Subjective Effect

I'm not playing this atm because I'm playing a better mod - Insurgency. It's kind of like RO was back in the day, but much more tight knit in streets and so on.

Looks good. DLing now!

So toffee coated things are childish? Get out. Children are drawn to many things, shiny blades for example, or playing sports, but that doesn't make them "childish". And there certainly are games that children are not interested in, but then you have to define what you mean by "children". Just like with books and films tastes change as we grow older. The child who liked a cutesy game when 9 may well end up only liking hardcore flight sims when 20, in just the way as our taste in films changes as we grow older. I liked the Transformers cartoon as a kid and it made me want to watch the recent flim (which I thought was pretty poor but that's not the point). What's wrong with just liking something because it's fun? And why the hell should anyone care if you've got a stick so far up your arse that you just can't chill out?

What is childish about playing games? People extrapolate some childish quality to them because children play them and those people are ignorant. What is childish about the plot of Half-life, Thief, System Shock 1 & 2, Deus Ex or even BioShock? Company of Heroes, Homeworld, Defcon, Far Cry, Medieval Total War? These are just the games on my shelf. The only game here that has a childish plot it Dark Messiah, and even that is pitched at adolescents . Children may play them but a child may watch many films that do not have 15 or 18 ratings and not understand them at all. Indeed many animations are cleverly pitched at both adults and children - they may contain cute characters with wacky adventures but there are many jokes that only adults will get. There is nothing childish per se about playing games.

I enjoyed a lot of BioShock. The more I played it the more I liked the gameplay mechanics, but (as with Doom3, which I think is the better game) it was only AFTER I'd given in to the final game design. It was still disappointing and the plot was rubbish - it was too similar to that in SS2 but what was worse than that was that it started to well. Ryan in the demo was awesome. In the full game he was weak. Overall it's quite good. I'd give it 6.5/10, and if you really think about what that means it's a decent score.

Another of your many errors - computer games are no more for children then films are.

Lol! Nice one spar. QFT. Domarius, I'd agree with you but oDDs MO is pretty well known know. The only thing puerile itt is his stubborn assertions. I admire your enthusiasm Unstoppable but nothing you can show us can guarantee that someone at Eidos Montreal with a lot of sway won't miss the point and ask for something stupid. Forget DXIW for a moment and consider 2 games which, whilst being better than average, have disappointed big time and which were both helmed by guys that looked like they knew what they were doing: BioShock and TDS. If devs that people have trust in because of past greatness cannot be trusted to produce a great game (no matter what the circumstances) why should we ever have such undying faith in anyone? I remain skeptical until (happily) proven wrong.

Playing games is neither puerile nor a waste of time you robot. Get a life. Learn to care about or feel for something. Just get lost until you learn to have an emotion or realise that the uncomfortable feelings you get in response to whatever it is that you care one jot about are (a 3D modeling app? I don't know) emotions. And whilst you're at it have a bath and put on some clean clothes. Sheesh.

Oh God just stop trolling. You are the grumpiest arse on the net oDD, I swear! Games are not a waste of time because we play them for fun and fun is important. If you find something else fun that's fine (most of us do), but come on - games are fun. You'll be telling us sex is purely chemical drive for the selfish gene and is not fun either next! As to Guitar Hero - it too is great fun. It's not really like playing a guitar, no, but you can certainly learn good rhythm from it. I find the songs I know easier, and those I can play on a real guitar (black Hohner Arbor Les Paul oh yeah) even easier so there is certainly some sort of crossover going on, what exactly I don't know. But ultimately you are correct - games, unless specifically educational, rarely teach us anything. The only real world examples I know of are a.those Japanese surgeons who play console games who have been shown to be better at laparoscopic work (and I know I certainly started off far, far superior to my non-gamer colleagues with laparoscopic hand-eye co-ordination, superior enough that I've had a consultant (attending for you USA people) ask me to stand in for a senior registrar (resident) with complex camera work), and b.that my knowledge of WW2 firearms due to playing Red Orchestra is better than it was.

There is nothing "dumb" about it. It's just an action game. Why does a different gametype to whatever it is that "isn't" dumb have to be dumb? All this elitism is just boring.

What surprises me is that there are no 1st person ninja stealth games that handle stealth in a Thiefy way and incorporate Dark Messiah type combat with a ninja stealth slant. I'm talking about a game where you are a hired assassin that has to use ninja skills to break into castles and palaces and take out the target with the minimum of fuss. Would be easy to do now from a technical POV but just needs someone with the vision to create a workable 1st person combat system that is far more sophisticated than that in Dark Messiah. I've posted my ideas for character skills progression in a Thief world that I think would suit both the larger gaming demographic and even the hardcore like oDDity, here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=6420 You could easily have difficulty settings that restrict any of those aspects and therefore the game could be as arcade-y and assassin orientated as you like, as pure Thief with ghosting requirements as you like or anywhere in between. Dark Messiah already gave us an example of how limited multiple character progression paths could work. It's fault was in not really allowing for as satisfying gameplay if you chose pure magic or pure stealth. Did anyone ever try fighting the Orc chieftain as a pure stealth or mage character? The problem was that the game was far too combat oriented - a Thief game would not suffer this since you always have the option of avoiding AI or, using the system I propose, taking them out in a more stealthy fashion.

You are so, so wrong. HL2 is anything but trivial, and it most certainly brought some new things to FPS gaming. The physics are used in a way that was never done before. It's not that other games don't have physics, but there is so much scope in HL2. The plot is great. It's just so dark and so different to that in HL1. It's almost like HL1 is just a prologue, and the way the cut-scenes are handled compounds it's brilliance. The end of HL2 is just fantastic. Valve do set-pieces like no-one else. Yes, we've seen it all now but HL2 set new standards for set-piece quality. Finally the art direction is just outstanding - the beauty of the dystopia still gets me, even when I play mods like Minerva. Dark Messiah's strengths, imo, lie in it's replayability and the solidity of its visceral combat. It looks good too and I'm really disappointed that there is no editor. But it's plot and writing is some of the most predictable and juvenile claptrap ever put into a game. It was so bad it was embarrassing. I can't imagine how awesome that game would have been if they had good writers (and made it a tiny bit longer). If you don't like FPSs then you won't like HL2 (and I suppose I'm fortunate in that there is almost no genre I dislike) but, and take this ok?; If YOU do not like certain genre your dislike of it may be due to that and not that it is a bad game. In fact this is HIGHLY likely. This is why you won't find me playing a racing game. I like FPSs and for an FPS fan HL2 was great, as are the following Episodes. oDDity - you may be right about the consolisation thing, but I think that a compromise can be made. There are plenty of "non-console" games that have come out on consoles.

Well STiFU, I agree with sparhawk in that I don't think customers need to be aware of the engine limitations to be affected by it. Why would they be? The gameplay issues are there for all to see - the movement, the map limitations in size and freedom of exploration and so on. TDS is not an FPS so I would never directly compare it to HL2, except to say that I enjoyed HL2 much more. People who come out with nonsense like "Just regular Hitboxshooting and some nice physics... wooooohoooo!" just make me laugh. So you're saying that Dark Messiah has no "Hitbox" attacking? It has the same elements as HL2 - enemies that are attacked and injured via a weapon-to-hitbox system and physics in the environment that you can use. You are just being silly - every single game can be broken down into constituents like this; TDS, ha! Just lighting manipulation and AI algorithm exploitation. The physics even sucks! If fact I could attack LIFE in the same lame way; Vision! LOL! Just light energy conversion into visual sensory perception! It is the sum of the processes that makes anything, a game, vision, whatever, what it is. Trying to trivialise anything in this way is to sidestep the important point - what is the result of the sum of these sub-processes and what is the effect on you?

They could easily make it a money-maker though, and a good game too. Look at HL2 - a money-maker and an excellent FPS. Why? Because people bothered to spend time on perfecting it. If they just spent time on designing and writing rather than just doing it half-cocked, like TDS was, it could be great.

With all the sequelitis going on at the moment I really wouldn't be surprised. But it'll be set in the present day or future with Garrett's descendant who has "genetic memories" of Garrett and a centuries old Keeper conspiracy and oh god it's going to be awful what ever they do.

I don't think even the XBox 360 can handle it. My rig struggled with the final scene in the demo at high settings; Core 2 Duo 6600, 2GB RAM, GTS 8800 320MB. There are only 1 or 2 cards more powerful than this at the moment, or an SLI setup. How is the 360 going to handle that?

This is a meta-discussion about YOUR pointless bickering. You'll notice I stopped contributing in any real sense to the pointless bickering you usually supply, and that's because there is no point, and it's really quite dull. I advise changing before you become a. really irritating, b.unlikeable and c. lonely.

Arguing is only fun if there is anything to be gained from it. You express extreme views, are totally unwilling to see past your nose to the fact that people are different and so might have a different perspective (whilst at the same time olol claiming to be "unique" what emo kid I AM UNIQUE rage waht?) and are so sure that you are correct in all of this that we might as well argue with a broom and you might as well sit in your ivory tower admiring the ivory. It's not fun, it's boring.

It depends entirely on your perspective. You seem to take it all too seriously and whilst there is an absolute necessity for serious analysis there should also be flexibility and tolerance, neither of which you display. At all. And for reference of perspective I find your opinion, or at least what you express here, to be more puerile than most because it is so narrow minded. Bigoted some might say.

Reminds me of someone. Eh guys? I had to lol at this.

Don't know if these are old but I saw them for the first time today. Nice. Especially the explosive effects. http://www.stage6.com/user/Neillithan/vide...is---Mass-Physi http://www.destructoid.com/make-a-house-ou...sis-59787.phtml

I loved it too. The Vortis kick ass all the time with thier electric attacks though. And the antilion guard isn't THAT hard to beat on hard. And when I played it there were 2 of them! It's a challenge and I didn't waste all my ammo. There was stuff to gravgun into its face.

And since that is likely to happen I think it is better to standardise the process early on. A degree of automation wouldn't go amiss.

You're not as different from everyone else as you wish you were oDDity. Get over it. And there is nothing special about "choosing" to abandon aspects of your humanity. You ask what the point of being like other people is - human beings are social creatures, it's in our nature and it's healthy for us as individuals and as a species. I ask you; what is the point of being different? What do you really achieve apart from the simple fact of being different?

Hmmm. So if you don't form close relationships do you not miss them? I think you might have had an unusual childhood or have some inherent problem forming emotional bonds. Everything you describe is highly abnormal. Abnormal for whom you say? For the average human being. You are changed by them because you enjoyed them and remember them. It's not a big change but if liked them enough to buy more and read most of them they stimulated a response in you. And that crap about not having anymore books to read is nonsense. I don't even like Pratchett's books and even if I did that's some seriously warped telegraphing you're doing there.