Nick_i_am

Lets put things into perspective, within a relatively short time of it's release the sims became one of the best selling games of its time.

...who said anything about you?

Well, people dont like too see their franchises OR their medium being 'raped' in such a way. It's human.

Stalker mode on!

Maya 7 is a fairly nice improvement over 6 with improvments to the HuD and greater stability being two of the most immediate boons. There are also a number of new options for things that were possible in maya 6 but fiddly (for example, toon shader).

While a very different game, I did enjoy the Universe of the last vampire game when it came out (Redemption) so just in terms of the world it's set in, i'm deffinately interested.

hence why, in terms of pure immersion, there is an argument for only letting the player character see what a person in his posision (even in the future or whatever) would be able to see. The problem with that is that is can generate more complicated controls, which can be an immersion breaker in itself.

Basically, yeah, there's a german tax law which allows him to do all this crap, and it's being fixed this year. How he keeps getting people to fund him, I dont know (though that might be somthing to do with the tax law). He's currently making a film of Postal for crying out loud POSTAL. The game which makes GTA look tame, the game where that only thing you need to know is that the only objective of the game is to have as much fun violantly killing people as possible. Douse them in petrol then flick matches at them, decapitate them then play wall-ball with the head. He's making a FILM of this, and, guess what, it gets better. He's writing it himself.

Arn't some of the sillier state laws in the US to do with there being pressure on some states back in the 30s or so that every state must have a cirtain number of it's own regional laws. Which is why things like 'It is illegal to shoot a whale out of the window of a moving car except with a harpoon' and 'It is illegal to sell peanuts in Lee County after sundown on Wednesday' ever come to pass.

Yeah, I have been a long time fan of civ and multiplayer has ALWAYS been a failing, but this time they have done it right and done it well.

Though to be fair, that wasn't the only part that failed them.

GUFFAW

Hmm, now that I have a gig of RAM it might be worth picking up in 12 weeks or so when I have some actual free time.

Yeah, i'm quite happy to burn down a city in Civ4 if it suits my specific needs, but i'm quite incapable of playing the badguy in any kind of RPG-type situation, the most I can manage is that which has comedy value, such as pushing people down wells. ...though I do seem to take rather too much pleasure from setting people on fire. Yeah, so basically, if it's FUNNY then I will do it several times and keep laughing, but if it's just plain cruel, no thanks. As for the pickpocket kids above, stupid UK laws. 'Hey, where's all my stuff gone?'

Is this game actually worth playing by the way? I have seen very mixed reviews and opinions. Ignoring the game glithes and preformance issue, is the core gameplay/quests/story/characters somthing even remotely worth looking into?

Brotherhood of Steel was a real fallout!

GMT Nickiepoo Haha, Lly (mongolians), myself (Japanese) and BigButt (indians) started playing a game and managed to get to the start of the medevil age in a 3v3v3 game on the 'mazes' map type. Lots of fun just building up infistructure while beating of barbarians and expanding with Bigbutt acting as a culture/wonder center while myself and Llyranor concentrate on military strength.

If you want to try a JRPG, Grandia 2 has pretty much the best battle system out there. The story is nice enough and some of the characters are lovable, it's completely liniar, even for a JRPG and dungeon trecks near the end of the game can get a little bit long, but as an introduction to JRPGs you could go a LOT worse. Not my favorate, but probably in my top 5, the skill/magic leveling system is nice as well. My main complaints are that with such a cool battlesystem they simply didn't make the game hard enough, if you fight most of the badies you meet along the way you will never really find any of the boss fights particually hard. Nice enough VAing and music too, overall, worth trying.

No disagreement there, but considering the information it COULD have been giving you (available spells, mana power, food and wood stocks, creature condition) it was a refreshing change yeah, same as OFP, though armour is way more of a factor in R6, and yeah, you could enable one in OFP, which would show your remaining bullets and clips, but you could also switch it off. Same with the crosshair. OFP can be played completely without ANY HuD. How does a real soldier check his ammo? he either keeps rough count or hopes he doesn't run out before the baddie does, but failing that, he ejects his clip and looks at the holes in the side to see roughly how many shots he has left. DoDs is too actiony to facilitate either of the above with satisfaction, so a 'halfway' where the user has a HuD icon of roughly what they would see if they wanted to check the ammo on a real gun is one step closer. On a game focused on realism or immersion, being able to flip your gun over and check the clip would be the most obvious solution to lack of an ammo count on the HUD as far as I can see. The only other thing I can think of was that used in the awful Jurrasic Park FPS 'Tresspasser' where the chick you played would scream the number of shots you had left each time you fired, before your gun got stuck on an object, fell out of your hand and got stuck somewhere under the terrain. Best Game Ever, but NO HuD.

I completely agree here, which is exactly why I didn't refer to Fallout as an immersive game, the HUD and contols kept constantly reminding me that I was playing it, not living it. As far as your point about the information presented to the player, I completely agree, Black and White was very nice in this aspect, having very little information given to the player via a HUD, and was much better for it. To further the point, things like displaying the ammo a gun holds on the gun itself (both Unreal Torniment and Alien vs Preditor did this, though they were secondary to the HUD), and, failing to have somthing like a portible medical scanner that you have to manually pull out to find out your own health, having a visual representation of how your character is feeling (which is fair enough in most cases) rather than a number of bar could be good in many cases. Deus Ex represented its health on screen like this, with the different parts of your body coloured on their condition. To use the example of Operation Flashpoint again, there is NO health bar, but your character does have one, represented in game numbers outside the players eye. If you take a hit and survive, lucky you, if you take hit to the arm, bai bai aim, if you take a hit to the leg, crawling mode!. It depends on the nature of the game, but neither a health or ammo bar is NEEDED just because it's an 'FPS' and the same goes for all types of game. Another good example is in Day of Defeat Source, ammo is represented by the HUD, but instead of being a number, is simply a picture of the side of your clip, so you can see roughly how many bullets are left.

Having said that, stopping the player from finishing the last boss because they accidently threw away a vital item in an area way back that they can no longer even access isn't really immersion, it's just frustration, to my opinion. Again, fallout comes to mind, you could do almost whatever you wanted and you would still be able to 'complete' the game. As far as I know (though I may well be completely wrong about this) there is no NPC or item which is NEEDED to finish the game.

haha, love the 'spoof' of the original starwars poster, clever.

Graphics and Control of will always be 'immersion breaking' for as long as we arn't plugging computer games into our brains, this is a non-issue because the point is never to think 'we arn't playing a game' but to get so involved in the game that it's not relevent. If that's what you meant though then it DOES happen to me, that the game becomes the world until somthing in the real world (and not the game) breaks me away from it. Of course, this is a facet of my personality, just as some people are more susceptible to addiction or whatever.

FEAR is a good computer benchmarker, but Bloodlines has some very...interesting coding in it. For memory, you can experiance annying performance issues with anything less than 1gig of Ram, but as soon as you get up to one gig the game starts to work perfectly (just in terms of performance).

erm, no actually, that's one of the things that can seperate a good game from a great game, excepting the obvious 'well it's still a game and not a neural link to your brain' (in terms of limitations). In terms of storyline alone, the point about immersion is that you get sucked into the world in such a way that it is BELIVABLE, even if the gameplay element of the game is surreal as far as 'real world' goes (for example, Homeworld as an RTS). In terms of gameplay, the problem only comes when gameplay and story are very intimate with each other and the player has the freedom to poke them both at the same time. Of course, the nature of these games mean that, done right, they can be very immersive since they can give the player a simulation of the level of freedom he is used to in the real world. My point is that story and storytelling does NOT have to be the immersion breaking element of a game, the reason why deus ex is being handled like a village bycicle in this thread is because they were, or rather 'could be'. Another game that really immersed me, incidently, was Operation Flashpoint. The high level of realism combined with a story and an actually intelligent AI really helped pull me in, but it was pulling me into the game, and not the world, which is another reason why 'immersion' alone is a dangerous word. So far in this thread we have seen examples for and against immersion via Atmosphere, immersion via Freedom, immersion via story and immersion via gameplay, and yet off all the games I can think of off the top of my head, none of them fill more than two of those.