What are you playing?

[shadowblade34]

I spent the weekend downloading Fallout New Vegas even though I already had all of the files, then fucking it up by adding a new mod. Now I don't know what the bad mods and useless ones are, so I had to delete everything, install it again and do new mod installs. Alongside that I've been trying to figure out why my PC keeps on crashing, hopefully it should be fixed now.

I did manage to get *some* gaming in. I've begun Max Payne, and I'm quite surprised, the GBA version of it is almost identical in level design and such. It's just from an isometric view

[bobby 55]

Yeah, computers. I spent all day yesterday investigating CTD errors. After exhaustive searching I found I either needed to do a repair on windows, or the HDD is about to crash. I get an ISO of the repair disc but no go as windows notified me the DVD drive and the HDD are not communicating with each other, or one or the other is fucked (my words ).

So I open up the computer to check for unseated pins and the HDD to mobo cable wasn't firmly seated at the mobo end. I haven't had time to see if that fixed the problem yet, oh, the crashes only occurred when gaming.

Extra: I ran a SMART program that indicated no trouble on the HDD. Though I believe those things aren't 100% reliable. I might fire up a game this evening and see what happens.

[AEmer]

Did you get it fixed?

Currently playing The Binding of Isaac, and league of legends.

My team and I are getting good at LoL...it's my first brush with esports-like gaming.

We're not magnificent, of course...we don't have insane skills...but we do regularly beat teams with players that have twice as many games behind them on average as our most senior player.

It's a peculiar type of game; matches are 45 minutes, and they become very stressful by the end, to the point where the feeling of elation is rapidly replaced by fatigue on every successful victory. It's really a very long time to concentrate, and yet I gladly do it as much as 5 times a day. As a game, it's kindof lackluster, but as a social experience, it's pretty amazing.

Anyhoo, binding of isaac...I must admit to not having ever played a game quite like it, and it's pretty hard. My roommate has easily beat it 5 times, but I have yet to even get to Isaacs mother...but it's a very good game. I absolutely love it.

[bobby 55]

Did you get it fixed?

No! The misadventures of Robert: The disc I was running was a boot recovery, it only took me the best part of a day to glean that fact. Since booting is not a problem it's no wonder it wasn't firing up.

I have run check disc, and memtest on both the cpu and ram. I did a SMART diagnosis on the HDD, and after completely removing every instance of Nvidia from the computer, I clean installed another graphics driver. I've tried last known good configuration and even the very limited system restore. I unchecked "automatic reboot after failure" but there have been no BSODs after the the CTDs.

So, power supply and the memory timing are the only things I haven't looked at. I don't have a Windows 7 64 bit installation disc to do a repair from.... in case of corrupt drivers or files. I have investigated lots of Event IDs, that only broadened my education of the ten thousand and one things that can go wrong on a computer.

I might give the bro-inlaw a call and see if he's agreeable to a stress test of the system, coz if it is actually a failing HDD, all the programs he loaded might be lost. Oh, the bios and Sisoft indicate all the temperatures are within the their respective safe ranges immediately after the crashes. The psu of course remains an undiagnosed heat factor.

[Jaedar]

My team and I are getting good at LoL...it's my first brush with esports-like gaming.

What's your ELO?

my team is pretty bad at the game.... 3 digit only.

[EER]

I have recently started watching some LoL games on youtube with commentary, it is surprisingly fun to watch considering that I never played the game at all.

[AEmer]

it's one of the better spectator esports, yeah. Starcraft 2 still has a leg up on it, due to a much older community, but people are streaming games reasonably successfully....A danish dude, guardsman bob is his nick, had 4k in his channel last night for his solo que games...and more than 60k tuned in to the recent intel extreme masters tournament. So...not bad.

We don't actually have an ELO (team rating) yet; we're roaming classic because we only play premade, and a couple of the guys we play with have yet to reach level 30. Our Team...OMGBBQ, original name, I know...has 6 level 30es, and the last 3 spots are reserved for people who are either level 28 or 29 right now. Our only weakness during the draft pick is that a few people only have a couple of alts...I only have a single. Noone is going to think to ban both singed and irelia, hopefully, but I'm working on getting Gang Plank up to snuff too.

I've no idea what our ELO would be, but I reckon it's going to land north of 1200.

It's also pretty clear who's the better players: The best of us have up to 10 alts that they can play with success...I might roflstomp fairly often with irelia and singed, but considering how useless I am with many other characters, it's pretty clear I need a lot more experience with my characters to work them right.

On the other hand, I've pretty much taken it upon myself to always do solo top. It's a lonely existence of trying to outfarm rivens, tryndameres and gangplanks, but once in a while you get a karthus, and things are good.....

[Jaedar]

Hey Aemer, do you play on eune by any chance?

Irelia is fun to play, but I find she gets outlaned by most of the standard top picks. Or maybe I'm just not very good.

I think the main reason my team is so low is that no one bothers to pick a lane to specialize in, so everyone has one or two champs they're decent with in every lane.

[bobby 55]

After going to the Asus site and finding a wattage calculator, the 650 watt power supply might not be capable of supporting all the components on this "loaned" PC. It's on the fritz or not producing enough power, either way means a new psu.

Update: The apartments where I live are being constantly worked on, and since the work started the power has gone off unexpectedly four times. Once just now. I also just found out an electric kettle blew the mains and threw the safety switch about the time when the computer had it's first crash. It's a miracle this computer is operating at all.

[AEmer]

Hey Aemer, do you play on eune by any chance?

Irelia is fun to play, but I find she gets outlaned by most of the standard top picks. Or maybe I'm just not very good.

I think the main reason my team is so low is that no one bothers to pick a lane to specialize in, so everyone has one or two champs they're decent with in every lane.

Yup, we're playing on EUNE. Our team is a couple of brits and a bunch of danish people. My summoner name is Mads Tejlgaard, so you can add me if you want. Currently we're suffering from a bit of player overload...my extended network is big enough that we commonly get upwards of 10+ people that we've played a bunch of games with on some days between 8 and 11, so it's a bit hairy to sort out who plays with whom...on the plus side, you can grab a game quite often, on the negative, someone invariably gets left out a lot. We usually run with skype for voice, but have also tried mumble...we're trying to figure out some other solution where we can get a channel set up and where people can hang out and organize.

Anyway, you're welcome to add me to your friendslist, then I can hit you up for some games sometime.

My team has had much success with specialized characters and specialized roles...it's just really hit and miss with specialized characters. I wanted to get tryndamere to work really badly, and he's a good character, but I just can't make him work. Singed, on the other hand, I was decent with at first, and now I consistently play him ok to very well, and playing that character and really figuring out all the little quirks about the various situations improved my overall play immensely.

Now I play Irelia mostly, and she's seriously scary. I snowball with her in at least half our games. I don't think it's because I'm that amazing of a player, but the build strategy I use works incredibly well, very reliable. You have so much utility in the late game; unless the enemy team has a melee carry that's snowballing, you can typically lock down any champion completely during teamfights, but you can also chase much better than most, escape more easily, and if you tank a big chunk of damage you can hang back and help with the cleanup to make a slim victory into a decisive one. It took like 10 games before I really got into her playstyle, and an additional 10 against the worst top lane enemies before I got to where I feel like I'm no longer letting the team down by not picking singed.

Anyway, from having played two characters and feeling like, wow, I play these very well, it gets much easier to learn new characters. I definitely recommend specializing enough to really figure it all out. I also recommend trying out new characters in dominion. IMO, if you're playing a character and there isn't a ton of problems you're tumbling with, and trying to optimize during every game, you probably don't understand the full potential of the character...you're probably making some base mistake somewhere, and it prevents you from unlocking the higher echelons of play, so you're stuck with simple problems and simple decisions. Just my oppinion, but typically, you should try to play another character if this is the case.

The rest of the players on my team have done this as well...they've had characters they used to learn to play the game with, played them a massive amount of games, then graduated onto characters more suitable to their playstyle, and slowly expanded onto similar characters. The biggest issue right now is that noone plays top lane that well except for our jungler and myself, but setting that kind of problem aside...yeah, I think it's worked out very well to have very strict team compositions. We're winning more and more games due to playing well late game than we used to.

As for Irelias viability...The professional teams often run a toplane irelia as their first pick for that lane so I think she's a genuinely good champion, though apparently Teemo (of all characters...) is a hard counter to her. One thing I will say is that I need smartcasting on her. It's so important; you can always land an e after a q, and r and w are already sort-of smart cast-y. It also makes laning incredibly safe and easy...you can actually select individual minions and check out their health, or if you need to kill a large wave just spread out your ult and take some health off of them all, and then spam q like there's no tomorrow...sure, you may burn 500 mana by ninjaing 20 minions in less than 3 seconds, but I promise you, it'll be the most satisfying 3 seconds of playtime for that entire game. Most importantly, you can jump to low-health minions and then onto targets hanging back, in a body-flicker type move, and once in a blue moon, you can actually jump to two minions before hopping there, scaring the crap out of people.

[AEmer]

@Bobby

Yeah, it may well be a psu problem. It very often is. Just ask Jonas

650 watt should be enough, but if its taken some damage, it might still be the problem. If you can find a store with an amenable return police you can test it out reasonably easy by buying a new one, otherwise I don't know of anything you can try.

[Hassat Hunter]

Borderlands.
Went down an elevator to pick up some weapons to sell. Go up. Die for no reason what-so-ever. Had to pay 5000 to make 500.

Good thing money's so worthless, I keep loosing tons when getting killed by the bosses (early on never, now later usually once, very rarely twice).

Also wondered why I have the GOTY and there are still little nitpickity bugs that irk me. No one ever thought to fix up the +ammo capacity skill (assault?)/vehicle bug? (You get about 6 additional bullets maxed out. But when leaving a vehicle it's loaded at the original max. So each time you exit a vehicle you have to reload to fill up the rifle. It's Soooooo annoying)

[Massaca]

Touhou Eiyashou Imperishable Night [pc], which is a Danmaku or Bullet Hell Shmup.
Been playing it quite a bit lately (primarily at work >_>) but I still suck at it. Working on doing all 222 Spell Cards (boss attack paterns) with a certain character and also trying to beat the extra stage.

Was trying one of the Spell Cards last night (one of the last ones, 205) and even though it's just a pattern that needs memorising it was bloody hard. Sat there giving it attempt after attempt until I reached my 99th try at which point my patience ran out and I gave up In my defense it was about 2am.
So yeah, it's really damn hard but also really damn great fun


Also been playing a little bit of DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu Resurrection and DeathSmiles on 360 (also bullet Hell Shmups) inconsistently over the last month but I have issues with the movement using the 360 controller, have an arcade stick too but it doesn't really help me. Wish I could use a keyboard for them.


Spent a fair bit of time playing that Installation 04 Firefight map in Halo Reach (From Halo CEA) in system link co-op with my brother, damn good map IMO and the only reason I have to even play Reach.


And finally, I started American Mcgee's Alice again a couple days ago. About halfway through it now. Still love it.

[Jonas]

I'm replaying LIMBO for reasons I can't get into. It's better than I remembered. Some of these puzzles are extremely clever, and even as I find myself remembering the solutions to most of them, they're still fun and satisfying to solve. There's a few bad puzzles in there, where the physics system just gets too damn fiddly, but on the other hand there's a lot of puzzles where the sheer physicality of the game makes the basic interactions with the puzzle components very engaging. I'd somehow forgotten about all the living creatures you have to interact with, other than the kids that chase you through their own traps and of course the motherfucking spider.

Though the overall game is a little too trial-and-error for my usual tastes, there's just so much really solid design in here - the foreshadowing of the brain parasites, the constant lock-offs preventing you from doubling back too far, the way the evil children's trap sequence is inverted as you flee from them, the way the spider sequence just keeps getting more and more gruesome even when you think it can't possibly get any worse, the fake mechanical spider trap not long after you meet the real spider, the way the glass on the factory roof cracks when you walk over it so you know what to do, the mind parasite trap where you're forced to walk all the way to the end of an area to free yourself, only to have to double back through the entire area, which now requires solving a bunch of puzzles that were designed to just let you through the first time around...

It's a very clever game, especially for a platformer.

[shadowblade34]

I'm playing TNM, and after being stuck for 2 years, I've finally managed to find the plateau with the two stealth pistols by the trash bags near the condemned buildings. Now I can move further on the game.

I'm also playing New Vegas without cheating this time, and a stable modded version, but it crashes sometimes - not a fault of the mods.

And in between those games, I'm playing Max Payne 1 and 2,and another round of Civilization V