The Video Game Thread

All remember the long awaited Half-Life 2: Episode Three. We've been waiting since 2007 for it and there is no indication other than a few pieces of concept art that it's even coming in the foreseeable rest of my life. Meanwhile Valve created Steam, Left 4 Dead 1 & 2, Team Fortress, Portal 1 and 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and DOTA 2.

And a group splintered off to create a new studio and just released Evolve.

So you can assume they're not exactly strapped for cash at this point.

As VG Cats put it:
Meanwhile, at Valve...

 

I might not have the Skull Kid figurine but at least I got the book. And the stickers.

 

Looks awesome, othersounds. I <3 majora's mask

 

Yeah, me too. <3
I recently got Skull Kid tattooed on my arm as well. Really happy about it. MM (together with Ocarina of Time) was The game of my childhood after all.

 

I think we need a photo of that!

 

I can't wait until Carbot finishes and releases the "patch" or whatever for Starcraft 2 called Starcrafts. Enjoy the Starcrafts youtube series.

 

Renditions of Video Game themes on Piano. Listened to once, and transformed on the spot.

 

I'll make sure to get one when I know it's completely healed. <:

 

Helldivers is freaking rad, especially when you're in a good a group. Man I'm digging that game so hard right now.

 

More TAS news: I editted together most of what I've done and it looks like that run will be 2:45 ish. Now earlier today I rerecorded some of the jumps and I should save an additional 15-20+ seconds. I think that there may actually be 1 or 2 more strats I could use, one of them would save close to 10 seconds by itself. For reference the world record for that map in legit mode is 3:08. I'll be able to take 30+ seconds off the WR of a 3 minute run. This run is going to be so amazing, and most people will have no idea whats going on.

 

I already have no idea what's going on! ^^

 

Tool Assisted Speedruns. While I do prefer to watch speedruns done with vanilla hardware, TAS' are sort of nuts for completely different reasons.

 

I'VE DONE IT!!! I FIGURED OUT A GLITCH IN A SOURCEMOD PLUGIN!!! I'VE KNOWN ABOUT THIS GLITCH FOR A BOUT A YEAR AND NEVER KNEW HOW IT WORKED OR EVEN HOW TO DO IT!!!

Basically it allows me to change my chat color to whatever the hell I want, and for which ever words I choose, and it can be done on any server with the plugin, which there are likely a lot of (at least for tf2). It's completely pointless but I think it's kinda cool.

 

Ah yes I am a PC Master Race individual bow before my 16 Gigs of Ram and terra bite hard drive! Jk Jk
Seriously though I am a Saints row 3 and 4 nut and no one I know will co op with me :'(
Lighter note I play on a private MC teckit modpak with my mate, along with Sins of the Solar empire which is Hard!. I am on Steam and have a good library of single players like Ryse sons of Rome, SR3 &4, Plague inc, ect. Then there is my most precious pity game ever, Zoo tycoon, the old 2006 one that has graphics like age of empires.... but damn am I good at making a successful zoo that looks like shit but is rich!

 

Anyone here own/know anyone who owns one of those steam boxes?

 

Aren't they not for sale till yet? I want to say only a couple review models are out in the wild. Either way. I'm still skeptical of price/performance over something I could build myself, but still interested in the tech.

 

I thought that too, but I was able to find prices on the steam store...

 

WALL OF NERDY TEXT MODE ENGAGE!

Currently I don't think any of them are for sale. And currently they are all rip offs (some more than others ofc). And naturally I can't fully say witch ones are worse because most of them don't have proper documentation on the parts. While the pricing is still very much up in the air, the fact that there any of them are more than $1,000 shows this is just to fuck people that don't know what they are doing over. However Asus' looks pretty good for a good range of games and Gigabyte's looks like it would work for older, less intensive games. In all actuality the small ones with proprietary cases are pretty much just laptops without screens or keyboards. Weirdly I feel like I would actually recommend the machine that can't be upgraded over those that can, but that's pretty much entirely because if you can upgrade it you should have built it yourself.

Like I said I can't say for certain which ones are good and bad, But I can say which ones you should absolutely avoid:
Alienware: no specific specs for GPU
Webhallen: Literally just a prebuilt PC. Non-proprietary case = you could build it yourself for less
Material.net: Literally just a prebuilt PC. Non-proprietary case = you could build it yourself for less
Falcon Northwest Tiki: The case is only 4 inches wide, and their price range is from 2,000 to 5,000 dollars... It is impossible to put 5,000 dollars into a PC that small without either fucking the entire build up 3 times, wasting most of your money, or making a heatsink out of solid gold (which is dumb because copper is way better for that).
Origin: All of their specs are "up to [ultra high end]" you're better off building your own. And no, if you want one of there cases you can't just buy it from them, because they are asshats like that.

Other stuff to avoid is anything with an SSHD by default. It's not worth it at all, your better off with an SSD and an HDD separately. DON'T buy something if all it says is i5 processor, there is a massive difference between a 4690k and a 4430. Same goes for graphics card if all it says is 9-series Nvidia or "NVIDIA® Geforce® GTX - 2GB GDDR5" (straight from alienware) avoid it.

What I do very much recommend is building your own. I've always said "if you can work a screwdriver and lego you can build a PC."
If you don't know where to start on choosing parts I have some resources that can help
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/wiki/builds
http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/
http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme/ (really only if you don't want to choose anything)
And the best resource I can give is me! Any of you guys are more than welcome to ask me for help whenever you need it. Cuz I luv u guys <3 I have helped multiple people choose parts with a couple PC's being close to or over $2,000 and I've of course built my current PC and am working on a second now.

 

Does anybody here play WoW? I've just bought it for myself x3

 

why would you do that to yourself