Aram

This conversation makes me laugh.

I got so pissed off with radscorpions in FO3. It took more ammo to kill one than sixteen soldiers in power armor, and you could kill it with a BB gun if you strafed around long enough. That's really why 1st person shooter RPGs annoy the **** out of me. Early in the game when you do very little damage, it's like playing a shooter in which all the weapons are retardedly underpowered and enemies won't seem to die and don't even react properly when you shoot them. I'd like it if, at least for a long stretch of the game, ammo is scarce but very powerful. Giving someone both barrels is basically an I Win button, but you don't know if you want to waste the ammo when you can sneak around, stare/talk him down, or bludgeon him to death with a hammer.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for a vidjagame version of The Road or even Mad Max. I would rather it was a little more like A Boy and his Dog. That had a character with enough guns and ammo, but it showed him going out of his way to steal some food and actually had a wastelandish feel until it just got weird.

Then it's a good thing I'm always right and you're not!

Bethesda who

I just hope someone making a Fallout game at some point will actually realize that they're making a game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland far into the future. It was easier for me to find food in Fallout 3 than it is for me to find food in my kitchen. You could find enough food in ten minutes to encumber yourself in any given area. Apparently nobody else goes into abandoned stores looking for food, and apparently in the Fallout universe they created food that will never, ever go bad or even stale. Fallout 3 was set, what, 300 years after the fall? Food does not last that long. I did like that in eating old food and drinking water the player finds, one makes a sacrifice by absorbing a small amount of radiation. Unfortunately, because we never actually need to eat or drink in Fallout, and the health benefits are so small as to be worthless, we mostly avoid eating anything like the plague, and leave most of the food where we find it. I'd like to see finding food and conservation of food become an enormous consideration for the player, at least for certain parts of the game. Finding water in the desert should be a task in itself, requiring such gadgets as an electrical dousing rod, portable filtration systems, and sanitization tablets to make the water one finds drinkable. The food one finds that is actually left over from before the bombs should almost always be inedible--instead, the player gets nourishment from finding mutated cactus fruit and by killing rats and dogs for meat. Bringing a companion should be a sacrifice not because they drain XP but because you have share your food with them. An animal companion like a dog or a Brahmin could help you find food, or help carry the load, or become food in an emergency, but you'll also need to feed it. The player could resort to cannibalism if desperate, but doing so would have an impact on his karma, even brand him permanently. This shouldn't be such an affair that it cuts into gameplay, but sort of mixed into it. Perhaps, during certain parts of the game, it could be the player's only consideration, just to show how bad things are. Say, at the beginning of the game, the player is wandering the Nevada desert in search of New Las Vegas, or half way through, the player is driven out into the middle of the desert, beaten, and left for dead, and has to find his way back. It's also easier for me to find ammunition in Fallout 3 than it is for me to find ammunition in a gun store--and that's even before there was a shortage. Reloading ammunition. J.E. make me happy again please.

I found the gun selection in Fallout 3 to be a series of horrible mistakes. Also the repair system was ludicrous. I like the concept of needing to maintain your weapon, but you shouldn't need to scrap an identical firearm every time you want to perform routine maintenance on a firearm. That's just dumb.

Get that plastic modern crap outta here. I recently acquired a 1957 vintage Colt Python. Original old style grips, and four digit serial number.

JE you're a great guy with great skills and you're gonna do great.

What about the guns

I don't like it when games make handguns as viable as long arms at the same tier of progression. In a real gun battle, the only time you should be using a handgun is when you're fighting your way to the nearest rifle. One way that I've always thought handguns could still be useful that no RPG has ever implemented is to make areas where a handgun is the only thing you can carry. A particular city has a restriction on firearms and body armor, and if you walk around with either the guards will immediately arrest you. But with some diplomacy or some bribe money or a favor the player can obtain a concealed weapon permit from a politician or sheriff. Or he can simply hide a firearm from sight, sneak by the guards, and hope nobody tries to search him thoroughly. Either way, the player is basically restricted to plain clothes and handguns, or with a perk or the right outfit might be able to conceal a sawn-off shotgun or small SMG. Handguns would be viable weapons all the way through the game, as would newer and better handguns, and wouldn't just be miniature versions of larger weapons with inferior stats. This could also open the door to an extra "concealability" rating on weapons, as well as a concealability rating on the outfits the player wears as well as on the player himself. A high strength, high endurance character in a heavy coat might be able to conceal a long-barreled .44 Magnum, but a petite diplomatic character in formal wear couldn't tuck away anything larger than a Derringer without some major printing.

The sequels were rather mediocre but I consider the original Broken Sword to be one of the best adventure games ever made. Possibly in the top ten.

Another thing about the 80s and 90s is that their action heroes were nowhere near as cool as they were in the 60s and 70s. Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen, Toshiro Mifune, and the like, were much, much better than any of the Schwarzeneggers, Stallones, (god help us) Chuck Norrises, who were frankly uninteresting and interchangeable. The 80s also managed to ruin most of our best action stars--Lee Marvin got second billing in a Chuck Norris film, Charles Bronson got stuck in a series of horrible Death Wish sequels, and even Clint Eastwood for a long time largely made crap. Anyway, this thread needs more clips. Lee Marvin, cleaning that **** up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSXjiEOnQtE...feature=related (the whole movie is on there, actually) Steve McQueen and Peckinpah: The Wild Bunch shoot-out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUhUAa3y4rE...feature=related Warren Oates trying to get across the border with a severed head: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SCBu7DUIdE

As much as I like Hard Boiled, every time I see that really awesome one-long-take, perfectly choreographed hallway scene in the hospital, I have to think how much better it would be if someone had actually shown those two actors how to properly hold and fire a weapon, how to clear a room, how to hit a tactical reload. Instead I see no reason to actually believe their bullets would be hitting bad guys when the bad guys' bullets aren't hitting them except that they have top billing and the rest are extras.

The eighties were a cesspit, sure, but a brief period that lasted through the late sixties to the mid-seventies produced some of the best films ever made. Sam Peckinpah basically created the ultraviolent gunfight sequence and movies like Bullitt and the Italian Job and the French Connection both defined the car chase sequence and set a standard for it that has never been equaled. The eighties were more or less ****, however.

I've always preferred some degree of realism or at least believability in action scenes. John Woo type stuff tends to piss me off as much as it entertains me. When the violence gets too cartoonish, it loses me. I utterly loathed Shoot 'Em Up. Terminator 2 is my favorite "dumb" action movie, and maybe it doesn't even qualify. Otherwise I prefer movie shoot-outs like Ronin, Heat, Collateral, and the Way of the Gun, in which there's actually some reason to believe that the hero could come out triumphant (or not) because of proper handling and superior tactics. I'm really, really looking forward to Public Enemies, the new Dillinger movie directed by Michael Mann, because as far as I'm concerned Mann is the current master of the cinematic gunfight. A Heat style shoot-out with Tommy guns would be pure magic.

I can think of many, many games with sex in them--some in the usual fade to black way and some very explicit. In some of them, it's even well done and adds to the story or gameplay experience. It's obviously very possible to do. I can't, however, think of many games that would be made better by adding sex where sex is absent. The medium is probably better off for the fact that developers don't have someone insisting they add sex and romance for no reason. They say that when a movie producer reads a script, if there isn't sex or at least a love interest by the tenth page, he throws it out. It's one of those great stupidities of the medium. I shudder to think of the horribly written, embarrassing to sit through bull**** we'd have to suffer if game studios demanded the same thing. If there's some very good reason for a love scene to be in a game, there's nothing stopping a developer from putting one in. If there's no good reason, there's nothing forcing a developer to include one. It's fine the way it is.

They have learned nothing from me. I am a failure.

I lost all faith when I read SMGs are "always dual-wielded." They may as well throw in some desert eagles and some oicws and some pancor jackhammers and call it a day.

You're Mr. Pink!

I'll see your robert Johnson and raise you a SON HOUSE SKIP JAMES AND BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON

This is Bob "Tonsillitis" Dylan. He has a funny voice and and a couple of really awful albums but he's the greatest thing that ever happened to music. This is Sam "Bloodbath" Peckinpah. He is the manliest and therefore greatest director to ever live. Watching a movie by Sam Peckinpah makes you grow chest hair. It's a documented fact. He brought to cinema what is known as a bit of the old ultra-violence. He didn't invent cinematic violence, but he refined it to a bloody art. Behind the camera he was crazy, coked up, drunk, and extremely abusive to his actors--Awesome Dudes all. Randolph Scott, Charlton Heston, Warren Oates, William Holden, Robert Ryan, Jason Robards, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Harry Dean Stanton, and even Bob Dylan. Lee Marvin, the king of Awesome, was never in a Peckinpah movie, but legend has it that Lee Marvin was the one who gave him the script for The Wild Bunch. Sam Peckinpah is the cylinder pin around which all awesome dudes revolve and he is the hammer which fires them. As you can clearly see here, here, and here, Sam Peckinpah was a true connoisseur of violence. Not Matrix style backflipping in black trench coats BS, not retarded torture porn like we have now. Just pure manly ultra-violence.

don't talk **** about quiche

I'm extremely tired of this being a debated issue. They should absolutely be able to marry. Anyone who thinks otherwise, and especially anyone who has voted otherwise, is an ass.

but somebody said they would!