[Schmattakopf]

Are there any good games which focus on politics? I can't think of any.

What type of politics? Civ-esque foreign relations sort of thing, or a political career simulator?

[SmZA]

Are there any good games which focus on politics? I can't think of any.

Hidden Agenda (1988)

Political Machine

[mocoworm]

[edit]

[KenOD]

Are there any good games which focus on politics? I can't think of any.

Depends on what you mean.

Tropico series for a fictional world and many came across impressed with Democracy I and II (especially with all the modding) for it's mostly realistic style and situations and responses.

Now if you are talking about actual issues reflected in games, there is PeaceMaker

[Laughing Banana]

Mass Effect series.

Is there any *way* of erasing "list of imported characters" from the mass effect importer? For example ME2 importers recognizes a bunch of characters I don't intend to play anymore when scanning for imports from ME1.

Deleting the files from HDD does not help.

[Lord British]

Is... is there a DOTA2 community thread? I can't find it anywhere!

[HK-47]

Is... is there a DOTA2 community thread? I can't find it anywhere!

Dota 2 isnt out yet, so it has no community thread. It has a beta thread.

[lucius]

I have a year and a half old 4GB Slim 360 with 320HD that when I shut it down sometimes it goes into to like overdrive pretty loud then shuts down after about 20 secs or so, it has done this like 7 times but I have shut it down maybe hundreds of times without it doing this. I was wondering if anyone else had this happen?

[Totobeni]

Here is an example of my problem



This strange phenomena hit many of my wired mice and keyboards and my PS2/XBox/GCN controllers wires (Even some of my Headphones wires have these knots) some wires/keyboards just die after few weeks of this too,any solutions at all? or way to prevent this from happening?

[woo and indeed hoo]

Are there any good games which focus on politics? I can't think of any.

I believe there was a sim game that focused on an election campaign that was discussed on GFW Radio a few years ago. However, I would have no idea what it was called or even if I just dreamt this!

Here is an example of my problem [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/vkitG.jpg[IMG] This strange phenomena hit many of my wired mice and keyboards and my PS2/XBox/GCN controllers wires (Even some of my Headphones wires have these knots) some wires/keyboards just die after few weeks of this too,any solutions at all? or way to prevent this from happening?

Do you unplug these a lot? Or just turn them over a lot? Apart from making a special effort to keep them untangled when you do this [presuming this is the issue] I have no other suggestion, sorry.

[wolfmat]

any solutions at all?

Untangle, straighten, massage until it stays straight when left loose again. (This actually works, just gotta massage enough.)

or way to prevent this from happening?

Fixate the cables. When you run around with headphones on, and turn left to brew coffee or whatever, turn right after that so that you neutralize rotations.

If you can't fixate the cables, keep them near stretched state. They'll resist rotations more then.
If you can't keep them near stretched, then roll parts up and bind the rolled-up part, so that the cable's near stretched state. The rolled-up part won't rotate in itself, obviously.

Or get on wireless gear. But I'm not a fan myself.

As for broken cables: Identify break location, open cable, solder, close cable.

[KennyLinder]

Skyrim on PS3. Did they fix the framerate issues? Just asking, was going to play it after Dark Souls.

[Kokonoe]

How can you tell if a 360/PS3 game supports 1080p? besides looking at the box.

[wolfmat]

How can you tell if a 360/PS3 game supports 1080p? besides looking at the box.

Put 360 into 1080 resolution, start game, count some pixels, use math.

Edit: I think the internet has already done this for most games, and there's a list somewhere.

[Syn23]

Maybe this isn't so "stupid" but I'll try asking here: Which components stay on in a PS3, when it's turned off and the "Remote Start" setting is activated? Can it cause any wear or damage to those components, with time?

[Gibbles17]

Couple of tech questions, the simpler the explanation the better of course :)

-what exactly do v-sync, anti-aliasing, and sub-HD refer to?

-what is netcoding? What determines whether it is "good" or "bad"?

-why are dedicated servers considered infinitely superior to p2p connectivity?

Thanks oodles!

[Syn23]

-what exactly do v-sync, anti-aliasing, and sub-HD refer to?

V-sync is a way to prevent tearing. Anti-aliasing smooths jaggies on objects edges. Sub-HD means a resolution that is inferior to 720p. As you can see, you would have found everything you needed on wikipedia.

-what is netcoding? What determines whether it is "good" or "bad"?

Netcode is essentially the part of a game code that concerns online playing. Lag and stability are two main quality indications.

-why are dedicated servers considered infinitely superior to p2p connectivity?

Because usually they provide a better (and fairer) multiplayer experience.

[paischtu]

How can you tell if a 360/PS3 game supports 1080p? besides looking at the box.

Some TVs show what resolution is being used for the currently used Input Device. Atleast Samsung TVs have this.

[mclem]

-what exactly do v-sync, anti-aliasing, and sub-HD refer to?

V-Sync: Monitors refresh at a given rate (60Hz, for instance, is 60 refreshes - new images - each second). Games can synchronise to the refresh rate, such that they carry out the game logic and render a view of the world once for every refresh of the monitor. If it happens to take a long time to do that, you might get one new scene for every two refreshes of the monitor (halving the framerate). Synchronised to the monitor you can only have 60fps or factors thereof.

With V-Sync turned off the game makes no effort to synchronise the behaviour of the game to the monitor refresh rate; it can easily be happily working on the logic for the next frame at the point the monitor gets around to rendering the previous one. The advantage of this is that the playable framerate is not constrained by the monitor refresh rate, so it can exceed 60fps or go to any framerate below that level.

There's two advantages of having V-Sync on: First, with V-Sync off you'll get tearing. That's when the monitor attempts to render a scene which the game is halfway through drawing, which means you'll get a clear image where the top half is of one frame and the bottom is of the previous frame; you'll see it quite often when turning. Also, there's one small possible benefit in that with V-Sync on you can code with the knowledge that the game logic will always have a fixed timestep, which opens up some potential for optimisations - albeit that's a fairly large step, and having code capable of dealing with variable timesteps is safer.


Anti-aliasing: A framebuffer is a grid of pixels. If you try and draw a diagonal line on a grid, you're going to get a 'stepped' look to things ('jaggies'). One nice way to alleviate that is to fill in the steps with a slightly lighter pixel to create a smoother look when viewed from a distance. One significant way of achieving that is to internally draw to a much finer grid than the one you're actually going to display, and then take each on-screen pixel to be the average of all the framebuffer pixels at that point. Loosely speaking! There's quite a few nuances to the generation algorithms that aren't reflected in my simplification, there.

Sub-HD: 720p and 1080i are generally accepted as the HD resolutions; that's 720 lines drawn in a progressive fashion or 1080 lines drawn in an interlaced fashion. Some games stretch to 1080p. However, there are many games that don't actually meet those resolutions. There's a few reasons for this.

First, and simplest, is RAM. A larger framebuffer takes up more RAM, and if you're extremely tight on RAM, reducing the framebuffer size can alleviate that.

One other one is that any piece of graphical hardware has pixel fill rate; how fast it can actually paint a given polygon onto the framebuffer. The larger the framebuffer, the more pixels the same polygon could overlap, and so the longer it takes to draw that polygon. If your scene requires painting too many pixels it's going to slow things down, and reducing the size of the framebuffer reduces the number of pixels to paint.

-what is netcoding? What determines whether it is "good" or "bad"?

The game runs on all the machines at the same time. Each machine distributes packets that inform the other machines of the actions of their player, and recieves packets from the others to keep track of those players. Netcoding is largely handling distribution of those packets and determining what information needs to be distributed to make the game run effectively - too little and other players won't be rendered correctly, too much and the packets will be too bloated and slow to pass around.

One other nuance of netcoding - and the bit I hate - is the fact that packet loss needs to be handled. In general, you cannot guarantee that any packet you send will actually be recieved by the recipient, and you need to handle that safely. On a similar note, you can't guarantee that the packets that are recieved by the recipient are recieved in *the right order*. Good network code plans around those limitations and allows for those failings of networking, but it requires a lot of care and attention.

-why are dedicated servers considered infinitely superior to p2p connectivity?

A dedicated server takes on all packet distribution responsibilities itself. The dedicated server's instance of the game world is the one that is 'right', and it has the responsibility to notify all its clients of the current state of that instance; they in turn feed back their movements and actions to it and it updates the state of the game world accordingly.

In peer to peer, one player is regarded as a host and handles that role; however, for one thing they're having to run the game as well as handling the hosting duties, and for another, if the host disconnects the other players have an issue. Some games are capable of migrating the 'host' role to another player (is that a requirement these days for console titles? I don't believe it was when I was developing), but that's a fairly complicated operation.
One other issue with peer to peer is often the host has certain inherent advantages; because there's little to no communication lag between their actions and their responses, they may seem to react quicker than anyone else in the game. I seem to recall hearing that Gears of War suffered from this?

[drugstore_cowboy]

Some TVs show what resolution is being used for the currently used Input Device. Atleast Samsung TVs have this.

Doesn't work for Xbox 360, it'll up/downscale whatever the console's output resolution is set to.

[Syn23]

Maybe this isn't so "stupid" but I'll try asking here: Which components stay on in a PS3, when it's turned off and the "Remote Start" setting is activated? Can it cause any wear or damage to those components, with time?

Anyone?

[Gibbles17]

V-Sync: Monitors refresh at a given rate (60Hz, for instance, is 60 refreshes - new images - each second). Games can synchronise to the refresh rate, such that they carry out the game logic and render a view of the world once for every refresh of the monitor. If it happens to take a long time to do that, you might get one new scene for every two refreshes of the monitor (halving the framerate). Synchronised to the monitor you can only have 60fps or factors thereof. With V-Sync turned off the game makes no effort to synchronise the behaviour of the game to the monitor refresh rate; it can easily be happily working on the logic for the next frame at the point the monitor gets around to rendering the previous one. The advantage of this is that the playable framerate is not constrained by the monitor refresh rate, so it can exceed 60fps or go to any framerate below that level. There's two advantages of having V-Sync on: First, with V-Sync off you'll get tearing. That's when the monitor attempts to render a scene which the game is halfway through drawing, which means you'll get a clear image where the top half is of one frame and the bottom is of the previous frame; you'll see it quite often when turning. Also, there's one small possible benefit in that with V-Sync on you can code with the knowledge that the game logic will always have a fixed timestep, which opens up some potential for optimisations - albeit that's a fairly large step, and having code capable of dealing with variable timesteps is safer. Anti-aliasing: A framebuffer is a grid of pixels. If you try and draw a diagonal line on a grid, you're going to get a 'stepped' look to things ('jaggies'). One nice way to alleviate that is to fill in the steps with a slightly lighter pixel to create a smoother look when viewed from a distance. One significant way of achieving that is to internally draw to a much finer grid than the one you're actually going to display, and then take each on-screen pixel to be the average of all the framebuffer pixels at that point. Loosely speaking! There's quite a few nuances to the generation algorithms that aren't reflected in my simplification, there. Sub-HD: 720p and 1080i are generally accepted as the HD resolutions; that's 720 lines drawn in a progressive fashion or 1080 lines drawn in an interlaced fashion. Some games stretch to 1080p. However, there are many games that don't actually meet those resolutions. There's a few reasons for this. First, and simplest, is RAM. A larger framebuffer takes up more RAM, and if you're extremely tight on RAM, reducing the framebuffer size can alleviate that. One other one is that any piece of graphical hardware has pixel fill rate; how fast it can actually paint a given polygon onto the framebuffer. The larger the framebuffer, the more pixels the same polygon could overlap, and so the longer it takes to draw that polygon. If your scene requires painting too many pixels it's going to slow things down, and reducing the size of the framebuffer reduces the number of pixels to paint. The game runs on all the machines at the same time. Each machine distributes packets that inform the other machines of the actions of their player, and recieves packets from the others to keep track of those players. Netcoding is largely handling distribution of those packets and determining what information needs to be distributed to make the game run effectively - too little and other players won't be rendered correctly, too much and the packets will be too bloated and slow to pass around. One other nuance of netcoding - and the bit I hate - is the fact that packet loss needs to be handled. In general, you cannot guarantee that any packet you send will actually be recieved by the recipient, and you need to handle that safely. On a similar note, you can't guarantee that the packets that are recieved by the recipient are recieved in *the right order*. Good network code plans around those limitations and allows for those failings of networking, but it requires a lot of care and attention. A dedicated server takes on all packet distribution responsibilities itself. The dedicated server's instance of the game world is the one that is 'right', and it has the responsibility to notify all its clients of the current state of that instance; they in turn feed back their movements and actions to it and it updates the state of the game world accordingly. In peer to peer, one player is regarded as a host and handles that role; however, for one thing they're having to run the game as well as handling the hosting duties, and for another, if the host disconnects the other players have an issue. Some games are capable of migrating the 'host' role to another player (is that a requirement these days for console titles? I don't believe it was when I was developing), but that's a fairly complicated operation. One other issue with peer to peer is often the host has certain inherent advantages; because there's little to no communication lag between their actions and their responses, they may seem to react quicker than anyone else in the game. I seem to recall hearing that Gears of War suffered from this?

You are a good person. Very informative and easy to follow, thanks a bunch :)

[saltinekracka]

360 player here with a Battlefield 3 question.

Whenever I download the game updates they're always HUGE, like several gigs. But when I downloaded the B2K expansion, the download file was extremely small--finished downloading instantly.

My question is this: Was the DLC already on my console with the multiplayer update, and am I simply "unlocking" it?

[Mikey Jr.]

Hey guys, I pretty much missed the entire arcade classic days like Galaga, Pacman, centipede, etc.

I got a DS and saw that they released these old classics on the DS. I saw "Namco Museum DS" in my stores bargain bin and picked it up. I am loving it, especially Galaga.

I was wondering, is there a list of these compilations? I would love to go back and play these games that I missed out on.

DS only please.

Thanks guys.

[Persona7]

360 player here with a Battlefield 3 question. Whenever I download the game updates they're always HUGE, like several gigs. But when I downloaded the B2K expansion, the download file was extremely small--finished downloading instantly. My question is this: Was the DLC already on my console with the multiplayer update, and am I simply "unlocking" it?

The DLC is included with the large updates so everyone has the same files and it does not cause issues.

[James Woods]

how do I do this SCP thing?

http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-264

I've seen vids and pics and it looks interesting.

[Natiko]

Okay so my 360's ethernet port just died due to a thunderstorm. At this point it's obviously pointless to try and find one of the older models so I'm more or less forced into getting a slim.

I was wondering if I could use this and just throw the naked hard drive from my current 60 GB one into it? If so I can just go with the 4 GB slim instead of the more expensive ones.

Thanks to anyone who can answer!

[daviyoung]

Yeh you probably can use that. But I've just slipped a naked drive into my 4GB and it works fine.

[Natiko]

Okay thanks. I might do that until it shows up, but I'm a little too paranoid to do it long term lol

[woo and indeed hoo]

how do I do this SCP thing? http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-264 I've seen vids and pics and it looks interesting.

I just had a quick look at that link as I have not heard of this at all and was curious and am none the wiser! What is this 'SCP' thing? :/

[Sarcasm]

Okay so my 360's ethernet port just died due to a thunderstorm. At this point it's obviously pointless to try and find one of the older models so I'm more or less forced into getting a slim. I was wondering if I could use this and just throw the naked hard drive from my current 60 GB one into it? If so I can just go with the 4 GB slim instead of the more expensive ones. Thanks to anyone who can answer!

I just took apart my old HD and slipped it in..no shell or anything.

[nickslicl]

Can anyone recommend some speedy usb sticks for my 360? Most of the Eurogamer recs seemed to be unavailable in the states.

[Conrad Link]

Hey guys, I pretty much missed the entire arcade classic days like Galaga, Pacman, centipede, etc. I got a DS and saw that they released these old classics on the DS. I saw "Namco Museum DS" in my stores bargain bin and picked it up. I am loving it, especially Galaga. I was wondering, is there a list of these compilations? I would love to go back and play these games that I missed out on. DS only please. Thanks guys.

I know there is a Konami one on DS cause my Dad has it and plays for Pooyan heh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_...s:_Arcade_Hits

[Mikey Jr.]

I know there is a Konami one on DS cause my Dad has it and plays for Pooyan heh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_...s:_Arcade_Hits

Yep, this is exactly what I was looking for. Lots of games on there that I have wanted to play, especially time pilot.

Nothing else comes to mind?

[Gravijah]

intellivision lives! is on the ds, too. i'm not sure how the port is, though.

[udca]

Me and my buddy have been playing the mode Captain your Country in Fifa Euro 2008 and Fifa South Africa 2010. The best part to us is being able to play only one player each and "leveling him up". Although the progression was way better in Euro 2008 (because you could choose which stats you would level up), we still had a lot of fun with South Africa 2010.

I just bought Fifa 12 and there doesn't seem to be that kind of mode available for coop. I did some research and the Euro DLC pack doesn't seem to have it either. What would be my best option as far as coop soccer with progression and position lock?

[McBradders]

What game is this from?



Edit: Breakers by Visco!

[Wildesy]

Do the available userscripts for Neogaf allow you to preview a thread by mousing over its title? It's starting to drive me a bit batty having to enter threads with ambiguous titles that don't end about being about what I thought they were about.

[coopolon]

Alright, I know I must be an idiot for not understanding this, but it has seriously plagued me for years and I've finally decided to just ask.

In Final Fantasy games that are based around an Active Time Battle system (ATB), there is always an option in setting/config for "Wait" or "Active." My understanding is that when you chose "Wait" the ATB system pauses whenever one of your characters turn comes up and you are picking what to do. This way you don't feel like you have to rush through the menus. Picking "Active" means ATB keeps going even while you are picking your next action in the menus, so if you take a long time your opponents might get an extra attack or two in there.

Great, that all sounds fine. Except picking "Wait" or "Active" seems to make no difference. I'm currently playing Final Fantasy IV, and in both versions I've checked (PS1 and PSP Complete Edition), they do the same thing. Even after choosing "Wait" in the settings, if I just sit there doing nothing in the menus I can watch opponents get multiple turns of attacking me while if they were waiting they maybe attack me once if there ATB bar filled up right around the same time mine did. What am I missing?

[Forsythia]

Mass Effect series. Is there any *way* of erasing "list of imported characters" from the mass effect importer? For example ME2 importers recognizes a bunch of characters I don't intend to play anymore when scanning for imports from ME1. Deleting the files from HDD does not help.

Are you playing on Xbox 360? Then do the following:

How to clear Mass Effect 1 endgame saves:

So, on the 360, insert the memory unit. Then -

1. Select "My Xbox" and scroll right to "System Settings"
2. Select "Memory"
3. Select "Hard Drive" (Assuming your ME saves are on the HDD)
4. Press Y to select "Transfer Content"
5. Select the Memory Unit.
6. For each category, press "X" to clear all the items. For example, Clear all Games, Gamer Profiles, Demos, Videos, etc. All of them EXCEPT what for me was the very last one, "Publisher Data".
7. Make sure you did NOT clear "Publisher Data". (If you did, open that category and reselect it.)
8. Select "Start".

This moves the "Publisher Data" (The completed career history) to the Memory Unit.

To get that final save for use in ME2:

Load up a save just before the final fight in ME1, and voila, one final save!

[Kontergurke]

Alright, I know I must be an idiot for not understanding this, but it has seriously plagued me for years and I've finally decided to just ask. In Final Fantasy games that are based around an Active Time Battle system (ATB), there is always an option in setting/config for "Wait" or "Active." My understanding is that when you chose "Wait" the ATB system pauses whenever one of your characters turn comes up and you are picking what to do. This way you don't feel like you have to rush through the menus. Picking "Active" means ATB keeps going even while you are picking your next action in the menus, so if you take a long time your opponents might get an extra attack or two in there. Great, that all sounds fine. Except picking "Wait" or "Active" seems to make no difference. I'm currently playing Final Fantasy IV, and in both versions I've checked (PS1 and PSP Complete Edition), they do the same thing. Even after choosing "Wait" in the settings, if I just sit there doing nothing in the menus I can watch opponents get multiple turns of attacking me while if they were waiting they maybe attack me once if there ATB bar filled up right around the same time mine did. What am I missing?

If you choose "Wait", time only pauses if you go into a sub-menu.
For example, if you select Item/Magic, you have infinite time to select an item or spell.
If you select Attack, you have infinite time to choose which enemy to attack.
But if you don't select any option, time will pass in both "Active" and "Wait" settings.

[woo and indeed hoo]

Do the available userscripts for Neogaf allow you to preview a thread by mousing over its title? It's starting to drive me a bit batty having to enter threads with ambiguous titles that don't end about being about what I thought they were about.

No idea, sorry, but I take the attitude that if they have to prick-tease people into clicking on the thread to find out what it's about then it's probably not worth reading and/or they are needy attention seekers.

[XonoX]

Back when i bought a ps1, it came with a couple of JPN discs. i tried to play them but could not navigate the menus or figure out what the hell was going on.

One game especially had a tune which has been stuck in my head since those days. Can anybody help me identify it?

The tune went something like "ta-da ta da da, howa howa, HOWA HOWA!"

It was very Pokemon like with lots of epilepsy enducing flashy animation.

Have i posted this request for help in the right thread ?

[EvilDick34]

Ok PC gaming enthusiasts, i have an odd ball question about a really old point and click pc game that came out in the early 90's and definitely was not a huge hit by any means but maybe someone can help me remember the name of it. So, my interaction with this game was limited to seeing it and playing it in a book store because i didn't have my own pc at the time.

Basically the set up was this, it was some kind of fucked up carnival point and click game. You would click on various attractions within the carnival and once you did the all too familiar video would play of some wierd ass character talking to you and then you would play some game ...i know i don't have much for you but i can tell you this game also came around the time when CD-DRIVES first came into the picture on PC gaming, hence you would click on an attraction within the game and a full motion video would pop up and then you would play a game after the character would say shit to you. Any idea on what im talking about?

[coopolon]

If you choose "Wait", time only pauses if you go into a sub-menu. For example, if you select Item/Magic, you have infinite time to select an item or spell. If you select Attack, you have infinite time to choose which enemy to attack. But if you don't select any option, time will pass in both "Active" and "Wait" settings.

Well that's odd. Is it the same way for all the games with ATB? Thanks though!

[ChoklitReign]

I was watching a gaming stream of something I totally didn't recognize. It was a third person action/shooter with a guy in a brown coat who could lose body parts and you could control things like his head back to his body. What's the name?

[StuBurns]

NeverDead

[Woorloog]

Does I-War (Indepence War) work well (or at all) with wired Xbox 360 controller? Don't have joystick at the moment but the wired controller...
And what about Freespace 2? Does it work well with the controller?

[Akainu]

Is it better to play games with full rgb?

[StuBurns]

Is it better to play games with full rgb?

You mean on a PS3? Generally, no. It hurts image quality. If you want more saturation, you're better off using your TV's settings.