Probably also Forsaken (a blatant Descent clone, but great at what it is), Strife (kinda open-worldish FPS-RPG/adventure game using the Doom engine), Powerslave (pretty much the precursor to Serious Sam, old school FPS set in ancient space egypt), Cyberstrike 2 (MMO-Mech combat game from 1998 ... the original from 1993 also had much of this, but it could only be played through GEnie, which is long gone), Shadow President (pretty much like DEFCON, creepily detailed nuclear war strategy game, with some pretty deep political simulation in there, from 1993), Cyber-cop (pre-Wolfenstein 3D FPS for the Genesis, PC and Amiga, also known as Corporation) and Independence War: The Starship Simulator (space combat simulator featuring a relatively large starship, with four bridge stations and TNG Enterprise style saucer separation, instead of the small fighter craft in most other space games).
I think that "it's bad for consumers to have a backlog" is kinda shortsighted, the vast majority of those probably don't spend more than they can afford on those games, and since people's personal economy may rapidly change, often for the worse. It could be good to have bought the games you are vaguely interested in when you could afford them, instead of waiting until you may not be able to afford it anymore.
I cannot remember for the life of me how I ever ended up here. I think I saw a comment on some Gamespot video that sent me over here? It might have been the Endurance Run but I'm not 100%. I just remember playing Oblivion on my brand new Ps3 (3 years after release) and watching Quick Looks at the same time in my dorm room.
I don't remember how I got here either, I did not follow Gamespot particularly closely - quite the opposite, I think the last Gamespot thing I watched before finding out about GB was Alex' video review of Big Rigs back in 2003 or something. I think I just happened to see Giant Bomb mentioned in TV Tropes or the Something Awful Let's Play forums some time in 2009, and then I kinda got stuck here.
Only 5 days left before the servers shut down now (they are due to be shut down on the 28th). Would kinda have expected the player numbers to rise a bit during this last few weeks, but instead it seems to be dwindling. Would be fun to play a few matches before it's all over, I'm currently playing Raven (as fisknoll), though I'm kinda considering deleting the character just so I can try Valor before it's shut down, since I only ever got to play S.V.E.R and Raven.
I mean really, read this, and tell me you don't think this guy is an asshole who is disliked by most of his family and acquaintances.
... I didn't see anything particularly bad about that? I thought it was surprisingly applicable to the recent discussions about how to play Dark Souls - lots of people with weird self-imposed rules of what is the proper way to play, calling alternate or simply more efficient ways cheap or easy mode.
You could buy a budget PC for around $200 that would be better than what you listed in every way. Still no top of the line stuff, but which would probably let you play most of the new releases at reasonable framerates on low settings if you scale the resolution down a bit, the integrated AMD Radeon GPU's are pretty alright, I used one in my main PC for about 2 years (an Radeon HD 4200, which did quite well up until Battlefield 3 was released), and I'm sure the same is true for the integrated Nvidia GPU's as well, I would stay away from Intel graphics though - even though neither of the integrated options are fantastic for gaming, the AMD and Nvidia ones usually support all the DirectX and OpenGL features, though not have all the power necessary to do them well, the Intel GPU's seem to have very limited support, and often won't load games at all.
Man, you know what else people don't have? A chat full of people pushing to go to the stupidly hidden secrets. You wanna talk about non-reviewers playthoughs? How many people who didn't use a FAQ do you think actually found that? I bet many more people missed Ash Lake than saw it.
I completely agree with this. I missed this place on my playthrough since I wasn't using a guide at all, and apparently there are TWO Illusory walls hiding it? Seriously? How in the world is ANYONE supposed to find that without any help?
The one thing I really disliked about this game is the stupid illusory walls - it's so stupid to hide content like that without any tips to its whereabouts at all. The only time I EVER found shit like this was when there was a note left by other players. How else was I supposed to know that I could attack a tree, or roll into a wall to pass through it?
Dark Souls isn't a theme park. It's not a narrow, linear roller coaster with pretty lights and underpaid carnies dancing a jig at the sidelines for your amusement. They "hide content" because they're secrets. Because if you say to yourself "I wonder if they'd be sneaky enough to hide another fake wall behind the fake wall" and try it, you just might be rewarded with something (like two secret areas that are completely optional but pretty cool). Your comment makes me wonder if there'd be someone like you complaining about secret warp levels in OG Mario, or about secret passages in DOOM if those games were released today.
Doom, or perhaps even more Wolfenstein 3D came to mind for me too - both of which hid secret areas or even levels behind illusory walls - in the case of Wolfenstein 3D, there is a prime example on the very first level of a secret exit hidden behind a wall in another secret room. Quake went as far as hiding the hardest difficulty in a secret room.
I haven't seen all the secrets in Dark Souls, maybe some are more well hidden than others, but just like the aforementioned Id Software games, there seems to be clues around (disregarding messages from other players) of what may be secret walls. While most of us probably started out playing Wolfenstein 3D by hugging all the walls thinking the secrets were hidden entirely randomly, there always was something differentiating the secret walls from the others - a different texture, items placed around it that made it look suspicious, and similar things seemed to be employed in Dark Souls too.
There's something about the color palette and the way they do lightning that looks very much like MW2, yeah. Pretty low contrast/flat lightning, with oddly exaggerated highlights that kinda gives everything a plastic look.
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