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STEAM announcements & updates 2011 Thread 3 | Buy now, play later.

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Snuggler said:
So I just finished up the Ballad of Gay Tony. I bought it on Steam, and bunch of you dudes probably just did the same, so this I'll use this thread post my thoughts.

I've owned Episodes for awhile, but I never made much progress with the story. In a GTA game, it's way too easy to get distracted. Anyways, I finally got around to playing through the story and I'm kinda blown away by how good it was.

It retains all of GTAIV's strong points - the awesome euphoria physics, the high production values, the eclectic soundtrack, and of course Liberty City. I loved GTAIV, but I'm struggling to think of anything that was lost in Gay Tony. It takes what worked with GTAIV, while adding a ton of cool toys like riot tanks, parachutes, explosive sniper rifles, gold-plated uzi's and so on. It's pretty clear that Rockstar aimed to please the people who found GTAIV's missions boring. Even in the earliest missions you're exploding yacht's with helicopters and base-jumping off of sky scrapers. The missions were consistently over the top, and overall much more memorable than what GTAIV had to offer.

In regards to story, I won't say much since a lot of you guys probably haven't played it, but it was also an improvement. GTAIV had some fantastic voice work and writing, but I felt that the plot went off the rails in between the opening and closing hours. Too many hit or miss characters were introduced, and it dragged on with no real purpose until the main plot resumed. Gay Tony benefits a lot from it's shorter playtime, there is next to no filler or fat, it's much tighter package.

In particular, I greatly enjoyed Luis's relationship with Tony. It was very genuine (I actually cared!) and it was refreshing to see a gay videogame character who isn't a shallow stereotype (like Bernie in GTAIV). Plus, Yusuf was fucking hilarious.

It's kind of hard to believe that something this good could be DLC in this day and age, but I highly recommend you dudes check it out if you haven't already. I'm not burned out on GTAIV yet so I'll probably move on to Lost and Damned, but it's probably gonna be a bit underwhelming after playing Gay Tony.


/perfectscore


Everybody says it : Gay Tony is what GTA IV should have been. More ACTUAL fun. It felt so good to get batshit weapons, crazy missions, meeting insane people and having to drive/fly military vehicles severals times. It was so good and so shameless that I felt it was a direct pun in the face of Niko's story.
 

Salsa

Member
I really need to get my ass to finish the episodes, left it at lost & the damned after 35 hours of GTA IV. I was a bit burned out.

What pisses me off is that since then i upgraded to a (stock) i5 2500k + gtx 560ti, and the game still wont run at 60fps with everything on the highest.. and im playing at 1360x768 :S should that be expected or am i doing something wrong? i literally just tried it the day i upgraded though, to test.


In other news i just played the first level of Hard Reset and totally forgot how fucking pretty the game was from the demo.

i9g49noCQMBJJ.png


iwGVhwz7TCYPr.png
 

Snuggles

erotic butter maelstrom
SalsaShark said:
What pisses me off is that since then i upgraded to a (stock) i5 2500k + gtx 560ti, and the game still wont run at 60fps with everything on the highest.. and im playing at 1360x768 :S should that be expected or am i doing something wrong? i literally just tried it the day i upgraded though, to test.

I think vanilla GTAIV is locked at 50fps. Maybe there were some optimizations with Gay Tony, but it actually ran quite well for me. My only tech issue is the complete lack of AA. The jaggies are a major eye sore, and I could force AA through my drivers, but my frame rate would take a hit.

Ugh, just started The Lost and Damned and I'm not feeling the film grain and filters after playing Gay Tony. It was so clean and crisp. :(
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
A big thanks to wilflare for gifting me Alice. <3

Now I can remove the cancerous Origin version from my Library.
 

Salsa

Member
I really enjoyed what i played of Lost & The Damned, though i havent finished it (and now its so far away that i'll probably start again).

That has a lot do with the theme and how its basically Sons of Anarchy: The Game. Seriously though, they rip it off baaaaaad, down to the plot points. No complains though.
 

wilflare

Member
JaseC said:
A big thanks to wilflare for gifting me Alice. <3

Now I can remove the cancerous Origin version from my Library.

what why! haha isn't it nice to have the game in both places?
thank xeno too!
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
SalsaShark said:
I really enjoyed what i played of Lost & The Damned, though i havent finished it (and now its so far away that i'll probably start again).

That has a lot do with the theme and how its basically Sons of Anarchy: The Game. Seriously though, they rip it off baaaaaad, down to the plot points. No complains though.

I was moments away from posting the very same thing.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
wilflare said:
what why! haha isn't it nice to have the game in both places?

Truth be told, I didn't have any issues with it, but now that I own the Steam version of the game, there's no need for the Origin version to be sitting there.

I also ordered the art book about an hour ago:

Amazon.co.uk said:
1 "Moon [Blu-ray] [2009][Region Free]"
Sam Rockwell; Blu-ray; £8.49
In stock
Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L.
1 "The Art of Alice: Madness Returns"
R.J. Berg; Hardcover; £18.14
In stock
Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L. ]

(I had to push the order total to £25 for free shipping. :p)

thank xeno too!

Ah, yes, of course! Thanks, Xeno. :)

Edit: Bah, missed the 'Edit' button.
 
Gay Tony was the better GTAIV. Lost and the Damned was good, too, and GTAIV was just pretty good.

I'll probably replay the GTA games sometime early next year after the crazy that is the next few months.
 
I forced me way through the first half an hour of The Lost & The Damned, so far it's been the typical this-generation-Rockstar game design where the player pushes forward and holds the gas for five to ten minutes while people talk. Had to re-drive the opening segment to get the dude's bike back because The Lost path finding failed, they drove off of a dock into the water and died. I had to re-do the drive and listen to another banal conversation. Got to one awkward gun fight that lasted maybe a minute or two, terrible controls, terrible a.i. then back to gameplay segments that may as well have been cinematics. These games feel like they're made by frustrated filmmakers. I forced my way through GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption, I don't know if I can do it again with the episodes.
 

wilflare

Member
JaseC said:
Truth be told, I didn't have any issues with it, but now that I own the Steam version of the game, there's no need for the Origin version to be sitting there.

I also ordered the art book about an hour ago:

(I had to push the order total to £25 for free shipping. :p)

Alice does have some pretty impressive art :D


a sidenote, anyone ordered Job's biography?
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
wilflare said:
Alice does have some pretty impressive art :D

The first time you're transported to Wonderland is nothing short of amazing. I hadn't been so mightily impressed with the artistry of a game's world since Portal 2. (Granted, I haven't played many games since Portal 2. :p)
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
SalsaShark said:
comes down to $32 with shipping :(

How much do Amazon charge for shipping?

id take the hit, but i really want the new 25 year anniversary MAUS hardcover D:

we'll see after i play the game i guess..

You'll be cursing your hesitation.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
SalsaShark said:
depends to where, weight of the book etc

in Alice > Uruguay case it goes up to $9.98

I was about to say "That's not too bad", but then I remembered $10 is roughly half the price of the book itself.

Edit: Okay, more like a third.
 

wilflare

Member
dont really have the space to keep these artbooks. hope they'll get on kindle some day
haha and i am secretly hoping the price of Alice drops to 10 in the future!
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
I'm going to put my copy in my bed and whisper sweet nothings to it every night. I may even change my avatar!
I couldn't bring myself to do such a thing.
 

wilflare

Member
Snuggler said:
Put them in the toilet room. Art books are great poop-reading material.

I thought newspapers are meant for that?

JaseC said:
I'm going to put my copy in my bed and whisper sweet nothings to it every night. I may even change my avatar!
I couldn't bring myself to do such a thing.

no please.. noo she's way better than emma too lol
 

Snuggles

erotic butter maelstrom
SalsaShark said:
JaseC is like a hot chick in my mind though, its like everything he says sounds nicer cause of that avatar.

Same here. As far as I'm concerned, he's the girl in the avatar, so I want to bang him pretty hard.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
You guys are too kind. <3

I forgot to mention that my Steam library was playing silly buggers the other night. I had two Doom 3s - one was Doom 3, of course, and the other Commander Keen. At first I thought Steam was going to go as crazy as it did on Salsa the other week, but, fortunately, that's the only anomaly I could find.
 

Salsa

Member
Mine got fixed since that, but i did have to erase everything except steamapps and steam.exe in order to get the thing to update from scratch to remove some of the duplicates.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
jim-jam bongs said:
Indeed. GrrImASexyFridge.

I can see this being the title to the debut single of an aspiring YouTube hip hop artist.

SalsaShark said:
Mine got fixed since that, but i did have to erase everything except steamapps and steam.exe in order to get the thing to update from scratch to remove some of the duplicates.

Golfham.
 

Echoplx

Member
JaseC said:
I'm going to put my copy in my bed and whisper sweet nothings to it every night. I may even change my avatar!
I couldn't bring myself to do such a thing.

ibv5GKQuau1HH3.jpg

with a bit more effort i could probably make it look half decent :p
 
While not strictly a Steam related topic, Big Picture Mode isn't anywhere to be found so it's kinda helpful. I got tired of always keeping a keyboard and mouse around to control my TV PC. It wouldn't have mattered as much except that I've always had a laptop sitting nearby my TV since before I hooked the PC up to it all the time.

So I decided to finally take the plunge and install Synergy, which I've used before for work but never thought to use in my living-room. Basically it lets you share a keyboard and mouse over a network. The result is that I now have a laptop sitting directly in front of me on the coffee table while I recline about 3m from the set, and I use that to handle the non-360 controller aspects of operating my TV PC.

It's a freaking revelation. Wii U ain't got nothing on my controller with a screen in it.
 

Salsa

Member
Man that site is crappy in explaining what the thing does at first sight. I mean i already have two monitors and i can MOVE MY MOUSE FROM ONE SCREEN TO ANOTHER! just fine :p
 

Caerith

Member
I play on my TV as well, and have no problem with keyboard/mouse from couch (all you need is the right stand). My only problem is text being too small to read. I'm really considering getting a second monitor, putting it closer, and then just using that for the hard-to-read text and playing everything else on the big screen.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
jim-jam bongs said:
While not strictly a Steam related topic, Big Picture Mode isn't anywhere to be found so it's kinda helpful. I got tired of always keeping a keyboard and mouse around to control my TV PC. It wouldn't have mattered as much except that I've always had a laptop sitting nearby my TV since before I hooked the PC up to it all the time.

So I decided to finally take the plunge and install Synergy, which I've used before for work but never thought to use in my living-room. Basically it lets you share a keyboard and mouse over a network. The result is that I now have a laptop sitting directly in front of me on the coffee table while I recline about 3m from the set, and I use that to handle the non-360 controller aspects of operating my TV PC.

It's a freaking revelation. Wii U ain't got nothing on my controller with a screen in it.

In 4 days, it'll have been 8 months since the mode was announced.

Valve Time™.
 
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