Slowtrain

Its awesome stuff. Eventually publishers can just the game skeleton away for free and everything in the world will need to be bought. Buy a house. Buy furnishings for your house. Buy a pet. A new horse. A stable. Hire an NPC to come cut the grass. All for real. Sorta. heck even mod makers may be able to add in game hooks so you can buy the mod you want directly in game. Just use a paypal account or whatnot.

EA already did it with one of the Need For Speeds. You could unlock cars/tracks/whatnot by paying for them with in-game money or real money. I was thinking more like having every vendor in the game be just an UI to the pulbisher's store and any item that you buy costs real money. Spells, potions, alchemical ingredients, hip clothes, even guild memberships and boat rides. Really, it would be an awesome way to make oodles of money. just imagine strolling around the Imperial City in Oblivion and having every vendor there be a UI to ther publsiher. It would be like shopping for realz. And everybody loves shopping!

I can't wait for the crpg where you go into the store to buy a +10 sword of head splitting and 10 healing potions and some armor from from the in game vendors and you actually pay real money directly to the pubisher to do so. That day is coming.

I don't think I've ever heard you this perturbed about a game, Hurlie. For you to talk like this is the equivalent of me running around screaming in outrage. AS to your point, I think it stinks. (not your point, this proces of embedding dlc in a game, even as the game ships). But let's be honest, who's surprised. Game development and publishing is just a giant commercial endeavor aimed at getting whatever money it can from gamers, who, for the most part, aren't the most savy consumers on the planet. The technology now exists for this sort of exploitation so it's going to get used. eventually, I'm sure gamers will be paying for each new level and each new cool item as they go. And they will. So the developers and publishers are probably doing the right thing.

A man's got to know his limitations.

Now if you add the stealth critical strike bonus, that's a whole 'nother story. \ Defintely. The Higher end weapons are pretty lethal with stealth kills. However, I've found that in RT combat they are not terribly reliable. I don't know if there are some bugs going on but there have been plenty of times where a RT steakth shot from the Blackhawk or sniper rifles seems like it should have resulted in a critical but didn't. Otoh, even with a low skill, hacking a super mutant master to death with the shiskabob only takes seconds and it always works.

The funny thing about melee is that in RT (non-VATS) combat it's insanely lethal. Armed with the Shiskabob, you can wipe out anything in the vanilla game quickly and easily, even playing on hard. You do take damage when closing, but once you get up on top of them, they just basically fall over and die. Only Bethemoths, and to a somewhat lesser extent deathclaws, require any sort of effort.

You should post more often. You have excellent taste and judgement. I like to encourage that sort of thing.

Lol, nope, and Im the perfect mark for ghost/demon/evil spirit movies, they usually scare me silly. Slashers dont bother me, zombies or monsters dont bother me but something about spirits does. Also, the ending. It just ends right after the scariest part of the movie! The screen just went black and the lights came up. No credits or anything so everyone was just looking around at each other wondering WTF just happened. Im mean, Im sure there are credits at some point but we sat there for around 20 seconds before gathering our crap and walking out and still no credits had started rolling. I haven't seen this yet, but it appears to be a bit like The Blair Witch Project, in that either the approach gets you or it doesn't. I actually enjoyed BWP quite a bit just because it was interesting watching a film made so far outside if the Hollywood system. But it didn't scare me in the least. Did you see Blair Witch? If so, how would you compare them?

About $100 million differences when it comes to budget. 300 was $70 mil, Waterworld was $175 mil. 300 also almost doubled the gross of Waterworld. I know you are talking more about quality and taste, I'm just saying Waterworld was a fairly epic flop while 300 was a box office success. Well if you insist on backing me into a corner, then OK, I will grudging agree that 300 was probably a bit better than Waterworld for a variety of reasons. I also really liked what Zack Snyder did with the Dawn of the Dead remake.

This forum has become so much more peaceful since the frothing masses got bored and moved on.

Maybe my epectations for 300 were too high? I don't know; they were ground-scrapingly low to begin with. I don't see much if any difference between Waterworld and 300.

lol. You mean you weren't so terrified that you crapped your pants and ran sobbing into the lobby?

I feel so antedeluvian with my vanilla NEC lcd.

lol. Do I even want to know? Probably not.

I have old eyes.

Well, I am assuming that you believe games should look as photorealsitic as possible and that if someone doesn't shafe that view it's weird. I'm just guessing though. I believe that you'd want a game to look as good as possible while still running at a decent framerate, as close to the developer's original vision as possible. This has nothing to do with photorealism. If I crank Prince of Persia's settings up it doesn't get more photorealistic, it looks more like a watercolor painting, for example. I've tried running games on slightly higher settings from time to time. The difference is pretty minimal. Either way it still looks like a computer game. Just smaller. If I drop down to 800*600 though it does start to look more blocky than I like. Although if there's no choice then running games at as low as 320*240 is fine, such as XCOM or Daggerfall.

Well, I am assuming that you believe games should look as photorealsitic as possible and that if someone doesn't shafe that view it's weird. I'm just guessing though.

But I do care how it looks. Otherwise I would play at the lowest resolution possible. Or I would just pick a random resolution. But I don't. I always set 1024*768. 1024*768 looks fine. My monitor's native resolution is 1280*1024 btw.

Fixed.

I'm not precisely sure why it qualifies as weird. I enjoy a lot of graphical imagery that doesn't qualify as photo-realistic. I think most people do.

Well, yeah, that too. But it wasn't quite as pompous and overblown as 300 or Waterworld. Maybe Transformers 2 is but I never saw that one.

I don't demand all that much from graphics to find them pleasing, I guess. On the plus side, runing games in 1024*768 allows me to turn on all the bells and whistles and still get a good frame rate. Especailly with action games, I find the game generally moves too fast for me to notice graphical details. If I was playing a more static game with a lot of drop denu mens and nested maps and so forth, I would probably go for a higher resolution.

Well, yeah there is. I don't like the way it looks. I play all my games in 1024*768 anyway. I've never felt the need to go any higher.

MADNESS! Spectacularly wretched? It was definitely a spectacle. As much as film can be anyway.