The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Okay, if I post again about that game, I'll try to remember to add some Wolfenstein screenshots.


But Ketola, since you mentioned Bioshock Infinite, and since you encouraged me to post screenshots, I was motivated to put together this screenshot tribute to the Bioshock franchise, from the hundreds of screenshots that I took. This is a small fraction.

PART 1 OF 5-PART BIOSHOCK SCREENSHOT TRIBUTE
(They only allow a maximum of 20 screens per post, so I will be breaking this up into 5 posts.)
​

I've been doing just the opposite from you - I've been taking time off work and playing some of the best video games of all time, mostly because Jeff mentions from time to time some great game he is playing. But I’m about to start getting back to work, and when that happens, I won't have time to play all these great games anymore. But I have to admit, the money I've lost has been worth it.


This post isn't really that wordy, but it is loaded with screenshots – full size 2560x1600 – just a small sampling – and most of them from my favorite game of the franchise, Bioshock #2. Each game was played at maximum graphic settings running on crossfire 3 gig 7950 cards at overclock of 975. Some of them are a bit dark – which seems to be something that steam does – and those dark ones will show more detail when you enlarge them.

Click to enlarge, click to shrink back.

To make sure they expand to full size, I am using the photo path provided by Photobucket Direct Copy, then adding ~original at the end of each graphic name – appending right to the jpg extension – a fantastic trick that was discovered by Sam.


Bioshock Infinite was incredible.

(Screens are full 2560x1600.) Here's the county fair where they first introduced the giant Handyman


The scenery was lush, and the graphics were spell-binding.


Yes, they had an ocean in the sky - complete with a beach.



Infinite certainly deserved its many awards.


Columbia was a magical place in the clouds



Infinite went further than Bioshock, which had only a few minority characters. Infinite went much further - it took some chances - it included full scale racism in all its ugliness, the sordid underbelly of the beautiful Columbia.

Minorities held only menial jobs, and the penalty for inter-marriage was stoning death from baseballs.


And the three Infinite DLCs were also very good.

Although I had played the original demo for Bioshock shortly after the game first came out, for some reason, the demo didn't look interesting to me, and I set the game aside for years. I was more into military shooters at that time. But Infinite pulled me into the series. Infinite was so good I decided to go back to see where it all began, and then I was more ready to let the Bioshock magic hooked me.

The first Bioshock established the genre, and it became a legend.

The art-deco motif had not been seen like this before



The whole idea of splicers was brand new - the undersea world of Rapture was fresh and …. oh so different


Some of the sets were like walking through a fairy-tale



And horror lay beneath it all, because the world, when you came upon it, was in deep decay. The splicers were insane and murderous, but some of the Rapture dwellers were even more fearsome, and YOU HAD NO CHOICE – YOU HAD TO START A FIGHT WITH THESE FEARSOME BRUTES!


This deep sea diver could out-run you, out-shoot you, and out-shock you, and you had to pick a fight!


I killed very few Big Daddies.

I was super intimidated by them. So my abilities never advanced very much. One time I was high on a platform and he and his Little Sister were below. I thought, if ever there were a good setup to safely engage him, this is it.

Tentatively I started firing, and by the time I ran out of armor-piercing rounds he was leaking water out of his suit, an encouraging sign. Regular machine gun ammo finally finished him off, to my amazement and thrill. I wandered way around and down the stairs to that lower level near the fishing area.

In those days you didn't adopt a Little Sister, you rescued her – you grabbed her and held her while she fought you and shook her little body yelling “No, No, No!” and then suddenly she went still at the moment of release from her bondage – poor little thing – she ran off grateful.


And throughout, there were these freaky little blood-sucking girls, processing all these corpses


So I made it through Bioshock the original, playing at maximum difficulty, and not really understanding how to use the sentry bots, nor the camera, and how to make life a little easier for myself. But somehow I muddled through.


Anyway, I wasn't sure if I wanted to play Bioshock 2. I approached it tentatively. I had it for quite a while, started the first 5 minutes, put it away for a couple years, but went back after Infinite and then the first Bioshock.


And it turned out to be great – maybe even the best of the entire lot.


Once I got into it, I enjoyed it 3X more than the original, and the experience of having played #2 would make the original much more fun for me, if I ever were to play it again – someday I will. In fact Bioshock #2 is one of my all-time favorites, and in some ways I prefer it to Infinite.


I would argue that it has more heart than Infinite. For example, the second DLC for Bioshock 2 is much better than any of the Infinite DLCs, with the tragic black computer genius who tried to revive his wife who was killed in the German rocket attacks on London. He put her personality into the Rapture super-computer. As a minority, he said “They ask me, why don’t I splice myself white? I tell them, I thought Rapture is supposed to stand for an individual being regarded for his contribution, not for the color of his skin.” His dignity, and his enduring love for his wife, after all those years, and how he decided finally that he had to let her memory go, at the very end, when he visited her grave in London, were all quite memorable and touching – even now I am moved remembering it. I can’t remember what character I played, but somehow I helped him get out of there.


Here’s a list of the 10 things in Bioshock 2 that improved the play experience for me, versus Bioshock original. Feel free anybody, to disagree completely, but I believe you’re going to have a hard time saying it is not a great game.



ONE, the graphics are arguably better than the original Bioshock.

Lamb’s Garden is a beautiful place with lovely statues and neon glow colors, a perfect killing ground


Of course, because it was made several years after the first Bioshock, graphics cards had evolved quite a bit, and so the devs could make the graphics more lush. That’s a given. Additionally, you play as a Big Daddy, and you can go outside.


Being a Big Daddy is really not that big of a factor – at first you move slowly but you can quickly acquire the power to move at normal speed, and then you mostly forget that you are a Big Daddy. I had forgotten until looking at the screenshots just now. Being a Big Daddy was not any special thing, but it became pretty special when it allowed you to go outside, at the bottom of the ocean, where the scenery is awesome.


Some of the undersea landscape is astonishing




TWO, Bioshock #2 taught me about taking videos - I never really got the idea in #1, and therefore I had a tough time of it, never getting the upgrades that are available when you do your camera research.

It pays to do your camera research - Level 4 Natural Camouflage means ... INVISIBILITY!!


Level 4 reward is worth all the dangerous risk of photographing these fire-throwing Houdini splicers




THREE, putting together the hydraulic pipes in #1 to crack a safe, or even to re-code a sentry bot over to your side, got old after a while – for the sequel they decided it wasn't going to be such a core part of the game and so they much simplified it – good idea.


It’s always safer to re-code 2 friendly bots, noisy as they are buzzing around, it’s the noise of protection




FOUR, the spear gun they introduced in #2 was a total joy - harpoon the guy through the head and pin him to the wall, then go get your spear again. You don't even use any ammo. What could be more fun!


A spider splicer exhibiting excellent posture: back straight, head up, impaled by a spear




FIVE, while the spider splicer character is back from the first Bioshock, they gave him a lot of personality this time. Now he is a most charming, twisted, weird, neurotic, paranoid New Yorker - I have Eastern cousins who actually talk like that.


When he zapped you with his little horseshoe hooks, and you started going under and he was sure he had the upper hand this time, he had the most crazy maniac laugh – it seemed to say, “Look at this, I’m murdering you, hahahahaha.”


I saved one point where I was in a branching hallway, as he came into the large piano room and headed away from me toward the sea window. I created that save point so I could test various weapons.


One of my favorite save points, target practice on spider splicer lurching toward the glass wall




I have a high-powered scope that makes this easier, but sometimes it’s good to practice hip-shooting




A rocket spear explodes in a ball of flame, but spider splicer only takes a 30% hit on life - he's tough!




He didn't especially appreciate that char-broiling from the rocket – now he’s coming to get revenge




Here’s the high-powered scope, and I have 9 more rockets, but he’s hard to hit on the run




I did manage to tag him with one in the chest – and it’s about to explode – looks like he’s done for




Yep, it was actually fun to shoot rocket spears at him – the complaining is classic. Why doesn't he just shut-up and take the blade to the chest like Blazkowicz in Wolfenstein (every time William does a bonehead move and stops paying attention to what is going on around him.)


Here’s another rocket spear in the chest – listen to his New Yorker whine of irritation before it explodes

--------------- TO BE CONTINUED -----------------​

 

PART 2 OF 5-PART BIOSHOCK SCREENSHOT TRIBUTE
(They only allow a maximum of 20 screens per post.) ​

Wow, I hit him with my trap spear – he lights up like the 4th of July but doesn't lose much life – tough!





New Yorker or not New Yorker, this spidy guy is tough tough tough - he can take you down if you don’t watch out!


The trap spear was a waste – he’s got 80% life still, and already tossing hooks at me – they hurt!!




If I fire right now, the spear will kill him – otherwise I’m a dead man!




I’m even closer to death, and he moves and bobs his head like a prize fighter – I better hit the health key





I hit the health pack key and he’s still beating me up – I electro-bolted him – can I spear him?




This particular guy beat me all the way down to one life – I better stop fooling around and impale him




Spear to the head was by far the most powerful, and was a one-shot kill. Trap spear to the body didn't overly affect him. Rocket spear didn't hurt him all that much – maybe 20%.


He is a very tough character. Yes, you could do shotgun, or whatever, but the only guaranteed one-shot kill was that head spear which you had to do before he noticed you, because then he moves all crazy-like unless you zap him with an electro-bolt to freeze him in place, which helps quite a lot, but it’s just for a very short one second and sometimes it’s not enough time.



And when I wasn't practicing killing him, it was also so cool to get him to join the home team by throwing that hypnotize potion at him. Tagging along with me and the bots, constantly complaining about this or about that – he’s a terrific companion - just like my crazy New York cousins. I didn't even care that he didn't hardly even kill anybody for me – he was just good company!


Fearsome spider splicer, now on your team, lurches along whining miserably like Seinfeld




SIX, once you realize the advantage of taking videos, which I learned from Bioshock 2, now imagine the advantage of turning invisible from Natural Camouflage when you stand still, which you get way near the end after a lot of Houdini splicer research.


That is not exactly a piece of cake – Houdini splicers are the ones who disappear and reappear and throw burning fire at you.


The longer you are filming, the more points you earn toward invisibility. There is a sliding scale that shows how close you are getting. I spent quite a bit of time over near the movie theater waiting for the Houdini splicers to show up. Sometimes I had to restart the save, and drag out a fight where I had killed him too fast and didn't quite earn enough points.

This lovely and dangerous fire-throwing Houdini splicer camera research can give me invisibility



So I would deliberately try to just wound him, not kill him, like maybe rivets in his leg, something like that. He would be pretty upset, but not dead, and the filming continued. During that time he would disappear again. Unlike idiot Blazkowicz, I had to stay pretty alert because he could pop up anywhere. I glanced to my left and saw the filming footage numbers incrementing. Good! But I also had to finish him off, or the film could not be successfully processed. Those were the rules.


“Oh, there he is, I must have enough film by now, spear to the head!”

“Did I get it? – Oh my, yes! – Invisible! Hooray!”

There is another very worthwhile goal of filming – I think you get it from the spider splicers – and that is the Fountain of Youth tonic. You stand in water and your health slowly increases up to a full bar of health, which is the upper red. Later you can upgrade it, and your Adam will increase also to a full bar, the lower blue bar. That is why I tried to not get down to 4 health packs when I had 5, or down to 4 Adam bars, if I had 5. If I survived the Big Sister fight with just the barest of health left on 5 bars, so I was seeing red, with the Fountain of Youth tonic, I could just stand in water and regenerate that almost empty bar to full strength. When I also had invisibility, I could stand in water all the time I wanted – nobody bothered me!



Anyway, Natural Camouflage is what they call the invisibility tonic. Can you imagine how handy that is?


Why Mr. Spider splicer, you’re all dressed up – and now you’re all dead – didn't see invisible me did you



Let's say that you want to stun some flying security bots, to make sure you have your full complement of two bots tagging along with you, helping you out with all the splicers who want to kill you on sight. So you deliberately mess up the code in a munitions machine, to trigger the alarm (another trick I learned in Bioshock #2, never figuring out that I should deliberately screw up that way in #1.) The first two bots come and you stun them with electro-bolt. Then you simply stand still and in 2 seconds you turn invisible again. The next group of bots come, fly over here, fly over there, sometimes fly right up to you, but they can't see you, so they fly away, and no more bots come, and then finally the alarm turns off. That is very helpful when the "shut off alarm" button is nowhere in sight – and there is no good hiding place around – but the "candy" machine is right exactly where you need it to be.


That’s just one example. There are so many uses to hiding in plain sight. (By the way, this doesn't work in a Big Sister attack. With her special powers, she knows right where you are.) Other than the Big Sister, the most dangerous enemies become easy to deal with, when they can’t see you.



SEVEN, the story is very compelling, and all the little subplots are well-written. Take the story of the elderly black jazz singer. She is not a splicer – so she is not disfigured and insane. But she is sure you are going to kill her.


Singer Grace Holloway, now on a cane, not crazy and spliced up, expects you to kill her and take the key




After all, you once broke her jaw.

She was entrusted to care for Dr. Lamb’s daughter.


She was entrusted with caring for the girl, she tells you – but the child disappeared






When she saw her with you, she tried to hold her. But nobody messes with a Little Sister when her Big Daddy is around.


They turned her into a little sister, bonded her to you, so you knocked Holloway down and broke her jaw



Yes, you knocked her down and broke her jaw. Of course she expects you to kill her.


But you don’t. (Unless you are a total jerk - you do have the option.) She is dignified facing death – death at your executioner hands – you conquered every challenger she sent your way and you managed to kill them all.


But you take the key, and you walk out, leaving her unharmed. I have many screenshots of that special encounter. The writing is superb.


I will remember that – that deliberate act of mercy after I killed all who came before – of those others, I had no choice, kill or be killed. But with Grace, I had a choice. She is not armed said the voice on the radio, for what that is worth - of course nobody could blame you, after all those splicers she sent your way.


So when you take the key, the giant brute Big Daddy that you are, and you walk out without touching her, she is shocked. She questions her convictions. She can’t help wonder about everything the venerable Dr. Lamb has told her about how evil you are.


She is sure there must be an honest mistake - she will have to speak with Lamb about it. But for now, she decides that the least she can do is to try to send some special bots to help you survive the murderous gang that has been arranged to bushwhack you.



EIGHT, you get a chance to control a Little Sister, and to get her to steal a Big Sister outfit for Eleanor. In this special segment you see what the drugged-up Little Sisters see when they walk around Rapture looking for dead splicers to suck the Adam out of.


The little sisters see things through drug-deluded eyes – it’s all a fairy-tale, and Daddy is the Best




These little Sisters are walking around in a fairy land of princes and dukes and high gentlemen, in a magical kingdom, no wonder they are always so upbeat “Come on Mr. B!” Gaily skipping along like the little girls they still are, “Let’s go Mr. B!”


But then the scene shifts for a second and you see what they never see – you see the reality of the squalor that surrounds them.



But momentarily the scene shifts and you see reality – the Little Sisters never see this decay and ruin




And then the scene shifts again, back to the wonderful fairy-tale.



What a fairy-tale filled with dukes and duchesses and all the beautiful royal people



And yet, isn't there a philosophical point to ponder here? Isn't life what we make of it? Isn't how we look at the world how the world becomes for us? Don’t we all have the ability to look for the beauty, instead of focusing on the ugliness?



NINE, the boss fights came early and often in the form of the crazed Big Sister who kept rushing out to murder you amid a horrifying loud din of Alfred Hitchcock high-pitched screeching, and constant explosions - the Psycho shower scene multiplied by 10.


They pulled all the stops with the Big Sister’s maniacal, screeching, explosion-filled murderous attack




This enemy, new to the sequel, proved to be VERY CHALLENGING, and learning how to defeat her added a lot of zest, anticipation, excitement, and plain old fear, to the game. She would come to kill you, after you had adopted a Little Sister (upon killing her Big Daddy) then found two special smoking corpses for her to suck the Adam out of, and then harvested the Adam by letting the little girl go back into her tunnel to join her playmates.


So it all started with killing a Big Daddy – what used to be what I was most afraid of in the original Bioshock – and now it was just a prequel to the real challenge – surviving the crazed attack of the Big Sister!


So you really had to get yourself set up when you got ready to let the little girl climb back into the tunnel to be in the little house with the other girls - that crazy psychotic Big Sister was coming to destroy you in about 2 minutes, and you had to know where you wanted to stage the fight, you had to get ready to set up your traps and lay out your defenses, and you had to remember to turn on the camera, then immediately switch to a lethal weapon of some type.


Once you got the final warning, you had only maybe 20 seconds left - then things got really hairy.



My favorite fight saves were (A-E):


#A: STAIR WELL – SETTING TRAPS, THEN WAITING AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS, OUT ON THE BALCONY OVERLOOKING THE GARDEN



I set up special save points that I could play over and over again, which helped me get better at defeating her. The first of these was in a special room next door to Lamb’s Garden. It was a large garden room with several large tree wells.

On one end of the room, a narrow hallway, a stair well, led up a short staircase to a small landing. Then as you see below, the stair well took a sharp right turn, and led up another 20 feet.

At the top was a good-sized balcony which overlooked the entire garden room. The balcony had a guard rail, but with practice you could leap off the balcony to the dirt where the dead Big Daddy is lying outside in this picture.


I used to load this stair well with trap rivets, and 2 or 3 proximity mines, to weaken the Big Sister




Above, you can see 3 proximity mines glowing green in the middle of the field of trap rivets.


As shown above, that entry section of the stair well could be packed with traps. It was a good place to use all your trap rivets for example. Trap rivets and their lasers weren't good for any other use. Trap rivets didn't cause too much damage, but a bunch of them would add up and might do 20% damage.


Other much more deadly items were proximity mines that could cause quite a bit of damage to an enemy passing within a few feet of the center of the proximity field.


Here is the view from the balcony, and there she is – I’m at the top shooting frag grenades down at her until she charges into the staircase to attack me, at which point I switch to Gatling gun with armor-piercing rounds.

She just appeared on the scene – I welcome her with a frag grenade to my stair well of hell



So I used to practice setting up the lower stair well like this.


I shot all my trap rivets on the walls, then I popped down a few proximity mines. I would wait for her all the way up on the balcony, trying to hit her with a frag grenade on her way in.


After the fragging, she never got up the stairs – some trap rivets remain – the proximity mines got her



Okay, that was a sweet kill, but I had to use up most of my heavy arsenal of mines. The above shows remaining trap rivets. I would rather use those all up. Let’s try the trap again with no proximity mines.


Three times out of four, she came up the stairs, so my early battles were fought with her advancing up the stairs toward me and toward any mini-turrets I had set up next to me. Mini-turrets were active for only a limited time – so I might place one as soon as I saw her, from the balcony, begin to rush into the staircase.


She has 20% life left, has hurt me a little, but faces a mini-turret and 132 armor-piercing Gatling rounds

--------------- TO BE CONTINUED -----------------​

 

PART 3 OF 5-PART BIOSHOCK SCREENSHOT TRIBUTE
(They only allow a maximum of 20 screens per post.) ​

When she realized that she was getting her ass kicked, sometimes the Big Sister ran back outside the stairwell to the big garden room.


So I would often finish the stairwell fights the same way that I began, by shooting down at her from the balcony, as she ran back out to regroup and recuperate. If I didn't finish her, she could pick up a live splicer and suck energy out of it and then come back to attack me again.


It’s all over for her with 3% life, as she tries to flee the stair well from hell and avoid my Gatling gun



Usually her death pose is lying on her side or stomach, but in this one case, she sank to her knees and then collapsed back, her life ebbing out from the horrific impact of being ripped apart by armor-piercing rounds.


I swear, I would almost feel sorry for her if she hadn't beaten me up so badly, harassing me, then humiliating me over and over again early in the game.


For a long while I was, like: “How do I kill this crazy bit*h!!!”


Dead Big Sister outside of fearsome stair well of death, loaded with lethal traps, then Gatling gun finale



So as I said, in the beginning the fights were staged in the hallway, which I loaded with deadly traps, and she materialized outside – I could see her from the balcony.


But once in a while she materialized right next to me – what the hell! – in total panic I barely had time to give her one electro-blast while I tried to re-create my practice leaps off the balcony.


A successful leap meant I landed unhurt on the ground below, and then she joined me a few seconds later, passing through all my vicious little traps. By the time she got outside, she wasn't quite the same hot-to-trot Big Sister of a few seconds before.


During one of those outside battles, I made the mistake of shooting a trap spear at her, when I had meant to shoot a rocket spear.


Prior to that time I relied mostly on the Gatling gun, as the screenshots showed. But I wanted to test out the spears to see if they were any good at all. I knew the regular spears hardly had any effect on her – but I thought the rocket spears might do some significant damage.


I was hoping to end my reliance on the Gatling gun, which still was my best weapon against the Big Daddies.


By mistakenly shooting that trap spear at her, I discovered the single most powerful anti-Big Sister weapon in the entire game. Like the trap rivet, the trap spear is designed to be shot into a wall, and then it shoots out a thin steel cable to the opposite wall, creating a 10,000 volt electric shock for whoever walks into the line. The thought of firing it at somebody never occurred to me.


#B: TREE WELL FIGHTS – JUST BELOW THE BALCONY – OUT IN THE OPEN GARDEN


When I started switching over to trap spear, those fights were not in the closed-in stair well, which was loaded with my traps, but they were outside in the garden. I was up in one of the tree wells standing in safety behind a tree, just waiting for her to show up at one end of the room or another, or maybe upstairs in the balcony.


The last warning – I have my camera open and ready to start filming – and then – switch to trap spear



I started the camera on her, then switched to trap spear, and my Adam power was set to electro-bolt, especially effective in the water environment as she got closer to me.


When I could see the white of her eyes, I zapped her with an electro-bolt which froze her in place for about 1 second, or maybe 2 if she was in water, allowing me to tag her with a trap spear.


When I speared her, for the first second she wasn't much more than irritated by the actual spear, as I had found out prior by shooting regular spears at her - no more than 2% of life could be seen to be lost due to the penetration of the spear itself. But a trap spear was different - instantly it shot out its line to a nearby wall, and since she was impaled on the other end, within 1 second she got the full effect of the 10,000 volts.


At that moment her health dropped by 20%, and she was frozen in place for at least 2 full seconds.


That was all the time I needed to reload the gun and fire another spear at her. I might have only a total of 5 trap spears, but often that was all I needed to put her down, with minimal loss of health, and minimal use of my Adam powers.


I showed no mercy with her – she was far too dangerous to toy with.

I have two trap spears left – probably one good one in the water would finish her!



Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, spear after spear, I often could end the battle in under 20 intense seconds. If she had a little life left, I might switch to Gatling gun, or more often leave it on spear-gun and hit the next munitions key for rocket spears. Each rocket spear had about a 7% damage effect, plunging into her, lighting a fuse, blowing up within one second - 2 of those could finish her off.


So my fighting style evolved from setting up a bunch of traps and fighting in the stairway with the help of mini-turrets, to not setting up any traps or mini-turrets and fighting mano a mano around the tree well, using trap spears and a few final finishing weapons, making sure to kill her quickly before she was able to stab a meddling splicer, and suck out some re-charging health for herself.

She still scared me until she collapsed dead. Intense encounters of the 3rd kind.


She's gaining health - she's got a splicer up in the air at the end of her spear, sucking energy from her





She’s dead, her corpse floating in the well - water adds to my electro-bolt powers



Beginning of the fight around the tree – I already have 0166 feet of film research – the fight is on!



Final Warning! She’s coming! The stair well is nearby – but now I fight her in the tree well



As I said, as soon as she shows up, I turn on the video research camera – then switch to trap spears



The camera just started – still at 0000 – and now I’m ready with electro-bolt, and the first trap spear



In the fight, my electro-bolts have more power to freeze her if she’s in the water – she’s near her end



I’m trying to avoid dropping down another health pack – but if I miss with this spear, I’m dead!



She has really beaten me up – I’m on rocket spears – but the last explosion dropped her to only 5% life



This fight was not a breeze – I lost a health pack – I better reload my last 4 trap spears




There’s something very poetic and peaceful about a dead Big Sister – “You’re my little bit*h now!”




This time I’m filming and fighting a Big Daddy, near the same area as the garden with the tree wells



Charging in from Lamb’s Garden is a Big Daddy on 108 feet of film – I used to be more scared of them




#C: MOVIE THEATER AT END OF LONG CORRIDOR, "SAY HELLO TO MY LIL FREN”


When I first went into this corridor and dodged a grenade, I hurried back out again. But later I realized the wonderful potential of making the grenade launcher my buddy – which started out with a hit from the remote re-coding tool and a successful re-coding.


We get the scary warning, the screeching starts, but my friend and I are relaxed and waiting for the kill!



I also have three mini-turret pals to distract the Big Sister, so my friend can launch grenades at her



Of course my sentry bot buddies aren't sitting out these fights - expand the picture below and you'll see one of them attacking the Big Sister just as she is slammed by a grenade.


Wow, this is what she looks like slammed by yet another grenade – she’s got only 5% life left

--------------- TO BE CONTINUED -----------------​

 

PART 4 OF 5-PART BIOSHOCK SCREENSHOT TRIBUTE
(They only allow a maximum of 20 screens per post.) ​

But in this replay she’s badly damaging my friend – he’s on fire – if he blows up I can’t repair him




I think my friend hit her with a solid grenade – I took a bit of damage also – she’s down to 45% life



But she’s right on top of him and will likely kill him – but maybe she’ll be hit by one more grenade first



Wow, she’s caught between my pal mini-turret, my friend the grenade launcher, and my trap spears






This time she’s dead and my grenade launcher is still working - ready to take out a Big Daddy for me



Those Big Sister fights were thrilling, very intense, and very fun. I usually yelled out some kind of insult when it turned fatal for her, something mature like, “That’s what you get, bit*h!!!”


#D: OH, AND YOU HAD TO KILL BIG DADDIES TOO, SO YOU COULD ADOPT THE LITTLE SISTERS


Inside Lamb’s Garden, you can always find Big Daddies following little sisters – kill him to adopt her




Then you have to go let her harvest Adam from special smoking corpses – and you have to fight off the splicers that attack you and attack the Little Sister and stall the sucking Adam process – where the exclamation mark is, shows the normal lengthening bar(which right now is not lengthening) showing the progress of extracting the Adam.

This spider splicer is bugging my Little Sister – I am invisible letting my mini-turret shoot him



This little sister is temporarily orphaned, and behind her is another one whose Big Daddy just got killed



Who is killing these Big Daddies? Why, it’s me! One of the 2 little girls will have to wait, but I’ll be back




This is why I wanted my little friend healthy at all times – look at this Big Daddy he snagged for me



That’s the dead Big Daddy, and the dead Big Sister further down the hall – don’t cry Little Sister



She is looking forlorn – he was so big and strong – now he’s dead next to my grenade launcher friend



Of course I’ll adopt you instead of harvesting you – I would adopt even if the other was better



She doesn't cry any longer, as you lift her onto your strong shoulder



#E: NEXT TIME I PLAY, SWARM 2 WILL TAKE THE PLACE OF DECOY 2


I finally come to Fontaine headquarters – and they throw the kitchen sink at me – but I’m a veteran!



At Fontaine headquarters they have all kinds of surprises prepared for me.


If Dr. Lamb thinks I’m afraid of this new Big Daddy – think again – my decoy 2 shoots back at him!


I never thought much of bee swarm – that’s why I have no pictures of it.

But, on the other hand, I loved decoy from the start!

They shoot at the decoy, not at you, until you have to re-deploy the decoy, which is required every 12 seconds or so. When I had the chance to get decoy 2, I jumped at it. Decoy 2 actually throws back at them whatever they shoot at it – I've had enemies kill themselves with all the firepower they throw at the decoy 2!

Somewhere along the line I did try swarm, the bees, and I wasn't too impressed, so I never got swarm 2.


But later, when the first DLC for Bioshock 2 came out, with all the contests, I used my Adam a little differently, and I ended up buying swarm 2 for the first time. This was a group of bees that would launch at an enemy, kill that enemy if they could, then attack anybody else who was around.


Playing that DLC, I remember the first time I set up for a Big Sister fight in a wet area, so my Adam electro-bolts would work to their greatest effect, but I didn't have any trap spears at all. So I made sure my armor-piercing Gatling gun rounds were selected. I prepared for what I assumed was going to be a very tough encounter, with a very high chance of getting killed.


As soon as she appeared I released two swarms of bees.


I wasn't expecting too much. But to my astonishment, the swarms drove her crazy. They launched at her and pestered her from all sides, like dozens of tiny sentry bots, proving to be a huge distraction besides the damage they were inflicting, enabling me to shoot her repeatedly and rapidly kill her. Yes I used up a lot of my Big Daddy armor-piercing rounds, but doggone, that Big Sister went down so fast! I was shocked! Those damn little bees pack a punch!


So if I were to play Bioshock 2 again, and if my Adam were limited, as it usually is, seeing now how powerful the bees are, I would upgrade to swarm 2 before some of my other favorites, like decoy 2. I imagine that swarm 2 would be very helpful also against that huge ape guy who requires a lot of punishment before going down – he requires almost as much as a Big Daddy. If he is distracted, I can probably hit him with heavy rivets – or maybe even a spear to the head – it would be nice to see how that worked.


(Similarly, come to think of it, what seemed to work best for me against the Handyman in the Infinite DLC Clash in the Clouds, were the birds, which attack like a swarm of bees. They distracted him so I could get off some rounds at his chest battery. So yes, next time I’ll get swarm 2 for Bioshock 2.)





TEN, the story ends on a strong note – it has a relatively up-beat ending just as good as the first Bioshock, and better than Infinite in my opinion. Especially right here at the end - here is Eleanor, the Big Sister you saved, who temporarily fought on your side – how great it was to have the formidable powers of a Big Sister as an ally for a change.


Why am I not shooting – because this Big Sister is Eleanor, my former Little Sister



Here she is again, and father and daughter are going to fight our way out of this together!




Some incredible passageways toward the prison cell block where the big fight is going to happen

--------------- TO BE CONTINUED -----------------​

 

PART 5 OF 5-PART BIOSHOCK SCREENSHOT TRIBUTE
(They only allow a maximum of 20 screens per post.) ​

We’re on our way over to that group of buildings



Eleanor was my little sister, now she’s big – she hears the little ones whispering – they left me a gift



All these little sisters, Eleanor and I are going to turn them regular again and take them with us



And here she is at the very end, looking down at you from the pier, brought back with your help to a surface "real world" that may not be ready for her, but here she is.

The writing is superb – maybe the best I have ever experienced in a video game.


Eleanor: “The Rapture dream is over, but in waking, I am reborn. The world is not ready for me, yet here I am. It would be so easy to misjudge them. You are my conscience Father, and I need you to guide me.”


You have saved her – but your time is at an end – she will always need your guidance on the surface



You saved her from Dr. Lamb.


Truth be told, she was never really your daughter, but when you, as a champion adventurer and diver, stumbled upon Rapture, and then when you were captured and converted to a Big Daddy, she was bonded to you when they kidnapped her from Grace Holloway and converted her to a Little Sister.


So the two of you continue to have this very strong connection, even though the bonding was finally broken. The two of you continue to have this very strong connection, even though much of your humanity was forever lost in your conversion.


But, at the end of the day, once a Big Daddy, always a Big Daddy. There is no going back for you.


The story is very poignant, heroic, and tragic.


(I salute the Bioshock devs, all 3 teams, and the leads whose astonishing vision was exquisitely captured in these 3 epic games. – Rich)

 

Rich, you would do very well making game walkthroughs and the like. I like that you take lots of screenshots, but include some kind of narrative so we know what's happening in the shots.

I appreciate that you take my game recommendations to heart. I like to think of myself as having fairly broad tastes and a decent idea of what interests you.

Lately I've gone back to Far Cry 3. This is the first proper playthrough I've done since I got the GTX760. For what it's worth the 6850s gave it their all in that game. ~30-50FPS at very high settings, average about 45. Of course the 760 blows them away. Running more like 45-70 all maxed/ultra, average of about 55. Not ideal but easily playable for me.

 

You're right.

I do a little setup, and then on top of each screenshot - you might have missed it Jeff - but I do have a short caption in italics - which is meant to explain that particular shot. For example, in the section, "Say Hello to My Lil Fren" I'm set up near a movie theater, with a grenade launcher turret that is now working for me - and then I have about 6 actions shots of different Big Sister fights in that setting - with a caption on each screenshot to do a little explaining.

Getting back to Far Cry 3 - that for sure is one of my all-time favorites too, and after your earlier post I'm waiting to hear more about Far Cry 4.

So you're getting 55 average - not ideal, but playable. LOL

I'm getting 26 on Arma 3, not ideal, and hardly playable either, lol. I was lagging so bad at one point, thinking "why is my gun wobbling so much - I know I'm not prone but this is ridiculous - it's hard to kill these guys!" Then I realized it was the framerate. So I dropped from ultra down to very high, then down to high. Later I went back up one, but not all the way to ultra. So I'm running 26-28. But as I try to go prone - it's mostly okay. Remember what I said I thought might happen - that the modding community would make single player campaigns - well they have, and you download them for free from the steam workshop, and some of them are friggin awesome.

I'm playing Hog Bay, and my other favorite is Contact Person. Hog Bay is a lightning amphibious raid on a small town, Molos, where the enemy has a good stronghold, but we want to bring in hundreds of Nato reinforcements. So we have 5 rubber boats of 5 men each to try to rid the town of about 50-60 enemy soldiers - no heavy weapons, no support - and neither do they. The raids are at 4:30 am dark, or 5:00 am sunrise, or noon midday, or midnight moonlit clear night. One challenge is to not upgrade weapons, but upgrading can be done at the boats - so I am trying every weapon, and every aiming attachment.

Last night I had the basic 6.5mm gun, but in a 100 clip light machine gun version, with 3 extra clips - that's 400 rounds, on semi-auto, with a low-power dms scope, about 10-15 two levels of zoom. (I had tried the SOS scope, 20-30 zoom, but it's a little too much zoom.) You can shoot without the scope - they give you crosshairs, and also by pressing and holding right mouse, you do zoom in a bit, like 1.5 to 1 minor zoom - just like in Operation Flashpoint - but it does help.

Anyway, last night, I kind of lingered behind all the advancing squads and went up to this raised porch of this house in a walled compound, a few hundred yards from the town, only to discover after a minute or two, that I was surrounded by enemies, and that all the squads were dead except for the Zulu health pack squad, which got killed one by one after a little while. But I was able to go up to the second level of the house, go prone, using scope of course, and kill about 10 enemies out the back. Then I created a custom save point, then I tried different strategies - even running from the compound. I had to kill about 12 more enemies before the few left retreated and the game signalled SUCCESSFUL MISSION.

At one point I crawled prone to the front door and hit the open icon, and shot 3 guys right out front below the raised porch waiting near the wide front opening of the compound. Another save point. Without my save points, taking advantage of the one save point they let you make, then putting them into numbered folders, I would never get through a grueling campaign like that. It was very hairy, but fun!!

On that other favorite scenario mod, Contact person, I was able to set my team in one place, then cover this other place using a Zephir machine gun taken off a dead enemy on an earlier part of the mission. We were to clear out a farm compound with scattered buildings, and about 20 enemies. I had beaten the mission, discovering a high-powered thermal imaging zoom scope that I had missed the first few times through, and killing most of the enemies from high up on an over-looking hill. But I went back to using the machine gun, for a little more close-in action. Anyway, after learning how to beat the game about 3 times out of 4 with my one main area of coverage, I decided to try to flank the enemy in the upper woods, staying below a tank that would roll down the hill and position there. But they could see me flanking, and they sent a dozen guys after me flanking from both sides. That was very hairy, alternating between standing behind a large tree, using peek, and running to another tree, then going prone and using the crosshairs - as iron sights were awful to use - but sometimes the cross-hairs failed and I had to rely on the tracer rounds - so I was caught between the high-visibility of crosshairs, and the sometimes low-reliability of the positioning - cross-hair failure. Anyway, after last night's single shot campaign, I am going to go back and try the tree thing with the machine gun on single-shot mode and see whether or not that is any better.

The woods works for me only once out of 5 times, but my first main starting point is already behind a tree, with a wound I have to heal, a couple already dead, and I need to run to my left behind cover, heal, then go prone next to one big tree. I might get killed in the first 20 seconds, but I don't have the boredom of the big hike to get where the first save point is.

Jeff, with your modding skills - I opened the editor just to play with it for 20 minutes. It was so cool to look at myself 3rd person and then imagining setting up the camera to pan in slowly, setting up a campaign. If you got into it you could create the most magnificent campaigns! A worthy application of your fantastic modding skills.

I was just looking at some Far Cry 3 screenshots yesterday - I never posted the amazing crocodile alley shots I was able to take. The crocs jump out of the water and eat a person or animal, within about 1/5th second - super fast. But the screenshot sometimes captures the magic of the moment - and it is shocking to see these beasts in action just a few feet from my wave runner or rubber boat. Should I throw those up?

Rich

 

Nonono I was mentioning that I appreciate both

I quite enjoyed Far Cry 3 because it more or less answered all my complaints about Far Cry 2 with a high level of polish. The developers have also listened to the community quite closely. Particularly they have heard the outrage about exclusion of the G3 assault rifle with open ears. Far Cry 3 had no excuses not to have it, and neither does Far Cry 4. No self-respecting modern FPS does really. One of their latest announcements was that they are indeed including the G3 directly due to fan outcry. If Far Cry 4 happens to be more of the same, and previews seem to indicate that it is, Far Cry 4 should be a badass video game.

As far as manufacturing mods for ArmA 3, that's a bit outside of my realm right now I would ideally want a bit faster CPU to run it heavily modded. Funnily enough, someone with a quite decent 4770K Haswell rig is waiting patiently for Broadwell, and I'm pulling some strings to see if I can line up the Gigabyte board, 1866MHz RAM, and CPU when he does. That'll be a while though. I'm expecting more towards the holidays.

I do have to say, I'd be curious to try a significantly faster CPU and see what it does for my games performance on the whole. From everything I can determine, this CPU hasn't been a bottleneck at all, but I've been wrong on this particular subject before. At the very least, this Thuban is a room heater at 4GHz. Perfect stability, but you can definitely feel the wattage being dissipated by the cooler. Evokes memories of the room heater 140W 940 with only a DDR2 controller running at 3.7GHz.

I'd be much happier with at 4770K at 4.2GHz with half the wattage on the same cooler... In fact, this cooler should give me quite a large advantage in that regard. Intel chips like good cooling too.

Not to bash the Thuban, but unless I want to buy a 9 series FX CPU and break 5GHz with it, I need to make the switch over to Intel at some point. It's just getting on in years and it won't tolerate this voltage forever...

 

Haha, Jeff, that was funny - the English language. When you said - "I like lots of screenshots", and then you added "but add narrative" - I thought you were telling me to add narrative. But you were telling me that in addition to the screenshots, you liked that I didn't neglect to also add the narrative. Now that I read it again, I see THAT meaning - the complete opposite of what I thought you were saying. LOL

Hahahaha - the mis-communication was funny.

Well then, Thanks - then obviously you didn't miss those captions, and I'll keep doing it that way!

So you're thinking Haswell - yeah me too. You'll be coming back to Intel then, for the power efficiency. Yes, that is what my thought is, why I haven't been too aggressive about trying to get the i7 940 near 3.5 or 4.o with $80 in faster memory - I know it will eat up a lot of energy and throw out a lot of heat. And we here in the LA area are in the middle of a giant heat wave!!!


Back to your comments about rifles, the G3 - I'm thinking back to COD4 multiplayer - that is the single-shot, am I correct? If so, then as I recall, I DID like that weapon - it was a badass single-shot that had lots of killing power. Am I right? It also came with a grenade launcher version as I recall, or you could upgrade it that way - boob tube - which I got to be pretty good at, and which I liked using.

(Which reminds me of one of my main pet peeves of Arma 3 - I totally hate how they screwed up the grenade launcher sight - rather than the V with horizontal lines that everybody else uses, they have a fake round circle, which you can adjust with page up page down. Stoooopid in my opinion. You don't have time in a firefight to be adjusting that silly thing - the idea of the V is to get used to how high to lift the gun depending on how far the guys are from you. Operation Flashpoint had the normal, great, grenade launcher sight, and Arma 3 has one that is so bad I never shoot grenades - EVER. They ruined it. Plus their's is not realistic is it? The V is based on an iron sight that you can lift up when you use your launcher. It is a REAL gun attachment. Is that circle a real thing that appears in your scope? Probably - I don't think they would pull it completely out of their butt. Anyway, I hate it.)

(I drafted an email to them, but their contact web site was down yesterday. I saved my letter.)

The other pet peeve I have, the other thing I HATE about Arma 3 - if you get wounded and you patch yourself up, you have to listen to yourself whine and cry like a fu**ing baby the entire time you are hunting bad guys. My god! Do I want to stay alive or not? I have to whimper and groan. It's annoying! I don't care how much it hurts - somebody will soon put me out of my misery with a bullet in my brain if I don't shutup and concentrate on the task at hand.

Now - maybe that is more realistic. I have to admit, I have never been wounded in combat and had to continue. Matter of fact, I have never been in combat. So - maybe the advisers told then to do that sh*t. But I think it's a personal thing - and me crying to myself is only going to take away my concentration, which needs to be on where the next mofo is, not on how much my leg hurts.

What do you think?

I should google that right now and see what the community thinks.

Holy christ - take a look at this: http://www.moddb.com/mods/old-good-stalker-evolution/forum/thread/feedback-3-wounded-aiweapons

"That mod shook me to the core. To hear friend and foes alike, crying out for help, well, it wracked my nerves and greatly amplified the sense of tension, both tactically and emotionally. Something that never really concerned me before in a first person shooter suddenly became very important: coming to the rescue of my wounded comrades. They would roll on the ground, if they could muster it, they would also cry in agony. If they were too badly wounded, or had bled out too much, they would whimper and moan pathetically till they fell unconscious. The more they bled out, the less frequently they would cry out. One could keep track of their state of dying by tracking the length of time between their cries and then their moans."​

The guy is talking about the wounded system in a mod of Operation Flashpoint - which apparently the Arma 3 devs paid attention to, with wounded enemies and friends crying out in agony. Just read one or two paragraphs!

After reading that, I guess I'll just be thankful they didn't add even more of that stuff.

Still I find myself saying, to my character "Shut up will you please!" You kind of have to tune it out - I will say, however, that when we start hearing Farsi being spoken, meaning that the enemy is VERY close, he tones back the whimpering quite a bit, thank god.

By the way - the guy in the article talks about wounded buddies rolling around in pain.

That reminds me - I am using rolling to great effect for targeting in Arma 3.

They have peek and lean for when you are standing or crouching. But if you are prone, when you hit the Q or E key, you actually roll. It can be quite effective I am discovering more and more. That is what I used last night to finish a successful mission on the Molos map I was talking about. I played it last night without upgrades. But at the very end, my weapon had 4 clips, but each clip had only about 4 bullets average. Arma does an interesting thing - when you shoot 15 rounds of your 30 round clip, then reload to a fresh 30, Arma keeps the 15 round clip. When you start running out of full clips, you begin to get your discarded low-round clips. That seems very realistic. I could see doing that. You shove your half-used clips in one pouch, and then you have to start using them if no ammo is close by.

Anyway, I had lousy clips, so I ditched my weapon and grabbed a Katina from one of all the dead enemies all over the place, but the rifle had only 5 round TOTAL. then I found one who had clips, where the context scroll-down menu said "Rearm from soldier" and rather than one 5-round clip, now I had 6 30-round clips. Nice! So the little tip pointed me East, and I went after 3 bad guys crossing a meadow. I killed one, then two were left. I was on a street slightly above the meadow, no grass to block my vision. I went prone behind a wall, set to full auto, then hit Q and rolled out from the wall, and targeted one of two guys about 50 yards out, whom I could see. He went down after a few bursts, and by the time his buddy realized where I was, and was ready to fire at me, I had hit E and rolled back behind the wall, where I reloaded a fresh 30-round clip. Then I rolled out and did it again to the last guy.

I was ready to run around and kill a lot more bad buys but it said Mission Success across my screen, lol.

I found that I started playing a lot smarter - going into houses, going out the back, then lying on the back porches if I couldn't see what I needed to see from inside the house. That put me 6" higher than lying prone on the ground, and it made a huge difference in the amount of enemies I could target. Also I had been killed plenty of times by going prone out on the ground, where I could not see a thing due to the weeds and grass, but they kept firing at where I had disappeared, and kept getting me.

So more and more I just tried to run from those situations which had a better chance of success - sometimes running in a zig-zag.

But prone on a raised porch was entirely different - totally great.

Or going prone at a corner next to a walled compound, when I know there is a bad guy on the side street, because I can see green tracer rounds (ours are red.)

Yes I could try peek and lean, but I have been killed plenty of times with peek and lean, so it's not that super great. Sometimes however, it IS a good thing to do. Still remember, you are either standing full up, or you are crouched, so your aim will not be as steady as full prone.

At the corner situation, with the enemy on the side street, and no meadow grass or weeds to obstruct your view, if you rollout from prone, you suddenly appear in front of them without warning. I hold the right mouse key to zoom in 1.5X before I roll. You roll out so fast, often they don't even see you magically appear on the ground 30 yards in front of them - the rollout is a freaking powerful thing - you can start shooting well before they think of it, and bam they are dead.

Normally I never have played this aggressive.

But I started doing it, because I was trying to save the life of my squad sergeant who was set on getting himself killed.

I had found on the Hog Cove mission, where you can switch squads if there are any sergeants left alive, that it was easier to hang with a sergeant, than to be the last player alive, and have to read the little tips "enemy spotted in grid 269132." Those grids were about 2 city blocks wide, and the SOB could be anywhere.

But a friendly sergeant knew where they were, and spotted them, if I could keep my sergeant alive.

When I realized that it was easier working on a squad, then I went back to a save point where I remembered this one sergeant from a squad I had been on before I went rogue, who was heading down a side street, and I ran like hell and finally found him about 4 seconds before he got himself killed. So I reloaded the save point, and ran even faster, and this time I beat him to his date with destiny, and I went prone and rolled out and killed the 3 bad guys before he could show up and take all their bullets in his gut. I had to do it about 3 times before I got it right.

In other words, I was doing gung-ho shit that I never did before in order to save this dumb guy's ass, to make it easier for me, with less boredom, to complete the mission.

So when I saw how great the rolling around was, I started using that a lot more - now I love it!

Just call me motherf**ing "John Wayne."


Speaking of gung-ho, by the way - I went back to the Contact Person map, in the woods, and I tried the machine gun single-shot mode, and it totally sucked. I couldn't kill anybody and I got my ass kicked.

When you are full prone with the machine gun, you don't get a wild and crazy rifle lift with full auto if you fire in small bursts. And those bursts throw rounds in a little bit of a spray pattern, and it only takes one round to kill somebody - I think it's close to a 10mm round on the belt.

On the other hand, regarding rifle lift, even when full prone, when you are zoomed in with sniper dms scope, let's say at 10X (the scope is probably 7-10x) and regular 30 round rifle, or 100 round variant of the regular 6.5mm rifle, you DO get a crazy wild lift with a 3-round burst, even full prone.

It is hard to control that wild lift.

Sometimes you can do it and control it, but it is hard work. However, you get zero lift with single shot. So it's just so much easier to spam single shots at the enemy as fast as you can hit the mouse key. You may get a slight rifle swing, but you can spam about 5-6 rounds per second, and one or two of them will always hit.

So, for Zephyr machine gun - fire in bursts - in prone, or even in crouch. Also for 30 round rifle, with red dot, not scoped in, burst is EXTREMELY effective, even in crouch, but especially full prone - enemy rifle, katina, also, burst is very effective.

BUT .... 6.5mm either 30-round or 100 round variant, SCOPED-IN, fire rapidly in single-shot mode.

So Contact Person, in the woods, regular bursts were better for belt machine gun. But I added a crazy twist to that map. After I found that single shot machine gun didn't work, I then went back to regular bursts, and I tried holding out the way I did before, using cross-hairs, but rather than success one time in 5, I got killed 15 times in a row.

So I had either lost the touch, or the Director had decided to kick my ass.

In response to getting killed 100% of the time, I slightly changed my woods strategy.

Rather than getting next to the first big tree on my left, I went to the second set of bushes, all the way left next to the hill, dove in, and hit "Treat myself." While that 8-second bandaging was going on, I hit M for map, scrolled to enlarge it, put the map cursor on a little plateau just in front of where I had left my squad, hit the ` key to command All squad, and hit the space bar for "move to map cursor" and then my voice said "Move 75 yards in front." They radioed back "Clean copy" while I was hitting M to get out of the map, and by then I was done healing, and the first bad guy was coming up on my left. What that did is, in the 30 seconds that it took them to begin to hit that plateau, then kill the 2 guys on the plateau - the sniper on my squad started seeing some of the morons who were coming to kill me. Suddenly guys attacking me were dead. I was hearing " Contact, AT soldier, 200 yard behind us" behind us meaning deep in the woods where I was. I only had to hold out and kill about 4 guys, watch the ridge line on my left, or take a quick peek on my right where occasionally they charged through the bush to find me.

However, the Director got pissed at the success I was having, and, at the last part of the last time I beat it, I looked up on the right, up to the street behind me where the tank traveled back and forth, on that last play-through the Director actually sent 4 guys up there on that street, blocked by the trees from my sniper guy killing them, to run down the above road toward me, to get into position to shoot me from above.

That was crazy smart of the AI. What the hell!

I had actually, a half hour before that, tried a different area, because it seemed that suddenly I was getting killed by tremendous fire and I had no idea where it was coming from. I had not noticed that the Director was doing that to me.

But this one time, having gone back to that earlier position and having better success with it, I looked up to the right, saw the guy 50 yards away actually mount the hill and run toward me, up on the street above, and then in total shock and amazement I saw 3 more guys also on the street above coming along who were already closer than he was. With some furious targeting, they all died to my machine gun bursts, but I was completely flabbergasted - WHAT THE HELL DIRECTOR. Couldn't take getting your ass kicked, could you? Never before has even one guy actually mounted the hill and ran down the street to put himself above my position.

So I do my twist, the Director does his twist.

I use the word Director, as in Left 4 Dead, where Valve talked about having adopted that kind of an AI strategy to change up the game depending on how the coop team was doing. I don't know what kind of Director system they have, but the AI do not do the same stuff each time. The programming is great. It must be something like that Director mode in Left 4 Dead where if you are beating the AI, they change it up and make things more challenging for you.

Yes, I was definitely kicking the director's ass - with the little ploy of moving my guys, I was beating the AI two out of 3 times, no more 1 out of 5. My success rate increased by a factor of 3. Hahahaha. I did that for a couple hours, proved that it was totally solid, then went back to that Molos attack and tried it with no upgrades for once, with lots of rolling.

Then I finished up last night with a light helicopter, called Sting Like a Bee. My job was to take out infantry after a successful killing of the big tanks by the heavy helicopters.

It took some getting used to - but basically I had to turn off hover - and stay fairly low, like maybe 4-5 meters, and keep my forward speed slow, like maybe 15-25 km/hr, and advance with the 5000 round mini-gun, as the infantry fired at me, just attempting to nail them all with Gatling gun bursts.

I got a little better at it, and then one time I finally took so much engine damage, that my helicopter slowly dropped down and lost power, near a disabled tank. I got out, ran to the tank, took the gunner seat, and killed the remaining 15 soldiers about 50 yards away with tank machine gun and heavy rounds. Then I realized, while the helicopter above said, "thanks for the assist - nobody moving down there" that there was one more mission to this scenario, shooting a convoy, and I did still have 13 missiles left, but I had a disabled 'copter.

So I went back to my last save, and this time I tried to just land near enough to that tank, without a destroyed engine. My engine and instruments were both red, but the helicopter did land successfully, and I turned the engine off, ran to the tank, killed the soldiers, then took off again, and went to a crash site of our first helicopter - got a check off on that mission, and then created a save point. Tonight I'll go shoot the convoy.

All of these are player mods - I have 20 scenarios, each one about 5-10 MB, and I have tried about 6 or 7 of them so far.

Rich

 

Lately have been experimenting with using my HDTV as a dedicated PC monitor. The 39" is a bit large but seems reasonable for sitting on the desk so far. Was preparing myself for lots of ugliness blowing 1080p up that large, but I'm more often being surprised by how many things still appear quite sharply. I have a viewing distance of 3-4 feet so I'm effectively point blank to the screen.

The biggest obstacle in usability was getting the brightness and contrast adjusted for a desktop. The default settings are extremely bright and high contrast to make for effective viewing at a distance. Makes for great LCD color and picture quality when used as a TV, but is extremely harsh on the eyes at PC desktop distance. Essentially had to lower brightness, contrast, and color all to about half their default settings. When compared to my other monitors, I believe I've been able to get a reasonable match. A single notch on sharpness is quite nice, but any further and it gets very grainy. Overall it's not perfect, never having been meant as a PC monitor, but I've startled myself with how close it can be gotten. My experiment can be considered a success on that basis alone.

As expected, lots of the middling-low resolution content appears quite grainy. The Windows GUI and general text though are surprisingly crisp and are more than usable for general computing. The opposite of my expectations. DVD resolution video also surprisingly translates quite beautifully. True native 1080p content is wonderful as well as gaming. It is much better for gaming than I had come to expect from previous experience. The actual size of the thing is fantastic. It's awesome for a great many games, and the sharpness at this distance is far more than I expected. Antialiasing really, truly shines in this case. I finally have a real excuse to use 16xQ when available

I understand that resolution is a major thing for PC gamers, especially myself and a few others here. But my experimentation is a matter of a couple hundred bucks vs over a thousand for similar sized screens. As far as that goes, a small to mid sized HDTV seems like a great choice to get a larger monitor for cheap. From my recent experience, they are quite usable, and with proper Widescreen Gaming tricks, can be made to have the correct aspect ratio as well. The size makes for a really breathtaking experience in games with high resolution textures. Modded Skyrim and RTS games in particular. Even when using the same or similar resolutions, size makes a HUGE difference in how much detail can be seen. The viewing and gaming experience on this cheap HDTV is absolutely superior to my 1080p monitor. My 1920 x 1200 monitor obviously holds a huge edge in nearly every category, but the size is still hard to ignore(though it's still somewhat larger than the 1080p by default).

My TV normally doesn't see much use, so I figured this was worth a shot to see if it could be tolerated. Currently I am quite pleased. In my opinion, a smaller screen such as a 32" or 37" would be much more practical. 39" is simply a bit too large, but serves as an exaggerated example of what can be done. I have a 32" that requires repair, and would be interested in making that a dedicated monitor. If this 39" can be this enjoyable, a 32" would be the trick fix, as it would be far more practical.

 

Wow, that sounds like a great experiment, and it is interesting that you are getting results that have exceeded your expectations. How are you driving it - I assume it has hdmi in, do you have an hdmi-out graphics card - or does your card have display-port, and maybe you are using an adapter to hdmi?

I sit extremely close to my Dell 30 - I measured just now and less than 18 " from center of screen to tip of my nose. But of course your monitor is close to 40, meaning 16/9 times more surface area. When you said 3 to 4 feet, that sounded far to me from my standpoint. But I don't have much choice, because I have the monitor on a very small table, which I rotate around for making phone calls for real estate, using the 19" Dell that sits on the same small trailer table.

Anyway, I'm not complaining - the close proximity gives me tremendous immersion.

But I see what you mean - for TV use, we have a 47" that we sit about 7-9 feet away from, so you're right, being 3-4 feet away puts you much closer than you are used to sitting when you use it as a TV.

Anyway, I'm glad you were able to find the adjustments that made it work well as a monitor.

And it is interesting that you are finding that the much larger size - from your Dell 27" monitor (or is it 24"?) - gives you a more dramatic gaming experience.

If you watch videos on your monitor/TV, you should maybe try out power DVD 13 - or I guess they're up to 14 by now. We paid about $100 for it full retail, and it is more than worth it.

But you can get it as a free 30 day trial, I believe, and then if you like it, I can arrange to allow you to get an extended sampling of the program, which I already have on my ftp site (with details through email.)

I have directly compared it to VLC, mpc-star, mpc-ht, gom, divx, every other player, capturing screen shot comparisons - I'll post them again if you like. The only comparable is the other one, I forget the name, which also has the True Theater upscaling. It upscales to 1080 p, adds saturation and sharpness, and you can do a direct comparison while it is running, splitting the screen several different ways, to see the effect turned on vs turned off.

So the TV in the kitchen is connected to a phenom computer, and in addition to cable, we watch videos - I always get them in good size, like 2-3 gigs for a movie, at 720p. I find that a good sized, (above 3 gigs I consider high quality) file, at 720p, with Power DVD upscaling, gives me a great picture. Even if you have a video already at 1080 p, and Power DVD 13 says "you already have high def - you might want to turn off true theater" Don't do it!! Leave the effect on - then do the comparison - you will see that Power DVD 13 enchances it further.

It works without, I repeat, WITHOUT, hardware acceleration - so if you ever get it, make sure you tell it to have hardware acceleration turned off - it's all done in the cpu.

Try it and if you like it, let me know. ​

Rich

 

Using HDMI as that was the available cable at the time. It can also do DVI. Most modern video cards have a single HDMI out port. Still driving sound with my sound card so HDMI's audio capability is being left out here.

As far as viewing distance goes, it can range anywhere from just over 1 foot to about 4 feet depending on my posture. In my usual gaming posture, I am leaned back into the seat but with the chair locked upright. This puts my head about 3 feet from the monitor. If I'm at the edge of my seat and have my face up close, it's usually 2 feet or less, which I'm finding is hard to do with this monitor but also less necessary due to its size. In my most relaxed posture, I sink right into my chair and unlock it so it leans way back. At that point I'm about 4 feet away.

I am finding the size does make a difference in my posture. It allows me to sit fully upright most of the time. The Dell 1200p monitor is a 24" by the way. The Asus 1080p is 23.6". My computer monitors do require me to hunch over to read small text or when I'm trying to view something very intricate or small in a video game. Using the TV allows me to bask in every detail without ever moving my head or craning my neck. Yes Rich, dramatic is certainly the right word.

It's particularly awesome for flight sims. And I do mean AWESOME. Cockpit view is a whole new experience when the cockpit on-screen is life-sized. Everything from small ground details to enemy planes in the far distance are vastly easier to track with my eyes due to their increased on-screen size. It also lets me see small targets much more clearly against the inky black backdrop of space. One of the main reasons I wanted to try this.

Again, I certainly understand that a dedicated PC monitor at the same size would absolutely blow my TV away. Not even a contest. But, in many ways, size is a much more important factor for me than resolution. Particularly, this allows me to have the "large monitor experience" without the hilarious performance demands of 2560 x 1600 or 4K. The only two resolutions I use being 1920 x 1200 and 1920 x 1080 means my performance and settings can be nearly indentical across all three screens. Games run just as well on my monitors as they do on the TV.

RTS games are probably my favorite improvement. All the intricate details and ever-changing gear on my squads in Dawn of War 2 really pop out whereas before they were something you had to zoom in to see.

I guess my final conclusion for this is that it's a vastly smaller hassle to use than I ever imagined.

 

Hmm, a week away on holiday not posting (and therefore not getting updates) and I miss a lot. I'll have to read all this lot tomorrow!

 

Wow!

Wait, how are you able to run 1920x1200 - your tv is a 1080p right - so it won't support 1920x1200 - if it displays the 1200, then it has to give you a slight letterbox left and right border area - which might be fine.

However, on second thought, I did buy a relative in LA a 24" samsung tv/monitor, which actually DOES have 1920x1200 capability - so maybe your tv also has that, but our Toshiba 47" is strictly 16:9, not 16:10.

That is just totally awesome, Jeff.


I'm glad you gave it a try. It really does sound like you are virtually capturing the 30" experience, without having to deal with the 4 megapixel challenge, getting by at 2.3 Megapixels and enjoying spectacular fps rates


... while I have to deal with occasional lagging trying to make 26-28 work


Sam, did you have a nice vacation? I wondered where you were. If you dare to go through that Bioshock tribute - every single screen is full-size and should show up nicely at 55% of your monitor size - which is still way better than the 700 wide pixels I used to post! That makes me wonder how a game like that, Bioshock 2, would look running on your 4k monitor - even if the game itself didn't support 3840 x 2160.


Also Ketola seems to have disappeared after encouraging me to throw up some screenshots - maybe he took one look and thought it was all a lot of throw-up.


Also Kevin is nowhere to be found, I had some nudity to tell him about.


And no signs of ddp either - I heard he is so ashamed of being Canadian that he applied for US citizenship on humanitarian grounds, like, he's tired of freezing his butt off for all these years.

Rich
(Sam and Jeff - check your email)

 

Absolutely in love with the TV as a monitor thing. Fully intend to either fix my 32" or buy one at some point. This has me convinced that I simply don't want the hassle of 2560 x 1600 or larger. I wouldn't turn down an opportunity to have a 3007WFP or similar just like any other PC hardware, but have realized I just don't care enough to pursue one given the price difference.

Rich, 1920 x 1200 is the resolution of my 24" Dell 2407WFP(Wide Flat Panel). The reason I mentioned it is that it's damn close to 1080p from a performance standpoint if not identical in some cases. This means that any game I tune on my best monitor will run just as well on any 1080p screen. Tuning a game to run on a much higher resolution might mean some major changes in settings if I want to play it on a TV or my 24" monitor. When switching from the Dell to the 1080p monitor or my TV, all I need to do is change "1200" to "1080" in an ini file or the settings or vice versa. There is no performance or video memory difference to account for.

I intend to keep the 2407 and sell my Asus 1080p monitor if anything.

 

Hey all,

Just briefly from me then - I am still here, believe it or not!

We spent the week down in Cornwall and, for the first time I can remember, had an entire week of clear sky and pretty hot temperatures. Not your average british summer at all!
We spent a fair few days out on this -
http://i.imgur.com/zjaqFD5.jpg

Visiting places like this:
http://i.imgur.com/WyWHN58.jpg (Although I admit this one's a cheat, we visited here by train)
and this:
http://i.imgur.com/N94wHxn.jpg (My niece & nephew)
Doesn't look like your typical dreary english summer does it?


On-topic briefly, back before we moved out of the student house, we used our Regza 42XV635 as a PC games display briefly. It was great for certain games, terrible for others. For whatever reason I find concentrating on text in strategy games on an HDTV very difficult, the contrast is all wrong...

 

Well, I guess the obvious answer is to concentrate on shooters with minimal text - lol.

So, Sam, I saw those pretty pictures of the Bahamas, but I thought you said you stayed in England for your holiday. I know that wasn't the case - I could not see a bit of fog at all. Yep - my money's on Bahamas.

Who was that in the boat? Certainly not yourself. Is that your dad on the left, and your mom standing up?

Jeff, I see what you mean - you just change the game to 1080 rather than 1200. Like Sam you had some contrast issues at first - but it sounds like you pretty much got everything fixed. For those flight sims that you like, do you have any trouble reading instruments or such?


Okay, brace yourselves - a few screenshots!!! Naw, just 6 of them. Full size.

These are of the last campaign on Arma 3 that took up so much of my time - one of the showcases called Combined Arms. I went back and re-did it. What I was trying to do is to see if I could become one of the drivers of that amphibious vehicle with the powerful grenade launcher, that I was fighting in the Gunship showcase.

The combined arms is all about attacking an enemy position, with the help of helicopters that bring you in, one amphibious vehicle that immediately gets itself blown up, destroying one amphibious vehicle of theirs, then trying to hold onto the position with the 6-7 guys who are still alive, surviving an attack of 15 of their guys, and one more amphibious vehicle with grenade launcher, and machine gun. I am carrying a rifle and a grenade launcher.

The big difference between the way I used to do the campaign, and this time, is summed up in this picture right here.

Whew - success - they are on the run with their tails between their legs!



What are you looking at? You're looking at me, and a bunch of my guys - and guess what - we're done. We finished. Look how many guys are still alive - you can see 3 or 4 or more in this picture - plus notice to the right, OUR amphibious vehicle is still in one piece.

Why the big difference from before, when no matter how I did it, I was the only guy left alive virtually 9 times out of 10, playing with excruciating patience to try to find and kill that last bad guy. Occasionally I would get lucky and one guy prone on the ground, like you see in this picture near the left pole, was still alive, and he would give me guidance where the last bad guy was - but usually he was dead too.

Okay - the difference - the weapon. The weapon I am carrying, is the one they issued to me, with only 3 clips. But I was able to keep the amphibious vehicle alive by killing more aggressively the enemy in our initial attack, and furthermore, I was right there when he moved into position, and the first thing I did is get into his inventory, and load up more ammo clips - so I started this whole mess with 10 extra 30-round clips, not just 3. That made a difference, because in full auto - this gun is deadly in very short 2-round bursts. They fall right down very many times. The enemy Katana that I used to have to pick up, because I'd be out of ammo, uses the same 6.5mm rounds, but I used it more in single shot mode - it was not ineffective in burst, I won't say that - but not the killer that this one is in burst mode.

Jeff, you probably can shed some light on why that would be. This is the standard-issue MX 6.5 mm of the Nato forces in the mod community scenarios that I'll be posting on soon. Why would one gun with the same ammo have a better burst system? Is it the anti-lift gas-driven reloader, stabilizing the gun? What would be the answer?

The second reason for my new success is this rock. By the way, the picture below shows the gun on full auto - in single shot mode the white line above the 24 bullets left (on this clip, plus 8 more clips available) would just be a small piece on the right. They have another gun that I have tried recently, a vector submachinegun firing a 10mm round (.410 inches) that has a middle position, where you get the 3-round burst that is built into the gun. This gun, with this red dot sight, in full prone, is deadly in 2-round bursts out to a full 400 yards.


This rock was here all the time, but it only worked well when I added my new strategy - and new rifle.


Yes, this is the rock that made this whole thing work.

I had tried this rock and every other one, many times before, but it would take so much fire, I figured out that it was just not practical - you could successfully shield yourself, but if you tried to edge out on the side, you'd be dead very quickly.

Here is the rock again. This is after success - and you can see at least two of the guys who are still left, the sergeant, and the guy above him in my gun sights, the guy prone who was usually the last one to get killed before the new strategy.

I would never stick my head out this far of course, but the battle is over, and some buddies are still alive!


So what was the new strategy?

1. The amphibious vehicle comes in from the left - and it comes within about 30-40 seconds after my save point - which is right after the guy says "brace for counter-attack." So you must kill this thing - I have tried letting it come it, and getting it then, but sometimes that works, other times not - the worst thing is if the sergeant calls a retreat when the thing gets close to the camp - because that is it - no success - he called a retreat!

2. The enemy is charging in like crazy, and that charge needs to be blunted. I used to run out 50 yards, get behind a smaller rock, kill the first two enemies, then run back just at the time the amphibious vehicle was entering out camp - and I had a save point at that time. Sometimes that worked - I would kill the vehicle, then take up a position - but often that ended like before - I was the only one left alive.

3. So this time - the first thing I did is head up to The Rock. As soon as I reached it I turned around and tossed a smoke grenade behind me about 10 yards. That smoke kept me from getting killed about 10 seconds from now. Then I got prone behind the rock, set to full auto, and targeted the first 2 enemies - way way way out there further back from before - and killed one or two of them. This also got the rest of the guys alerted better, and some of them went outside the camp circle and took aggressive positions slightly forward. It also slowed the enemy down - it took a little sting out of their charge.

4. I went through only one 30 round clip - by that time the smoke had begun to billow up, and I hit crouch, and ran down into the smoke and ran left just outside the camp - and usually I was not wounded because of the smoke. By then the enemy amphibious was just cresting a small hill or coming through some bushes. Using high-magnification zoom, and a straight forward shot, I hit it with the first anti-tank missile while it was coming through a bush and really could not see me yet. I instantly hit reload, blasted again while it was stunned - maybe some of its tires had been blown out and it was moving slowly - and if I needed, I had a third round loaded while I looked to see if the vehicle was burning up by then. I have killed that thing about 200 times so I am pretty good about that part. (Recently I did the boot camp - and I learned about using T to activate the launcher lock, on this same PCL launcher. So it is possible that if I had hit T, the launcher would have locked for a one-shot kill. I never knew that. One day I'll go back to this showcase and try the T.

5. Amphibious dead, I turned and ran back to the rock. The smoke which was blowing my way, had not quite dissipated, and using some small trees as cover, I could usually make the rock and dive in behind it without getting wounded. If wounded I could heal - I had about 5 health packs on me. Then I peeked out on the right side, like the above picture, but not so far out of course, and tried to pick out one guy and make that kill. Back behind the rock I hit reload, peeked out, another kill. They weren't so thick on shooting my position as in earlier attempts to use that rock, as we had more live guys now. The worst before was if a machine-gunner had my rock in his sights. But that didn't seem to come up much anymore - I think their machine gunner had been taken out by our machine gunner. By the way, our amphibious vehicle was usually exploded by then, but even if not, it didn't really seem to be much of a factor in the battle.

6. Occasionally they would came over the hill on our left - to the left of the picture above. That had been my problem in trying to hold out on the left side of the circle. Before I knew it, they'd be behind me. Using this new rock position, I was shielded pretty well from enemies coming on that side, and then when there were no more to be seen peeking out, I could peek way out and handle any who were harassing the prone guy.

Here again is another successful finish - look at all of my alive guys, and look at the radio message - the Opfor are retreating. I can now beat this counter-attack 2 times out of three.


Yeah, read the news, they've turned tail and ran. Wait a second, don't go! I've still got some hot lead for you!!!


I used to be the only guy who would go up and get into the helicopter (the prone guy, if he survived, never got up to get into the 'copter) but now look, the sergeant and one other guy are there ahead of me.


I'm no longer the only guy who showed up to the airport!


Two is company, three is a crowd, but I don't care - here we are successful, three of us, getting ready to take off, at the end of this lovely mission that I can now beat - take that, you evil Arma3 Director - I'm kicking your ass 2 out of 3 times and there is nothing you can do about it!!!


What did you expect, first class and a stewardess? No matter - there is rest and hot grub where we're going!



Best of all - no more painstaking and tension-filled sessions working around slowly to try to find and kill the last enemy - listening to myself whine and cough over my bandaged wound - telling myself "Shut up already so I can can concentrate!"

Rich

 

I'm in the red at the back - Otherwise yes that's mum, dad, my brother's wife and my niece & nephew - my brother's the one behind the camera

Lol bahamas, not quite, but it certainly felt like it most of the week! Since I ended up doing unexpected voluntary tech support all night last night I still haven't had a chance to read your posts properly - I will get round to it, honest!

 

See the rest of my post below. Strategy games are just fine on it. I've gotten it nearly identical to my 1080p monitor.

There's a ton of adjustment on my TV and I've gotten it so close to a PC monitor that it isn't even funny. Text is perfectly readable in any application, games, typing, web pages, etc. After adjustment, I haven't had a single complaint about clarity, text legibility, or contrast. All settings default to 50 on this TV which is perfect for use as a TV. My PC desktop-friendly settings are this:

Brightness: 60
Contrast: 30
Color: 40
Sharpness: +5(One notch)
Adaptive Contrast: Off

At default settings this TV had eye-burning contrast and text was near impossible to read without eyestrain. Right now, I'm currently typing this post up on it with zero issues. Cockpit flight instruments are perfectly visible and especially easy to read due to the increased size. On-screen indicators(not integrated into the in-game cockpit) are also perfectly clear and easy to read. That includes any sort of text or on-screen indicators in all of the RTS's I've tried.

My best guess would be that the first gun either has a long barrel or some other feature that allows it to put out multiple rounds more accurately. Everything from firing rate to weight of the weapon to recoil system to familiarity can affect full-auto accuracy. The first rifle either has a faster firing rate, allowing 2 rounds to leave the barrel in quicker succession, or it has a longer barrel/is heavier creating the possible illusion/possible effect of better accuracy due to less recoil. It could also be a combo of both things. Barrel length also affects muzzle velocity and round accuracy directly. A longer barrel will create higher velocity and accuracy almost every time, and higher velocity is usually equal to greater impact force. Many things could be at play there Rich, because ArmA uses real physics-based ballistics. It's certainly an interesting question.