alanschu

What does he have that requires you to kill him?

I don't think you have to kill . Though I usually get him too because he has it coming!

Deraldin is teh winnar!

Call of Duty 2 is 1b. Well, they're both pretty interchangeable. We'll go tie at 1 F.E.A.R. is the other one on my list as well. I'm importing Fahrenheit as we speak, so it's missing from the list. I didn't find there to be that huge of a selection at the moment. My list was: 1. Call of Duty 2 1. Civilization 4 3. F.E.A.R. 4. Fable: The Lost Chapters 5. Quake IV 6. Farcry (cheap alternative I've been meaning to get) 7. The Movies (may not be released though) I honestly couldn't think of much else this year. Last year it was Pirates and Bloodlines, in addition to Far Cry (though I didn't get Farcry).

doo do doo DO doo dooo doooo do do do, do do do, do do do, do DO do DO doo

I think you might be able to get away without killing him by being cheesy or discrete or something. I've never tried though and I took great pleasure in killing him because yes, he was annoying

Which is unfortunate. I like games for more than just the graphics. Graphics are a nice "addition" and I certainly don't mind them. A great game with great graphics is better than a great game with poor graphics. But I'd much rather play a great game with poor graphics than a poor game with great graphics. I'm not sure how it really takes away from immersion, as I still don't consider games to be exceptionally "lifelike" in any way. Even with the new consoles coming out. The best thing to keep me immersed is to provide a quality game that keeps me hooked. To each his own however.

I actually wouldn't mind a movie (if done well) set after Judgement Day. Terminator 2 is the best of the three IMO, with Terminator, then T3.

Hopefully we bounce back against Nashville. Here's hoping Peca can make a return. It sucks having two of your best PKers (Reasoner and Peca) out with injuries.

I think you trailed off mid-sentence there. And you can still make judgements as to how much of the RAM is allocated to video. Those decades worth of programs still work on current unified memory architectures that exist in some PCs today though. Making a transistion to unified memory wouldn't render previous works obsolete. There is an issue with sharing video memory in current computers, but it's not memory allocation nor is it backwards compatibility.

I've still been meaning to play it, since I was a huge fan of the original. If I ever stumble upon it I'll likely get it since it'd be like $5.

Except there was no reason for you to share that information. Anyways moving on. My friend says he really enjoys it and considers it way better than Civ 3 and Civ 2. It's on my Christmas list at #1a so here's hoping :D

The one I got wasn't cloth. It was plastic. At least I'm pretty sure that was NWN. I can't remember. Could be IWD. Ultima had the awesomist maps! So soft!

I can quickly think of one off the top of my head. I know there are two people that die, but you can find a way to not kill one of them yourself, so "you" have still only killed two. The funny thing is, I could've sworn that I heard Warren Spector say that one of the biggest gripes he had about Deus Ex was that you had to kill THREE people, but I can't think who they are!

Hype takes marketting dollars. This increases the costs even more. The main reason why I've never really complained about the cost of software in recent years is because I too have noticed that, adjusted for inflation, they are much cheaper than they were a decade ago. The problem with the games industry now is that games need big time sales to recoup their costs. The development of the vast majority of games is supported by the sales of one or two big sellers. It's a gamblers market, where money is invested in a product with the hopes of it being a bigtime seller. It's part of the reason why many (including game developers) have begun to fear a regression in innovation, and more rehashings of the more established genres. It also means the death of the smaller developer, as the only way to truly compete is to have tons of money to make a game that appeals to the masses. Unfortunately the masses has a fixation on art content, which is where the bulk of the cost is. A game could be flawless in every sense of the word, but whether you like to admit it or not, if it has subpar graphics it will struggle sales wise. This is because at the current cost of games compared to the development of the games, the game must appeal to the masses in order to make money. Knowing people that do work in the games industry, higher wages is likely not a big part of the equation. The games industry is not an industry to be in if you're looking to make money. To answer Darque's question, the biggest increase in production costs is the excessive amount of art content. Art teams have become huge and expensive, and the only way to truly compete in a market of the masses is to have nice graphics. It's the easiest selling point of a game, and something the general public is interested in. In odd cases you'll get games like The Sims that are truly unique and appeal to traditional non-gamers (more women than men play The Sims), but those are odd. And even then The Sims was virtually cancelled on numerous occassions because it was preceived as being too risky. I'm looking forward to Spore, which utilizes algorithms for its art content and its physics model determines appropriate animations based on the physical structure of the animal. This alone will reduce the number of artists required on the game, and hopefully find a way to severe costs. Add this in to the fact that they hope to use user-created content to populate the various worlds, costs also begin to shrink.

There's a ton of variations on lethal weapons. Plus, if you want, it's very possible to go through the game killing I think only 2 or 3 people. And even then you can kill them in ways that don't even require weapons. Deus Ex is probably one of the most engaging stories that I've ever played, and there are many parts where I figured the game would easily be wrapping up, only to find out there was more game to come!! The ability to customize your character goes way beyond "lethal vs. non-lethal"

Oh, they tried, they tried. Remember Deus Ex: Invisible War? It had the exact same coding for Xbox and PC; but while this caused a great game for X-Box standerds, it was crap for PC standerds, and also gave loads of framerate issues for many PC users due to crappy X-Box optimisation... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I mean like with an emulator. Stick the Xbox disc in your drive and play it on the PC. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I would suspect that the code is not robust enough to worry about variable CPU speeds, memory, video card, etc.

The thing is, computers are capable of still working regardless of having 128 MB of memory or 1 GB of memory. Why does variable memory affect unified architectures more than the distinct architectures we have now? What you said is definitely an advantage of the constant parts of a console, but I don't see how it supports a unified memory architecture.

Good on paper. They've certainly been underperforming so far IMO.

The Core was a HIGH-Larious movie from a scientific perspective

The only reason why I secretly hope for the failure of the XBOX is because of Epiphany

Ovechkin is who I'm cheering for for the rookie of the year. I find his feats more impressive than Sid the Kid (who is playing well too) given he has a stunning lack of talent on his team. I'm not sure how Crosby would do if the situations were reversed.

I agree that T3 was much more comedy than the other ones. In my encounters, the only ones that really liked it were the ones that liked the first two.

I read somewhere that these courses dont really teach about hardware and software and just concentrate on using the most up to date equipment at the time. This is fine except once you graduate yoru knowledge is probably obsolete. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's pretty much what Buchanan said.

What Game Development University do you go to Kaftan? And what precisely do they teach you there? I've spoken with John Buchanan of Electronic Arts, and he basically said that EA has poor histories with typical graduates from schools dedicated to dame development. It seems as though he has the impression that they didn't do too well once a shift to new hardware came into effect. To be fair, he made these comments while giving a discussion to a CompSci department at my University. He did say that some are good though, and those were generally the ones that also offered graduate programs (a bizarre correlation IMO, but maybe it means the school is more academic rather than vocational??). In any case I'm not sure where you got your information from regarding PC "dominance." I'm a PC fanboy and don't even own any modern consoles because I hate them, but consoles totally dominate the market from the information I have heard (including information coming from Electronic Arts, and to a lesser extent Bioware).