Section 8: Prejudice - MagicPC Edition

[Spectre-7]

Downloading on Steam right now. Anyone else pick this up and wanna shoot some space marines a little later today?

[Lint of Death]

It's tempting at $15, I loved the Section 8 beta from a long while back. Let me know if it's good ;)

[Spectre-7]

Fun game. I'm not at all sad about the $13.50 I spent on it, and I'm usually 60% buyer's remorse by volume. The only thing that's bothering me is that a number of ammo types and perks are unlockable, but it's not at all clear what I need to do to unlock them.

[OrangePulp]

Looks like for most of the stuff you just have to level up; a few at the end require perks, some of which are pretty simple (Money in the banana stand, buy every deployable once).

Game seems fun; now I just need to get in a game where I'm actually on the winning side.

[Lint of Death]

That's good to hear. After getting ripped off by Fire & Sword it'd feel good to spend similar money on something nice. I'll have to see how my paycheck looks in a couple days, since I want to resubscribe to RIFT as well, but I'll put this game on my mental watch list.

[Ravenlock]

I'm definitely interested, though I'm out of town til Sunday so I'll have to make my decision on it after I get back. Will look forward to hearing impressions.

[Spectre-7]

I spent most of the day playing around with bots and getting a feel for it, and I thought it was reasonably fun... then I went online and played with real people, and I find myself a bit less enamored with it. Despite benchmarking reasonably well, it feels like my framerate is bogging down during combat, making targets unusually difficult to hit. It also seems like wherever I go, there are 2-3 snipers on all the surrounding hills just waiting to pick me off.

Might just need to give the game a rest for a bit and come back to it fresh.

[OrangePulp]

I think it's also a game that will be much improved with an actual squad of friends. Also, the game has a fair amount of depth as far as loadouts, how to spend your money, etc., so it's tough to hit the ground running.

Don't forget to use the lockon feature; I think it's kinda lame that it's in the game, but you might as well use it if it's there.

[Squidbot]

Pulling this down on Steam right now.

[Spectre-7]

My opinion has bounced back a bit, and a big part of that is that I've mostly corrected my performance problems. The biggest issue was that I was using the game's automatic settings, which were maybe a little too high for my hardware. It really doesn't help that the built-in benchmarking doesn't seem to perform the same as actual gameplay; I was getting rock solid 60+ FPS in the benchmark, but I could easily get the framerate in-game to drop down under 40 just by looking toward one of the cap points.

Usually, that sort of drop wouldn't be a very big problem, but I accidentally had mouse smoothing on for some reason, and that was causing effective mouse sensitivity to change depending on the framerate. When framerates dropped (say, in complex environs or intense firefights), the mouse sensitivity spiked, making aiming a raging pain in the ass. Unchecking mouse smoothing made that less of an issue, although the mouse still seems oddly erratic, especially whenever I'm piloting a mechsuit.

Last, the Steam in-game overlay apparently has some difficulty closing after exiting Section 8: Prejudice, and I had 2-3 of them running concurrently sometimes. I think that was dinging my framerate pretty bad, so I've been more vigilant about making sure it's actually shut down before starting the game.

With all of that corrected, I'm having a much better time in game. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's good fun and I've been putting some decent time in ever since. I have some philosophical differences with the designers (predominantly automatic weaponry + little cover + lock-on mechanic = some dreary ass firefights), but there's good fun to be had... when you're not getting randomly sniped by someone on a distant hill, at least. More than anything, I just wish the unlocks were a little easier to get a hold of; some upgrades and ammo options seem really far away, and I'm not sure I have the motivation to work for them.

Oh, and there's just too much crap on-screen. I need to turn off a few more read-outs, I think.

Pro-Tip: To check out your current framerate, open the console with the ~ key, type stat fps and then hit Enter. The same command will remove the framerate read-out when you're done.

This babble brought to you by Tequila. Tequila... it's what's for dinner.

[Lint of Death]

I have this game now, wheeeeeee.

[Wasson_]

wow seriously....fuck GFWL.

[c0m3d14n]

wow seriously....fuck GFWL.
i nearly bought this game yesterday to fill the time till brink releases, gfwl was what led me to decide otherwise ;)