Slowtrain

I think pretty similar to you - things that just seem outright 'unfair'. My main hate is things like monsters spawning in when you're part way through a room - fine if there's a reason for that like you failed a spot check or they were 'ported in or something. But just unexplained spawning really annoys me. Or like when a dozen hook horrors suddenly appear right behind your party when there is no way they could have been there. OMG, they were in his shoe!

Oblivion. That's a package deal.

Yeah, for people who have played the game, chime in re: the fun factor and stuff.

Yeah, it's just as frustrating as check points and respawning enemies. If the checkpoints and respawing enemies lead to countless reloads in order to make progress, then yes, absolutely. Happily, Far Cry 2 didn't suffer from that problem as it checkpoints and resapwns were pretty balanced and reloading was pretty much totoally unneccessary.

What is some stuff you wish game designers would get rid of in games? What stuff really pisses you off or has made for some traumatic gaming moments when you thought your monitor was going out the window due to extreme frustration? One thing I hate is what I call "gotchas". These are little traps that developers put into games that you can't possibly know about until you spring them and then you die. Horribly. And reload. I remember once I was playing HExen coop with a friend. We had just negotiated an extremely long and rather tedious level and we were carefully crossing a narrow ledge around a pit of lava. Suddenly, the section of wall beside us smashed forward across the ledge, hurling my friend's mage into the lava pit. Great. Now that's challenging gameplay. We looked at each other, probably both realizing at the same time that our last save was some time ago and that we were going to have to replay a big chunk of that level again. Hexen went into the trash and we went to watch TV instead. I suppose game developers give themselve little tingly pleasures when they design stuff like that, but I totally hate it. What's your hate?

lol. I hate it when that happens. I always know it's time to take a break when I'm cussing out the developers because I haven't made any forward progress in a game for thirty minutes. Jumping itself in games doesn't bother me and can be fun. but its the excessive reloading that always gets me, in any form. Games are rarely interesting enough for me to gain any enjoyment out of having to replay an exact sequence over and over and over, until finally through dumb luck I finally succeed and can move forward in the game. Actually, out of all the things I dislike about games, that is probably the thing that I hate most. Endless reptition is NOT fun.

Based on that review, it sounds like you can expect to reload a lot. SOme aspects of the game sound interesting, but more than just an occasional reload tends to really hurt game flow for me. I've never really understood how some people have the patience to reload 20 or thirty times just to get a jump right. And then that just leads to another jump. And then another. I guess for some people that sort of counts as gameplay challenge?

I remember when Volourn gave Morrowind a chance. He didn't last very long.

I've always felt that God works better as a theory rather than a fact.

Has Obama come out against private ownership of firearms? If so, I totally missed it for some reason.

In Fallout 1 there was a scattering of easter eggs and goofy moments, but they were pretty rare. It was mostly a serious, albeit dark-humored, game. Most of the original devs departed after Fallout 1 and the team that ended up doing Fallout 2 ramped up the goofiness and easter eggs to a pretty absurd degree. The game became more of a referendum on pop culture than a serious game. It still had good moments, but everything ended up being a tad exessive.

I would guess that people who played Fallout 2 first would tend to like it more since it has so much more content. Even though a lot of that content is pretty goofy. Fallout 1 was a much leaner and tighter game, though still packed with stuff.

I'm not dissing your take on Bethesda, mostly since I pretty much share it, at least as far as the last couple ES games go, but aren't you at all curious to see if FO3 might not in fact be a decent game? I mean the reaction has been pretty good, and not just from reviewers but a lot of people right here, many of whom are a rather tough lot to please.

Still haven't played FO3 so I can't comment. AM looking forward to trying it out though when time allows. I've always preferred FO over FO2 simply because FO2 always felt to me like an overlong rehash of FO. If I had played FO2 first I would probably like it more since there is more to it, but since in fact I played Fallout 1 first (many times over), it still gets a lot of points for being the first.

The first one was pretty good. But by todays standards both 1 and 2 are "niche" so their lack of appeal is pretty understandable. Even at the time Fallout was first released, it was considered a pretty hard-core crpg.

UFO Hunters had an episode on the Tinley Park Lights last week. It was pretty interesting what with the huge number of witnesses and recordings of the events. I don't neccessarily "believe" in UFOS as such (an alien spaceship etc) but people in Illinios saw something and nobody is sure what it was.

My hope is that they continue to evaluate where their games suceed and fail and then make each new iteration of both franchises better. If ES5 coughs up the same bloody lung that was Oblivion and complely ignores all the improvements that have been made in FO3, then that will be really pathetic. Right now, I am expecting the next ES game to be much much better than Oblivion.

Oh yeah, with some mods the game becomes better, definitely. And some aspects of the Shivering Isles expansion improved the game, but I think the core gamplay systems are hideously flawed. And those faces! It's like little demons climbed into my computer and are are trying to get out. Disturbing, I think. It kinda is. Maybe? No? Hmmmm.

Hellhound fight is one of the most annoying in the game. Maybe the most annoying. It's worth at least still trying to keep going for a ways past it. May still not like the game, of course.

In your opinion... Sure. But its a darn good opinion! One of my best ones! When I signed up for this board so many years ago I wanted to leave my old handle behind as convincingly as possible. Too bad its not so easy in the real world. I still can't believe that Visceris has gone through like four accounts here in that same time and they all have more posts than me...

Mixing anything with Oblivion leaves a pretty unpleasant taste.

Every review he does makes me laugh at some point.

I dunno. The game might be pretty good. Perhaps some tie in between trailer and game might be in order, then? Post a trailer and talk about why it makes you anticipate the game? I've explained that trailers that show no aspect of my potential interaction with the game don't help me very much with forming an opinon of a game. Yeah, Alan Wake looks good. I suspect that is the major selling point for the game. But good-looking games are the norm nowadays. There's almost no need to even mention that a "game looks great" at this point. They all look great.

I consider an interesting trailer to be something that shows me an interesting game. G-A-M-E. Games are interactive. Edit: Just gets me recalling fondly how so many people got so excited at the Invisible War trailer. lol.