teh Forum

Everyone must buy Quake IV. There are no bots, so I need human victims. It's quite nice. It's nice and fast, just like Q3A. I haven't played single player yet, so more on that soon. I also picked up F.E.A.R. but haven't installed it yet. I shall post more when I get more time on it.

WOW!

Admiral and Choki: You're going to like this game we shall have to play soon.

Well, what's he big into now?

He's big into those trains, Quake IV, and F.E.A.R fer-instance.

Play Quake IV and F.E.A.R. is imperative at present!

F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 have been downloaded. I finally got Q4 to work, I reinstalled my video drivers, and chipset drivers, and audio drivers. I'm not sure what one of those was the culprit, but it worked.

Jerk: are you running the beta forceware drivers? I was but I reverted back to the 78.01

As for FEAR, I have yet to try it.

Quake 4 is graphically awesome; it is a might dark at times, which makes it very similar to D3. At some points it is hard to distinguish from D3 actually. I love the Q2 influence in the game; the level architecture is very reminiscent of that. The weapons are all closely comparative to the Q2 weapons as well. I have one thing to say about that, bring on the Hyperblaster! I haven’t really tried multiplayer, but that is not very possible since I have downloaded the game. I'd like to play a little multi on a LAN, or with Hamachi. After I can see the multiplayer aspect of the game, if all goes well, I just might buy it. No promises though.

I have yet to see anything that reminds me terribly of Doom 3, besides the overall appearance of the engine. I haven't gotten anywhere that was so dark that I couldn't see. I do use the flashlight attachments fairly frequently to make dark places easier, but none of them have been pitch black. Nothing like the scientist/lantern level on Doom 3. Have you driven the hover tank yet? It's not my favorite part, but it's kinda fun in a Battlezone sort of way. My computer is currently not working, so I don't know if I'll be able to play tonight or not. I picked up a 7200.9 (yes 9) today to replace my system drive. I figured, if I'm going to have to do a full reinstall of Windows from scratch, I might as well get rid of my PATA drive.

Woo hoo SATA2!

Sucks to not have a working PC, I feel for you...

Even on outside areas there are areas that have heavy shadows. It almost felt as though I was in a really big room, instead of actually outside. True there is a lot more color in the artwork, and no completely pitch black rooms, but it still is a tad too dark sometimes. The addition of the flashlight on the gun is a nice perk though. It looks really cool to see your squadmates running around flashing their lights around, amazing effects there! One of the things that bothered me about doom3 is the amount of rounds you had to put into a guy to take him down. Seems as though this is the same on quake 4. I do like how they incorporated the quake3 /quake 2 sound-effects, even though it doesn’t really fit sometimes, it gave it some familiarity. I agree with what jerk said earlier that he prefers Strogg to fatsos and zombies. Overall I do like the whole q4 military attack experience better than the demons / zombies, and the spooky scariness of doom3. So far I like q4, I like it better than doom3, but then I didn’t really like d3 all that much.

Multiplayer:

When doom 3 came out, I bought it for the prospect of multiplayer. It had very limited multiplayer, I think I played it twice. I remember hearing oh doom is more single player oriented, wait for quake 4, that will be the next-gen Id multiplayer experience we are waiting for. Well Quake 4 is here, and I hear it only supports 16 players. It has a Hollywood voiced extravagant single-player, and possibly a half ass multiplayer. Now I haven’t even tried it yet, so this is all hypothetical. 16 players still seems kind of limited by today’s standards though. Even if they hack the game to support more, the levels are probably only designed for 16 players. I can hear it now; wait for quake-wars, that is the Id next-gen multiplayer we are waiting for. Well... who knows? Let’s get some game on, so someone can change my opinion.

So... for the record. Hamachi works like a charm, and is sooo easy to set up. I can see it now, in the future there will be CD checks for LAN play... heh.

I just got finished playing a little multiplayer, I gotta say its pretty fun. Its basically Q3A, with better graphics. Which is good.

The only thing I don't like about MP is the lack of bots. (so far) I mean, Q2 didn't come with bots either. Then someone developed the reaper bot for it. (which later became the AI model for Unreal's Skaarj.) So I'm confident I'll have my synthetics soon. 16 players is cool with me. That's all Q3 had. With Quake style levels, I just don't see the need for more. For something like Battlefield or CS, the more the better I say. For play more like the singleplayer though, wait for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It's on the D3/Q4 engine, but it's tactical, and much more MP oriented. For quick Quake matches though, I can't see how more than 16 people would make the experience any better.

My PC is set up now. I'm just copying data back on, and installing software. I'm going to leave it at stock speeds for a while, let it burn in, see how it goes, then start slowly bumping it back up again. I'm pretty sure the problem wasn't OC related though (at least not the initial problem.) It was something to do with the new BIOS I put on. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe how fast this SATA2 drive is. It's like SCSI was when we were still using 2-6GB IDEs. I wish my D drive was one of these.

So is the new bios holding together so far? Should I avoid that bios?

So I played me up some Quake 2. The metal stroggs with the mace hand actually take a lot to take them down. 5-8 single shotgun blasts depending on proximity. So i guess Q4 isnt too far off.

Grab this: http://www.quake2evolved.com/news.htm and install it to your Quake 2 folder. It gives you a fancy interface, nice lighting, water caustics, shader effects, etc. Quite cool. Still totally compatible with Q2, Q2 Max, and all the other engine updates, etc. I never play Q2 without it.

Yeah, those guys can take some damage. Hyperblaster will kill them fairly quickly though, and 1 or 2 well placed rail-shots. I can't wait to get Q4 back on my PC. I forgot to back up my saved games though for it and F.E.A.R.

I think there was some sort of file-index mismatch (reason it kept trying to run chkdisk.) It just kept on going, so I rebooted, went into Windows, copied what was left of the drive (luckily got my music, cartoons, PC ISOs, etc.) and then formatted it. Drive is fine, files are back on it, and it's all happy. So everything was intact, but Windows wasn't reading it right or something. So when I copied the files, they came off fine because they weren't really corrupt. That's why I think it was some kind of index error.

I lost my D:\Games folder though, which is where my new games were installed, and where all my abandonware games were. I still have all those games, but they are all zipped up, so it's going to be a pain to get them all back on there, and set up for DOSBox. Bleh... Well, it's kinda worth the trouble anyway because now I have a shiny new OS and clean drivers to play the new games on. Weeeeeeeeeeeee!!! I'm going to ghost the drive before I install anything. That way, if I frack it up again when I OC, I can just toss the image back on.

Fuck! I just realized that Guild Wars was installed there. I hope my character is saved on their servers, and not just locally. Oh, that will suck. I was level 16 of 20, with lots of fancy stuff. I don't think I'll want to play it again for a while if I lost that. ('twas a lot of work)

The package has arrived! Thanks again.

So... I'm downloading the Q2 evolved stuff now.

Wow! That Quake 2 Evolved is quite impressive. I have seen it before, but it has actually progressed quite far since I saw it last.

Yeah, I hadn't seen it for a while either. Then Seth and I decided to play it one morning, so I grabbed it. It didn't have the fancy lighting the last time I played it. (It makes a huge difference.) Guess what. I'm not going to OC my PC. It never drops below sync at stock speeds in Quake IV at 1280x1024 with everything maxed. (Except AA of course.) Even AF is cranked up. I think that will do nicely. Maybe I'll bump it up sometime, just to see what it can do though. F.E.A.R. also runs completely maxed in 1024x768. Not bad at all. You must SLI yourself.

CPU is idling at 33C.

Guild Wars is fine. Character is saved online. Phewwww!

That makes sense, otherwise there would be some hacking a goin on with the characters.

My CPU is idling at 34C, but I'm not overclocked at present.

Just going to go ahead and add one more....

WOW!!!

So FEAR! Pretty cool stuff. I was having some fun with the dual pistolas and the Bullet-Time...

I've only used the bullet time once. In Max Payne I used it all the time, but F.E.A.R. is slightly different. Max Payne was more cinematic (especially since it was third person,) so it fit right in then. Since F.E.A.R. is first person, I don't use it much because it ruins the immersion a bit.


That stupid little girl. Almost hopped out of my seat again.

[spoilbox]She was writhing across the floor toward me doing this little creepy-ghostly breakdance of sorts in that weird jerky animation. Bleh. I fired a clip into the wall behind her. (made me feel a little better)[/spoilbox]

I use bullet time like its going out of style! Its really great to do a slide kick in bullet time, and then cap him in the face as he is falling down, add a quick spin to the side, and you can probably take down his buddy before you run out of b-time.

I played Quake IV for a couple of hours last night. I actually was just going to run it for a few minutes to test my new overclock settings, but got totally sucked in. Got to the first real boss. Quite cool.

Some of the lighting further in is incredibly cool. Especially if the lights are off in the computer area. The lights look nice and bright to where I start squinting.

The X-Fi card I got is excellent for games. It sounds really nice, and the environmental audio actually sounds like it should now. Before it was interesting, but there was always something out of place about it. Now it works well. It also seems to have improved performance a little bit over the onboard. (which is to be expected I suppose) It wouldn't be my first choice for writing music or something like that, but for games it's tip-top. If one already has an Audigy 2, there's not a huge reason to upgrade, but if one has been using onboard audio, it's quite a nice card, and nearly worth the money. (when the price drops a wee bit, it will be totally worth it)

[spoilbox]The spider bosses are pretty cool. The room they're in is even cooler. That blue lighting looks incredible (epsecially in the dark)[/spoilbox]

[spoilbox]I saw it already, i downloaded time demo 4, and thats where its recorded at, yes it looks damn cool![/spoilbox]

I wish someone would hurry up and make some bots for MP.

Wow, there are some fairly icky things later in Q4...

They were in Q2 as well, but not quite the same.

Iron Maiden?