Hehe. Yeah, I pretty much got out of PC gaming just before the concept of high-performance video cards came into being. Doom and Command & Conquer didn't really care how many trillion polygons per nanosecond you could shade.

I will admit to having gone out and spent a fair bit of money on a fancy sound card after ROTT came out. Anybody remember the Gravis Ultrasound? Yeah, that card was the shit.

It's all good, though. I'd much rather trade off some graphics detail for mouse-based input. And frankly, with the resolution turned down a bit (from my system's native 1920x1200) and the detail controls set to medium, it still looks better than the first one, and plays quite smoothly


Given the number of PC-based games that I play in the average decade, I can't see myself spending any more than the bare minimum for a video card.

No $200 video cards for me. I just paid $30 for an XBox1 and $10 for a DuoX2 modchip. I've got something soldered wrong because it is not booting up correctly but it should be an easy fix (I hope). I was dying to play Black again and my other working XBox1 is hooked up as a video server and not really ready for playing games.

FWIW, here is Black (very cool game):

Ahh. I suppose that's where you and I differ then. I do 95% of my gaming on the computer so I'm always upgrading and putting the latest and greatest into my rig. I barely ever touch my PS3.

In other news, still plowing forward in Portal 2. It gets even more hilarious as I progress. Game of the year, hands down.

So do I. I just honestly don't play too many computer games these days. At least, apart from simple little flash games. (Crush the Castle and Hedgehog Launch don't care what kind of video card I have either.)




I've been taking it in small pieces. Trying to prolong the experience as much as possible. Just met back up with my one-eyed friend, and we're about to go down a familiar elevated corridor.

Just beat it - the end is pretty cool. Got stuck for awhile in one of the levels - chapter 8. Apparently I wasn't trying in the right place.

The last console I had was a Atari 2600. I only play games on PC and prefer to use a mouse and keyboard for input as I can't stand those thumb controllers. The most expensive part of my current PC is the video card (XFX 6970).

A friend just beat Portal 2 and was pleased with the game. I may end up buying it since I played through the first one. Amazon has it for $38.

I googled the terms mouse with ps3 and the first (news) link made me make that "hnff" noise out my nose.

Why is that, prey tell?



CHAPTER 2 SPOILER FOLLOWS

Highlight to read:

I must say, the GlaDOS dialog is really quite well-written. She had turned into a serious asshole during her slumber. One gets the feeling that she is harboring an actual grudge just from the sly verbal mistreatment alone.

END OF SPOILER


99mx5, I'm with you on the Atari 2600. Granted, the ratio of shitty games to awesome games got pretty high towards the end of its lifetime, but it's interesting to me that, so far as I can remember, that was the last system on which realtime two-player gameplay was really common until, what, the Wii?

I did have an NES after the 2600, and then a Sega genesis after that, and that was the end of my console experience.

Double Dribble. I just remembered that. Great two-player game.

Ludicrous gibs (give me that...). I admit I liked God Mode, but I liked Dog Mod even more...

Went from PC speaker to Adlib, Sound Blaster, to Adlib Gold, to Sound Blaster Pro, to Sound Blaster AWE32, to Sound Blaster Live. Quite the upgrade one could say.

Creepy, that's the exact sequence of soundcards I had...

Its even more creepy when you add the fact that you've admitted that you are cyberstalking Joe and me...

MSI 870A-G54 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
HIS Radeon HD 6950 2GB
AMD Phenom II X4 840 3.2GHz
CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB

~$500 every 4 or 5 years for a new pc. same as a console at release ever 5-8 years.

and i have a TOSHIBA Qosmio X505-Q8xx (not sure what model, had a q875 and the 360m video chip died so they are sending me a q890 to q899)

"No Keyboard and Mouse Support for PS3′s Portal 2"

just the high relevance for such general search terms.

I know it is a touch late, but here's a little trivia to answer one of Joe's earlier questions:

POTATO = PO(r)TA(l)T(w)O = Portal Two

Well, yeah. I'd kind of accept it as an axiom that, in addition to costing more and displaying at a lower resolution, any console release of game X is inherently going to have poorer controller support than the equivalent desktop release of said game.

:D


In all seriousness, though, I didn't realize that mouses were supported by any console games. I'm having a hard time visualizing it, for two reasons.

1: My Xbox is in the living room, and the sitting affordance in that room is a cushy sofa. Cushy sofas are not ideal mousing surfaces.

2: Do you also have a keyboard? Or does the mouse have buttons on top for walk and action commands?



I don't think any weapon in a game, either before of sense, equals the sheer awesomeness of the Drunk Missile. Nothing says "I'm fucked" like turning a corner and seeing a wave of those bad boys flying at you.


Soundcard-wise... I never had an Ad-Lib. Although I do remember having a copy of the little flexi-record (yes, RECORD) that they distributed for a while as a demo.

My first x86-class computer was a Tandy 1000HX, which had a fairly primitive three-voice sound chip (just three different beeps at once, nothing resembling actual instruments), and while it was a definite step down from the C64, some of the software companies did pretty amazing things with it. Sierra, in particular, comes to mind.

After I put together a generic 286 machine, I installed the then-new Game Blaster, which was a C/MS private-labeled by Radio Shack.

When the Sound Blaster came out, I bought one immediately. This was before "Creative Labs" existed in the US, and ordering one meant clipping the little 2" ad out of the back of Compute! magazine and mailing it to Brown-Wagh Publishing along with a cashier's check.

Then there was the SBPro, then the SB16, to which I later added the Gravis ACE (which was a wavetable-only device; it had a passthrough for the audio out of your main sound card, and the software configuration got a bit weird as games had to know to use the GUS for music but the SB for digitized audio) and after that.... I really don't remember. Good sound cards sort of became a commodity item around that time. I do remember that I hung onto that GUS right up to the point where ISA slots went away completely.

By comparison, I've never really splurged on a video card, unless you count the very first VGA card I bought, back when they were just plain expensive in general.

I remember back in the day I spliced a USB keyboard into my Xbox 1 and was able to type into chat on Phantasy Star Online.

PS2 has mouse and keyboard support for some games.

The first console with mouse support that I'm aware of was the SNES.

Before you ask; yes, I had a Nintendo brand mouse on my SNES.

Joe, you bring up a good point about today's games. Most games these days focus on the single player element first then multi-player second. I remember many games having a coop mode. Now some games only have a single-player mode and then multi-player is added on as a patch. I hope P2 becomes a wake up call for coop game play. I still remember the good games playing coop in Quake, R6 Raven Shield, Ghost Recon. R6 Vegas 1, 2 and Serious Sam.

Portal 2 is starting to receive less than stellar reviews by PC gamers due to it being a game ported from the console version like Crysis 2. It sad to see how console games have hurt PC gaming. Games are not modded as much as before by the gaming community and PC games no longer use the extra computing/graphics power of PCs nor do they allow dedicated servers. Good thing Black Ops will have mod tools released soon. $15 for a map pack? No thanks.

As for sound cards don't forget the Aureal 3D. It was the one that completed with Sound Blaster back in the day. Too bad they were toppled like 3Dfx.

Since moving into this house I have always had at least 4 of some sort of console set up in a LAN Party type configuration. Back in the days of XBox1 there were a ton of games that supported SystemLink (XBox's version of a game that can be played over a lan). When the 360 came out they all but dropped the SystemLink option. Most games have an XBox Live component (where they can charge a monthly fee) but it is rare to find a game for the 360 where you can play co-op or deathmatch over a LAN. This probably is a non-issue for most people but when you cannot access XBox Live it is a major kink in the chain.

Yet another reason why I prefer PC-based gaming.

As I said earlier, I'm not really much of a "gamer" anymore, but it's nice to be able to pop online and explore Portal 2's co-op mode without having to subscribe to a monthly service.

what's your steam username?

You'd love to know that, wouldn't you? So that you can stalk me, and insult me, and tell me how much better it would be for everyone if I were dead.

It's thraddax.

when I enable my psn -> steam link, I'll share my username up here. so you can all take steam baths with me

We were watching a few episodes of Pawn Stars tonight and this commercial for Portal 2 came on:

(I had not seen any until now. Thought I would share)

I love my computer. Defaulted to very high settings and it runs so smooth. Woot. I suppose I should expect that though with 2gb of video memory, 8gb of ram, and an water cooled OC'd quad core processor at 3.62ghz.

That's right, I'm bragging about my sweet computer specs.

You will perform the same with half the ram, and half the processor cores. This game, like most, are highly dependent on the video card abilities.

Fwiw, my hd5830 which replaced the hd4890 (under warranty. <3 xfx) that I bought in 2009 for $150 plays it flawlessly at 1080P with maxed graphics. Now my 12 gigs of ram and I7 920 dont play a very big part in that.

Hell, even my laptop's gtx 280m plays it at 60 fps.

Anybody notice how much more often P2 loads compared to P1, and how it goes to a loading screen instead of overlaying the words?

"This next test was designed by one of Aperture's Nobel Prize winners. It doesn't say what the prize was for. Well, I know it wasn't for being immune to neurotoxin."

Does anybody else think that the single-player levels are seeming a tad easy? I just got to the start of Chapter 4, and I just can't shake the notion that despite having some interesting new tools to play with, these tests don't seem as complex as they were in the first game.

the hole thing was to easy.

I was really hoping they got much harder/more complex.

yeah i get that impression too. the later chapters get a bit more challenging, but they are by no means impassibly difficult. chapter 7 is interesting.

Maybe "easy" isn't the right word, but perhaps "one trick pony".

On the one hand, it's interesting how much larger and more open most of the test chambers are. I wonder if this represents some technological difference in the game engine, or if it's purely a stylistic choice.

On the other hand, it seems that each chamber only has a single puzzle in it, even if it's repeated several times. It's mostly been a matter of "ok, if I put portals there and there, and then jump into this one, and then re-place the first portal while I'm airborne, then I'll land there, and I can grab that cube. So I'll just go ahead and repeat that exact process six times.

Chapter 4 Spoiler:

Like the room in chapter 4 with the three lasers and three receivers, but only two blocks. To me, at least, it was obvious within a few seconds that you needed to send all three beams through a single portal to get them where they needed to go, and after that it was just a bunch of tedious trial-end-error getting the angles correct.

END SPOILER

Or maybe I'm just jaded...

Has anybody noticed numerous billboard advertisements in their city? This is the most advertised game to date if you were to ask me. I counted 4 billboards just on the northwest side of town, not to mention countless commercials.

I don't get TV commercials, but I did notice a billboard in San Marcos, ironically right next to Fry's.

Funny that you mention it. I can't recall having seen a billboard ad for a videogame since Red Dead Redemption. They had Chicago and NYC plastered with those things.

This, of course, brings up painful memories. My good friend and neighbor Mark Robinson was the lead developer for the Midnight Club series, and after the most recent installment was done, they put him in charge of the Red Dead team. Needless to say, as soon as that game was released (and had set every record imaginable for game sales) they laid him off along with nearly the entire Rockstar Carlsbad team.

Thanks for bringing that up.

You monster.

no billboards out here. and the trees are saying nothing.

btw, I finished the game this afternoon.

so short. and i'm tormented by the damn playstation network outage preventing me from network coop.

I actually got past that section on accident. I just happened to drop a cube in the right place and it worked.

Well, we had some friends/family over today and I finally started playing (coop split screen). Was pretty good. I'll fire it up in single player tonight if I get a chance.

How many levels are there?

Chapter 5 Spoiler:

Ok, I have to rescind my previous criticism a bit. I've just gotten into the Aperture Classic phase of the game, and it's actually kind of interesting. Still somewhat basic in terms of problem-solving, but for the first time I'm really starting to enjoy the atmosphere of a game.

I love the old logos and vintage feel. You'll continue to like the forthcoming levels I suspect.

Rob, there are 9 chapters. each varies in length.

I used to have a bad ass computer as well. 386-40 with 8 (yes, EIGHT) meg of ram and a 300 meg HD. People used to come over to the house and they would freak out when I told them I was loading Links 386 in RAM. I think I paid around $2000 for the system. That was the last time I chased technology.

I have no idea where that damn potato wound up at...

dont spend too much time digging through the debris for it. just sayin.

Probably got shit on by a bird or something.

Could be. I just have this feeling that the potato is going to prove important later on.

Perhaps it has been eaten by a deer. :D

Having played thru the game (sorta, helped my roomate with it)
This is a fun thread to read. :bigtu:

I just beat the game. Overall I'm glad I bought it, but the ending didn't have the same pizazz as the first one.

<<<<< LOL spoilers

JOE:
http://sellout.woot.com/

(link valid 4/26 only)

Atari Flashback 2+ Classic Game Console

$24.99

I finished the game last night. Was pretty good. Now I just need to play some co-op.

Lol, I love being a douche every once in a while. The co-op level where you stand on the button to make the bridge and walk across, yeah, my partner didn't make it.

The single player gets pretty epic towards the end, you really have to understand the first game and what you and apature science were doing to understand the vintage stuff.

I loled @ "Fuck you. I'm going to play Mortal Kombat".

I suddenly understand the logic behind the "potato sack".

don't think too hard on it.

How could I? 1.1 volts just isn't enough.

portal 2 DLC "Peer Review" is out!

No idea what that is????

play with me

more coop levels