LegitFruitSnack

Having full control at full throttle takes away any skill required in a driving game and also takes away the the speed/handling balance. I love racing games so I get more enjoyment out of more depth in the driving in most any game but If you are a person who finds the driving in a game like GTA tedious than having full control at full speed might be considered more fun for you.

As for the driving in GTA IV vs GTA V. I just finished playing through GTA IV right before I started 5 and throughout 4 you get used to the unique style of driving that game has, and when I started 5 I was immediately surprised how well it controlled and how much better it felt than 4. After watching the live stream I thought it was going to be difficult given how much Vinny was all over the place in any vehicle he drove.

@indiefinch: Thanks for the info

Besides the invite issue which seems like an easy hurdle to jump what do you guys recommend new people do to get involved. I've been watching Brad and I've read some guides to learn basic terminology but for some reason diving head first into pub matches seems like it won't be very noob friendly. I'm interested but I'm the only one of my regular gaming friends who likes competitive stuff and I can handle people being mean on the internet. But the trick is finding people who also provide info around the ridiculous name calling that tends to happen.

It all depends on your personal situation. If you can afford to buy every game you like then I would personally buy it. But that doesn't mean that renting games as a way to save money is wrong. If you are only renting them for quality testing then consider buying it. In any case there's no need to feel guilty that you like something.

Yea I used to have K/D of 1.5 or 1.7 in Call of Duty 4 and the Original Black Ops and I have around a 1.1 in the newer games i think. I agree that K/D ratio isn't always that important but it is definitely a way to tell if some one is competent or not.

The difference between CoD and Battlefield as it relates to K/D are interesting though. CoD is a game that only has the ability to be successful in two ways kills and wins. So usually the amount of kills you get will equal a win or loss. Where as Battlefield has the ability to heal people as a medic or repair vehicles as an engineer and DICE does a good job in making those other classes worth playing and gives you something in return for doing what you want. If you wanna kill people you are going to receive better guns for your efforts if you wanna support people your going to unlock better supporting items.

But yea I'm not feeling bad at all about my skills I will get better just like any thing else it will just take time. But you just wait until I decide to discuss my experiences with a helicopter using the mouse.

I took a week off from the Metal Gear Solid series this week to play some Rayman Origins on my vita and play Battlefield 3 on the PC. Rayman is still as good looking as it was last year and it a blast to play on the Vita. The controls are also really tight and satisfyingly floaty at the same time, and that along with the animations make you feel like you a badass at games. That game can get really challenging by the end especially if you are trying to collect every thing you can and when you finally nail a whole level flawlessly after you have been trying for a half hour you you feel like you accomplished something. The S rank I got in Origins is high on my list of S ranks I am most proud of.

However the main game I want to talk about is Battlefield 3 and its less so because of the game and more of my experience with it. Battlefield 3 is a perfectly competent game and if you're a fan of good shooters Battlefield 3 is definitely an excellent shooter but it does nothing to really innovate and bring in people who might have grown tired of the genre. What made it so interesting to me was that it is the first shooter I have seriously tried to play on the PC. I used to be above average in Call of Duty and Battlefield Bad Company on consoles and have been using a controller for games for the better part of 12 years, a controller is like a part of my body at this point. Long gone are the days of having to look at my hands to figure out where the button I need to press is. On top of that the shooter genre has become accustomed to standards control wise. So much so that if placed in front of most any shooter I, like most any gaming enthusiast, would be able to pick it up and be decent in very little time.

The main reason why I don’t play shooters on the PC is because of this change in control mechanism away from my comfort zone. It’s like someone who all of a sudden is forced to brush their teeth with their foot. It’s probably possible but they’re not gonna be very efficient or comfortable while doing it. At the same time, though I feel like it is important somehow to learn how a large segment of shooter fans prefer to play them instead of just writing the PC off as inferior. And I tell you it is an extremely humbling experience. I started off playing some of the campaign just to get a sense for how bad I was going to be and wow am I bad. Those days of having to look at my fingers are back even though I use a keyboard more than I use a controller using it to control a virtual set of hands is completely different than writing an article or typing in a web address.

I then tried some multiplayer and it took me 30 minutes to even get one kill and the only thing I could really do was laugh. On a console when I was good if I were to ever even go close to a negative K/D ratio I’d just quit and even now a days since I play to many different games to devote the time to continuing to stay that good if I have a string of like 5 matches where I go negative I’ll take a break but even then forcing myself to play almost 3 full matches without even killing one person is not something I ever thought I would be able to handle temper wise. The strange thing is I never really got mad the first kill was more of a goal or an accomplishment for me that evening.

But as I played more this week I started to get the hang of it. I quickly realised that a lot of the fundamentals from shooters on consoles carry over onto the PC, it is just how you perform those fundamentals that is the difference. You still need to check your corners, understanding the flow of a map is crucial. then understanding what you can see and what is able to see you at any given time, then training your fingers to just instinctively move properly is then just about repetition. At this point I am better than I was a week ago but I still have a long ways to go and I look forward to being able to hold my own and being able to play anything well regardless of platform. Its almost like learning how to drive a manual transmission. It may not be as easy and an automatic may or may not be a better choice in any given situation but being able to make the decision based off of personal experience and being able to drive any car is a nice skill to have if it is necessary.

So in my struggle to get caught up with my backlog of games I am trying to enforce meeting deadlines. The first deadline I am forcing upon my self in the new year is finishing the Metal Gear series before Rising comes out. Rising at least on the surface looks like a completely different playing game than any other in the series but it still looks like a ridiculous good time. My interest in the game basically boils down to “Fuck yea I wanna chop shit up with a sword.” but , I digress. I purchased the MGS HD Collection last year when I purchased my PS3, and it like many other game have been sitting on the shelf. I owned a PS2 but at that point in my game playing career I was very close minded in the games I played and at the time Metal Gear was, I guess too complicated for me is the way to put it.

But this generation my mind has significantly expanded and I want to play most every thing and after hearing how good of a game MGS4 was, I was interested in going back to the older games to get caught up on the very convoluted story line. I did some research and read up on Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2. I really didn't feel like playing a PS1 game again because I feel early polygonal games don’t really hold up at all and MGS2 has a section in the menus that kind of walks you through the events of MGS1 I felt comfortable skipping the actual game. I then started my mission with Sons of Liberty.

It will never be an experience I can compare with someone who played it originally because first of all gameplay standards have changed and second of all I knew about the main plot twist that seemed to make people mad. It was also my first foray into the series so I don’t have the attachment to Snake as other people at the time had. I don’t really understand the hatred for Raiden really because of this. I mean he is sort of a bitch and every time he would go “Why?” or “How do I do that?” I would shake my head slightly but him being a rookie and having to learn the ropes from most everyone he met was an interesting story to be involved with. Whether he was a bitch or not I certainly don’t hate him at this point in the series.

The experience I can share though is that I found the game to be quite good. It holds up surprisingly well aside from some clunkiness with the controls which is to be expected. There just isn't a flow and fluidness to how things work, everything needs to be deliberately done. But at the same time the game was designed around this deliberateness so I never felt like the game was asking too much of me. I was also surprised how much of the game’s story still surprised me. I decided long ago that to get the type of coverage I want on games I need not worry about games being spoiled or I will miss out on things I would rather know about regarding development or speculation that is being discussed. I figured I knew about all the game had to offer surprise wise just from talking to people about games and listening to and reading games media every day but at multiple points during the game I said out loud “Wait, what the fuck just happened?” and by the end of the game I didn't really quite know what completly happened until I asked a friend some questions.

Snake Eater was next, and unlike Sons of Liberty I hadn't really picked up much spoiler wise and was going in mostly cold apart from a couple of easter eggs I heard about. This first thing that surprised me was how good looking the game is, It definitely isn't the greatest looking game ever but for being a remake of a 10 year old game it was surprising. I have played games released in 2012 that looked and performed worse than 3 does. Snake Eater has some welcome Improvements including a better camera that was included in the subsistence release of the original game. Having what would be considered a modern camera system was a big improvement to the fixed camera in 2. The controls were similar to the previous game but I was used to them at this point so I found them less bothersome. The game had some interesting changes display wise as well. There is no automatic radar like there was in the previous game which forced me to keep a line of sight with the enemy that bundled with the environment the enemies blended into made the gameplay slightly more interesting and is what made the new camera so helpful being able to point it where I wanted. There were items that served the same purpose as a radar but using them consumed battery power and after going to any sort of convention with a smartphone you have a new mission in life that revolves around storing as much battery as possible at all times so I never used them really.

The story seemed more straightforward than 2 at the end I wasn’t really unsure about any thing that happened. I do wish it got more convoluted than it did just to be more interesting but overall the story seemed solid and ultimately wasn’t disappointing. The bosses in the game annoyed me quite a bit though. Having them all named after a noun and then having them repeat said noun over and over again reminded me of a weird form of a Pokemon.

After playing both games I feel like the part where you play it was better in Snake Eater but the story of Sons of Liberty kept me entertained more. Both games are also weirdly self aware and self serious at the same time. I enjoy the references that are made to things that are only made possible in a game and how instructions tell you to use the ACTION BUTTON, It gives the series a personality that not many other games pull off very well when they try to be self aware.

The next game on my list to get through is Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, followed by the last game in the HD collection Peace Walker. I am choosing to skip portable ops because I don’t already own it and for the sake of time alongside the small controversy of whether the game is truly cannon or not I figured I could read up on it or watch the cut scenes on YouTube or something. I am looking forward to 4 because it is the most modern game and I hope its gonna answer some lingering questions that I have. I will be disappointed though if I don’t find out more about Revolver Ocelot. He sort of has this thing about him that makes me feel like there is more to his character that hasn’t come to light yet.

I play alot of games, and I buy more games than I play, which by the way is a bad practice to partake in, because I play so many games by the end of the year I tend to forget what I thought of the games I played, unless they made a strong impression on me. So I have decided to actually write my thoughts down so I have something to go back on, and also make it available online incase anyone out there cares what I have to say. I have been planning to do this since the beginning of last year and since it is the start of a new I felt like why not start now.

Why do I want to write this stuff down? One could argue that games that make strong impressions are the only ones that matter, but I disagree. There is a lot to be learned from games that end up being mediocre or not revolutionary. In an industry where taking what another developer has discovered, then using those mechanics or devices in your own interesting ways to create a product that is something you and your team can call your own. The games that end up being in the middle so to speak are the main body of this brand of entertainment. In any given year there may be only one or possibly no significant games in any given genre that make revolutionary changes with platform, because of this I think it is worth making note of all the games that you experience good or bad. After 10 or 20 "mediocre" games that each developer adds their own slight spin to you will notice a significant difference between game number 1 and game number 20.

At the same time I’d like to have a record available of my experiences with a game around the time I stop playing it, for 2 reasons, The first being to see if I can connect the dots about why i stop playing games whether it is because the game did something or if it is because something different came along for me to play. The second being so there is a record of how a game ages weeks or months after its launch. Most reviews do what they are trying to accomplish in telling a user if they want to play the game or not, but I’d like to keep record of what someone can expect after they have put a significant amount of time into a game that has the ability to change significant amounts, either because it is multiplayer based and people get better or because it has received significant updates or expansions.

Now since I buy more games than I play I have a larger than normal back catalog of games to play so I will be writing about whatever I have played, not necessarily what is out that week. I am mainly doing this because it has been something I have been thinking of doing for at least 2 years and something I have been seriously thinking about for the last 10 months. It's something I am gonna do for personal gain and if anyone wants to come along they are welcome to it hopefully I will keep up on this a lot better than I was about starting it.

Personally I wouldn't get the updated version because of the lowered resolution and slower hard drive speed. Depending on how you plan on using the laptop those might be not much if an issue.

As for the graphics card difference they would both probably be perfectly fine for you. They are close enough to the point that if you truly cared about the difference you wouldn't be gaming on a laptop.

If you absolutely have to buy the laptop now it is probly going to do alright for you but if you can I would wait until you find an available model that you are 100% comfortable with. I only say that because its a fairly big purchasing decision and making a rash decision that you are not totally confident with is never a good idea.

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