I also am miffed by the skills system. There is too much reward for driving stupid and too little for driving well.
Beyond that, I do really like the game. It's good enough to make me wish for Burnout Paradise but unfortunately not good enough to replace it.
I play on PC and it usually runs very well (I have a top CPU and a 970 video card and not a huge display) but once it a while it just starts hitching up for no apparent reason. I'd say it starts to do this for a few minutes every couple hours. It's not a huge problem.
I did have it lock up for me consistently while trying to get the Falcon XB from the barn. Google it, I'm not alone. But eventually that cleared up.
The auction process is still a mess. It is so time consuming that for cheap cars you end up investing more time than money trying to win auctions. You might as well just buy them all out. And you still can't get your money back from an auction that you were out bid on until the auction ends. And bids just randomly fail still, and then when retried work. It's baffling this wasn't improved at all since Forza 4. If you don't use the auction house this won't be an issue.
Does anyone know how to get Groove out of the station list? I rejected the free trial and now it just says "playback error" when I'm scanning through stations and get to that one. I just want it to skip it.
I don't really have a problem with the market positioning. I expected this to be $600. With this price Sony stands a fair chance of this just being the "normal PS4" and thus them getting $400 from an "ordinary person" getting into PS4 at this stage. This could produce noticeably more revenue than positioning the slim as the "ordinary" one and having an "Elite". So it's a clear message and it's a reasonable one even if it isn't what I expected.
I kind of have a problem with them not really saying too much about it and saying nothing about PS VR. I also would find it odd if it didn't have a "4K Blu-ray drive" especially since I don't think there is such a thing. It's the decoder that makes the difference and so unless Sony couldn't get a high bitrate decoder into this box I can't see why it couldn't play 4K Blu-rays.
That having been said I have no plans to ever play 4K Blu-rays, 4K will be streaming for me.
I'd like to see the DS4 changes to have dished sticks, because it's hard to hold the current stick toward you for any length of time (think of Nathan Drake, Crash Bandicoot or Clank in one of their "run toward you" scenes).
Manual transmission take rates are plummeting worldwide because autos are more efficient now. Manual used to have those who want to feel more connected with the car and those who wanted to get more performance or fuel economy out of an econo-car. Well, with power up worldwide and autos getting better fuel economy now you only have those who want to remain connected to the car left. And still high-end cars are losing manual options.
Anyway, this is more about video games. It's even more odd to drive manual in a video game because you frequently don't have a useful tach (none here) and the engine notes being able to convey shift points is also hit-or-miss by game. In real driving you drive the same car frequently. In real racing you drive the same car and do repeated practice laps and are expected to optimize your shifting, driving, etc. for the situation. In video games you drive 3 laps of a track and then move to the next with no practice. It's an entirely different situation and having more assist (whether in shifting, braking, etc.) is much more common in video games.
That's why it seems odd to be driving a manual in a video game.
I mean, you played Burnout, right? It's made by Brits and it doesn't even offer a manual option. Micro Machines didn't offer one, also developed by Brits. The list goes on and on. It's a video game thing, not a nationality thing.
@a_turtle: Maybe, it's ambiguous without having played it. They've mentioned manual shifting being a weird thing in other contexts throughout the years though and I assumed it was part of that but maybe not.
@drewbert I heard you talking about hum, USB cable and MacBooks on the podcast.
The reason detaching that cable fixed your problem is you have a ground loop. That means that in your system you have multiple ground points which aren't at the same voltage.
You mentioned detaching the USB cable fixed the problem but wondered why that is when the cable had a choke/ferrite bead/inductor/filter on it. Those are used to block AC signals, that is signals with a frequency, typically a high frequency. When you hear beeps, chirps, etc. due to electronic noise, those are high frequencies or at least relatively high frequencies causing those. A ferrite bead used properly will fix those.
But you have a DC problem. The grounds are at different DC voltages. A bead cannot block those. You can block those using capacitive coupling, but that can be problematic to add on. Another way (that Jeff aluded to) is the to use a transformer, like an "audio matching" transformer or similar. Someone who did car stereos might know about that and Jeff seemed to reference that. The problem with using a transformer in this case is that transformers have a cutoff frequency. As long as you are passing audio only over the transformer you can make this work, but with USB you are passing very high frequency signals and it really won't work.
So what you need to do is to eliminate the ground loop. There are two ways to do this. With properly made audio equipment the right way to do it is to bond all the grounds in your system together with a nice thick ground wire, like 14 or 12 gauge. Then all the grounds will be equalized to the same voltage and the loop is (probably) gone. Significant current might flow through the bond, that's why you use thick wire. But the problem with this is that if there is intentional current flow over a connection then the grounds will still differ for reasons I won't get into. And with USB the device is probably drawing power, so that means intentional current flow.
So you use the other fix. That is lifting all the grounds but one. That means that every ground but one becomes a non-ground and all the devices then ground through that one connection. This is only okay if there is not significant power draw across the devices, because this means that devices will be using each other as a path to ground. In your case, this should be fine.
Now, let's talk about how to do it and MacBooks in general. In a MacBook, the audio ground (more accurately called an audio return or reference) is capacitively coupled, so you don't have to worry about it. EXCEPT that if you have an audio device that you connect that has a metal face on the plug (on the part of the plug you grab) then that metal face can touch the laptop case and that case is directly grounded, not capacitively coupled. To fix that, either pull the plug out very slightly (half a mm will do it) or paint the face of the plug with nail polish to form an insulator. Or put one of those paper hole punch reinforcers on the laptop or plug face instead of nail polish.
Next step is to to lift the power ground to the wall. The easiest way to do this is to just unplug the MacBook. It has a battery in it so it'll still work. The problem is now the MacBook will run down. So to fix that, stop using the 3-prong cord on your laptop power supply. Switch from that to the 2-prong mini-blades you got wth the power supply. This doesn't have a ground, so it lifts the laptop ground.
If you use the 2-prong power blades and make sure the audio cable (and anything else conductive) isn't touching the MacBook case, then your hum should go away even with the USB cord attached. Now you just have to check to make sure the laptop case isn't live (with a meter or simply by touching it) and you should be good to go.
For more info or how to find out about some more details behind this problem and similar ones, you can message me.
Great to see Mr. Zurkon. And the RYNO (seemingly neither Jeff nor Dan know the origin of the name).
Seeing these two realize the R&C games are good games is refreshing but also not surprising. This kind of game, a pure platformer with bright graphics has really been WAY out of vogue since the whole "next gen" era brought on by waves of bald space marines in beige/gray environments. We've run into an era where so many gamers feel that games like this are too "kiddy" for them. Which is weird, since if you do it in 2D with some pixelation they snap it right up.
I hope we've run far enough past this consensus to a time where it's okay to like a game like this again. And I don't mean ironically either. You shouldn't need to pretend like the game is laughing off its own conceit to sell itself to gamers (see Sunset Overdrive and its various gags and camera mugging). What I'm saying is gamers, realize that maturity doesn't mean you have to act like you're above a fun experience just because it also appeals to tweens.
Insomniac has usually done good work and it's glad to see it recognized again. I'll pick this game up as soon as I finish what I'm playing right now.
And wow does this game look great.
I liked Crack in Time, I didn't really like all 4 One. I'm not sure I remember Into the Nexus! I feel bad about that.
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