Slowtrain

Oblivion? Right, all credibility right out the window then. And as Steve points out, considering how little is known about FO3, calling it a worthy heir is obviously a prediction of nostradamus-like magnitude. WHich is to say, total BS.

Just reading those names makes me sad.

I should just point out that I don't think Bioshock is a horrible game. Mostly it was just disappointing. I felt terribly crestfallen when I realized all the choices I was making on the first 2 levels, which seemd important at the time, later turned out not to be. I actually think Bioshock might be a more fun (for me, personally) if played it as a straight shooter with no ADAM or plasmids or tonics or hacking or research or vending machines. Just running and gunning and using health and ammo pickups. I may give it a try that way since I don't think I'm going to finish the game as is, and I'd like to get my money's worth out of it. If I were trying to give it an objective grade (such as I can) I would say its a "B" grade. Its a solid game that the developers obviously spent a lot of time on, and it was mostly bug free (before the patch anyway). For me that downsides are character development choices that don't really matter and a great deal of repetition as you move pass the second level. The story so far hasn't been enough to interest me to the point where I can ignore the lack of meaningful choice and the repetition. I do think that the grades of 9.8 and whatnot for Bioshock are ludicrous, however.

World exploration and character development. I enjoy FPS games a lot for the action, but for the most part they are linear with minmial exploration and your character never gets to be created. My most recent really favorite game, STALKER SOC, managed to combine the FPS stuff that I like along with enough of the CRPG stuff I like to make a game I really enjoyed. I would have enjoyed skills and stuff as well, but hey, what can you do.

Well, I am enjoying Crysis quite a bit. Not an all time classic but it certainly seems to achieve what it sets out to do. I'm playing on hard and it is challenging without being overwhelming. The game certainly thows a lot of enemies at you. I don't know now many soldiers I killed in the first big village where you rescue the hostage, but it must have been more than 100. There appeared to be some respawning going on until the hostage was secured. If I had known that I would have gone right for the hostage rather than trying to clean out the opposition, which I eventually decided what to do. I've been conserving the ammo for the SCAR since it seems like it's going to be pretty rare. Do you ever get more SCAR ammo in the game? Beyond what you start with? And your team? (I vultured some of the dead squadmates scar ammo!) Or is it best just to use ithe weapon up then dump it so you can use that weapon slot for somethign else?

Is Half Life 2 still worth playing at this point? It was one of those games I bought but never got around to playing. I stil having it sitting unopened on my shelf. On a happier note, I just fell through a mountain in Crysis. At first I thought that I had gone too the near the edge and fallen off the mountain, but no, it was through the mountain. Now I am inside it. There's a lot of water down here. Its like Tomb Raider. *reloads*

Crysis though is very specific about how it wants to entertain the player: 1) Give the player a fairly open playing field when approachign tactical combats. 2) Give the player the nanosuit. 3) Give the player the ability to walk run sprint jump lean strike crouch hide crawl prone grab throw Then let the player put those pieces together as they see fit. But how they choozse to put those pieces together is quite consequential because if they do it badly they die (and now vitachamber to bring them back either!). Bioshock wants to entertain the player by giving them the ability to add the plasmids and the mods and weapon upgrades and create something. WHich is fine. I have no problem there. SS2 did the same thing (although it had more of the Crysis pieces as well). The problem is that how I put those pieces together appears inconsequential. Sure I can buy up all 5 tonic slots for engineering and make myself a hacker that's awesome at turrets but why bother when its quicker and easier just to grab my upgraded MG and blow the crap out of them. Well, you answer, because if you hack it you get a turret that will kill splicers for you. But splicers are so easy to kill, (as Pidesco pointed out above) why should I bother not doing it myself. Well, you answer, becasue then you can save health damage and ammo usage for yourself. But MG ammo and medkits are infinite and cheap and there are vending machines that sell both every ten feet, why should I care if I burn some extra medkits and ammo. Well, you answer, you can save wear and tear on your special upgraded weapon by letting the turret fight for you. But, the wapon will never degrade and I wil never lose it and I can upgrade all the other ones, so why should I care if I use it all the time? Well, you answer, if you make yourself a hacker you can hack all the vending machines and get things cheaper. But money is infinite and things are so cheap anyway (a regular medkit costs 20, a hacked medkit costs 16) plus there a tons of free ones all over the place, plus enemies drop them when they die, so why should I bother hacking to save an utterly inconsequential amount of money? Etc and so forth ad nauseum. Do you see what I am getting at here? The choices that bioshock sets out as being significant, aren't.

I've heard this line of reasoning before, not in reference to Bioshock but other games, and it's redonkulous. Unless you can upgrade them all RIGHT AWAY, the ability to eventually upgrade them all does not negate the choices of what to upgrade first. If that was the only problem surrounding the significance of chocie in the game then I woudl agree with what you are saying. The problem is that NONE of the small choices that are in the game really matter, so you get a lot of little issues adding up to one big issue. Even your plasmids and tonics are infinitely swappable. I don't have to make any decisions that I have to live with for the rest of the game. Even rescuing the little sisters instead of harvesting them doesn't really "hurt" your adam collection since you get the little present from Tenebaum for every three sisters you rescue, which is way more than enough ADAM to do whatever you want. In a shooter, tactical choice is what makes the game fun. Tactical choice can involve how you equip your charcacter, how you approach a tacitical sitiation, the mechanics of the in game combat system (moves parries etc) and so forth. Crysis is at the moment a great example of a great way to give infinite tactical choice in a shooter by combining a fairly open approach to combat situations along with the nanosuit. Since Bioshock is a FPS and very linear in its approach and its combat system is not very robust or complex it is pretty much dependent on making the choices on how you outfit your character to keep the combat interesting. In the early levels I didn't realize how uttery inconsequential those descisons really were, but it didn't take long to realize the machine gun was all I needed adn everythign else was meaningless window dressing.

I enjoyed booby trapping the medstations. I did it at first, but after a while it became pointless, as the splicers just weren't worth the trouble. They're just too easy to kill. That's my whole problem with the game. EVerythign is kind of pointless. There's never any reason to make hard choices. Why bother hacking a turret when you can just run around the corner and blast it with the machine gun and take almost no damage. And medkits are infinite and super cheap so who cares how much damage you take anyway. MG ammo is also infinite so why bother using any other weapon? How cares which weapons you upgrade since there enough pttp stations to upgrade them all fully, or close to it anyway. And you can carry all the weapons so no choices there either. Even a lot of generic shooters these days don't let tyou carry all weapons a la the early days of FPS since it lessens the tactical significance of your load out. Addtionally I've got about 400 units of unspent adam cause I have no reason to spend it and I haven't even rescued the little sisters on the current level because there's no reason to bother. I'll do it eventually just for gameplay sake though. At this point I'm just running around with my non-upgraded pistol and a hypnotized Big Daddy letting him stomp anybody who gets in my way just to save me the annoyance of having to do it. Of course that's also annoying because he tends to stand right in my way and doesn't initiate combat with enemies on visual detection alone. So I have to shoot splicers with my pistol to "target" them and then scuttle out of the way while my Big D smooshes them like a grape. And the level deisgn is just terrible. First you run to the bathysphere, then something happens that cuts of access to the bathysphere, then you have to run al the way to one end of the level to find something, then you have to run to the whole other end of the level to find something else rinse and repeat until you are allowed access to the bathysphere again. At this point I'm just resigned that every goal I accomplish is going to send me to another goal all the way on the other side of the level through the exact same infitely respawning splicers that I've been fighting since the SECOND level. And the big relevelation that ATlas was Fontaine might have been more shocking if it wasn't telegraphed from the start of the game AND if Levine hadn't used the exact same trick in ss2 where in exactly the same way you find out the good Dr. Polito who has been helping you so generously is actually SHODAN. How anybody could refer to Bioshock as a great game boggles my mind.

The only thing I find annoying so far is that the North Korean soldiers all appear to have bionic vision, but I guess its only fair since I can turn invisible. The AI seems a little iffy. More so than in Far Cry. Sometimes it seems to be lost as to how to react. I do miss the mercs from Far Cry though, they were a lot more entertaining. Needless to say it looks great as well. I'm playing in 1024*768 with no AA and have everythign set to high except shadows which I have on medium. It drops a few frames from time to time, but mostly it runs sweet. Better than Oblivion does, and it looks better.

Crysis. I love that dang nanosuit. I've got the suit modes bound to M5 and can really do some crazy things by fast switching between the different modes. Plus the whole predator thing is neat if somewhat understated. I give it a definite thumbs up after Farcry. Not deep, but definitely fun. Oh and I am also playing Bioshock. Sort of.

Well, I finally got around to playing it and after being careful to avoid spoilers since the game was released, I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. The first 2 levels were promising. The big daddy/little sister interactions were fun to watch, the underwater levels felt reasonably fresh and interesting. All the aspects of SS2 that I loved so much were there. The graphics were pretty good. But by the time I was playign through Arcadia, a vague feeling of this all being rather tedious had set in, and by the time I hit Haephestus, I was bored on a level I haven't experienced since the Ice Temple in IWD2. I've currently halted while looking for the antidote to plasmid mind control. I want to keep playing, but I find the tedium difficult to bear. My main knock on this game is that it is amazingly repititve after the first 2 levels and the FPS combat is hideous. AT this point i just run around with the machine gun shooting everything, buy medkits at whatever vending machine I come across and then continuing. All the enemies are the same, have been the same since the 2nd level. The weapons haven't changed. The upgrades suck. I stopped hacking anything because I got sick of it and it was totally pointless. The level design is insanely tedious. I wasn't expecting Bioshock to be better than SS2, but this is really a let down. The whole survival horror/creepign menace of SS2 has been replaced by a laughably easy and unsophisticated FPS bang fest. I remember creepign around the dimly lit cargo bays in SS2 with about 8 bullets in my almost broken pistol while listenign to the howl of psychic monkeys all around me and almost wetting myself the whole time. Nothing like that in Bioshock sadly. ANd fer chrisskaes if you are going to make a game that focuses on FPS combat, make the combat GOOD. I went and played some Crysis after almost passing out from Bioshock tedium and got my ass hammered at first and was like: "Oh yeah, FPS combat is supposed to be kinda challenging and thrilling. I forgot about that." (Then I threw an outboard motor at a North Korean soldier and jumped onto a roof! But that's a different story). And speaking of story where is the bioshock story that is supposed to make me change how I see games? PLease. Between the ridiculous Oblivion reviews and now the ridiculous Bioshock reviews, my opnion of the gaming media is at an all time low. The only way any reviewer could say either Oblivion or Bioshock are "greatest ever" level games would be if their entire gaming experience goes back only a year or two. I could list 100 games of all different types better than either of those 2 games without even trying. Argh. Deus Ex invisible War was better than Bioshock. I am so disappointed.

I liked it OK. It wasn't the game Harvey Smith promised through. It failed on 2 different counts: 1) A rigorous and complex biomod system that makes the need for skills totally unneccssary. 2) Choices that really matter. He failed to deliver on both. Still, I enjoyed it enough to play it twice through. Better than most first-person games that come out.

Those screenshots looked OK to me.

Not that I disagree with your fundamental take on Oblivion's implementation of level-scaling, taks. If you had said instead: "Darned level 20 watermelon farmers armed with daederic longswords" I would have chuckled in agreement. A more salient example that strikes closer at some of the grotesque design flaws in Oblivion.

Rats aren't level scaled. They are always level 1 with 4 hit points. I let my horse kill them for me.

harsh. I'll probably still buy it anyway though, just to try it out.

Not really. It was as meaningless as the "moral choice". Whereas in Deus Ex or even Diablo II modifying your character added to your list of abilities or enhanced your weak ones, in Bioshock you start out good at everything and get better, and nothing is permanent, so by the end you have no weaknesses at all. It's more like Oblivion than anything else. An all-powerful character is no more interesting than a supremely weak one. But, this hype, yes, it's stupid. But I've reason to believe that USA Today wasn't paid off, but rather, a staggeringly large contingent of console 'tards (as Yahtzee affectionately called them) actually believe this ****, and USA Today is only calling it as it sees it. geez, the last time I was here, Bioshock was going to redefine the computer game as art. what the hell happened?

Good Lord, Cant just buy the freaking thing already. It took me a little over a day to research, buy, and build my new system. And its awesome. You guys spend way to much time pondering this stuff.

well, I tested with a dvi cable I borrowed from a friend, but it didn't solve the problem. ABout 50% of the time, it takes about 5 minutes for the monitor to display any image (which after 5 minutes is the windows desktop), the other 50% of the time it starts showing an image the moment the system begins booting. If I switch over to the VGA inputs the problem disappears. As long as the problem doesn't get worse I can live with it.

Thanks, Tale. For some reason my dvi connection has died, though my VGA is working. I will replace the cable this weekend. Hopefully that is the problem and not something on the monitor itself. That would totally suck.

I tend to agree with NatS. Reviews generally are not very helpful, although gaming mags can make OK toilet reading if there's nothing else. Although I suppose if I didn't browse gaming message boards, I might find them more useful. There's an obvious conflict of interest when major gaming publishers buy ads in the gaming mags or web sites. Take your reviews with several handfuls of salt, imo.

Do you lose picture quality if you run from a dvi video card through a DVI-VGA adaptor to the VGA input on the monitor instead of just running from the dvi out of the graphics card to the dvi in of the monitor?

Well, I am pretty hopeful that the new game will feel a little less "tight" then S:SoC. Accoring to the faq, STALKER: Clear Sky will have all the existing territory from the first game as it existed some years prior to S:SoC as well as 50% more new areas. If that is true, then that is going to be a pretty large space to explore. Not Oblivion big, but still plenty big enough to make the world feel more open even if area transitions are handled in the same way as S:SoC. I thiknk it would be pretty cool to see the Agroprom Institute when it was still staffed with researchers rather than just being a run-down battlezone.

For me Thief was all about the Hammerites. A Thief mission without Hammerites was like a day without sunshine. All their dialogue was awesome, and when those Hammer guards reered back for a overhand smash from their titan hammers, I used to come close to wetting myself in panic. the stealth aspects of Oblivion were some of the best parts of the game. Everything from the Thieves and DB quests to the implementation of stealth and backstabbing. The only thiefly area of the game that I felt was sorely lacking was the cruddy lockpicking minigame, but even that would have been much better if it was done in "live" time rather than with the game "frozen". If I found out the Todd Howard was leading a Thief project I would be pretty excited. Far more so than I am by Fallout 3.