Slowtrain

iirc, the strength penalty is only 10% per stat point to chance to hit. So its easily overcome just by raising your skills higher. If you are in an emergency situation, you can just take some buffout which will give you some extra strength. Plus power armor, if you choose to wear it, wil eventually raise your strength anyway.

Unless it has been returned to development, which is always possible, Jag 3 is dead. IIRC, Strategy FIrst pulled the plug on the project due to problems with the developer. Or something. Frankly I wasn't paying much attention. The idea of a Jagged Alliance game without militia, mines, sectors, or a dynamic campaign wasn't the least bit interesting. Linear, mission-based combat games bore the crap out of me.

Yeah, it doesn't look half bad. Is it a straight shooter? Or are there some dialogue, character development, quest aspects to it?

Eh? JA3 is still in development? I thought that had been cancelled for the 3rd time. What about Witcher 2? Still more than a year away? STALKER: CoP is a smallish game, but its going to be a good one. I hope. Out in a couple weeks. New Thief is in development.

Short? The main story or the game overall? I don't mind if the story is short if there is lots of terrain to explore and to be scared sh!tles in. There's only three or four maps, though they are apparently larger than any of the maps in the previous games.

Call of Pripyat, as in Stalker 3. More like Stalker 1.3 Exactly. An actual STALKER 2 is in the works I guess. Both Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat are considered standalone add-ons on to SOC, rather than new full games. CoP will apparently be the last of the SOC games. Haven't been to the forums in quite a while, so there may be more info now.

Get to the den and buy a magnum and some ammo. If you do all the quests in Klamath and scrounge around enough, you should be able to pull together enough money.

Everything I've heard has been very positive. Mostly I get the sense that most people who like STALKER think that CoP is the best of the lot. Except, of course, that it is short. More of an xpack than a full game.

mmmm...an art/game debate. Again.

Good graphics are never a bad thing, but they rarely make a bad game good. I freely admit that I appear to be a lot more tolerant of non cutting-edge graphics than most people. Probably because I grew up with them. While its true that there is more to do, I don't know if looting soda machines really qualifies as an engrossing gaming activity. Maybe if I could blow them open with a rocket launcher, it might help. FO3 could use more destructability in the environments, if they really want immersion. Quite true. Although I would prefer the vanilla game as shipped not need so much fixing. Still FO3 is far superior to Oblivion in this regard. IMO, both Fallout 2 and 3 fail brutally in this regard. In both cases the developers seem to have fixated on the stupidest comedic aspects of the game world. Probably Fallout 2 is the worst offender, though. there's more meaningless stuff to do, but is there more quality stuff to do? I recognize Beth believes in quantity over quality, but I'm not sure I do. Come on. Almost all the joinable npcs in both Fallout 1 and 2 are better than Fallout 3. Maybe Katja is the only exception, simply because she doesn't have much personality. Hmmm. Actually all the npcs across the board are better in FO1/2 are better. It's not even close. Yeah, maybe. I don't really think of the combat in FO1/2 as a strength compared to say Jagged Alliance 2 and XCOM. I guess so. I'm not sold on follower AI in any of the games. Well, yeah. A bunch of monkeys jumping up and down on a typewriter are going to write better than Bethesda on their best day. I guess so. VA doesn't do much for me one way other. I think Wes Johnson in MW, Oblivion, and DO3 is the best overall. I like Malcolm McDowell so he's a plus. Dorn was terrible. Its pretty much a wash.

Fallout doesn't look awful. 640*480*256 is not awful. *shakes head*

Fallout > (Fallout 2 == Fallout 3)

The cool thing about Croshaw is that he has an identity as a reviwer, and a following. So he is no lober beholden to publishers. rather, ther opposite, publishers are beholden to him. The world of gaming reviews needs more reviewers with strong identities and followings.

He doesn't say what he wants to, the fans don't "allow" him to like a game, it's a big no-no. If the fandumb manifests as mailbox spam or harassment from the boss, I've no idea. Have you seen the way he treats his fans? Its all part of the game, but I don't think he really cares. Its still a gimmick, but its a different gimmick then reprinting the publisher's press releases and calling them your "review".

But they aren't very good at FPSes either... I think one of Bethie's problems is focus. They try to cover too much ground in their games and end up without a focused game design. FO3 isn't a very good crpg, but it's not a very good FPS action game either. Because they were trying to work on both sides of the fence and as a reult ended up with a unsatisfying mishmash of rpg/shooter I think if they dropped the crpg stuff and just focused on shooter/exploration with some minimal amount of dialogue, they could make a great game. It seems to be where their strengths as designers lie at this time, anyway.

A valid point. For me, I don't really think of game reviews as being "useful" to me anymore. There was a time, back when CGW was in is heyday, that game reviewers actually did bring knowledge and thoughtfulness to the table. While reviews are always somewhat subjective there once was considerably more authority behind them. Nowadays, reviews seem mostly to be little more than extensions of the publishers PR campaign, especially for major titles. I just simply enjoy the fact that Croshaw has enough of an identity as a reviewer that he can say what he want about the games he plays. I don't think I'd ever buy or not buy a game based on what he says about it though. Mostly I like listening to his reviews of games I've already played.

I think Beth would be well served to drop the pretensions of making a crpg and aim for a more straightforward action exploration game along the lines of Farcry. Then the lack of writing skilz wouldn't even matter and they could make a fun though utterly insubstantial game, which seems to be their overall goal. edit: That's not an insult. I think Farcry is a pretty fun game.

I just like the fact he's willing to call games such pieces of ****. Even if its just a gimmick, it's still refreshing in this age of sycophantic game reviewers.

Think about some of the scenario's that Fallout 3 sets up: Reilly's Rangers under seige from supermutants while holed up on top of a hotel rooftop A bunch of young adults thrwon out into the world at Big Town and under seige from slavers and supermutants Some kid who goes whack and kills his parents then gets picked up by some goth dude whose is starting his own little family for outcasts etc. These all have the potential to develop into interesting scenarios where I give a crap about all these people and the world in which they are trying to survive. But they all fail in the end because Bethesda doesn't give a crap enough to develop any of them. Each one is just like a little excercise in mutant killing and then boom! over. I finish each one and am left thinking: what was the point of that? If Betheda just spent a little more time trying to engage me, as writing should, all these scarios could pay off as being really interestign and significant.

I don't disagree with this, but at the same time I also think its completely fair to criticize a game for its failings. Yes, FO3 is perfectly functional at its current levels. I think its a fun game. BUT it would be even more fun and worthwhile if the writing engaged me with the characters and the world. Make me feel something about this huge gameworld I am interacting with beyond just amusment at blowing up raiders with landmines and finding quantums. I personally don't believe in just sitting back and accepting the status quo if it is something that I feel is or could be worthwhile and/or significant. Fallout 3 is fun. With some improvements it could be much more than that.

Whether he said that or not, doesn't mean Fallout 3 and consqeuently Bethesda can't be criticized for that choice. Frankly, if he did in fact say that, then my personal criticism becomes even louder and more vociferous.

I totally agree in regards to Fallout 3, but it goes way beyond just firearms. Why are there thousands of stimpacks still in first aid boxes in supposedly looted buildings? There's way too much of everything scattered around the gameworld. It was obviously a design choice by Beth to do it that way rather than making items a resource issue. I think its a poor choice becuas it devalues the worth of everything in game: Stimpacks, for example, are so common they cease to have any value. A betre way to do it is to have stimpacks do a lot of healing, but be really rare and really expensive, therefore when you manage to get one or two it becomes a really big and awesome deal. FO1/2 also suffered from this problem btw, just not quite to the same extent as FO3.

Well, for my part I would say yes. The writing is far below the level of even other games like Stalker and Far Cry 2 which no one ever talks about for the writing. And the fact that Fallout 3 is supposedly a crpg, just makes the writing deficiencies even more glaring. There are brief moments that work: For example, I think Kimba's lines in Big Town when you first talk to her carry a sense of pathos for their situation that almost make me feel like I am for a brief moment connecting with the gameworld and the horrible situation in which she finds herself. And its those moments that only reinforce how utterly disconncted the vast majority of the writing leaves me from the gameworld that I am traversing.