Slowtrain

As long as it doesn't make my character look like he has malaria.

Problem is, you need a good story with good characters to have a good ending. Most games fail the former long before they fail the latter.

Reviews are not just for purchase. A good reviewer is educational. My favorite reviewers I read regardless of whether I am actually interested in paying for something or not. They usually just have interesting things to say.

Holy crap that's a lot of hps. Attacks must do a butt load of damage. That;s my kind of game. Looking cool is 9/10's of the fun!

You should try complaining sometime, Hurlie. Its fun! I prefer to complain about serious issues, like when they shut down the Ice Cream shop that was just down the street from me. Tragedy! I'm really not joking, every time I pass that place I sigh. It was dang good Ice Cream. Marble Slab Creamery. If you are on the internet and you're not complaining, then you are not doing it right!

To me, the most important aspect of a review is that the writer have a sense of the history of the topic he/she is writing about. WIthout a sense of what has been done before, it is impossible to place current reviews in context. If you've only seen 10 movies in your life and they are all in the last year, you're reviews aren't going to be very informative. Same with games. Or music or anything else. I expect someone whose reviews I am reading to have seen more or played more or listened to more (depending on what is being reviewed) than me. That way the can provide with information and context I simply don't have. Beyond that, I don't have much preference other than they be able to express their thoughts reasonably clearly. Stylistically, I don't care at all.

16,000 HPS? AM I reading that right? What kind of crazy damage scale does WoW use? How may hit points does a level 80 fighter have?

You should try complaining sometime, Hurlie. Its fun!

remakes will carry the death penalty lol.

I generally don't like parody or self-mockery in my computer games. Humor that springs from the gameworld itself is fine. A good laugh is always fun.

Amazing is one word, yes. Stupid is another. lol.

Isn't plausibility always a distant second to gameplay though? You develop the gameplay cincepts first and then hang them on only as much plausibility is needed to make the gameplay work. Games are neither as tightly plotted as genre fiction; nor are they as charcter driven as mainstream fiction; games are gameplay driven.

Is expecting plausability from party members really important in the context of a computer/video game though? I'm not saying it isn't. I've just never though about it before. Computer/video games are generally held to a pretty low standard of plausability in pretty much every facet. I know for myself I rarely blink an eye at anything, however ludicrous and contrived, in a video game, because, well, it's a video game. That's they way they're made. Is it time now, as video game budgets start to rival those of medium budget movies, to expect more actual writing and stuff from game developers? Pop posted an interesting article about the astronomical size of game budgets in the Aliens forum. Maybe we should be holding games to a higher standard now?

Reading through the aug list brings a tear to the old eye , it does. *sniff* My usual aug set up was: Microfibral muscle Speed Enhancement Ballistic protection Radar Transparency Power recirculator Energy Shield Enevironemental Resistance Vision Enhancement Spy Drone The cool thing was that by stacking a fully upgraded power recirc with a fully upgraded ballastic protection with a fully upgraded environmental resistance and then using ballstic armor, you were basically immune to bullet damage for a very long time. I could walk right in front of machine gun carrying bots and thumb my nose at them. Good times.

http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Deus_Ex/Augmentations It was a head aug and paired with spy drone. SPy drone was awesome.

Thank you. That sounds familiiar. I think I might have used VATS once or twice when I first installed the game. I must not have liked it though. FOr some reason.

Actually, I don't think I ever took that aug, since I never considered missiles a threat and that aug was paired with something else I wanted more. Can't remember what that other thing was though. Was that a chest aug or a head aug? Can't remember that either. I'm getting old.

Is that article pro party, anti party, or what? I can't tell. What point is being made?

Well, I guess that explains why I've been scratching my head in puzzlement at all the posts I see talking about how easy FO3 is. I've been finding combat plenty hard and a huge drain on ammo and stimpacks. But apparently, that's because I'm not using the VATS thing. Next time I play I'll try to remember to use it just to see what it is like. How the heck do I turn it on anyway? *looks for manual*

IIRC, the damage multiplier on realistic was 4x base damage. the sniper rifle had a base damage of 25, which meant that on realistic a torso hit without armor would result in your instant demise. The 10 mm pistol only had enough base damage to do an instant kill if it hit you in the head and recieved the head shot damage multiplier on top of the realisitc multiplier. WHich happened occasionally, but it was rare enough that it wasn't too dangerous. Plus any active armor at all would attentuate even headshot damage to safe levels. SOme of the other big hitters like the shotguns and plasma rifles did a lot of per shot damage, but the per shot damage was spread across multiple projectiles. SO they were only dangerous at point blank range, which was usually easy enough to avoid. Missiles just seemed to slow to be a threat. I'm sure I got killed by them once or twice, but again it was a low risk thing. That dang sniper rifle though. That was the tough one.

Does using VATS change the nature of the combat? For better? For worse? For whatever reason, I never use VATS. Just out of habit, I guess. Fallout 3 looks like an FPS, so I play it like an FPS without thinking about it.

That must be somewhat difficult. At times there is so much incoming damage, like when you are in the middle of a scuffle with 4 raiders, three wild dogs, and a MR. Gutsy, that I can't imagine how a healing over time would help. Part of the problem is that combat is not particularly tactical at all. Its more just a war of attrition: whoever has the most stimpacks wins.

But we should!

Combat was poo. Animations were not so great. It was buggy as a roach motel. But other than that Arcanum was pretty fab. I would love to play more games like it.

I'm just curious what difficulty level you played Deus Ex on? It was laced with one hit kills for me, especially later in the game. Realistic. One shot kills pretty much only happened with the sniper rifle. That was the only weapon that scared me anyway.