mark2000

I'm surprised that people here have only found out about the Metal Gear Solid series just recently. You guys might want to check out the 4th game if you have a PS3. It's a pretty good stealth game and is WAY better than Conviction as a stealth game. The game itself is quite heavy on the story segments though with cutscenes that can last for a little over 30 minutes and the story itself can get pretty crazy most of the time. It can also get very confusing if you haven't followed the story since MGS1. It's still a very fun game overall though and the online multiplayer can get pretty interesting at times because of the SOP system you can use to keep track of your teammates. If you guys are interested, MGS3 is a PS2 game set within the cold war and is basically a prelude to the series' entire story. A camouflage system is also used there in the form of different patterned BDUs and facepaints. Since the premise is a Solo Sneaking Mission within the Russian mountain wilderness, you also need to hunt down local flora and fauna for food to keep your stamina at peak condition. I suggest playing the "Subsistence" version of the game though because that one brought a lot of improvements to the original game as well as an adjustable third-person camera similar to MGS4. The story can get pretty crazy there too but not as frequent as 4 though. So yeah. If I'm being completely apathetic towards everything Ubisoft has pulled out of its sleeves about Future Soldier, that's because I know a ton of games that have done the same Sci-Fi features before but in a much MUCH better and more entertaining way. The Metal Gear Solid series are just some of those games. By the way, MGS also used to have a form of Optic Camouflage (aka invisibility gizmo) in the story but has just recently steered away from using them on living subjects by the 4th game because the technology apparently gave users a very small amount of radiation sickness. (You can still unlock it as a special item in-game though lol). And just to reiterate how crazy the story can get: The 'Mother of the US Special Forces' during the cold war uses a sawed-off M16 fitted with a drum magazine that never runs out of ammo and she fires it with only one hand.......... So yeah. That's crazy enough by itself and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

You, sir, just made my day. AWESOME!

It's called a bad/lazy/uncreative attempt at gameplay balancing. It makes as much sense as having to break someone's neck just to be given the liberty to shoot multiple targets in quick succession.

Looks like I'm gonna be that guy from Crysis again. I hope Jason Statham is in on the joke too. Will it come with the Narcom again? Because everyone suuuure loved that one! Enough fooling around though. Seriously, how about if all of us here promised right now to expect nothing from this game but a cheesy and campy action flick? It'll definitely save us from a lot of headaches later on. Ok, maybe that's a bit too harsh. Who knows? Maybe the story, pacing, and atmosphere this time will actually be pretty good. I'm just saying that all of us here should finally realize right now that [GR] is in the past and there is no way in hell that Ubisoft can (or will) even attempt to recapture that magic from the old days. Let's just...take what we can get from this and find something fun about it (assuming that the game turns out to be good anyway). From a gameplay standpoint though, I'm still on the fence on what to expect from this game judging from past experiences from the most recent clancy games. GRAW2 was pretty fun (and it still is actually) but I always had to turn the volume down just to avoid any painful effects from the incredibly cheesy voice-acting. Rainbow Six Vegas on the other hand was nothing but a heavily scripted corridor shooter that was as bland as they could come and with the advent of COD4 which is basically within the same genre, I just couldn't find any more reason to play this game again. The fact that actual gameplay footage is non-existent yet doesn't help in formulating my expectations either. In conclusion, I'm just going to shrug this game off for the moment given the lack of information. However, I must say that the recent trailer looks nice in showing off the new features and if the dev team is sophisticated enough into weaving these things properly into the levels instead of blatantly shoehorning them in crappy scripted sequences that will do nothing but present them as useless gimmicks, we might actually end up with a pretty good game here. If the team that did Assassin's Creed 2 managed to learn from past experiences and actually IMPROVED the product by a pretty good margin, there's no reason why this team can't do the same thing.

Wow. That's pretty short even for a Designated Marksman. Then again, not every building can cover an 800 yard radius so I guess it makes sense. =/

At what ranges are we talking about here approximately? 600-800 yards or closer?

I wasn't really asking what snipers do these days as much as what kind of gear they usually carry around. Nevertheless, any extra bit of useful trivia is always welcome for me.

Thank you for the replies. I've been running my own little exercises using simulators these past few days and while I'm already used to the brute force number crunching, I'm slowly coming to realize that there's just no comparing to weather/ballistics software when it comes to pinpoint precision. Seriously... even just 50 feet of altitude difference can really screw up a good adjustment. Even mil-dot range estimating can be a real killer since I've had A LOT of experiences where I get errors by about 60 yards just because I screwed up my readings by 1/20th of an inch. 1/20th!! *sigh* All of that is just part of the job, I guess. I'm just worried that with all the extra ballistics software I've been adding to my exercises lately, I may already be relying way too much on technology without even realizing it so I just had to ask about this. I'm actually glad to hear that the extra gear is really worth carrying out in the field.

I was wondering what are the more common practices that snipers/spotters do in the field these days when preparing for their shots. Do they carry range cards, memorize it all from the get-go, or are portable ballistics calculators more common in the field these days? Mil-dot ranging, scopes with ranging reticules, or laser rangefinders? Portable weather monitoring instruments, or the age old practice of personally getting in sync with mother nature? Calculators or mental number crunching? <-- (I just realized that this part alone is worth having an extra person around. )

Still playing the old SP missions while using all my favorite sniper mods. I don't play for more than 2 hours though because when the urge to play on a 2000+ meters sized map appears again along with the realization that I suck too much to make my own...well...let's just say depression kicks in very quickly. >_>

Ah. I see. Considering how huge that thing was, I had a feeling something like that happened. Thanks anyway.

In the News Section, there used to be an article about a huge weapons mod compilation complete with a PDF file just below the article containing Rahnmans Weapons Mod for GRAW 2. Now I can't see it anywhere for some reason. Can anyone please confirm this? I'm sorry a can't give a specific name since I never really took interest in it until just recently after it disappeared.

People already learned their lesson after Bioshock and Mass Effect. This just goes to show how backwards Ubisoft has finally become. Besides, even Bioware had to scrap this "must always be online" scheme before release. Ubisoft sure has balls (or just titanically stupid) if they think they can pull this off.

Parabellum's tutorial was really helpful in making me understand the game's damage model and velocity formulas but there are a few of his explanations that I could never understand on my own. 1. Exactly what is the value being used in 'x range'? Is it the same value you put in the weapon's 'Max Range'? One other thing: How would you know what the actual velocity of the bullet at that given range is? Is there an existing real life document somewhere that has recorded the velocity of each and every ammo type at certain distances? 2. I'm sorry if this may sound incredibly stupid but I just can't understand what the idea being expressed by the sentence above is. Would someone be so kind as to explain/rephrase it for me? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a feeling that this game will be filled to the brim with the same old quirks from the teams that made the recent R6 and GR games, namely: - Mexico is the new Iraq; and - Enough Black Hawk Down rip-offs to put a Bruno Mattei movie to shame.