Willei

Hazama is damn weird. I feel uncomfortable up close with him and uncomfortable at full screen. He's a popular guy though, I've played loads of them online so far compared to zero Tsunami Yoyos.

I ordered it from Play Asia as it comes out cheap for some reason (about £25) but only if you go for slow boat shipping. Amazon.com have it in stock and will ship to the UK but shipping bumps the price up massively, particularly if you want it in a hurry. VGP didn't have stock and I didn't think to check Movietyme, possibly because I'm also out of the loop for this stuff.

Definitely want to check this one out, it's not quite on the top of my list though. If you're a fan of English language visual novels, first of all my condolences, but you may be interested to know this is directed by one of the writers from Ever17.

I bought this today and very cleverly left it at work. PS: HAZAMA FOR LIFE

I'm finding that at the moment, but I'm putting a lot of it down to maps for now. I almost never have a good game on Jungle, Array, or Grid, but I often do very well on Launch, WMD, and Firing Range. At 20 hours in I feel like I'm still finding my feet with the weaponry. I'm doing well with the Famas, AUG, MP5K, and the Spectre, but not so much with anything else and especially not with the semi automatic weapons. Also agree with Neom. I really want to be sprinting everywhere as I spend a lot of time rushing around maps, but I'll be damned if I want to spend hours playing CTF to get there.

Hey guys, I got a couple of questions about Blops. Firstly, who's got the RllmukBlackOps tag? I'd love to have my FR accepted if you get a chance to look at it! And the real question. How does one go about getting good at this game. Either Black Ops or just FPS in general. I've got plenty of experience with fighting games and those present very obvious avenues of improvement if you're so inclined. You go from working on execution and making sure you get the moves you want, learning and practising the ways of getting as much damage as possible from your opportunities, then working on tricks and learning what you can and can't do against any given character. In FPS it kinda seems like you just have to play and play until two things happen - you develop the motor skills to target precisely, and you learn the maps to the point where you know where the action will be and where you can flank if required. What do you guys reckon?

What's more surprising is that some people with upgraded hard drives have actually reported the install to take around 20-30 minutes. That doesn't help the 99.5% of people with the stock one of course!

It's the same as licence tests, you only get the reward for each grade once.

I'll check tonight if no-one else beats me to it, but IIRC the track has the same cone layout as the special event.

Good games last night guys. I've barely played the game yet and the last CoD I played multiplayer for any length was the first one so it's all a bit new to me. I spent most of my time being amazed at how effective just about every weapon seems to be in this game. I must be going crazy too but it felt like my guns were more accurate and had less recoil when I had silencers on them. So many great moments with the shotguns too. Just make sure you don't have the Olympia and the Python at the same time!

What does that mean to GT5 though? That they thought of it after the fourth year of development? Regardless, shadows are definitely not an afterthought but are afflicted by the same issue.

I can't say I enjoyed it as anything other than a brief novelty, but I had a friend over the other day who wanted to try the game out. He was kinda unsure about the game after being disappointed by most of the cars he liked being the standard models (he is a front wheel drive hatchback kinda guy), but he was absolutely chuffed caning a Swift around Charmonix in the snow. I guess because he's spent a plenty of time driving on snow in ill-equipped vehicles, at least for an Englander anyway. I think there'll be a lot of people who have a similar experience with the game until they hit one thing they really like. There's certainly enough stuff in the game to support that! I personally had that happen to me during the AMG Driving School event.

No, you probably shouldn't like that fact unless you're looking for reasons to bash the game. You should be disappointed with that fact like the rest of us. The glee with which you point out the flaws is what's distasteful. While I'm not in love with PS2 car models or low res alpha effects (which is really the main problem, though it manifests itself in the shadows, rain, and on decals of the standard cars), you're comparing GT against the best aspects from several games. If rain and snow was a piece of cake, how come it's not in more racers? You can easily and just as pointlessly pick fault in much the same way with any of the games you list. Yeah NFS looks pretty nice, but what's up with all those jaggies? Games X, Y, and Z did anti-aliasing much more effectively three years ago! I think you'll notice when you play more that a lot of the criticisms don't matter. The standard cars don't look so shitty when you're not nose to tail with them. I honestly hadn't noticed any problems with the shadows whilst playing the game because you don't get a chance to gawk at them. Apparently even the framerate is going to be improved in an upcoming patch.

I think it's only configurable restrictions in the online mode.

I learned to like this game a lot more when I stopped focussing on what was missing and started enjoying what was there. Even stuff like photo mode is a lot more fully featured that I'd expected. Just a reminder for people, there's the PSN ID thread in the online racing folder. It'll be good to get some races and some banter going when the online starts working properly at peak times: http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=235274&st=0

You know, I really love how this thread remains on the front page month after month!

There's a little garage button in the bottom right corner of the screen when you've selected a race. If you don't have an eligible car and need to buy one, that's an entirely different and potentially even more frustrating matter.

Just been having some amazing fun tearing around Trial Mountain in a BMW Z4 M. For about the third time in the course of playing this game, if you asked me what car I would pick if I could have any of them in the world the answer would have been "the one I'm driving here right now". The AMG Academy around the Ring was great too. Blasting around the full circuit with traffic on it brought back memories of the famous video of that guy doing it the RUF Yellowbird, though thankfully not quite as tail-happy!

Nah forget that rubbish, you need to check out the Miata.

Did you get the chance to try it with an SSD or is it good enough with just the network disabled?

The bugs in that game were on a different level to what we're seeing in GT5 at the moment other than the menu load times, which do have a workaround. There were many things that made the F1 situation frustrating, but most of all was Codies keeping their cards close to their chest about patch news followed by the long wait for it. I haven't even booted up the game after the first week I got it, so bitter was the taste it left in my mouth. And no, that doesn't mean GT5 is getting let off the hook. Plenty of people are here complaining about it. Is the thread still not sufficiently negative for you Meerman?

The Xbox stuff was mentioned a couple of posts back, check the last few posts in this particular thread of conversation. You're looking at the problem like it's been caused by excessive traffic generated by the game to the server backend. Tom_B is saying that the problem is the game stalling while it awaits a response or hits a timeout from the servers. The problem is that the servers are overloaded, but it would have been mitigated entirely if the server transaction was processed in a background thread.

I think Sixbuttons has a DFP and didn't have any problems with it.

Check the cable for your pedals. I had the exact behaviour you describe when the cable came loose. If it's a new wheel, try it with another game and make sure everything works properly there.

It was fine for me yesterday and all day up to about 6pm today, when the loading times between screens on the menu became unbearable. I have mixed feelings on the game. The visuals and the physics are pretty much top notch which is what we were all expecting. Someone said all the cars handle the same earlier, and that's just not the case in the slightest. Hopefully you don't require a wheel to get that. The special events and the licence tests are much more enjoyable than they've been for me in the past, and they're still something unique to the game. The NASCAR one was especially eye opening, that is a more varied discipline than I'd imagined. Or observed. Or noticed playing the 1994 NASCAR game on the PC by Papyrus. The other stuff is not so good. The menus are just too slow and unresponsive, and knowing that I'm going to have to go through three or four different ones to do what I want always pisses me off. I can live with the loading times on the game for some reason even though they're not great. The structure of the game is the same old thing, pick a car and do some events. It became a trudge that I wanted no part in even quicker than it did for Forza 3 which had the season system to liven it up a bit. The events themselves, setting yourself up with a challenging race is a roll of the dice. You can go in to the menu and see a list of typical cars, then try and match one in a similar performance level. Then you've actually got to find one. The used cars rotate all of the time so that's some more dice rolling for you. There may or may not be a suitable car available in the dealership. Well eventually you'll get one and think you're in for an acceptable race, but there are still more ways that it can go wrong. A car better than all of the examples can appear and you'll have your work cut out. When I played the Euro Hatchback races, I saw an Alfa on the list of typical cars and knew it was premium so I grabbed it. When I got into the race I was doing okay but everyone got off the line much faster than me and I was having to constantly hold off multiple cars on the straights. Looking at the list again, I saw that all the cars were upgraded and my little Alfa was about 50bhp short of the competition. I didn't win, so I had to go through all the menus again to do some upgrades. The amount of time you can waste trying to do a single race like that boggles the mind. The AI is dire as widely noted. I haven't noticed any changes since GT3. If you get into a situation like the one above where you have to hold off multiple cars, they'll swerve slightly to overtake but if you block them off they'll just hit the back of you. And they'll keep doing it. They also seem to take certain corners oddly slow. It'll probably be better when it's more competitive in the higher level events, but there's no AI difficulty settings to adjust until then. Given all of that, I'd still rather be playing the GT5 single player than Forza 3's because the subtlety in the driving simulation makes it sufficiently enjoyable regardless of what the AI is up to. That doesn't mean shit though because I got enormous mileage out of Forza's multiplayer week after week, and may yet get more. So for in GT5 I've twice tried to access the online mode and twice the game has frozen while polling the list of lobbies. Obviously I can't say anything more about it yet, but that's an inauspicious start. So yeah, there's a great game under there but you've got to work to get what you want out of it. Hopefully that game will come closer to the surface with subsequent patches.