for it. The Halo games are great, the Gears of War games are great, and I do think Mass Effect 1 (barring a few tedious things) is still a fantastic experience in comparison to the sequels.