I just recently ran into an issue where Age of Empires II: HD Edition wasn't correctly registering that I'd completed all the Battles of the Forgotten, so I tried SamRewritten out to unlock the achievement in question and it worked fine.

I like getting achievements as a way to push myself and to look back on so I'll probably only use this to unlock bugged achievements, but I like the idea of being able to re-lock them—could be fun if I'm replaying a beloved classic to lock some/all of the achievements and experience getting them again.

Edit: Huh, I've just discovered an ID clash: Torchlight and Just Cause 2: Multiplayer Mod both have the Steam ID 41500. I've got the former, but SamRewritten thinks I have the latter. :S:

Edit 2: Oh, ok, it also displays Torchlight in the list and I can access the achievements for it, so it shows all possibilities if there's a clash. Interesting.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Juffo-Wup is inevitable.

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo far, I like everything I've heard about this expansion (and the free stuff going with it) except for the basic problem that I hate federations.

Yeah, I'm kinda in the same boat, even as a generally peaceful player who prefers exploration, expansion, development of planets, and building mega-structures to war. It sounds like maintaining a federation will become its own mini-game, which could be interesting (assuming we get better diplomatic interactions), but it'll probably need to come with some more value for being in one.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Origins definitely sound cool, and a great way to make empires even more unique while freeing up space for an extra civic—civics that you could only pick at the start of game and never change were an awkward compromise. While it was generally expected that those civics would get translated over, some of the new ones look really interesting, like Void Dwellers and Shattered Ring.

Now if I could just get that Calamitous Birth origin for a fungoid species, I could finally realize my dreams of playing the Mycon from The Ur-Quan Masters… :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeI don't think I can answer all your questions from the article [External Link]. But some. They tested a mediocre laptop and a gaming PC, e.g. with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. They used a 1000 fps camera (Sony RX100M6) to measure the time from mouse click to change on the screen, locally and with a streaming service.
They measured 25 to 40 ms locally on the gaming PC and 70 to 100 ms on the notebook. The streaming services added: Parsec/Paperspace 5 to 60 ms, Parsec/Amazon 15 to 50 ms, Shadow 10 to 90 ms. (Worst was Liquidsky, 80 to 270).

Thanks for the summary, as I can't read German. :) That is interesting, maybe it'll work fine after all. Guess we'll see when more people get their hands on it to review it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeGerman computer magazine c't has asked people to play games on PCs without telling them they were streamed - and the people didn't even realize. Furthermore, every online game has the same communication lines to cross...

Specialized gaming PCs, or a cheap laptop? Connected with how fast internet? Using a high-quality gaming-oriented router, or the cheap crappy one that your ISP provides? Were these avid gamers, or more casual? What kind of games were they playing? :)

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that there are a lot of variables in this scenario, and a lot of ways to make it look good, where in reality the average consumer might not be able to get the same experience. But hey, maybe I'm wrong and it actually works fine even in less-than-optimal situations. Cool. I'm not interested either way, so it doesn't matter to me. It just seems strange they'd focus entirely on games where any latency would potentially be highly noticeable and don't have any games where a few milliseconds of latency wouldn't really affect the experience. :S:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm not super-familiar with all these games (none of them are stuff I'd be interested in), but aren't they all character-based action-oriented games? Come to think of it, for a streaming service, why don't they have any single player games that aren't action-oriented? Y'know, ones where the slightest input lag wouldn't destroy people's ability to enjoy it? Imagine playing a Civilization game where the fractions of a second of lag don't affect it too much, with the power of a server somewhere to calculate those interminable late-game AI turns. Or any of the many graphically-less-demanding puzzle-type games out there. Those would seem to be a much more natural fit than games where speed and reaction time matter. But I guess some suit at Google thought they wouldn't get the "hardcore" gamers if they didn't offer entirely AAA action games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

As I already use Chrome (and Chromium) I'm not going to be switching, but…interesting? I guess? Maybe it'll help people switching from Windows?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Looks hilarious! Can't wait to try it out with a friend. :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: pbAlso, don't know about cs:go, but tf2 keys are a common 'currency' in game trading. For example game X costs 1 tf2 key etc. Some steam forums are full of that.

Yeah, I don't know about CS:GO as I don't play it, but from what I understand this happening to TF2 would pretty much drop the economy in its tracks. I guess we'll see what happens.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I don't mind the lack of a premade empire since I never use them anyway, and I'm busily trying to finish up a short campaign for an achievement at the moment, but I look forward to trying out the rockin' new features of this DLC. :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments