lazygecko

Modern top 40 production trends are fucking terrible. Hip Hop/R&B is the worst. They've all but abandoned their soul/funk roots and instead draw their inspiration from the cheesiest European dance music. At best, it might be a poor imitation of minimalistic 808 beats from the 80's.

It always starts with "protecting the children". http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/nqfgd/to_any_posts_saying_rpolitics_is_too_overreactive/c3b4qv8

Music will probably still suck.

I think the dungeon variety this time is a lot better than in Oblivion and even Morrowind. But sadly it's true that Bethesda are just plain sub-par at game design/balance and they never seem to get better at it. Not just the awful level scaling, but also the fact that if you even give the slightest thought to minmaxing, the game quickly crumbles into a ridiculous exploit-fest. Mods are pretty much essential for Beth games, I couldn't ever imagine actually enjoying them on a console. Having Obsidian make a Fallout game with their engine really showed just how much better other devs can be apart from the world design. The biggest leap forward for Skyrim was the presentation. I never found Oblivion all that impressive thanks to the butt-ugly aesthetics and animation quality 1 generation behind the rest of the industry. Other things were slightly improved, or same as in Oblivion, or actually worse as is the case with the so obviously rushed and shallow quests. They really should just let Obsidian handle that stuff for them, but it seems unlikely as Elder Scrolls is their "baby" unlike Fallout.

I don't have much of an attachement to the original Deus Ex soundtrack, and the new one still struck me as utterly forgettable. Game music "fitting" a context is only dependant on conforming to our expectations. And right now AAA games are obsessed more than ever with being like big blockbuster movies. I don't mind game music being like movie scores per se, it's just that the modern post-Batman Begins stuff sounds like utter shit to me and has infested everything. I'm a big fan of the classic Italian school of film music, and I think it shares similarities with the classic game music we love so much. And I think this has an interesting example about what kind of music "fits" a certain setting. I'm talking about the iconic spaghetti western music which had plenty of electric guitars and other oddities which is really out of place in a 19th century western setting. They just did it because it sounded cool and was just plain good music, and after that it has become entirely acceptable to hear such music in that context. My point with this is that this can easily be applied to game music as well. It would probably help if the industry stopped looking up to Hollywood so much and started treating games as its own unique medium, which is essential if we want it to actually grow as an art. And regarding music being adaptive, I'm not 100% sure about the first Deus Ex but the first Unreal also made by Alex Brandon changed in real time depending on what happened while also retaining the qualities we like in classic game music.

Skyrim. So buggy,

Really liking the way pitch bending works in the piano roll. It's something I've always been yearning for in FLStudio.

Some useful console commands for taking screenshots: tm - completely hides the UI. This includes the console itself, so you can use the console to effectively pause the game for some nicely timed screenshots in combat or whatever. fov x - changes the field of view, with x being the value. I use 85 as the default value (Beth's default ones always make me naseous). Around 60 is good for closeup shots of your character and 100+ might be better for scenic stuff.

The creation kit is probably going to be released in a few days, but there's already some great mods you can get. Here are some of my favorite gameplay for rebalancing to make it more fun and/or challenging PISE Deadly Dragons True Darker Nights Balanced Magic Reweighed Potions Faster Arrows Snotgurgs Useful Food Playing with these in a sort of self-enforced hardcore mode where 1 death means it's completely over, can't use quickloads, can't use fast travel. The game is much more intense, enjoyable and rewarding this way.

For the best, you'd probably have to get custom-built speakers by people who know what the hell they're doing.

Sounds good. Love the Roger Dean-inspired artwork.

dB is only a reference point as has been said. The actual value sound is measured in is pascal. I think 0.000020 pascal was the equivalent of 0 or 1 (can't recall) dB, and the dB value increases on a logarithmic scale. Just using pascal wouldn't be practical because we'd be dealing with some ludicrious numbers.

What a blatant LotR ripoff!

Germany: Netherlands: Great Britain: Arena Norway: Pagan's Mind Sweden: Tunisia:

We’re also planning on rolling out support for 4-Gigabyte Tuning (Large Address Aware) next week for our PC users. Stay tuned! A pleasant surprise for once. Never expected them to do this.

Eve Online

If you haven't played the game yet today, you need to avoid the latest patch at all costs. If you're on PC, first disable automatic updates for the game, then go into offline mode before you launch it. The new patch creates more problems than it fixes, some of the most severe gameplay bugs introduced are magic resistances not working at all and dragons refusing the fight you.

It's an educated guess. The single player campaigns require writers, voice actors, set piece levels with a shit-ton of scripted events going on, lots of special animation work, and god knows what else. Do you have a citation for most buyers ignoring the single player?

If nobody buys them for the campaign, why is the majority of the game's budget spent on it?

I think there's a cap for resistances around 80% or so. I was wearing 2 50% fire resistance pieces but I was still taking some damage from fire breaths.

The new crafting system is great, albeit maybe too easy to powerlevel. I've gotten both smithing and enchanting up to around 80 now. Made some special enchanted gear pieces with 15-20% improved smithing results on each piece, which all stack. I wore them while crafting and improving ebony armor in addition to drinking a blacksmith potion with an additional 40%, resulting in my ebony armor and weapons nearly doubling in stats.

I don't even know if this sort of thing can just be modded away. It's likely hard-coded into the engine.

Some of the content streaming gets pretty obvious and I'm playing on Ultra settings. The waterfalls are the worst, they're just a static blocky model and will often stay that way for about 15 seconds. It's clear they had to compromise a lot to fit all these visuals on consoles, but did they really have to keep it that way on PC?

What difficulty are you playing at? I switched to Expert right at the start and find it fairly challenging, closer to Oblivion with OOO installed. I'm level 21 and things like bears will still fuck me up, although I'm playing a mage/warrior hybrid type and don't really excel in either yet. Had a dark elf companion from Dawnstar for a while who was pretty helpful, but he just got killed in a bandit ambush.