How was he "bested" by Heath Ledger? If Ledger hadn't died shortly after the movie...

He actually died while Dark Knight was still in production. I when Ledger died Warner put out a statement he pretty much finished filming his role.

...everyone would have said he was good, and nobody would have cared anymore. It's the River Phoenix Syndrome. Make a decent movie, die, and suddenly you're this Legendary actor.

Meh, his accolades for the movie were deserved regardless. His portrayal of The Joker in the movie was essentially how I imagined him from the comics. Nicholson's Joker was ridiculously comic and just showed the character as a lunatic madman. No depth, no substance, just a white-faced clown in a purple suit.

Not saying Nicholson's role was bad, not by any means. But he certainly didn't get any inspiration from the comic-series Joker.

It figures - a new CEO tries to fix some of what is so very wrong with EA and the shareholders revolt

It has nothing to do with it. A company fucking up is a company fucking up and the stockholders have every right to complain.

Were all its other problems disregarded, IW would still ultimately fail miserably because the sprawling maps of Deus Ex were replaced with tiny little dorm rooms.

I thought IW would've been better if it wasn't associated in any way with Deus Ex, but what the hell, it was about the only it had going for it.

As for Deus Ex 3 being a PC exclusive. Meh. There is no reason for it to be. If the budget for the game is so small they can only make it for the PC, then there stands a good chance it'll be a fairly lame game regardless. Besides, I've played the PS2 port of the first Deus Ex and it was a prime example of how ports can be done right. PC exclusives should relegated to the past, IMHO; but then again, there's still a good chance it'll land on a console soon enough. If not, and the game turns out to be a POS, then, well, it wouldn't be the first time the PC acts as the trashcan for bad games.

Yes, but if they make it those people can just not play it, where as if they never made it I have no options.

Ha! You'd just go onto something else. If DXIW was never developed, or cancelled, there would probably be sadness at a sequel getting shitcanned, but at least we'd all be spared the drama.



This comment was edited on Nov 28, 2009, 19:27.

MW2's tech is utterly amazing. The graphics are slick, the gameplay is solid, it's noisy as hell and sounds and looks amazing when played on my PS3. That said - SP was great as long as you didn't pay attention to the story, particularly the inconsistencies and cliches that make it up.

COD4 still sells for at least 39.99 on PC and 49.99 on consoles

I picked it up for $20 off Amazon. Used, but for that price I really enjoyed it felt it was worth it.

This comment was edited on Nov 16, 2009, 21:51.

Bioshock ads talked about how awesome it was. But really, it wasn't all that great. Reviewers were paid to say how revolutionary it was. It was not. At all.

I disagree about Bioshock not being great (though not "revolutionary"), but I felt the same way about Uncharted 1-2. Bleh, both games considered the best the consoles have to offer and they were so bland and boring.

rented it. good rental - not worth the money to buy.

No kidding. The SP mission set sucked hard compared to the first game; basically just the same objective repeated over different levels. Bleh. And I played through veteran mode and threw the controller a few times.

1) I think he had a dual purpose, make it seem like Russia used nukes and also to black-out the entire war area to give both forces a break and time to think.

The nuke was detonated to give America time to regroup anyway. If you recall a cut scene between Price and Shepherd, Priced asked him if he was prepared to do what was necessary to stop the war, to which the General agreed.

Price knew what was going on and realized at some point Shepherd essentially paved the path for the US to be invaded, thus the raid on the submarine pen was a cover to launch the nuke.

Plus it seemed like Russia was heavily reliant on its vehicles and tech they were using to invade while the US had the vast majority in numbers.

Kind of, but you got it backwards - it was the Russians who had exploited the American military dependence on technology. The Russians had decrypted the ACS module before Soap and Roach got it back and thus it was implied Russia had hidden its invasion force from detection. It was never explained how they gained the technology before Soap and Roach went for it; and the only thing I could come up with was Shepherd was covering his own tracks.

Really, MW2 storyline is a load of crap. I usually hate flag-waving patriotic garbage while playing war shooters, but damn, those stories at least made more sense than MW!

The story itself is insane, almost to the point of Metal Gear Solid not making sense.

Metal Gear at least made some sense if you paid attention. MW2 just...really required some leaps of imagination and insinuation for it to make sense. Really, the game was not made for its SP! Which is a shame, because the previous COD (save MW 1) had some decently written stories, if a person doesn't mind the constant patriotic garbage.

Perhaps all my plot issues were answered flawlessly, but I missed ALL of the important plot details because I was too busy getting a bayonet shoved up my ass.

Trust me, you're not the only one. I had to play through twice before I picked up all the points, then I realized I wasted the time paying attention to the story. There really wasn't one.

I don't bother with console garbage.

Have fun patching your PC games.

Other than the fact that it's the sequel to the first Modern Warfare, which was an excellent (if completely by the rails) shooter with awesome setpieces...

My favorite mission was where LT Price did that assassination mission in the Ukraine, crawling through the formations of soldiers and moving APCs. Cool stuff. I'm not all that big into MP, so I was a little irritated at how short the SP was.

Better late than never?

The weaps in GTA IV are weak and don't show much planning or thought.

I don't know how you could say that. Until San Andreas there wasn't much change in how weapons worked or felt. Even SA more or less contained the same look and feel of the weapons from past games.

I will agree GTA IV's weapons were weak.

Goddamn I'm loving this game. This is the first time since the first time I played Baldur's Gate that I feel like I'm playing...well, Baldur's Gate

I haven't played Invisible War yet, but some of the bad things people have said about it actually sound like fixes to me

Actually, you might be better off playing IW first if you haven't tried it yet.

And it wasn't necessarily a bad game...it just certainly WAS NOT a suitable followup to such a great game.

Also, IHMO, the game is overlong.

Harvey Smith thought the same thing and we got Invisible War. That game probably adhered more to Smith's desire for DX1 to have been only 2/3 the length it was. I thought the length was a little bit long, too, but I consider DX:IW the opposite result of DX in terms of streamlining - they just went way too far with it.

Also there are many articles where Spector came out defending harvey's stupid ideas like Universal Ammo, he was intimately involved.

That still doesn't explain why DX:IW was so inferior to DX; presuming how much control you believe Spector had over the design of the game.

"Intimately involved". He represented the game to the publisher, I suppose. Beyond that, I have yet to read anything saying Spector didn't let Harvey Smith design the game to his (Smith) own vision. Anything.

And it's been stated in numerous interviews Harvey Smith had the reigns on the entire design of IW. A person doesn't have to read between the lines of these interviews to get the idea Smith had his ideas for a DX sequel devised before the first was even released. Or that by the time play testing got around to figuring out which features didn't mesh well, the game was far too along in development to be worth the big delays likely required to redesign them. Or that Eidos was leaning hard on Ion Storm to produce a game...you know, the whole "suits and marketing execs" thing.

Enemy troopers used squad tactics, flush you out with grenades, etc.

Well, they hid behind cover and chucked grenades at you anyway. And those damn Marines did that really well. Some of the supposedly evolutionary AI features the enemies were said to possess apparently didn't make it into the game. There were supposedly plans for enemies to outflank the player and even do coordinated rushes of the player's position. Encountering the blackops girls towards the end, they might have had some better AI coding, but it seemed to me they reacted like the Marines, just faster and quieter.

If I play a story-driven game for 40+ hours, I want a decent ending that lasts more than a minute.

If it's quantity of time you are looking for, pop in any Final Fantasy game (typical FF endings are great, IMO, but lengthy); or better yet, pop in Metal Gear Solid 4 and watch a 15 hour movie.

The endings for DX were very interpretative and if you're a player who would rather have an ending just handed over and explained to you, DX won't work for you. Considering your comments over the action portions of DX, Call of Duty is probably more your line.

This comment was edited on Nov 6, 2009, 11:58.

is'nt jean a girls name?

Not when it's pronounced as "John" apparently.

Can I get an "Amen"?

Is this a vague reference to Cave Dog?

BTW, STFU Jerykk.

Just got done playing Uncharted 2...borrowed it from a friend (whom stayed up all night and day playing it). I must say, wow. It's vast improvement over the first one. Combat is better, hand-to-hand is more fun, the guns actually feel more tactile (hard to explain this one), and it's difficult as hell, but I don't mind playing through certain parts again and again.

I was bitching the other night about the playing the demo for Uncharted 1 and not seeing where all the love was coming from. I think one poster even said something to the effect it was a "poor representation" of the game. Whatever. Demos are suppose to represent their retail release. It's marketing, it's the whole point of a demo. I could rent the game, but I just don't care at this point.

Nice thing is - Uncharted 2 may as well be a standalone game without the added numeric to designate it a sequel. The first story may as well as not happened

The game was created from ground up to be a console game and the PC part pays the price for that.

Pft, it's just a mediocre game to begin with, ports notwithstanding. I played the original OFP on the Xbox, and while it's certainly no substitute to the PC release, it was by no means bad.

What's the gist of the article it's too long to read.

Basically paying attention requires a certain amount of effort and action games minimize that with reflexive gameplay.

I guess Uncharted 2 is coming out tomorrow. I never played the first one, so I downloaded the demo and played it. I quit after about fifteen minutes. The combat was boring and the cover system didn't do anything to enhance it, except as an excuse to unload dozens of enemies at the player. The weapons were weak. The parts that are so-often compared to Tomb Raider amount to running down an obviously linear path, sometimes encountering puzzles that were too easy unto themselves. There were cheesy little elements added, like parkor (parkour?) that made me yawn and say "who cares?" Drake was somewhat cool, though. Though from what I hear the story stays pretty good for the first half then pulls an Indigo Prophecy towards the end. Meh.

Maybe I'm just being too critical, but I just didn't have fun with the demo. That's alright, $25 saved

The N64 controller was terrible. You couldn't reach everything without taking your hand off the controller.

I have longer fingers and a larger palm-print than most people, but you'd have to have pretty small hands not to be able to use the N64 controller. Like the size of a dime.

Besides, WTF are you doing posting in the console section? Get back to the outside where you belong!

SexBox, The First "Adults Only" Video Game Console.

It's got Jerykk written all over it.

Maybe they'll license the software to him use the Wii remote on it.

This comment was edited on Sep 5, 2009, 21:22.

There is no such thing as a good CRT anymore, not with how far LCD monitors have come along.

As for the Bangladesh news, I can't fault them, but still, thinking The Onion is a legit news site, that's just hilarious.

There's been a few times over the years I've ran across an Onion story that wasn't labeled such I had read twice. When I was in college I'd print up a story and put it on the college bulletin board; about every week or so. It got to be someone else would do for me.

[edit]

And yes, Twitter needs to die.

This comment was edited on Sep 5, 2009, 21:13.