Slowtrain

I don't think people (here, gamers) should have to do homework to insure that the game for which they are about to lay out 50 US dollars (+/-) actually works. It's totally outrageous what publishers and/or developers get away with when it comes to software "bugs".

You mean like the very original Jagged Alliance 1 the first? I haven't played that in so many years, but iirc it was not that good a game. Jagged Alliance 2 blew its doors off in every possible way, except maybe for some of the mercs that got cut out. Is it the actual identical game on the DS or has it been substantially changed? I saw some screenshots, and it looks like almost a direct port of the original. You are on an island helping that woman and her father gain control for some super healing drug. The DS can't handle the complexity of JA2, so it's no surprise. I enjoyed the original, in a lot of ways it built the framework for JA2. It will be worth it to me to see the old mercs again, and the DS has proven quite capable at turn-based squad level tactical combat games. I can't find much about it other than a Gamespot preview a few months ago. It's actually a pretty interesting port. If I owned a DS I'd give it a try for sure. I don't know if I would buy a DS just for that though. Still, it's a notch in the DS belt, so to speak. SOmebody needs to port Daggerfall and XCOM and Syndicate Wars to the DS. Then I'd buy it for sure.

Awesome. Thanks. heh. That was one of his better ones, too. Doesn't make me want to rush out and buy the game though.

Has he reviewed Dead Space yet? I can't recall.

You mean like the very original Jagged Alliance 1 the first? I haven't played that in so many years, but iirc it was not that good a game. Jagged Alliance 2 blew its doors off in every possible way, except maybe for some of the mercs that got cut out. Is it the actual identical game on the DS or has it been substantially changed?

I haven't played it either but am planning to at some point. I think I am waiting for some sort of GOTY edition which will include the SDK, DLC, and of course, patches. However, if one of these days I find myself bored and want to play a crpg, I might just go out and buy it anyway. I am expecting a reasonably fun game and hope I am not disappointed.

I used Firefox for a while a few years ago. But it crashed a lot for me and seemed to be less than compatible with a significant number of web sites. So I went back to IE. But that was that was a while ago. Maybe non-IE browsers are a more generally compatible and stable application now? I'm not really interested in making an ideological statement with my choice of web browser; I just want one that works and doesn't crash very often. I'm currently using IE 6 and it does crash from time to time, although mostly its never clear if it is the fault of the browser or the fault of the web page itself.

How does the exploit happen? Does some piece of malware need to be installed on your pc first and then when you log in at a website you can lose info? Or does the website itself get hacked and nothing needs to get installed to you pc to make you vulnerable? The latter would seem worse than the former.

Its like somebody recreated this thread from frog DNA.

Possibly. But I think also that people forget old games if they didn't like them all that much. For example, in my case Unreal, which I played, but which also did not thrill me very much, so I remember bits and pieces and and an overall impression that might or might not be accurate Otoh, when people like games, they tend to play them more and repeatedly, leading to a more accurate recollection of what the game was like. People who enjoyed HL are probably more able to recollect its positive points, simply since they played it a lot more and were obviously more engaged by it. Ultimately of course, it should be possible to not love a game but still give it credit for its accomplishments. I think that becomes difficult though if we only played the game once, a long time ago. Regardless of whether people liked or disliked HL, the fact remains that the game was revolutionary in the FPS genre and had a profound impact on the development of future FPS titles. It is as much a classic now as XCOM or Civilization or Diablo.

Yes, I was not intending to slight either of those games. Those are both fab games and are actually much higher on my personal fave list than Half Life. I didn't include them though because I really don't feel like they are doom-style shooters. WHich HL still is; it just raised the bar in that genre. ANd true, to some degree for games in general. I remember Unreal as being incredible graphics-wise with some interesting weapons but failing to raise to the overall level of HL. Unreal iirc was a lot more Quake than HL. I barely remember it though. D3d was awesome! I would still probably rate it as my number 1 fave pure shooter.

Half Life was a pretty incredible experience when it first came out, compared to what we were seeing at the time. Yeah, it's easy to look back now and ask what was so great about it since pretty much every element of Half Life was pretty much been adopted as gospel for modern FPS games. But at the time? What was Half Life's FPS comptetion doing? Heck, what was Half Life's competiton? Quake, Quake 2, the hypothetical Duke Nukem 4, Sin. Both Sin and HL were billed as the Quake killers, and while SIn pretty much failed utterly, HL pretty much did mosh all over quake/quake 2 as far as a single player experience What first person shooter raised the post-Doom bar as much as HL did in regards to single player gameplay? Blood? Shadow Warrior? Heretic 2? You could make an argument for System Shock 1, except SS1 was pretty much concurrent with Doom not post-Doom and offered a variant FPS gameplay that took quite a few years to catch on. You could make an argument for Duke Nukem 3 with its pipe bombs and tripwire mines and jetpacks and flushable toilets and explodable walls. Maybe. But HL really skyrockted the bar in level design, immersion, weapon implementation, story (for a shooter, as in there actually was one, sorta), soldier AI. The soldier AI alone WAS revolutionary. We had never seen anything like that before, calling out to each other, working together, chucking grenades around corners. Is it a perfect game? I don't think so. The platforming elements blew chunks, the final level was freaking hideous, the entire second half of the game lost much of the atmosphere that the first half achieved, the alien creatures weren't nearly so interesting as the soldiers. I don't consider HL even remotely one of my favorite games, but that doesn't negate what a gaming milestone it was.

Versus bugs that make your games unplayable right ot of the box. Its interesting how some gamers seem to have no problem buying a new game and letting it sit on the shelf for three months while they wait for a patch, but get all agitated at the thought that DRM might make their game unplayable in 3 years. Not you ML, just some gamers in general.

NOLF was pretty awesome except for the "you were detected: mission failed" parts. Not a lot of them but even one is annoying. NOLF 2 eliminated that iirc.

WHile I don't disagree with this thoughy, I will just point out that I have played a lot of games in my life. Every time I have had problems with a game it is because of bugs, not DRM. My most recent experience is with Far Cry 2 with contains a gamestopping bug that affects quite a few users. I would trade DRM for bugfree games any day. What are you trying to say? That they should add DRM because it reduces bugs? I'm saying, given my experience in gaming, focusing on DRM because of the problems it causes is focusing in the wrong place. Bugs are a much larger source of problems with games. Please note, I am not saying DRM does not cause ANY problems, rather I am saying that bugs cause more problems. I recognize that it is not really an either/or scenario, but, idealistically speaking, I wish gamers got as outraged about buggy games as they do about DRM.

WHile I don't disagree with this thoughy, I will just point out that I have played a lot of games in my life. Every time I have had problems with a game it is because of bugs, not DRM. My most recent experience is with Far Cry 2 with contains a gamestopping bug that affects quite a few users. I would trade DRM for bugfree games any day.

According to wikipedia ketchup is a thixotropic fluid. That's pretty cool. I thought it was just slow.

DO you mean that localised versions won't sell because people prefer the English version if given a choice? Or that producers don't think they are going to make back the money they would have to spend on localising the game because it won't sell enough, so they don't even bother?

Here's sort of a general question for non US gamers who play US developed games: Do you prefer to play the original English speaking US versions of games? Or do you prefer to go with a language localized version? Also how much choice do you have in which versions you can get? I'm curious because obviously all of you speak and read English better than many Americans do, so the actual language used would not in and of itself be a barrier.

Sorry. I thought we were kind of going back and forth with each other, so in lack of a quote context I took it as mostly applying to what I was saying. Anyway, I don't intend to come across as hostile in any way towards you. SO I hope you aren't taking it that way. Like I said it is just my pet peeve of the moment that I have wanted to see the Spanish REC for quite some time but instead have been only allowed to see Quarantine. WHich I don't want to see. It's annoying. ALthough, I haven't checked on REC's domestic availability for some time. Perhaps I should do so now. Quarantine has, I believe, finished its incredibly brief theatrical run. btw, Gorth is totally awesome. So don't get too down on him. Actually most of the regulars on this board are great.

I'd agree that Americans are probably not singularly evil in that respect. But from living in this country I know that America has a tendency to want to remake things into shapes it finds more appealing. I'm sure other countries are similar in this respect, but I don't live in other countries so I can't comment on them. Others should feel free to so so. How does changing something created in another country and then presenting that expose anyone to anything different. We've just changed what was different. Of course. I'm not going to sit here and say that re-imagining something is bad. Re-imaginations are often totally awesome in their own right. The Magnificent Seven, for example. Or A Fistful of Dollars. (I've watched a lot of westerns). But re-imaginations should not always be neccessary for getting people to watch something created in a different country. Shakespeare has been re-magined many many times. But it has also been produced faithfully many times as well. What am I castigating exactly? All I've basically said is that non-domestic entertainment products seem to have a difficult time appealing to the american market, and that one solution to this is to apparently Americanize non-US entertainment concepts and present them to the US market in a re palatable though often inferior form. I think your personal offense in telling me to go to hell is a pretty excessive reaction to such a minor commentary on American entertainment tastes. Um. You do realize I'm American, right?

AGreed. If you remove the non-US part of the film or the game, sometimes you lose what made the film or gane interesting in the first place. Besides if Spain has already made a really good horror film or if Denmark has made a good minseries, does it really need to be totally US-ified to make it palatable to an American market? The unfortunate answer is yes.

Breast Hill Castle. Umm, what?

I'm sure money is an issue, but I also think that if a US developer went to their pulisher and said that they wanted to make a game that was mostly set outside the US and almost none of the game characters would speak English in their dialogues (dialogs?), the publisher would laugh them right out of the room.

ANother one of my pet peeves at the moment is the domestic US movie Quarantine. WHich is a remake of a film called REC, a Spanish horror film from a couple years ago. REC is supposed to be a really excellent little horror movie, but I wouldn't know, becuse as an American I haven't been able to see it. Why not? Because it will not be available in the States until after Quarantine has finished its domestic theatre, dvd and possibly pay per view run. WHy? Well because if people can go see REC, they might not go see Quarantine! Because REC is apparently a far better film. AS usual with US remakes of foriegn films So instead of being able to see a movie that I really would like to see, subtitles and all, I have to wait until our totally pointless US remake circulates through its markets. The sad fact is that the US market is pretty unfriendly to non-US entertainment products. And it really irritates me. And I don't think it has anything to do with "moral superiority" either.