mkreku

Third mood trailer from Risen: http://www.worldofrisen.de/video_18.htm?PH...162213b0cf98caf They don't really tell you a lot these mood trailers, do they..? All I know by now is that pigs turn around some kind of axis in the middle of their belly and can rotate around their own horizontal axis on the spot..

Maybe the girl had never been outside her shop? Experience is, after all, relative.

Wow.. This amount of self denial is almost mind blowing. The NMA/Codex guys came in and politely asked a few harmless questions (totally without prejudice and full of hope for a good game), and in their innocence they're blasted by profanity and unfair accusations. Yes. I've been a member of the Bethesda boards too. That's exactly how it happened. Just wow.

Divine Divinity reminded me of the old Ultima's in some ways. Except for the excessive fighting. That's the only aspect of it that reminds me of Diablo. There's a lot of clicking involved in getting around the open gameworld.. But the quests were interesting and at times it felt like an adventure game because of their difficulty. If you make it out of the village (where you start), you'll enjoy it. I thought the village was the worst and what most reminded me of Diablo, which is why I always (not so) secretly believe that people who refer to it as a Diablo clone never bothered to play past that damn village. And the village is probably less than 10% of the entire game.

If you can't see the flaw in your own argument, then the discussion might as well end here. You bank your entire argument on your opinion that Planescape: Torment had a great story and that Fallout 3 sucks in every aspect. Well, my opinion states that Planescape: Torment's story wasn't very good and that Fallout 3 had some good moments. What do we do now? Why would it be "sad" if someone happened to enjoy Fallout 3's story? Do you really think you're in a position to judge people like they were less worthy than you to make up their own minds about what to like and what not to? Do you somehow think your opinion outweighs anyone elses opinion? And what's so urgent about ? Or ? Or ? This is what's the most sad about people still stuck in the nineties: they have to make **** up to discredit everything made after the year 2000 and especially Bethesda/Fallout 3. Well, I guess it's much better to create a sandbox world and then put a time limit on it so people can't explore it even if they wanted to.. biggest flaw of previous Fallouts, in my opinion.

Immigrants.

So how was the redhead twins then?

Many? They're niche products so far. I did a quick search on a Swedish site called Prisjakt (a site that collects information about wares, prizes and makes them searchable in a database) and sorted monitors on their picture ratio. 1048 products at the time of the search. 4:3 had 73 hits. 5:4 had 234 hits. 16:10 had 521 hits. 16:9 had 94 hits. (the missing items are probably not defined in the database) Not really scientific or conclusive, but it's a clear indication.

I can't believe the Sharks lost. Again. Talk about cementing their reputation as playoff underachievers.

That's a pretty good list (except the ones I crossed out..). I would probably only want to add Alan Wake (yes, it's supposed to come out in 2009, believe it or not) I am Alive (the teaser is excellent) and Dead Island (dead in the water?). Oh, and I am eagerly awaiting Eschalon: Book II.

I just wish they would make the exploding sequences much, much more rare. I mean, after a while you were exploding ogres.. er.. supermutants by the dozen in every fight. For example, in Wasteland you only got those horrific combat descriptions if you hit a 10 hp enemy for 100 hp damage, in other words, when you totally overkilled something. In Fallout 3 you only had to hit anything with a 10mm pistol and they would explode at random. Also, weapons degradation would work better (in my mind) if it only affected reliability, reload times and perhaps firing rate. Having a 50 damage gun dwindle down to 10 damage after 50 shots is a bit.. I don't want to call it unrealistic, but it's annoying and doesn't add to my enjoyment of the game. It only makes me carry around ten extra exactly similar weapons.

Another thing: Does the map area really have to be a big square? Aren't there better methods of stopping the player from going out of the map zone than by putting up an invisible wall and going "You don't want to go there?" I'd much prefer an asymmetrical map area and "natural" walls. A mountain range, a canyon, a fast-flowing river, way-too-radiated zones, anything is better than invisible walls.

Not quite. I'm saying put more space between those places that were counted as locations on the map (the ones the arrows pointed to), but fill that extra space with other interesting stuff to find and see (the stuff that don't have arrows, like the examples I provided in an earlier post).

The link provided points to a probable overheating problem for the Imac users who've chosen to go with the fastest GPU available for that setup: the ATI 4850. It's not a "driver glitch". Of course, since Apple has chosen not to do anything about it yet, we can only speculate. Still, they have problems. The extreme design is having an entire computer built into the case of a screen. This means it will be much, much more difficult to get an appropriate amount of airflow inside the case, something which the ATI 4850 desperately needs. I'm not even sure the Imac has any fans! My friend who bought the Imac says his screen gets incredibly hot in the upper left corner. So hot you can actually burn your hand on the aluminium frame! He has the 4850.

But it doesn't have to be empty to be barren. If you fill that landmass with a balanced amount of "goodies" to find, exploration becomes fun and rewarding. My beloved Gothic games are a good example of this. Clever world design and plenty of small things to do and find. For example, in a desert you may end up finding an old car, half buried in the sand with a still locked trunk. Or perhaps a few unmarked graves (did you bring your shovel?). Or, like in Fallout 3, sewage drains you can enter. There's plenty of stuff you could fill the world with that would still let that world feel barren and desolate. Of course, if you just make a huge landmass with nothing in it and tell people that it's empty, then it's a waste of time. The lure is supposed to be that there may be something out there for the people who enjoy the exploration aspect of games.

Widescreen monitors are almost always 16:10. If the choice to force 16:9 (which is the format of almost all new TV:s today) isn't consolitis, what is your explanation for it being 16:9?

I think I can hear the Leafs golfing from here.

This! Someone wrote in the previous version of this thread (that is now locked) that more empty space is useless. It's not. No more than having more/longer dialogue to read through. It sets a mood. Fallout 3's world was OK, but I never got that lonely, barren feeling because the world, although relatively vast, was brimful with life and settlements. I would love to be able to walk through a rock desert seeing nothing but swirls of dust and tumbleweed, without having ten arrows indicating that there's an entire village two dunes away..

Yeah, I hate this new trend of having to load "profiles" before starting a game. And "Press any key to start" screens everywhere (that screams of "Press Start to play" that all consoles have). Or badly implemented mouse controls that are inconsistent throughout menus and the actual game. And huge fonts that are designed to work on fat TV:s. And anorectic control schemes for people who can only use their thumbs and two fingers. I'm sure Alpha Protocol will have all of that if only because I just mentioned it.

Of course they'll perform identically if they have the same hardware. My point, however, was that for the price he paid, he could have gotten an i7-powered top-of-the-line computer. What he actually got is even worse than what I am running right now, even though my computer is 2 years old! And they're definitely not less likely to have stability issues. Because of their extreme design (in the case of Imacs) they're actually more likely to have stability issues, especially from heat. http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14901

I hope it is much bigger. Preferably with more space in between the different hot-spots. Also, get rid of those little arrows showing you the way all the goddamn time! And bring back vehicles. Even Wasteland had a car and a helicopter.

This also worked in 1998: Times change.

One of my friends bought a 24" Imac (with an added Radeon 4850) this Monday and it's driving me nuts. I tried to talk him out of it but he just wouldn't listen to me. Anyhow, this is what he could have gotten (he paid over 19000 SEK): This is what he got (same gear as in the Imac, except the case naturally, is worth 12300 SEK): Of course, it looks like this: Still, is it really worth almost $1000 more just for looks?! I don't think so, especially since it will perform worse too! Apparently he does.

At least you're not a Leafs fan.

I finished Gothic 3 CP 1.7 for the first time ever tonight! And I did it twice! I also hit level 82, which is the highest I've ever gotten in Gothic 3. It sounds like a lot, but you don't get anything from a level except 10 skill points, which you must then divide among all your skills, hitpoints, endurance, mana, strength and so on. Anyhow, I must say that Gothic 3 was much better than I thought it would be. Well, with the Community Patch 1.7 installed. I did have several crashes to desktop (most often when using the teleport stones), but other than that it was table as a rock and virtually bug-free. There are three ways of finishing Gothic 3. In the lore there are three gods: Beliar, Adanos and Innos. Beliar is an "evil" god while Adanos and Innos are "good" gods. The difference between Adanos and Innos is that one is the god of magic and the other is the god of paladins (and the like). Since Adanos and Innos are on the good side of the morality scale, it's possible to follow both those paths for quite a while. It's only around the last 20% of the game where the paths divide. If you choose to side with Beliar, you immediately lose the Innos and Adanos paths. Anyhow, I did every quest I could find, fought every monster I could see (combat is fun now!) before making a save around the 80% completion mark. From there I went with both paths in one night. It was great fun! It's a bit sad to think of how close Piranha Bytes must have been to delivering an amazing game. It was originally supposed to have more interaction with the original gang (the friends from Gothic & Gothic 2), all the world was supposed to be filled with hand-placed enemies, locations and chests and it was (naturally) not supposed to be so damn buggy. The CP 1.7 could only deliver a bug-free experience (and rebalancing and better combat) so the things you find in the world are still not as unique and interesting as in the previous Gothics, but it's easy to imagine how good it could have been. Especially in places where they had time to build the world specifically for an encounter, fill it with the right creatures and then, at the end of it all, you find a locked chest with random loot.. Annoying. Anyhow, I've had a great time with the game. All in all I must have spent around 200 hours on this game (since I've had to start over several times..). Must be a new personal record for time spent on one game (not counting World of Warcraft).