Parabellum

Aha! I knew about the Companions guild and their quest line, but I didn't know about the werewolves in the Silverhand ruins. Vampires, I found. And happily killed. On another note, those lich guys that sometimes spawn after you learn a shout at the dragon walls hurt. A lot.

What remains to be seen, is whether or not GR:FS will actually be any good. If the evolution from GRAW to GRAW2 to GR:O is any indication, then FS is going to be another Bruckheimeresque yawner for kids.

Skyrim's random yet consistent crashing issues seem to have been remedied by playing the game on my Vista 64 install, rather than the XP 32 install. I can only assume that it's an XP issue, since both installs are on the same machine, using the same hardware. It's just too bad that Vista is a bit slower than XP, really. WytchDokta, where do you find werewolves and vampires? I know about the Brotherhood quest line where you can turn into a werewolf, but I'd rather go find one out in the world. Alduin fell to my swords last night. He wasn't too hard, honestly. (Disclaimer: I was playing on super-duper-easy-noob-mode. But don't tell anyone) Now, it's off to explore the rest of the game. It's sort of sad though, that my character clobbered the hell out of dragon kind, and no one seems to care. People in the streets are like "Hey man, nice beard." Or "You should have played on a higher difficulty, noob." No appreciation at all, I swear.

I've received Skyrim as a birthday present. Aaah, Skyrim, sweet Skyrim. Oblivion's ability to keep me mesmerized for hours on end pails in comparison to Skyrim's sweet, snowy call. If it weren't for the random crashes and the game's tendency to simply vanish from time to time, then I may not have come up for air yet. My only complaint thus far (my character is a level 10 Nord fighter) is that the game is horribly unstable. It may run for 15 minutes before seizing up, or it may run for 6 hours. I've had to run in Windowed mode to keep the from locking up my computer completely when it freezes; now, it simply vanishes. The trade-off is that the game's FPS is nearly cut in half. Aah, well, I guess no game can be perfect. This one's as close as I've seen, though.

Congratulations, Ruin! Welcome to married life, with the hopes that it treats you as well as it's treated me.

RTI is going to have to put more into their project than pretty graphics and post-processing effects to compete with VBS2. VBS2's administrative/instructor tools and ability to integrate with other training platforms are robust, to say the least. I would think that RTI has their work cut out for them if they want to compete with BIA in that respect.

Same to you, mates. Merry Christmas. I hope everyone gets to see family and watnot. Unlike me, who is stuck home alone sick, while my wife's family hordes her.

Keep us posted on how this patch affects gameplay, will you? My nephew has Skyrim for his PC, and he advised me not to get it until the memory issues were sorted.

Holy necrothreads, Batman!

I really hope not. The Hitman series is so great, because you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, however you wanted. Blood Money, especially, allowed you a lot of freedom in where you went and what you did. It would be a shame to clobber that game design.

I didn't learn any real-world close-quarters tactics from Ghost Recon. I did incorporate what I learned in police training, into video games (and certainly improved as a gamer), but I can't say that playing Ghost Recon taught or perfected any real-world knowledge on my part. If anything, I'd say that, were one to take typical video game tactics and try to use them in a real-life shooting situation, then he'd probably get himself shot.

Can't wait! *droooooool*

Look here. Be prepared for a lot of math. We had a professional mathematician on the boards at one time who looked over the formulas to make sure I'd done them right (your name escapes me, but you know who you are, and thanks!) so I'm pretty confident that if you have accurate information going into the computations, then you'll get accurate results. Please note that the damage table at the top of the tutorial was done using information on Hornady ammunition, and not default in-game weapons. If you don't want to do the math yourself, then DonMiguel coded a ballistics calculator using the formulas on the linked tutorial. quick and dirty edit: DonMiguel does a fantastic job of explaining the finer points of the math involved in the second link that Wombat50 posted. He does a finer job than I could ever do. =)

I have to disagree with you. The ArmA series is quite optimized, and I've seen BIS games run very well on ancient machines. It's all in how you configure the game on your machine. I've got a machine that's several years old, running on 3 gigs of RAM, and ArmA 2 runs quite well. It's all in how you configure the options on your machine. GordoViper would be a good person to seek if you're having trouble; I've seen him get fantastic performance on some really, really slow machines.

You're undeniably correct, in my opinion. CoD and MoH have done well because they've stuck to the roots of their success. Ghost Recon hasn't done as well, because UbiSoft hasn't stuck to the roots of Ghost Recon's success. If and when the suits at Ubi figure that out, then Ghost Recon may once again dominate the field.

The game still sounds mediocre to me. Floating text that tells the player to turn around? I'm sure we've seen that before. Highlighted enemies, ammo count, etc? That's old-hat as well. It seems that Ubi has simply slapped several concentric circles around the player's weapon, and put HUD information there, whereas it's normally in the corners of the screen. The Nine Levels of Ho-Hum, as it were. Cinematic moments where the player doesn't have control aren't necessarily a bad thing, unless they're overdone or used at times when the player would really rather have control (a la CoD: MW2 or BIA: Hell's Highway) but such moments certainly shouldn't be a focal point of the game. All in all, there still really isn't anything being said about FS that makes me think Ubi may have finally gotten it right.

I wouldn't put too much faith in that report just yet. There was an instance when I went into GameStop and asked if I could pre-order an EverQuest II expansion, only to be told that the game had been cancelled. On the flip side, if GR:FS really is cancelled for the PC, are you really missing anything? I could make you a GR mod with pretty blue rings around the barrel of your gun, if that would make you feel better. I'm sure that we could even find a way to mod the UI so that ammo/magazine count and other pertinent information is displayed on said wispy rings of futureness, to enhance the effect. Then, we'll get someone else to create a mission pack where you run, run, run as fast as you can and shoot everything you see, all the while with someone shouting "MITCHELL! MITCHELL!" in your ear at the most inopportune times, and we'll call it Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (PC). Sound good?

The retail market kept Ghost Recon off the PC? Sorry, Theo, that's complete crap, and you know it. While the geniuses at UbiSoft have (as always) had their heads in the sand, CoD and Medal of Honor have been selling millions of copies on the PC. Ubi could have had a piece of that pie, had the company simply tried to compete. It isn't as if UbiSoft had to come up with a new product line to attain and maintain a sizable market share; Ghost Recon had already obliterated its competition, and it could have continued to do so, if UbiSoft had simply continued to follow the formula that Red Storm created. Instead, UbiSoft elected to butcher and castrate the series, and ignore the very market which gave them their beloved Ghost Recon franchise in the first place: PC gamers.

It's been a struggle that Ubisoft has been losing, ever since they decided to dumb-down the franchise for consoles. GR2 was the death knell for Ghost Recon. The series doesn't have a quality track record. Ghost Recon and its two expansions have a quality track record. Anything after that is rubbish. Wait... does Ghost Recon have a quality track record, or has it been too dry? Which is it? The real gems lay in Matt Benson's interview: Sony Online Entertainment has that same rationale when it comes to competing with WoW. SOE, like Ubi, apparently believe that their product is inferior, and thus incapable of competing for sales during the most lucrative selling time of the year: the holidays. I would tend to agree with the notion that Ubi's product is inferior. I don't even know what to say to this, honestly. The geniuses at Ubisoft don't understand why Ghost Recon was a huge success, nor do they understand why Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are huge successes. Here's a hint: It's not about how many gadgets you can throw at the player in the game. Ubisoft has been all about gadgets and gimmicks ever since they took over, and that's part of why the series has sucked. The main reason the series has sucked, however, is that Ubisoft doesn't understand what makes great shooters great. Ubi should stick to console games like Assassin's Creed. They'll never make a good shooter.

Years ago, I was playing a co-op game w/ SOTOMac on mission 2, and we were trying to do the mission "right", as in killing only who we had to kill, and avoiding contact if at all possible. There were several times on that mission when we laid perfectly still for several minutes each time, waiting for guards to path away from us. In one instance, a guard came and literally stood right on top of me for a short time. We didn't dare shoot at him, because there were quite a few other guards in the area, and if we had shot that one, then we'd have been overwhelmed in short order. We simply laid there and waited for him to move away, and then we continued crawling toward our objective. I still love missions like that, which require you to avoid contact if at all possible, and to be smart about where, when, and how you engage. God, I miss the days of playing GR online, as well as the days of playing VBS1 online w/ Gordo, WardenMac, Whisper, and the rest of those guys. The feeling that as a team, you'd pulled off an incredibly difficult mission was something that the current crop of shooters can't recreate, because they're all about the instant action and big explosions.

The French have never been very good at war in the first place, so why are we still surprised and angry that a French game company can't make a good war game? The best we can hope for is another unsubstantial game that plays like a Jerry Bruckheimer film, and is entertaining for about as long.

There is (or was, at one time) a bug in the rsb format where sometimes the files will only open on the machine that created them. If you used a different OS/image suite to create the images, then there's a chance, however small, that's the issue that you're seeing.

The new banner looks absolutely fantastic! Rocky, thanks for running the best fan site on the web. It's really something that some of us have known each other for over ten years. I still have a Covert Ops mouse pad and a card that you sent me, probably eight years ago.

Something that has helped me is turning on the guides on my digital camera's preview screen, so that I can actually see where the elements of the shot will line up.

I can remember the excitement of getting to play-test WOI for the first time. It was (and is) truly in a class by itself. DonMiguel and his team were very successful in creating a convincing WWII atmosphere, and making Ghost Recon feel more like a WWII game than the modern shooter that it is. Hats off to DonMiguel and his team!