alanschu

The AI cheated in the previous Civ games too though. Why only chastize Civ 3 for it?

0111 1001 0110 1111 0111 0101 0010 0000 0110 1011 0110 1110 0110 1111 0111 0111 0010 0000 0110 1001 0111 0100 0010 0001 0010 0001 0010 0001 Seriously, TOMBS points to anyone that knows what I said :D

The only Ultima that I played prior to VI was IV. While I enjoyed it, I was used to the Ultima experience of the later games (particularly VII) so it wasn't really what I expected. I tried playing Ultima I but didn't particularly enjoy it.

I would suspect that MS ponied up most of the lolly.

NEVER!

But these same suits pay their market analysts big bux to determine the cost effectiveness of their solutions. If no one was listening to in game dialogue and just skipping it past, then there'd be no point in wasting the money on voice talent.

But think of the millions of dollars that go to DEA officials that try to combat the evils of marijuana!?!?

I guess console gaming will be your cup of tea now that you'd jumped ship. They're well known for their 50+ hour games

No. But you keep clamouring about how the games aren't like PS:T, Fallout, and whatnot. And the reason why Sin City's artistic design works is because all movies ARE in colour. You can still just as well have the "only key people talk" artistic style, as your coveted Sin City example does just that (although I'd prefer Schindler's List). You're really stretching things if you are trying to claim that Sin City is living in the past because of its artistic style of utilizing black and white. Never mind the graphic novel references To restate, whether or not Voice Overs are here to stay, has no bearing on whether or not games like Fallout or PS:T will be made again. But hey, you're the one that things that secondary characters have voice overs so that we know what they sound like. If a game needs a talking head to let you know that you're coming up to a main character, then I think that that is BAD design. Let the game content tell me it's a main character, don't tip me off by letting me know it's a main character before I've even spoken to the person. I don't need to be held by the hand. Do people play their DVDs with mute and subtitles on?

The typical decision is something like "We have 100,000 left in our budget. We can screen 50,000 men for testicular cancer, with a projected result of saving 500 lives. Or we can send one little girl with a rare brain disorder to California for a treatment which has a 10% chance of letting her live 20 years." Government is full of decisions like this. There is no room for philosophical nicety or time for endless debate. The spotlight goes on you and you have to choose. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Not sure what you're trying to say here, at least with respect to my post you quoted.

Yeah, I got a good chuckle when I read that.

That's nice. Since you put it so eloquently though: "Exceptions prove the rule." <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It was a balance to your sweeping generalisation, not a new proposition to establish the contra position. I was pointing out the flaw in your all-encompassing statement about how you listened to them all (with the concommitant implication that "most people listen to most of them"). Sure the background comments in Deus Ex are good. But think how bad they'd be if they weren't done right. Quality: good. Crap: bad. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Of course. The same goes for writing. Reading a crappy line of dialogue doesn't make it any better than hearing the crappy line of dialogue. I could imagine how it would be if the lines sucked...but why? They didn't! I mean, imagine Game Y if it had sucked! Quality: good Crap: bad applies to everything. I also made my assertion that most people do listen to them since voice acting is not going away. If most people skipped them, then developers and publishers wouldn't add them in! Fortunately KOTOR's wasn't bad. At the same time, I hear many people (not including myself) that love the voice acting in the original Resident Evil. I've never made an assertion that voice acting automatically makes a game better regardless. I want everything to be done quality wise, and considering you already pointed out in a different thread how cheap voice acting is with respect to the total picture of game development, there's no reason why more lines cannot be voiced. Is it a deal breaker? No. A good game is still a good game. A bad game with all the quality voice acting, and minute attention to detail graphically is still a bad game. A good game with those though becomes a great game. Half-Life 2 is a game where I would have been content with the same, emotionless stares with the simple moving mouth for dialogue, much like the original Half-Life. It was a good game. But all the little details going into the characters, that ultimately are just fluff and not necessary to the game itself, contribute to the greater entertainment value of the game and make for ultimately a more entertaining experience. If the game had sucked I wouldn't have cared how realistically the faces were. Fluff doesn't make crap games good, but it does make good games great. Since you like to play the imagination game, imagine System Shock 2 in Source (or Doom 3, or any modern engine). Seeing the drone with the pipe wrench casting off a beautiful shadow down the long corridor while you were out in the open without a weapon of your own would only add to the creepiness of the game. Furthermore, imagine System Shock 2 without the voice overs. I imagine reading those diary logs would have been just as thrilling of an experience. I think a lot of the claims people make about not caring about graphics or sound or voice quality are in a position to make easy assertations because they know that things aren't like that anymore. How many people would jump out of their seats for the ultimate in revolutionary gaming that was mute, and looked like this: That's a screenshot of Ultima IV, and even Ender will vouch that I had never played the game before recently, and I was still able to play through it based on being a huge fan of VI and VII, and hearing how quality IV was. I enjoyed the game, but I know that there's many people that haven't played the game that would not be able to get past the interface nor the graphics. If KOTOR 3 came out looking like that, even if it was the bestest game ever I doubt 1% of the people on these boards that apparently love RPGs so much would even give it a second look. As for Roshan, I think he's living in the past. Considering games like Planescape: Torment don't make the required money for developers to stay in business, then I doubt we'd see one like it again anyways. Imagine if Planescape: Torment did have quality full voice overs though...... I'd also suspect there'd be much less Bastila fans if she wasn't voiced by Jennifer Hale. People staring blankly at a screen while you read a line of dialogue don't illicit that type of emotion. Many of the lines by the romance characters in Baldur's Gate 2 are also voiced, and I don't think it's a coincidence.

Is there any top player or top prospect that isn't rumoured to be on their way to Toronto at some point in any off season? So far they've "just missed" Joe Thornton, Vincent Lecavalier, Pavel Datsyuk, Roberto Luongo, Scott Niedermeyer, Martin St. Louis, Brad Richards, Nikolai Khabibulin, Paul Kariya, Teemu Selanne, Adam Foote, AND Peter Forsberg, in addition to Zetterburg... Seriously, JFJ should have been able to get all of them for "I want to play in Toronto so bad cuz it's teh r0xx0rs!!" discounts. For shame JFJ :D

That's nice. Since you put it so eloquently though: "Exceptions prove the rule."

If you were representative of the entire gaming industry, then we wouldn't have voice overs since no one would bother reading them. If great games are trully loved by all and graphics didn't matter, then why do so many great games fail?

Maybe it's just me and my "socialist" Canadian ways, but I think when we start determining who does and does not live based on their health insurance is pretty weak.

Might as well have secondary characters in movies not talk either. They might deliver poor acting for their parts!

It's possible, if you have some really large stores that sell computer games, to find some of the old Classics series of System Shock 2. If I can still find them (albeit I have to look) in Canada, surely you could find one in Northern California.

Given that I don't directly understand wookie speak, I'm not going to let it play in its entirety. The only dialogues I "skipped" in KOTOR were the alien ones, because I knew they were repetitive and wouldn't have expected otherwise. Having said that, if they were mute and the rest of the world vocal, I would have disliked it. But I love full voice over. It's cool sneaking around in a game like Deus Ex and having the NPCs do random barks to each other. It doesn't work as well in a game without full voice over, because you have to move your eyes off of something that could be important otherwise. I would miss most "banter" in a game like Baldur's Gate, because the barks would be displayed on the same chat channel as every other message in the game. Worse yet, they could pause it, which takes me out of the experience even more. But if you can't accept that some people feel it makes the world more immersive, then there's no real point creating a discussion asking why people like it. In a world where everyone talks, I'm never taken out of the game universe. If people talk sporadically, or only certain people talk, then it tend to take things away from the overall experience, especially nowadays. Sure, it was neat seeing the Talking Heads in Fallout, but I disagree that they make the character more memorable. If you remember a character or think that that character stood out more simply because they actually spoke their lines, then I would say the developers failed with that character. I prefer to remember the characters for their interesting personalities. I also think that talking becomes more important as the experience shifts more towards first person or third person views. KOTOR for example shows the faces of people close up when talking with them. Having them stare blankly at me while I read a line of dialogue would seem silly. I find partial voice overs or the outright lack of voice overs more appropriate in a game with a more distant, isometric view. I don't remember missing voice overs in NWN, but I do remember thinking Anachronox seemed silly to not have them.

As yo your first point, it is impossible to say with hindsight. But let's analyze each component, logically. I have recently played System Shock 2 for the first time, and the graphics are incredibly dated, yet I enjoyed the game for it's story. Additionally, there is no way I will go back and play a crappy game that had revolutionary graphics for 1993. So graphics are not an impediment to a great game reagardless of age, and they do not impel future players to revisit an ordinary game with advanced graphics for the time. Secondly, I disagree that reading is becoming pass

I would have voted caffiene personally. As for marijuana, I wonder if, as someone else mentioned, it's a gateway drug simply because it's illegal. I doubt if it was legal that it would have as much of an impact on trying other drugs. If it does, then I'd say that nicotine and alcohol are much bigger gateway drugs then. Don't know too many people that have tried marijuana that haven't either drank or smoked a cigarette. As for that study Ender, I would like a link (or at least a reference). Should be a good read.

If you own a computer that is at least from the year 2000, you should be able to play the game just fine.

Game runs fine on my Radeon 9800 Pro, Athlon64 3500+ with 1 GB of memory. It's not max details, but it is still probably the best looking FPS I have on my computer (including the likes of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3). Too bad you can't get it to run very well

The pusher. Consumers should quit pushing for better graphics :D As for the "old" games with poorer graphics that we still like, how much of that is because we've already played them? I tried going back and playing some of the original NES games that I missed out on, but I just couldn't get past the bad graphics. But I'm totally into playing 8 hour marathons of Mega Man 2. I think nostalgia affects a lot of our preferences. I don't know many people that have been able to pick up Fallout, today, having never played it, that has played it long enough to see the game that it is. They usually get hung up on the interface and the graphics. Furthermore, reading is becoming passe. We're getting spoiled with spoken lines of dialogue, and when you see Morte's miniature essay for a response after every dialogue option, it can be a bit burdensome. As for games like Planescape: Torment being "terrific," don't forget that we're the specific market audience for it. I have seen many people that have not enjoyed PS:T, as it just wasn't their kind of game. Please don't go completely ignoring their tastes when you make statements such as PS:T being absolutely terrific. I love PS:T as much as anyone else too. As for Lineage, well, Blizzard could put out a game that lookd marginally better than their previous iteration and people would still buy it based on the success of the previous. Lineage came out in 1998. 3D accelerators were still in their infancy, and the other big MMORPG had similar graphics. Once it had the installed base, it didn't need the better graphics because people were already playing Lineage I. I wonder if people would still make the transition if Lineage II had much better gameplay, but WORSE graphics?

Maybe he's just bitter about it. Did you start it?