Zelyre

For people who answered Valkyria Chronicles. Snipped from the wiki:

Alicia is the 19-year-old heroine of the game.

Isara is Welkin's 16 year-old adopted sister who cares greatly for her comrades.

Edy is a 17-year-old militia shocktrooper.

Homer is a kind and pretty 15-year-old boy with a frail constitution who serves in Squad 7 as a engineer.

Susie is a 19-year-old scout.

Though, I guess outside of Alicia, the other characters aren't really what I'd consider main protagonists.

@DoctorDanger99 said:

@Zelyre: i would absolutely love to sit in on a game and just watch how its played. but i live in the middle of fucking nowhere in North Carolina and unless im playing a NASCAR rpg theres no one around. i have a few friends who i could maybe get interested in it but i know i would have to know the game pretty well before i rope them into it. i can see them getting bored real quick if im constantly forgetting rules or allways going back to the book to look somthing up.

there needs to be a Personal listings for rpgs players!

Ask and you shall receive.

Check local game and comic book shops. I know the local shop by me runs RPGs every week. There's a store not too far from me that's dedicated to board games. They run dedicated game/RPG nights.

Oh, one more thing. That Pathfinder box set also has a single player scenario in it as well.

I've never played the Star Trek RPG. So, with that said, I have a feeling its one of the more advanced RPG systems out there. I mean. RPG and Star Trek. How far down the rabbit hole can you go!

The only table top RPG I played by the rules was Rifts and holy shit balls, it seemed like an evening worth of combat RPG was about 30 second's worth of game time. The few D&D sessions were loose and had a ton of house rules.

If you've never played a table top RPG before, and have never had someone GM a session for you, it might be difficult to pick up one of those books and go. Sitting in on a session would be the best way to learn.

The Gamers with Jobs podcast brought up the Pathfinder box RPG before. One of the hosts plays it with his eight year old, who in turn has been teaching her friends how to play. Learning how to play the basic game opens the door to the more advanced systems. From what I've heard/read, it introduces both the gamer/game master parts of a table top game. Rules are Pathfinder-lite, so the game should move quickly, even if you're slow.

You might want to check youtube as well. I'm sure there are some tutorials out there, as I used Youtube to learn how Warmachine works.

Inverted. Always inverted.

Not only did I grow up playing games like X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Wing Commander, etc, I spent my teenage years wanting to work in TV production. Being behind a camera means that pulling back = up. Have a camera in front of your face? Want to look up? You tilt your head back.

The only time non-inverted ever made sense to me was Freelancer, where the cursor moved on screen and the ship then followed the cursor. Otherwise, I don't understand non-inverted controls in games. You're not moving the cross hairs on the screen. You're moving a camera. The cross hairs merely tick off the center point of the screen.

But that's me. I use timers on my phones when I take self portraits instead of showing the world what my bathroom looks like. I remove the stock signatures from my devices, since I don't want people to know my emails came from my iPad or Galaxy phone or whatever. I'm an old man who shakes my fist at kids who are on my lawn.

I don't care about any kind of redesign. They can make it neon green text on a lemon yellow background.

What's grinding my gears, is that recommended videos and shit I don't care about are mixed in with my subscriptions. I've gone and changed youtube so it only shows uploads by people I've subscribed to. Now, instead of seeing subscribed uploads by chronological order upon going to youtube.com, I see that The Real Giant Bomb has uploaded a quick look of Super Mario World posted 20 years ago.

Great. Thanks. I saw that shit already. So, now I have to click on subscriptions to see videos posted in the past few hours. It just doesn't feel stream lined anymore.

You're going to get a packet of thermal paste with the heatsink. When you apply it, less is more. Too much and you end up trapping heat. I apply a bead a little bigger than a grain of rice and spread it with a plastic card so that it's a very thin layer. Don't torque screws down. You don't want to crack or flex the PCB. Don't put all the metal standoffs in the case before trying to mount your motherboard. If you put a standoff in each hole, chances are they won't match up with the board and you'll short the motherboard. Count out the holes on the motherboard. Then put the stand offs in the board. If your board has 8 holes, you'll put in 8 metal standoffs. Put the board in the case and make sure the standoffs line up with the holes.

Money.

But in a Visa card format, so he can pretend he has a credit card and be all cool in front of his kid friends.

Unless his kid friends have for real credit cards. Then he'll be mocked senselessly.

@JazGalaxy said:

I don't understand how Brad's statements could be anything but PC elitism. The Xbox 360 is an almost 10 year old console being pit against a brand new PC. It's nobody's fault that there's not a new console to make the game for and moreover, many people don't want to pay 2000 dollars to make a gaming rig that rivals the comfort of a console.

Calling a game "shit", as brad did, because it looks better on computers is like calling a 4th grader stupid because he's not as smart as you are.

Not a single person needs to pay 2k to play PC games at 60fps, 1080p, so let's just set that myth aside, yeah?

As for Brad's comments:

Once you get used to 60fps, 30fps is noticeable.

The quicklook of the 360 version looked like it dipped below 20fps very often.

There's no reason for a PS3/360 game to dip below 30fps. They're closed systems. Every PS3/360 runs the same GPU/CPU. There's only so much optimization one can do before you have to start giving up eye candy and it seems like that's something the developers did not want to do. So, it is kind of shitty that they're making you play at frame rates that aren't consistent and smooth because they're too stubborn to reduce rendering resolution, or turn off shadows, or whatever they need to do to keep a consistent 30fps. On a closed platform, performance should be consistent. If you went from Halo 4 or Black Ops 2 to Farcry, you'd find the performance difference jarring and it would tarnish the experience.

It's more like calling a super senior stupid because he's twenty and hasn't graduated high school. That super senior could graduate high school easily, they simply choose not to because they're lazy and don't apply themselves. Is the kid technically stupid? No. They might be a genius. But their desire to be mediocre when they could be great? That's stupid.

Do it. I love XBMC on my home theater and Plex on my iPad, Android devices is nifty too.

I bought a cheap $50 samsung blu-ray drive a few years back. As long as you can read the disc, you should be good.

I use MakeMKV. It's free while in beta and it's been in beta for... forever. Right now, the code listed is good until January 2013.

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1053

Once it goes out of beta, you'll need to buy it.

Handbrake to encode the rip so you're not sitting on 30 gig raw dumps.

You'll need hard drive space and a lot of it. I recommend Western Digital Red drives, and I do believe they come in 3 TB sizes.

Time. It takes a while to rip the blu-ray but it takes a long time to encode it in handbrake. Depending on the settings, it can take my 4.6ghz i5 overnight to do a movie, or it can take under an hour. It all depends on the quality I want.

The only issue I have is I can't get forced subtitles to work. Right now, it's all or nothing and I've just been too lazy to play around with settings.

If you plan on viewing blu-ray rips on your PS3/vita/iOS device, your computer will most likely be doing the transcoding, so you'll want something fairly beefy. If you plan on having multiple devices streaming from your media server at once, you'll want to make sure you're not running some POS 100mbit dlink switch.

@MarkWahlberg said:

If one were to have an iMac instead of a PC, would a bootcamped Far Cry run any better than the 360 version?

A fairly generic question. What kind of iMac do you have? Unless you have a 27" iMac, I'm guessing you have an AMD 6750 in your iMac, since it's in last year's model and The New iMac (copyright, trademark, etc, etc.).

You won't be playing it in 1080p like people with PCs, but this is Fracry 3 on maximum settings at 720p on a 6750. This looks like the intro of the game, so you can compare this video with the first twenty minutes of the FC3 quick look.

If you have the 27" iMac, regardless of the year, those video cards should be able to push 60fps at 1680x1050.