Latest posts of: spigot

Quote from: kathode on April 30, 2008, 11:57:49 PM

So couldn't get away from work last night in time to pick up my preorder. No big deal right? Preorders are good for several days last I checked. Well just back from my local Gamestop. They sold my preorder to some random person. No, it wasn't a mistake. They apparently got a call from corporate telling them to sell everything regardless of preorder status. This is why you should never ever preorder. Your money sits in their bank account and buys you nothing.

I've always been adamant about the pre-order thing too. Everytime I walked into a Gamestop it was like facing the Pre-order Gestapo. Up until they pulled these recent and rediculous shenanigans where corporate issued initiatives to sell pre-ordered and pre-payed stock to walk-ins, I actually did do a few pre-orders with them that ended happily and without incident. After this though, I may never pre-order with them ever again.

Wow, just wow. Bonafide software issues/glitches aside it amazes what people will find to complain about. The even funnier ones are the ones with a long laundry list of nitpicking minutiae issues concluding with a very polite and almost apologetic "Ah well, guess this type of game isn't for me. <shrug>".

ZOMG Niko's hair doesn't grow long like in real life?

ZOMG You can't mod your cars and put on a 3-foot high spoiler and spinners?

ZOMG If Niko keeps eating at the same places everyday doesn't he get sick of the food? Why doesn't he make some comment about trying something new?

ZOMG <some other nitpick>

WORST GAME EVAR. I AM RETURNING IT OR PUTTING IT UP FOR TRADE. KTHXBYE

Quote from: The Grue on April 30, 2008, 08:52:30 PM

Quote from: PeteRock on April 30, 2008, 08:47:35 PM

then watching as he vaguely spoke of his difficult past both helped me to empathize with the character, which helps a great deal when trying to immerse one's self into such a role.

Anyone else playing the game like me where when you start out you only walk places (in other words never car jack) or ever kill a person except for the mission? I almost feel like he wouldn't just start stirring shit in the city, but instead will fall deeper and deeper into the crime life, slowly but surely. I just feel that's the way he'd do it and so play the character that way.

I try this ..... for about 5 minutes. Then I end up car-jacking some poor schmuck's humvee, picking up a hooker, then plowing into a group of mothers pushing their baby carts down the street. icon_twisted

Put in a decent amount of hours last night (sorry if I didn't accept any of your invites! I have no mic! I need to rectify that today) and I'm liking it more and more. All the little details in the world really take the game to the next level. I still think Niko on-foot moves really sluggishly, but the driving is getting better and I love tooling around in the chopper.

The radio station selection is really good and varied as well. I think I spent most of my time last night just cruising around listening to all the stations. Liberty Rock FTW!

For anyone who's gotten the "Warm Coffee" achievement the love-making cutscene (which incidentally shows no skin at all, just buildings WTF) that proceeded it seemed really cheesy and out-of-place, even for a GTA game. "Oh Niko! Tell me interesting things!"

Some memorable stuff from last night:

- Carjacking a car so fast the passenger didn't even get a chance to jump out. So I'm cruising around town with this dude in the passenger seat screaming his head off. I let him out, then proceed to back over him.

- Going full blast in a humvee and trying to take a wicked jump near the big water fountain in the big park, but falling short and smashing right down on poor ol' grandma just trying to take a walk.

- Taking Michelle to a bar, stumbling out into the street piss drunk and hailing a speeding taxi as it blows past us. The taxi guy actually hears and brakes hard, screeching and sliding into a fire hydrant. He's now sitting on top of the broken hydrant going full blast under him. We both get in and the next second another car plows into the back of the taxi. The taxi driver gets out and engages in fisticuffs with the other guy, a chase ensues between the two, and we're both left sitting in the car going 'WTH'.

Quote from: coopasonic on April 29, 2008, 06:13:00 PM

Quote from: wonderpug on April 29, 2008, 06:09:21 PM

Quote from: Magic on April 29, 2008, 06:07:31 PM

Quote from: wonderpug on April 29, 2008, 05:38:08 PM

You know, I can give a first impression already after all. Big thumbs up to the free month of Live Gold. Why hasn't this been mentioned in any of the advertising from R* or Microsoft? So bizarre.

that's news to me. In both copies of the game I have had so far, I've yet to see anything. Where is the card?

Mine was right under the map and manual.

Unless I somehow missed it, I didn't get it either. Did you guys that got it all buy CEs?

My 360CE came with a Live card.

So I scored my 360 copy at a Gamestop midnight release last night. Rolled in at 11PM, no one outside. I walk in and I'm like the 3rd dude there so I pay off my preorder and we chill out for a bit. By 11:45 there were about 20 people in the store. I walk out of the store at 11:50 with my copy. Everytime a big new release comes out I tell myself I"m not gonna camp-out or go to a midnight release and just sleep-in instead, but then I end up doing just that. I guess I just like getting caught up in all the launch excitement.

Having played for about 90mins after getting home, the good 'ol GTA feeling is still there. The world really does feel a lot more alive and random. Still getting used to the controls. For some reason the driving and walking just seems really sluggish (for the driving I can see because of the crap cars you get in the beginning). I ended my night after doing the first date mission. I'm liking it so far.

Please add RoboSim to your XBL friends list. I can't wait to see how the MP is.

The ones where they punk people and claim to stop making Whoppers is so so rediculously dumb. I'm assuming the angry patrons in the commercial are all part of the act, but if not, are people really that stupid to go apeshit over a freaking hamburger? Talk about priorities in life....

Wow. It looked to be entertaining, but I might just wait for it on PPV now.

Quote from: Lee on April 19, 2008, 06:57:27 PM

Quote from: spigot on April 19, 2008, 06:55:18 PM

Couple of my babies when I lived in the city. They will be missed. I also had a Trek 2200 that I can't find pictures for sadly. I long for my biking days, but they seem like distant memory after moving out to the burbs.

http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z67/rogsim/fixie1.jpg
http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z67/rogsim/fixie2.jpg
http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z67/rogsim/fixie3.jpg

You cover your bikes in electrical tape??

It was a work bike. Locking it up to posts and whatever the hell else was planted down doing your runs can ding your frame to hell. And besides, bike thieves can't resist a shiny glossy bike, so it served a dual purpose.

Quote from: The Grue on April 13, 2008, 05:24:03 PM

Quote from: Ragnarok on April 13, 2008, 12:51:44 PM

And using B.S.'s Ironman is perfect for the trailers.

It's so corny and stupid, though. The only thing the two have in common is the name.

Corniness aside, it's natural for people to draw a reference or even passing thought to the B.S. song. Does the song fit? For purposes of the trailer, yes. I don't think Barry Manilow or Neil Diamond would have equally the same effect.

I too suffer from the hand-washing and organization issues. I absolutely have to straighten things out, align objects so they appear symmetrical and order things by height, category and color. I hate clutter so sometimes I'll be up at 2-3 in the morning vacuuming and rearranging and repositioning things around the house.

Funny you mentioned this as I'm always suspect of the games Target sells. Why are some new titles in shrink-wrap and not cellophane? I could understand if they opened up the boxes to insert their own store security tags, but I find it extremely odd they would open them for no reason whatsoever.

So my buddy is getting hitched in a few months and I'm tasked to throw him a bachelor party. I could always do the standard strippers, cocaine and miscellaneous shenanigans thing but why not do something different (but still with strippers)? What bachelor parties have you guys personally planned (or attended) that was unique and different from the norm? Any ideas appreciated.

I've got my pre-order down for this too. I usually geek-out on "Collector's" or "Limited" edition packages, and this one just seems downright cool.

I finally beat the SP the other night. If you can believe it, the ending of Vegas2 is actually worse than Vegas1, which sucked pretty bad already. These guys just can't tell a story for shite. The action rocks, but they plain suck at narrative.

Also, was it just me or was it hard to make out what the hell the other characters were saying? Seems more often than not the dialogue was drowned out by the overbearing dramatic music.

I also encountered a glitch in one of the levels where after I killed a turret gunner the gun kept firing on it's own, even as I moved to another far-off area of the map. The blasted thing just kept on rat-a-tat-ing away.

I haven't played too much online yet. I tried my hand in Terrorist Hunt and got my ass handed to me repeatedly. The enemies in Terrorist Hunt seem so much more aggressive and heavily armed, even on the Normal difficulty.

These may be stupid complaints, but the size of your character on-screen seems too large. Seems like a decent amount of screen estate lost. Hopefully this is adjustable, but spending the majority of the game staring at my guy's back could get annoying. And what's up with the enemies taking 10-20 bullets in the face before they go down. These are supposedly the lowest-level grunts too. Makes you wonder what kind of other guys you face later on.

I'm in for this. The coop should be hella fun. If someone else here picks it up, we should definitely play coop.

XBL: RoboSim

My dual-mon developer workstation setup at work:

Because they prefer to be strippers, sorry, "exotic dancers".

Walmart, of course, being the end-all-be-all premier definitive voice in the latest-and-greatest digital entertainment electronics industry.

+1 to Laner for, well .... being Laner.

As beautiful the graphics and animation are and as insane the action is, I just for some reason can't get into the game. Maybe it's because I was just a casual fan at best of the first three in the series. As always, my loss is your gain.

So I have a minty fresh 360 collector's edition of DMC4 up for grabs. Comes in a metal case and a DVD of the first 4 episodes of the DMC anime. Grab yours today for a GT-Friend price of $45 shipped.

And the best part of this whole deal? This, of course slywink

+1 to naednek for Burnout Paradise

Your post was a little too long to read, so I'm just going to answer with a: perhaps.

Old, but cool, but old.

naednek has expressed an interest. If it falls through, it'll be back up for grabs.

Sad tragedy. I liked the movies he was in. Makes me want to see The Dark Knight even more now.

All this time I thought it was just me getting old and going blind. I couldn't see the text in Dead Rising or R6:Vegas for squat. Luckily my new LCD HDTV solved that issue icon_biggrin

Did anyone catch the documentary Life After People on the History Channel the other night? A pretty cool show. The premise being that if every single human being in the world would vanish or disappear tomorrow, what would become of the world we left behind? What would happen to all of our technology, all of our complex industrial (nuclear, electrical, etc.) systems, our cities and neighborhoods?

Really makes you think about how fragile our existence is in this world. As soon as we're gone, everything just falls apart and nature reclaims and reverts all the modern progresses man has made.

A stupid n00b HDTV question for you guys, but here goes:

I recently picked up a 720p LCD HDTV with an integrated HDTV tuner that can handle up to 1080i for TV broadcasts. I know that with the current crop of HDTVs when, for example, a 720p set is fed a 1080i (or 1080p) signal it will do one of two things: 1) not show anything at all or 2) downscale the signal to the TV's native resolution.

Avoiding the whole 1080 vs. 720 debate, what are the advantages/disadvantages of running a 1080 signal, say from an up-converting DVD player or even the 360, to a 720p HDTV? Would the downscaled 1080 image look better or worse than if I just used a signal matching the native resolution of the TV? Should I even bother at that point? Other forums I've seen have said the downscaled image would lose detail and look worse, others have said downscaling would make it look slightly better (as opposed to up-scaling the resolution).

Thanks!

A small get-together with close friends. Kind of a pot-luck thing. Maybe we'll watch a movie and play some games too.

Re-gifting: A victimless crime or insidious chicanery? We were all perpetrators or prey at one time or another.

ITT we post the last item which we re-gifted to another poor, unwitting ~~victim~~ recipient.

*Edited title.

Nothing special. Probably just a small get-together with the family. Usually a group of my close friends get together to celebrate, but what with almost everyone in that group being married or celebrating elsewhere with their SO, we can't even decide collectively when everyone can assemble to meet.

The last thing we need is Gamestop holding all the cards for people who want a Wii.