wow, you all need girlfriends, or some kind of real female contact....

Someone's projecting.

Ack no! ToEE and Arcanum have convinced me Troika doesn't deserve the license.

Actually those games just prove that Troika shouldn't be making engines. Arcanum had a great story and no combat system, ToEE had a great combat system and no story. Both had a horribly flawed engine that was prone to bugs.
Then we have Vampire coming out, which is looking to have a great combat system, extensive story, and has licensed the best engine ever seen.

The Ion Storm boards are looking exactly like the Anarchy Online boards after that was released. Five billion topics about how bad the game is, and a dozen people attempting to make excuses for the developers.

Guys that haven't even played the title wildly running about like chickens screaming "The sky is falling". And the demo doesn't really count since it had about as much content as a pre-alpha build.

Sorry to break it to you, but there are only three websites and three magazines whose reviews really count in PC gaming. And two of them have so far come out saying that the final game has the exact same problems as the demo.

I've played the demo and found the game absorbing like the original with much more atmosphere this time. The Reviews have ranged from OXM's 9.1 to Gamespot's 8.0, but none of them have given the game lower than a "great" rating

OXM did not review a PC build of the game. There's a reason why EVERY gaming magazine and website on the planet reviews different platforms of the games separately.
And the numbers do not matter when the reveiws themselves are attesting that the flaws we all hate are indeed there. What you are doing is being an apologist.

That's consistency in my book and warrents my own personal evaluation.

Most people won't pay $50 to do an "evaluation" of a game.

Some people like to complain just to be different from the bandwagon, it happened with every other big name title released such as Halo etc and will happen again with HL2 and Doom 3.

Sorry to break it to you, but with Deus Ex: Invisible War, complaining is the bandwagon. And from my experience with games, there is always good reason why such a state of affairs comes to pass.

The idea that Warren Spector was solely responsible for DX1 and that HS came out of the shadows, stole IW from WS, and then proceeded to rape the game is crap. WS was Producer and Project Lead for DX1, he was studio lead for IW.

Actually, he's been pretty hands-off for IW, and focusing his time on Theif 3. They have two separate teams doing the two games.

Nothing too new there, though it sounds as if the reviewer didn't really like the first game so it's difficult to gauge his evaluations of the gameplay.

The problems that Greg pointed out are the exact same problems seen in the demo.

Nero 6 has an option to disable the virtual drives in the preferences. For more information about this, please refer to the documentation that came with the software. You did buy it, right? RIGHT?

Actually, no, I got it for free with my CD-RW drive. They don't give you documentation with shareware.
What I also didn't buy is XIII. What a coincidence.

That's not really true. Why do little kids do things like talk to the TV then?

What the hell kind of kid talks to the TV? I don't know a kid on earth that talks to the TV.
I know ADULTS that talk to the TV, however (when watching football).

Some types of violent crime has apparently diminished while other forms of it are on the rise (murder down, assault and rapes up).

According to who? All sociological studies I've ever seen, state that crime among minors has gone down since the 80's.

Violent media desensitizes people to violence. They're much more inclined to use violence to resolve conflict than not.

False. How someone reacts to violence does not determine if someone will commit violence. There are no social or personal consequences to not caring about violence. However, everyone knows the real consequences to violence. They do not get programmed to ignore these obvious consequences through media brainwashing. Such a notion is absurd: if it were true, we'd be a NATION of killer zombies.

We've already heard from the peanut gallery, so let's go to the pro's. Here's a link to an APA article.

The APA deals with controlled lab research, not the real world. You need to look at the real statistics.

step 1) do not allow retailers to sell games that have a rating higher than the age of the buyer. (its supposed to be like this already, but it still happens.)

The problem is that this is illegal and discriminatory. They don't even do this with movies.

step 2) if a parent is buying the game for the kid, TELL THEM ABOUT THE RATING!

That won't work either. The parents are too stupid and apathetic to care about what the rating means. Hence why the kids end up going on killing sprees, with or without video games.

Is this the part where everyone freaks out about how an 8 year old should be able to buy Soldier of Fortune 2 without anyone else knowing or caring?

What I'd like to know is where the 8 year old got the money to buy SoF2. Last I checked, 8 year olds don't have jobs.

"Black Friday" is the term used by the people who have to actually work retail today.

gamespy's curious score given the problems the reviewer claimed he had.

It's called "reviewer tilt". It's how much the reviewer actually enjoyed the game, regardless of all factors. GameSpot actually made it an official part of their review scoring some time ago.


This comment was edited on Nov 28, 05:10.

I think the problem is the gamers of today are just SO jaded that they are at the point that they expect EVERYTHING in a game.

What do you mean "think"? When the amazingly amazing HL2 physics demo came out, people were looking for .0005-second shots of clipping errors.
Now for the DX2 demo they have to (*gasp*) manually adjust settings, something that takes all of 2 minutes. Of course this could be looked at nothing short of the apocalypse.

Dont forget the handy little installer Gamespy had at the start of the install for DXIW, 4 stars, coincidence, I dont think so

Of course you don't think so. You're completely inept when it comes to the subject of marketing and advertising. Apparently you think that the journalists at large companies like GSI also do the advertising deals.

warren spector payed em off

Right. Because he's just so rich after having one successful game released in the past 4 years.

creston, you have to try out the inventory interface.
It is 100 percent designed for console, you can barely use the mouse in it.

Warren Spector openly intended to get rid of the mouse dependence in DX2's interface before DX2 went into development.

Why is it that there are people calling themselves "loyal fans" here, when they don't even remember the problems that Warren admitted about DX1 since DX1 went onto shelves?

Doesn't explain why the game runs so poorly on high end machines yet looks like it was made 3 years ago.

How very odd. Since I have a three year old video card, and when I try to run the game, it comes up with a message pointing out that I need a card which will run A GRAPHICAL FEATURE THAT DID NOT EXIST WHEN I BOUGHT THE CARD.
Quit being so melodramatic.


This comment was edited on Nov 26, 13:23.

This comment was edited on Nov 26, 06:12.

But my point is that Max Payne 2, HL2 beta and the D3 alpha all run on my crappy GF2 Ti

A game with a modified version of a two year old engine, a game with scalable graphics down to Savage card level, and a game that isn't anywhere near as heavy on DirectX9 use, proabably aren't very good comparisons to how a souped-up UW engine game works on your computer.