GaZZuM

Cool, well if any members are online soon, I wouldn't mind an invite :)

I don't think I've been on Star Trek Online in atleast 3 years. Is there still a Giant Bomb community on there?

It seems like a natural evolution of the original to me. Bigger levels, better story, more gameplay diversity, harder, more characters.

It retains that thing I love about Hotline Miami, which is the feeling of trying something one way for 15 minutes, then choosing to tackle it a completely different way and finding success thanks to your willingness to change your own tactics. There were levels I felt like I was stuck on because a certain tactic got me 80% of the way there, but instead of just plugging away doing the same thing over and over again I changed my strategy and would usually be done soon afterwards.

I'm about 9 hours in and I'm still finding myself getting that satisfying feeling of adapting my way out of a challenging screen. Sure the levels are bigger, and you actually NEED to use guns, but that opens up so many more options. For me, this is an improvement on the original in every way.

LoL has made specific efforts this past year to making supporting actually fun. If that's your preferred role, then LoL is the way to go.

Here's the way I see it.

We started with Jeff, Ryan, Vinny and Brad. That's a pretty firm base right there, and it was proven by years of incredible content aided by a wealth of experience to back it up. Ryan died. To say absolutely nothing of the unfathomable tragedy of the situation, we were one core member down. Vinny had a child and, more than understandably, moved back to New York to raise his child near his family. We go one more core member down.

We're left with Jeff and Brad as the only "core members" left in San Francisco. It's easy to see Jeff's priority as re-establishing a base of experience and knowledge, rather than taking a risk, especially with so few "veterans" that Jeff was as comfortable with.

In my mind, Dan is almost designed to take the place of a new Ryan (it felt horrible to type that). An experienced co-host that can bounce off Jeff and serve as a constant, known quantity. With a base of Jeff, Dan and Brad, they can build off of that in the future with "riskier" hires, they've done it before, I mean years ago when we had our "core group" of 4 and a growing site, they hired Patrick. He was pretty fresh-faced compared to what we were used to, but he added a new flavour that, while met with opposition, was far from a safe choice.

I realise I may have been very blunt/morbid here (obviously Ryan's death was much more than just "one man down", it broke all of our hearts) but I just think maybe people are reading into this decision the wrong way.

All that being said, the bigger conversation this has triggered is an important one. I fully admit, I'm not well-versed enough on that topic to contribute to it, but on the subject of the new GB hires, I do see more than 1 side to the story, I just kinda wish more people did too.

Manchester, UK

@exiledvip3r said:

Well said :)

The video game BAFTAs are where it's at if you want a dignified, classy affair.

I feel sick. Devastated.

@jgf: I didn't know what those P numbers corresponded to, I just set it to performance level [2], clicked apply "clocks and voltage" and nothing seemed to happen so I put a bit of Diablo on, played it for a good 15 minutes and the framerate wasn't great, lowered the resolution, lowered the graphics and then when the action hotted up, screen captured the NVIDIA Inspector. This is what the settings were when I had the most action going on on screen at 20FPS on the lowest possible settings:

Edit: I restarted and tried it out. Upon applying the new clock settings the P-state switched to P0 for a few seconds then went immediately to P12

Edit #2: Wow! So I got Diablo 3 to run at the overclocked settings and it was glorious! Haha. 30FPS constant at almost the highest settings, the GPU got hotter obviously, around 80 degrees after a good 45 minutes of playing, which is good enough, it cools down super quickly now as well, so all I need to do is alt-tab for a minute to cool it back down. I changed one of the power settings that I read from another forum may help. I went to advanced power settings and changed the system cooling policy to "passive". I'm not sure if that's what did it, or the restart, but for whatever reason I just had almost an hours worth of lagless, pretty Diablo and I'm on cloud nine :D