Well on the PC version anyway, you press use on a player (like you would to revive them) and you give them $100 each press. And I think FF is off, not sure if it can be turned on or not.

Just finished my first Bug Hunt game today, was great fun! Only thing that would have made it better would be if my team mates didn't have the upgraded Pulse Rifle sound...

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Add me on Steam for A:CM play!

Ps3 allows you to share money too. I am loving the new patch fixes and bughunt! This should have been how the game was released.

To transfer funds to another player on PS3 you have to get close enough to point your weapon at them until you're prompted to press the O button. Each press transfers $100 to the targeted player. It can be done fairly quickly, but it can be difficult if the person is moving around, which is why a mic & headset for coordinating team actions (and keeping tabs on the status of your teammates' health, ammo supplies, available funds, etc.) is essential.

For example, you've given nearly all of your funds away, then run out of ammo and can't afford to buy more. If your teammates don't protect you and you're killed, you won't have enough funds to buy back into the game, or be able to help them reach the next objective. Your only option will be to wait until your teammates suppress the threat and you respawn with full health and ammo, or start the game over again should they fail.

I've yet to clear any of the missions mainly due to ineffective planning and coordination amongst players, which eventually leads to disaster as the difficulty level increases. Suppression of successive waves of enemies is critical to survival and a primary objective for winning the match. If everyone isn't playing for the objective as a unit, utter chaos will eventually ensue, and it ain't pretty!

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GySgt Gustafson, Dru R.
Callsign: Mud Shark
A06/TQ0.0.32122E1

I've found that teamwork is essential for the marines on most missions. I have to constantly watch out where they are, as one moment, we're headed toward a survival objective, the next, I'm opening the door to grab the sentry gun, then pounced on by aliens with no sign of my team mates.
Of course, my team mates could also be annoyed at why I didn't turn the corner with them and wandered off on my own!

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Weyland Yutani Corp. Bio-Weapons Division - "Superior Weapons through Superior Genetics"

Exactly! The way this game plays seems to demand that players stick together, as well as plan strategies and execute tactics in a more coordinated manner than some other multiplayer FPS games. I think verbal communication is also a more important consideration in this game than in others, where you can play for the objective and support your teammates without needing to talk much, if at all.

If somebody needs to go do something without giving at least a brief heads up to fellow teammates, things can go sideways in no time if your mates aren't in the vicinity to cover you while you're occupied hacking open doors, activating suppressor beacons, carrying/setting up sentry guns, fetching ammo, etc. I've only played a couple of hours or so in Bug Hunt so far, but this sort of thing happened too often, and it always ended badly. Not fun...

Pointless background chatter in a game can be annoying and is why most headsets have a mute option, but even brief exchanges of critical information, with some form of ID (i.e. callsigns) between players so you know who it is, where they are, and what task they're performing, could really take this game to another level in terms of simulating realistic squad combat action, not to mention make it a lot more enjoyable to play with human-controlled squad mates. That's how I'd like to be playing this game, anyway!

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GySgt Gustafson, Dru R.
Callsign: Mud Shark
A06/TQ0.0.32122E1

Well after procrastinating for long enough i decided to pick up ACM now that it's come down in price a wee bit.

I have to say after all the negative criticism and poor reviews, I'm really surprised at how much I'm enjoying it...I'm even finding the campaign a bit of a challenge on the rookie level!
Granted I'm playing the patched version and i have no experience with the game...but never the less it's much better than i expected.

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Pt S. Ellis
A01/TQ2.0.12145G1

Trust me....it wasnt so pretty pre-patch.

But it was never ugly or broken, never!

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We can't afford to let one of those bastards in here.

Exactly.

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Steve
Corporal in 69th Regt. 1st Batt. Homer’s Heroes.

"I'd like to die at the age of 80 in my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a girl's mouth around my c**k."

Finished this on Soldier- now playing on the Hardened difficulty post-AI patch and I'm getting my arse handed to me about 10x as often/fast as playing on Soldier/pre-patch.

I notice clearly that Xenos don't form an orderly queue to eat 10mm, and swarm you more readily than before, making target priortising a life or death choice....Plus they take more damage to waste, move faster, take cover at range (something I'd not spotted previously) and come at me from more angles.

So, a real challenge....I think Ultimate Badass is unlikely to get more than a cursory "Whoops-dead again" run at, assuming I make it through on Hardened.

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2nd Lt Jon "Jaylo" Lopez
A11/TQ1.0.72144E1
USCM Quality Assurance Division- Aerospace and Space Products- Earth
"Checklists Save Lives- No Service Stations at 30,000ft"

Tell me about it. After I got splattered all over the blast door just before leaving the Sulaco (well, trying to...) about 5 times in a row I kinda gave up on Hardened, at least for now. That's the first serious fight... o_0

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Yeah, it was never the "SHITTEST GAME EVA!!!!" that's been bandied about. There have been worse over the years (someone claimed A:CM was worse than Big Rig or the N64 Superman - really???).

But critical success does not mean everyone will love a game, just as a critical pounding won't make everyone hate it. Of course, I should say "shouldn't" there, as a lot of people who haven't even played some of the games they criticise say they're rubbish!

Mass Effect 3 was critically acclaimed, yet one fan took his complaints about the ending to the Federal Trade Commission, and online outrage and complaints got a new ending as DLC.

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Weyland Yutani Corp. Bio-Weapons Division - "Superior Weapons through Superior Genetics"

I should really bite the bullet and buy Mass Effect 3 without waiting for all the DLCs to be available - before someone goes and spoil that ending for me.
Something tells me I'll love it, too...

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Play through with or without the DLC if you like, but 3 really is totally awesome.
The main DLC for ME-3 is the 'extended' ending, but that merely contains some extra quick cutscenes and a little bit more dialogue to cover up what some perceived to be plot holes (which I already filled with imagination and what details they gave me), but the overall 'thing' remains.
You're not really missing out if you don't have it.

Personally, I quite liked the ending as it felt realistic, rather than the grandiose epic LotR-scale that everything is trying to emulate. It seemed in keeping with the slightly more adult edge that the whole series has had.

If buget is a concern, you can get all three games for about £25 off Origin. I heartily recommend the über-ultimate collectors editions on all three, though. You get soundtracks and art books and comics and 'stuff' in both the digital and actual versions.

Then again, I freely admit I've become a Mass Effect fanboy - I even bought the playing cards and a Hoody with the N7 logo and the stripe down the sleeve!

Haha! *points and snerks* Fan-boy! Fan-boy!!

Yeah, like I can throw stones from my glass house.


Budget's not the problem, really. It's just that I discovered with ME1 and Dragon Age 1 that some of that DLC could be played independently from the story, but more of them added characters. And I wanted to make sure I played the campaign with ALL the characters available at the same time. If only to see all the interactions and everything.
The thing is, I hate replaying through a whole game just to experience a handful of extra cut scenes and bits.

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Most of the DLC is extra missions, really. These are accessible from most saved games, unless your only save is right at the end mission. I found this out to my detriment.
Unlike Dragon Age: Origins, you can't open the game and just jump into the DLC.
The trick here is to keep multiple saves as you go, rather than overwriting the same single save-point.


In DA:O, I didn't really think much of the new characters at all. I have seven or eight different characters and still find myself using the same few companions, with only one or two differences and variations on how I treat each one. Leliana is almost always my love interest, although my mage is a dirty dirty bastard and likes him some Morrigan!!

With ME-2, I found they already had SO many companions to choose from, half of them were redundant. Strangely, those I hated were core characters like Tali and Liara. The newer ones were generally cooler (Mordin, Miranda, Jack). Only Garrus and Ashley (I prefer to kill Kaidan) stayed with me.


Oh, I hear you.
I've played completely through as a pure Paragon and am re-experiencing as a Renegade über-bitch, as almost every dialogue will be wildly different and even different missions are available to you.
But really there are so many different bits depending on your options that, if needs be, it's sometimes easier to just watch a load of YouTubes.


I'd still say that ME is probably THE best game I've ever played, to date.

It's certainly one of the best, at least. Excellent balance of gameplay, story, background, character interaction...

And I NEVER use only one saved game spot - usually I cycle through 4 or 5 at least. Harks back to my early days as a gamer on Amiga - or even the old Thompson, when saving meant using a tape recorder and took 2 or 3 minutes! ^_^


Anyway, we're getting dangerously off topic here. How 'bout them Xenos, huh?




*lightbulb*

Oh... Sports team... The Wey-Yu "Xenos" against the USCM "Badasses"... o_0

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Sorry, but they had SIX years. Not six months. Six... years... That's nearly the entire lifespan of the XBox360 and PS3. Do you really think they aren't to blame? Ignoring the outright lies Randy Pitchford spun like a spider, how many other games have come out since those systems hit the market that didn't have the glaring flaws that show a complete disregard for QC like A:CM did?

If they gave Gearbox yet another extension, how many more would they have asked for after that one? And the next one? When do you as a company out to make a profit tell your contractor that, "enough is enough, finish this project right now or we'll take legal action." Would you not want to see a return on your investment if you've been waiting for six years for a return on it and the contractor you've hired keeps delaying over and over? This isn't even considering that Gearbox managed to finish up THREE other games while developing A:CM. They didn't even do most of the work on A:CM during those six years and sub-contracted out work to lower overhead code farms like Timegate. What kind of business model is that? Acting as a middleman for game development isn't exactly a winning strategy.

Pretend you're a would be home owner who has paid a contractor to build a house for you and the contractor keeps delaying completion of your house yet finds time to work on other houses that it started building after yours. At what point do you say "give me my house now or else?" Then imagine you get the house and you find out it's worse than you imagined and not only is that the reality but the company you paid to build the house didn't even build most of it. Most of it was built by sub-par QC contractors.

psst, Gearbox's Aliens: Colonial Marines was cancelled in October 2009, at the same time as Obsidian's Aliens RPG. A new game was negotiated following a more Call of Duty gameplay structure and given the same name.

Contracting smaller studios to work on components is widely used in the industry, it isn't some dirty secret or trick. Before I switched to mobile, the studio I worked at, contract work was it's bread and butter, In 5 years I worked on 7 different games, making levels, props and characters. Sometimes the process was smooth, with clear goals, sometimes the project was a mess, with constantly changing styles and gameplay requirements. I wonder what camp A:CM falls into?

Pretend you are building a house for someone, you are excited, it's everything you want in a project. Just as you can see the house getting close to completion, the client decides he doesn't want this beautiful house anymore, he wants an apartment block, because they can get more tenants that way. The house you been building is torn down and you start again, possibly with a reduced budget to work with as you are desperate for work. As you build, the client keeps changing the arrangement of rooms, suddenly wants to add dedicated bathrooms for women. You know the changes the client wants don't work, the style doesn't fit the neighborhood, but they are the client. You try and steer them to your ideas, but it doesn't work.

Meanwhile, the other house you have been working on has been a joy to the client, and the working process was smooth. They want another, even bigger house, and will pay well.

How enthused are you going to be working on that apartment block that you know is all wrong, for peanuts, built on the rubble of the house of your dreams?

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A11/TQ1.0.32150E1 Murphy, J - Covert recording headcam. There is no flashing red light when you are on Kona-Cam
Weyland-Yutani: Their projects are intentionally full of bugs. Avoid!

Using that analogy, we're not the house owner, Sega is.
We're just the person renting the house after it's been built, so aren't the ones who should complain.

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Steve
Corporal in 69th Regt. 1st Batt. Homer’s Heroes.

"I'd like to die at the age of 80 in my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a girl's mouth around my c**k."

BurtKona, love you man

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A Scot, a Predator and an Alien walk into a bar....hilarity ensues



Read it here!

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6120506/1/Aliens-Heart-of-Darkness

I'm not sure why you pointed that out. I never suggested otherwise. And yes you as a renter have a right to complain since you're paying for a service, a house to rent in that case.

yeah but it gets boring 2 months later

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SSgt Kris "Bloodsucker" Kobus, VAS.
A09/TQ2.0.12136E1

You're saying Sega steered them into producing the pile of crap that had a glaring lack of QC and away from a beautiful masterpiece of a title that Gearbox wanted to produce? Supposed sources from within Gearbox that have been confirmed by media outlets haven't hinted at anything like what you are describing, at least last time I read anything about the drama surrounding Gearbox and this game.

And the part about canceling the game early in development and voiding the contract and then negotiating a new one to produce what is essentially the same game with the same name sounds a little absurd. I'm not saying it's not out of the realm of reality or didn't happen because I can't say for sure that it didn't. However remember we weren't even shown anything until development was pretty far along. My guess is because they didn't have much to show for it even after 2-3 years, which is more than the length of time many fully fledged games take to get produced from conception to release. Given that, I'd say your analogy about there already being a beautiful house under construction is far off the mark. Conceptual ideas and conceptual art don't equal a product in development or house under construction. Even if that's true that they had a product well under development that was scrapped, it doesn't change the fact that Gearbox seemed to completely forget what the job of quality control means when it came to the final product.

I'm sure them listing themselves last in the long list of developers that worked on the game wasn't just them being humble. I know lots of companies subcontract out work and that it's not a dirty secret. Just about every single industry out there does this. However, Gearbox headlined this game and got paid to produce it as lead developer. Problem is after playing it, I can see that that was not the reality of the situation. If I pay for a Toyota and yet everything about the overall quality of the vehicle screams Tata Motors, and Toyota is being evasive about what they actually did to build the car while insider employees are dropping a dime on Toyota explaining what little involvement Toyota actually had, I'm going to put two and two together and come to a logical conclusion.

Here's the bottom line. Consumers expect a certain level of quality from a developer with a known track record of producing quality games. Add in that the whole time the game is under development, said developer talks up the game and explains how dedicated they are to the project and how great it's going to be. Game is released and people are charged $50-$60 for a game I wouldn't have paid $20 for from an independent developer. Gearbox had a responsibility to their client and their client's customers to produce a quality product. They failed there miserably. Gearbox has now created one of the worst debacles in gaming history. If they didn't have the time or resources and weren't given enough funding to do this project, they should never have accepted it. Now assuming that Randy Pitchford is a competent businessman, you'd think that they had all of those things since he accepted the contract. Only a complete idiot would do otherwise. My guess is he saw that he could make his money go further if they paid third party developers to do most of the heavy lifting and they could take the leftover money to do other things like work on the Borderlands games and Duke Nuke 'Em.

I love you.

In a modern, gentlemanly fashion, obv.

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Steve
Corporal in 69th Regt. 1st Batt. Homer’s Heroes.

"I'd like to die at the age of 80 in my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a girl's mouth around my c**k."