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Slowtrain

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  1. Well, I read that the respawns in some checkpoints get annoying very quick since you have to travel the same roads and kill the same enemies every five minutes. I also read that the story suffers from being so open and quick to adjust to the player's actions (not really a bad thing to me.. all I really need to know is that I'm supposed to hunt the Jackal). Some people are complaining about the weapons that keep breaking. This WAS a problem to me in System Shock 2 (since they broke down before you could empty a single clip, almost), but if you can fire your weapon a realistic amount of times (1000 rounds?) before them becoming a nuisance, it's quite OK. Someone complained about the PC version feeling like a console port. I really hope this is not true. Another complained about shadows being broken (as in unrealistically tough for the system on anything above Medium settings). I don't care about that. I can't remember anything else off the bat. Those aren't too bad. I don't have the same problem with respawns that some gamers do. The respawns in STALKER were pretty rapid but they didn't bother me. In an open world, you need to keep it populated to some degree or it will end up feeling empty. As far as story goes, I'm totally with you. Just give me an objective and let me get to it. Bioware can keep the dang cutscenes and romances and Valve can keep the super scripted linear path. Give me freedom! Breaking weapons don't bother me either! This is great. COnsole port might be more of an issue if the controls suffer. But the IGN review said it looked better on PC, so I'm hoping its not a straight port but more of a multi-platform development. And if the shadows are a problem, I'll just turn them off. Won't even notice it after a bit. So sweet! Looks like I'll pick it up tomorrow.
  2. It's not at all. The IGN reviewer sorta complained about that. A mild complaint. Its just a marketing, name recognition thing. No mention of scifi. Just mercs and guns. Plus you get to operate on yourself and pull out bullets with a pair of pliers. SO Ramboesque! I might buy it for that reason alone.
  3. That would seem unlikely on the surface. There is always a market for single player games, and the gaming world can only sustain so many MMORPG's at a given time.
  4. How is it? I'm strongly considering buying this tomorrow (when it's released here in Sweden). I've heard some worrying reviews and some encouraging ones so I can't make up my mind yet. Wish there was a demo! Why can't all games have a demo?! The IGN review was very positive. The few things that the reviewer didn't like, such as a lot of travel and the quest structure, wouldn't bother me. I was planning to get it as soon as I can. An open world shooter would be so totally sweet. What bad things have you heard? edit: I just checked metacritic. It shows one mediocre review (a 70 from Gamespy) but everything else is 85 or higher. It seems bugfree (mostly) and is being compared to STALKER more than anything else (except less buggy than STALKER). COnsidering how much I loved STALKER, I'm pretty sold at this point.
  5. Thanks, MC. Interesting read. Have focus groups ever produced anything great? The reliance on it in todays entertainment world seems to be moving everything toward a generic middle ground. Nothing that's really awful, but nothing that's really interesting either. Reading that post-mortem basically echoes mkreku's post above: a lot of the elements that make up potentially interesting games are in Bioshock: adventure, crpg and shooter design elements are all there, but none of them are really refined enough to make a compelling experience. Bioshock basically floats in a sort of blobby middle ground where it has no real identity, other than a visual one. I do agree that visually it looked intesting and the world had a decent amount of atmosphere (although I felt that that unique location of being at the bottom of the ocean was never pushed hard enough; most of the game I felt like I could be anywhere), but, for me, a game's looks absolutely cannot save it, if the gameplay fails so utterly. And there was a lot of BAD gameplay in Bioshock. Remember that part where you have to run and get the honey out of the bee nests. You have to activate the smoker, then have about 20 seconds to run in and collect as much honey as you can and get out before bees swarm you. Wash rinse and repeat until you get enough honey to proceed. I mean, wtf. A 10 year old MIGHT find that sort of gameplay compelling. Also, did I mention that Bioshock wants to be a shooter but has infinite health and you can't die? Really, it's a pretty messed up game. I DO think Bioshock 2 has a chance to be much better. Mostly because it would be ahrd to screw something up this badly twice in a row.
  6. The hacking minigame in Bioshock 2 is right there with the wheel o' speaking minigame in Oblivion as far as annoying and tedious minigames go. On the plus side hacking is so useless and poorly implemented in Bioshock that you can easily ignore it, much like the wheel o' speaking in Oblivion. Did I mention Bioshock has a total of like three enemies that you fight over and over again FOR THE WHOLE FREAKING GAME. meh. Its pretty though.
  7. "sucked" seems a tad harsh. But vastly overrated I agree with. "Vasty overrated" seems a tad lenient. Hideously sucked, I agree with. But it was SO purty. *applauds*
  8. Far Cry is very underwhelming today. When it first came out the enormous environments were incredible. SOme of the stealth aspects of rustling through the bushes were amusing as were some of the mercs. And the combat was good enough. Several years later the bar on shooters has been raised, and a lot of the stuff that made Far Cry cool is now commonplace, and what is left is just a pretty straightforward FPS. And of course, awesome graphics age quickly and get unawesome pretty fast as technology pushes forward. But make no mistake, when Far Cry first came out it raised the bar on FPS games. But going back and playing FPS games long after their time seems a waste to me. CRPGS and strategic games age much much better. Sin was crap when it came out, insanely buggy crap. I can't believe it is worth playing 7 years later.
  9. That was what I thought first but I've read a few things that seemed to indicate more depth than that? If it really is just an exercise in dismemberment as tactical combat then I would pass.
  10. Well both System Shock 1 and 2 had some survival horror aspects to them. More so 2 than 1, although 1 was very creepy as well. They all take place on space ships. People are wiped out and you roam around the ship reading logs and stuff and killing nasties. There is goo on the walls. The similarities are faily obvious. I may get this. It ssupposed to have tons of atmosphere, which is always a really great aspect of a game like this.
  11. Internet: If you're not whining, then you're not doing it right!
  12. Its amusing to hear people who whine endlessly about drm whine endlessly about whining fallout fans. lolz. whining is in. edit: a had a moment after making this post when the word "whine" for a moment didn't make sense to me anymore. I hate it when words do that. *whines*
  13. Last time I played it, with all the current patches (although the last couple are mostly multiplayer fixes; the first 2 are the most important as far as the single player game goes), it was more or less OK. I still have the problem with the Nvidia drivers and the way STALKER handles clearing texture memory so I had to lower the texture quality to stop the game from constantly crashing. Once I did that it was mostly just the random crash and the same sort of odd in-game behaviors of the artificial life systems.
  14. mmmm. System Shock 3. By Bethesda? *faints* Bioshock was the condensed EZ-reader version of System Shock. For those who prefer large print, short words, and pretty pictures.
  15. I've spent thousands of good faith dollars on computer games over the years. Good faith in that I was paying my money to get the product that was what it said it was and did what it said it did. Sometimes, that is in fact the case. A lot of times it is not. No developer or publisher has ever offered me my money back for those many times that I got something that was not what I paid for: a working product. Caveat emptor, right? So be it. I'll pick up a game like S:CS in the bargain bin. Others can of course feel free to buy games that don't work. God bless. Not at all. WHat I suggest is that developers and publishers know from past experience that many gamers will get all frothed up over an upcoming game, rush out to buy it the day of release, then contentedly sit around and wait for (possible) patches. Since that sort of behavior by gamers is a known and endlessly repeated phenomenon, developers and publishers know that they can release their broken or semi-broken games and people will buy them anyway.
  16. Bethesda does seem to be playing both ends against the middle though with FO3 though. All the gameplay we've seen appears to be mediocre FPS gaming, but then Todd and Pete and Emil talk about the dark gritty gameworld, the deep choices, the roleplaying depth etc and so forth. If Todd and Pete and EMil came right out and said that Fallout 3 was a first person action game just like Oblivion with a few small changes such as XP and a different-type of level scaling, then I would have stopped paying attention to FO3 completely long ago. They haven't done that though. Really, they've done just the opposite. This double-dealing has actually begun annoying me over the last few weeks, and consequently I really have stopped giving a poop for the moment. The truth will be revealed soon enough though. RPG or FPS? Deep or shallow? Choices that matter or utter inconsequence? It will be interesting to see how it all ends.
  17. Isn't that kinda like buying an awesome new car and then having it sit in the driveway for 3 months until the mechanics can get it driveable? Does anybody actually do that? Gamers have an inordinate tolerance for letting developers and publishers kick them in the face and laugh. Over and over and over again. I'd rather buy STALKER:CS more than most other games right now, too. But if it doesn't work very well, why bother spending the money in the first place. There is always something else to spend money on. I suppose if I was super rich and didn't care about wasting money, then maybe it wouldn't matter.
  18. Snobby has nothing to do with it. Expecting something you spend your money on to actually work seems a pretty reason expectation. GSC appears to have Troika syndrome: Our games are totally awesome and hardcore; don't bother us with trivialities likes bugs and crashes. I'll pick it up in the bargain bin sometime down the road, thanks.
  19. He liked it more than I thought he would. A pretty positive review, really. Surprising.
  20. Wait. Didn't a fair number of reviewers say that Oblivion was one of the best or even THE best crpg ever? ANd Bioshock? Wasn't that a game that some reviewers referred to as Art? How can games this great be forgotten through history? On my Oblivion box it says: "One look at Oblivion will shatter your conceptions about what is possible in a video game." --Game Informer This is timeless stuff. I mean where else do you see games where this many npcs have their eyes located in their foreheads.
  21. I've come to the point where I view animations as more important than model detail or attempts at 'photorealistic' environments. I think it's a matter of priority. For me 'good graphics' means rich in color + fluid + stylistic. Fallout 3 looks ugly to me, though if they're able to capture the post-apocalyptic setting well enough, I think that's fine. That's an interesting take. Animations are so important to creating a belivable character, especially a human one, that maybe they are the most important aspect of a games graphical presentation. However, if the models are poorly created or textured, even good animations will fail to capture realism. If you look at Oblivion's avatars, much of the texturing that comprises the major muscle groups is fairly cartoonish, especially on the abdomen. A lot of the skin doesn't even have textures resulting in a real lack of depth, like rubber dolls skin. And of course with the faces, one has to ask themselves if the people creating the faces for Oblivion even knew the general rules of feature placement on a face to begin with. SOme subtle variation is fine of course, but many of the Oblivion faces are grotesque monstrosities with such a wide deviation from an ideal that they are really rather freakish, like you were just dropped into a sideshow carnival. You CAN make decent faces with facegen. Its not even hard, but either they were randomly generated to save development time, or they were just poorly done. With the beast races of course, there's a bit more freedom to play around without constraint, but even those faces aren't very well done. The Argonian faces, especially when viewed head on, have almost no sense of depth or bone structure, looking more like giant gas filled bladders than atually heads comprised of either bone or cartilege (can never spell that word). In other words, animations are pretty important, definitely, but animating a poorly done avatar doesn't cover up the avatar itself is not very good.
  22. Spector was very supportive of Smith during some of the more difficult times of IW's development, when upset Deus Ex fans would ask Spector to get more involved in the because of the design choices SMith was making, such as dropping the skill system. But Spector always maintained the position, very politely, that it was Harvey SMith's game and Harvey Smith's choices to make and that SMith had Spector's full support in whatever he choose to do. I was actually kind of suprised a couple years later to read an interview with Spector in which he seemed to be subtly distancing himself from the design choices of IW. Maybe I read too much between the lines of what he was saying, but I remember how shocked I was to see him holding any other position than: It is Harvey's game and Harvey has my full support. But Spector has always been quite honest in his interviews, much like Josh in fact. I remember a great interview in which he talked about all the terrible mistakes he had made and all things he had done wrong in the development of Deus Ex. This was well after the game was released of course (way way after), but it was still a fascinating read. I remember him acknowledging the how terrible the AI was in Deus Ex and explaining the reason for that was that they waited until the very last minute to put in the AI and try to get it working. They didn't consider it that important. WHich he admitted was a terrible blunder on his part. I have a lot of respect for those sorts of admissions.
  23. It would be ironic if the leak was a review copy from a reviewer that gave the game a super high score. ANyway, I hope Bethesda tracks whomever down. Go Pete Go! I haven't been this supportive of Bethesda since um, well, Daggerfall.
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