Slowtrain

I don't know, MC. I read Tolkien a lot and nothing ever made me picture any of his dwarf characters as being particularly Scottish or having a Scottish accent. I'm not saying Tolkien's observations might not have influenced his thinking but I don't recall it coming through in his books. At least not explicitly enough that I picked up on it.

Don't get me wrong. I think that graphic improvements are great in sports games and otherwise. I see things in computer games now that I never would have even dreamed of seeing 10 years ago. The incredibly lifelike human avatars, the amazing envirornments, the realistic vehicles, these are all totally incredible things to me. There is a point in Crysis where you are driving uo this valley in a tank surrounded by lots of other tanks being fired on by tanks, (aka a tank battle lol), and while you are doing a huge mountain in the distance starts to fall apart. The whole thing combined for just an amazing moment and I replayed that sequence at least a half dozen times just to watch that mountain fall apart over and over again. It was stunning. But but but....that is not going to stop my copy of Crysis from going into the trash in a year or two while my precious copies of XCOM and Master of ORion and System Shock remain carefully protected in my closet. WHy?

I think that may be a good point. Certainly it would seem to me that there was a major change in how many interesting games were developed and released after (and while) all the small computer game developer studios shutt their doors and/or were bought out in the late 90s. I've heard people say that it is much easier to be innovative in a small company but that it is much easier to turn out product in a big company. Maybe the gaming scene is just suffering from the loss of those small and mid-size developers like Looking Glass and Microprose and Sir-Tec.

My guess is that it is because game developers draw most if not all of their inspiration from previous games. So once one game developer made a Scottish accented dwarf it is inevitable that all game developers everywhere would follow suit. Why the first one did it, I don't know. Maybe he was Scottish?

Eurogamer's usually quite good at looking past hype. Sounds interesting. Read the full story (preview) here: http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?artic...4466&page=1 Isn't that exactly the same preview that made the rounds a few weeks ago? All coming from Pete Hines' sitdown with a bunch of game jounalists, where they watched him playthrough a few minutes of the game. It certainly appears to contain all the same info: a bunch of dialogue options about cutting the cake at your tenth birthday party, that you can make your baby pc cry by pressing the F key, that Dogmeat will show in a non-scripted event sometime in the first thirty seconds of gameplay (but its not scripted, no, of course not). blah blah blah. I don't spend a huge amount of time on Bethsoft's FO3 forums, but I do stop by almost every day, so here is the real deal about FO3, no hype: No one has any idea. That's right, none. Bethesda has realased so little info about the game that no one knows enough about it to pass any sort of preliminary judgement. No one has seen any of the skills, the real dialogue of quests, how the levelign system is going work. ANyone who says FO3 is going to suck has no basis for making that statement as there is every chance it will be a brilliant game and nothing has shown otherwise. Anyone who says FO3 is THE game of 2008 and will be brilliant has absolutely no basis for making that statement as there is every chance that the game will be a huge boring suckfest and nothing has hown otherwise. The game is finished and is undergong testing and tightening and revision. It is due for release in Fall of 2008. There will not be a demo.

The standard for computer game mech combat was set by Mechwarrior 2 in 1995. Its never been surpassed. (Other than graphically of course) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechwarrior_2 Falcon 3.0 released in 1991 had a full flight model and avionics as well as a dynamic campaign, an entire war being simulated as you flew missions that constantly changed as the state of the world changed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_3.0

I found that setting. It was set at about half to three quarters so I turned it up to max distance. That was a nice tip. Thank you, Pidesco.

Is that a changeable setting? I'll poke around a bit in the options.

This game came out in 1996. It was truly awesome. Since then countless game developers have ripped it off brutally and not one has come close to matching it despite the massive advances in computing technology that the last 12 years have brought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova:_S..._Force_Centauri

I just took the defaults that the game gave me. 1024*768 Full Dynamic lighting High quality *shrugs* It looks pretty good to me, but I'm not so particular maybe?

The only thing in gaming that has evolved in the last 5 years is graphics. WHich is fine, awesome graphics are nice, but they don't make a game classic.

The atmosphere is STALKER is simply marvelous. Oblivion may look better, but it doesn't FEEL better, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

All this STALKER love finally won me over. I reinstalled and am starting a new game. w00t!

Games were better in the mid-late 90's then they are now. Go get Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3 while you are at it. Also Deus Ex and Systen Shock 2. Toss in Thief 1 and Thief 2. Master of Orion 2 is always nice. Warlords 3 is good TB strategy. Jagged Alliance 2 is of course THE TB squad combat game. Arcanum, Wizardry 8 are some other good crpgs. Seriously, with that computer and access to Ebay you could play older games for the rest of your life and never lack for quality.

Feel the STALKER love.

If some marketing genius had put Annah's boobs on the box, it wold have outsold Diablo for sure. Instead we got a BIS employee painted blue and with a mop glued to his head. Yeah yeah that's teh game I want. lol.

Okay Obsidian let's shut it down. erm.. what?

nrmd

I'm probably attaching too much significance to the me mention of Syriana, but to me a game that was seriously like Syriana could be really fun and involving, but one would be hard pressed to make it an action game and still keep it "like Syriana" especially since one of the underlying resonances in Syriana is the futility of a man's action. To make the game really like Syriana the player character would have to achieve nothing and die at the end. Somehow I don't think that's going to happen in Alpha Protocol. lol. ANyway, no I've never played KotoR 2.

Syriana showed a world in which superhero secret agent skills are unable to resolve anything. The secret agent in Syriana was a fat middle aged man who ultimately failed to achieve anything except perhaps a small amount of personal salvation. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy James Bond films a lot, but to put the two film's world views together is just a really strange juxtapostion.

What was wrong with the ending?

Syriana was the anti-James Bond film. You can't combine that sort of thing.

I don't think Hell Kitty is disagreeing with anyone's opinion, I think he is just looking for a definition of artistic. Which I am not going to offer. But looking back at PS:T, it was a game I didn't and still don't particularly enjoy playing. However, I can still acknowledge that it is quite obvious that more thought went into the creation of the story and the NPC party members than is usually seen in a computer rpg. Also the art is quite good. SO even though I don't really like the gameplay and I dislike D&D as a crpg ruleset and the combat was boring, I can still respect the game as having a lot of positive qualities that set it apart from other games I have actually enjoyed more. I can respect the game and appreciate it without really enjoying the actual experience of playing it.

What exactly does this mean? Increased accuracy? Increased damage? what? I'm curious because I find user mods notoriously suck at balance. Not all. Just almost all. Even mods I like.

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