Diogo Ribeiro

Wookies ate the ending.

I'd tell myself to be weary of dark rooms and suspicious holes in my 17th birthday party. And when all else fails, x=8.

Movie rights on the way. Tom Cruise will play Daniel M'Mburugu, Ben Affleck will play the dropped machete, and the leopard will be played by Elton John - who will use no stunts whatsoever.

The only feminine power I'd like to have are PMS Blast and Radial PMS. Men would freaking cower in fear.

I suspect this thread is going to sink faster than Dungeon Lords. If that's possible, anyway.

More to the point, is he conscious or has he been whacked in the head and is happilly dreaming of his owners while water starts filling his lungs?

A drowning newborn pup trapped in a garbage bag dumped in a cold river at night isn't as sad as imagining that some gamers would salivate over this kind of thing.

I'd be the biggest slu7 in town.

Torn OH WAIT

I have to get San Andreas as soon as possible. Times are hard, so I guess I'll have to mug a few old people off the street. Probably steal their dentures and ask for a ransom or something. Just anything to get the game.

System Shock 2 could very well be considered a survival horror game. I think even moreso due to its ability to stress and frighten players much more than any console survival horror I've ever played did, with the possible exception of the original Silent Hill. I never got the same feeling out of the Resident Evil series, for instance, and I find it surprising they're considered by many to be the highest expression of the genre.

That so much sounds like an 80's band.

It's TORN. You all know you want it.

Fair enough, sorry.

Careful, your Visceris is showing.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your suggestion, or thinking of something else entirely, but wouldn't that tamper with players who attempted to form groups since there'd be unique instances for every single player?

They could make these heroes and villains be actual irreplaceable NPCs in the gameworld, and the players would not be able to take their place. Or they could prohibit any given number of elements - such as names, power sets and costumes - from being used. But none of these actually seems like a good idea, the first because it isn't that much of a safeguard, the former because it's too restrictive. The downside of making a game, especially a MMORPG, which is based around a known and well-established franchise with popular characters is that most every gamer will want to be the main characters. While I haven't played the Matrix Online, I assume many gamers try to create characters who are very close, aspect-wise, to the movies' characters. They also tend to use name variations of these characters. NEO, ^NEO^, NeO, Neo1, NeoTheOne, >oxNEOxo<, TehReal1, 3niTY, m0Rph3uz... You get the drift. I suspect much the same will happen with any superhero-themed Marvel and DC MMORPG. I think the best way to deal with this would be to create a middle level for gamers. Some incentives. You can't be any of the "hard-hitters", but you could play as a character who eventually gets to interact with them, either in a friendly or hostile basis. You could be a vigilante who just started his 'carreer' and meets up with some Marvel of DC character who could use some help; then progressively become of greater help or danger to established heroes or villains (but obviously never destroying them or taking their place - an unfortunate side-effect of licensed products like these). I'd like to see special events could spring up, such as top players being given temporary high places in the game. Something like the "Death of Superman" or "Knightfall" story arc, or any other character-shaking plot being transposed into a MMORPG, but that these players could take their places. Much like Bruce Wayne chose Azrael to be the new Batman for a while, so could players take his mantle for some time. Unfortunately, there's always the chance that players that would perform actions deemed unrepresentative of their characteers by their respective owners, which would probably result in not using something like this at all. Maybe they could pick on these storylines and expand them a bit to allow players to become important in some other ways. Or they could do something wacked out like making a central server which housed all the main heroes and villains which stood for the Earth used in DC canon, but then used all other game servers as parallel Earths, something in the vein of Crisis On Infinite Earths (DC) where there were heroes of multiple earths and timelines more or less co-existed. Something like this for Marvel could also be applied. No one could play the original versions, but instead they'd be able to play near identical versions without needing to worry with iron-fisted, licensing rules.

No disagreement there, but these so-called interactive scenes allow me to do things that standard controls wouldn't allow because these things weren't built into the game under the same principles that standard gameplay was. That's my gripe, so to speak; it's mostly a detachment from the flow of the game, and the game itself. In some ways it feels akin to playing a game where the character can't do anything really special, but during rendered cutscenes he is a superhero of epic proportions, capable of doing things he can't during standard gameplay.

I'd just prefer if they decided to allow for constant player interaction with the gameworld. More of a "let the player explore whats around him to let him decide how to solve something". A simple example I remember was the Akropolis Tower in Parasite Eve 2, where Aya has to confront this giant (No. 9) who is coming at her in the fire escape. I remember shooting at it and being able to kill it with no great problems, but on a replay I slightly nudged the buttons and the targetting icon flipped over to (what I think were) nearby electric cables running up the walls - shooting these while the boss was next to them caused much more damage. Extremely simple, but more compelling than "mini DDR" sequences.

Granted some people find it difficult, but it seems (at least from my experience) that most gamers don't have a problem with this at all, only a few find it difficult to proceed in circumstances like these.

Fixed as in mandatory, which seems to be the case. True. Yes, and that's why I questioned how challenging these things are. If it is as easy to perform as simply playing the game then it feels a pointless abstraction or more of the same, not much of a challenge as far as I'm concerned.

All sheep are evil. Except Belle.

That's the winning ticket for Morgan Spurlock. Anyone can realize the problems inherent in having McDonald products be a part of your diet. His documentary is alarming because it shows what would happen if someone had a diet only consisting of their products and nothing else... Apparently, some people won't realize the problems unless they see said problems taken to the extreme.

I don't believe that fixed, sequential input has the same value as standard input used in the remaining stages of the game, considering the different applications and outcomes. A mandatory sequence carried out by a character that just isn't carried out until you press a series of buttons is definetely not the same as reacting to events happening in realtime. Considering that it actually is (or should be) something I have control over rather than the character, then why is my direct control being switched for something not so direct? If I can do these things, let me actually do them instead of placing me in a position where I have to direct the character to do them. Player reflexes over character reflexes. Also, if as you say those events aren't that different from the rest of the standard gameplay in the game and they mesh with it well, then wouldn't it at some point become a mundane task of minimal to no challenge? This would be especially true of console gamers who have grown accostumed to this type of thing in console games and can perform these things effortlessly by now. Challenge is usually a personal thing, but if as you say there is no difference between either element and if both are actually easy to perform, then where is the challenge of perfoming these sequences?

You can add challenge to a game without needing to have players go that way. You can even use hardware in clever ways - Metal Gear Solid allowed players to use the second gamepad to fight against Mantis, and the Castlevania title for the Nintendo DS will allow players to use the Stylus to apparently cast spells and cause changes to some of the game's areas - but just having players tap a sequence of buttons, wheter in fixed or random order at several points trough the game isn't terribly new or exciting. It's like developers go "Hey, we don't have a good challenge for players, so why not just make them tap the controllers' buttons randomly? That'll win them over." What is the problem with making areas or situations challenging? Hell, even with my dislike of FFVII, the scene where the initial trio of Barret, Tifa and Cloud having to pass by some guards by running and hiding behing pillars is, even as simple as it is, much preferable. Saying it was like DDR would be the big exageration... That's why I said mini