After CliffyB's massive butthurt over Gears and PCs and videocards as an indicator of end-user tech level and maliciousness, UT3 is pretty much the last of Epic I think I'll ever see; it pleases me to no end that they're still supporting the game despite the completely unfair backlash it's gotten since day one.

And here I thought the most ridiculous butthurt I'd ever see was awhile back when Don LaFontaine died and there were comments along the lines of "Finally! Movie trailers were getting so repetitive with the same voiceover!"

Thank you, intertubes, for proving me wrong.

Word.

I never said ANY of those things. Hate? Where did I say that?

This is implied when you, you know, call something rubbish. Again, Chewbacca Defense; this has nothing to do with anything, it's just arguing over semantics.

My point is that compared to Ace Combat 6, this game looks and plays like rubbish.

The simplification of the flight controls all look rubbish and my guess is will never be used by anyone who wants to actually fly. AC6 didn't need any gimmics and it is a very - VERY - popular aerial combat game that nobody complaints about in terms of controls and such. I've been designing and developing flight systems - including aerodynamics - in games for almost twenty years, and make a dewordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordsbleublahbleublahbleu.

I actually did address gameplay and even went so far as to point out that it may very well blow many chunks (since I haven't played it and therefore don't actually know either way,) before touching on what it would mean compared to Ace Combat even if it does suck, but I guess your eyes just skipped over that since it would stop you from justifying yourself.

Also, if AC6 is that popular, why could I hardly ever find a game when I still cared? I stopped caring anyway because when I actually found a game, it just kept degenerating into High G Turns followed by QAAM/AADM spam with the Raptor, Berkut, or Nosferatu. Maybe HAWX is just throwing in cheap gimmicks, but maybe those gimmicks will turn out to be actual innovation that adds a layer sorely missing from the genre. I can be an Ace Combat fanboy since Air Combat on the PS1 and still knowledge when a) a game in the series has problems like AC6's multiplayer in this case and the storytelling like I was saying before and b) that when a competitor brings something new to the table, I won't actually know if it sucks or not until I play it for myself.

This comment was edited on Jan 24, 2009, 02:59.

I'm more worried about CliffyB's idea about charging second-hand buyers twenty bucks to fight the final boss catching on than this.

If this caught on, demos would be the new hot item on torrent sites.

The Riiflex is an interesting little peripheral, but man, you thought people destroying their TVs with their Wiimotes was bad before...

Missed what point, that you hate a game you haven't even played based on perceived budgetary problems/incompetence/it's not made by you/god knows what and you want me to salivate over a trailer for yours instead? Seriously, a trailer?

What the hell kind of a response is this, anyway? This has got to be the most incompetent application of the Chewbacca Defense I've ever seen.

This comment was edited on Jan 22, 2009, 20:29.

probably the most unrealistic combat "simulation" ever...

I'll pass.

You see any realistic combat flight sims anywhere these days? No? Probably because realism in this genre is boring as hell (ask any pilot and they'll tell you flying a fighter jet in reality as opposed to Hollywood or videogames isn't actually nearly as much like a videogame as everyone thinks, mostly because there's quite a bit of effort and work involved in it,) and no one bought them.

But seriously, how can that even be compared to the excellent Ace Combat 6? Better yet, who exactly is this game targeted at?

Are you kidding? Ace Combat 6 was far from excellent. In fact, I'd say much more than HAWX, it was a sign that companies are reluctant to spend all the extra money that next-gen titles really need. The graphics were better and the maps were larger, but it was hardly more complicated than Ace Combat 5 (the individual operations were nice, but this was purely orginizational so you won't get lost on the larger maps) and the plot was extremely straight forward with much less effort put into it.

Every character was ancillary to what was going on and the way the plot cut to and from various, seemingly random people, some of them civilians, no less (and Matilda's mother was nothing but annoying with her constant "I had no idea this was what war is like!" attitude in everything she says, and oh god, no, I don't want to "go dance with the angels," shut up,) was just terribly fracturing. It wasn't nearly as epic as The Unsung War or The Belkan War, and the latter still managed to outdo it while only having one wingman and less plot presented than AC5.

HAWX is hardly rubbish just from these trailers. Ace Combat 6 looked good, but this is clearly graphically superior, especially the detail in the urban areas. The fact that they're at least trying to innovate some new gameplay into the genre has me sold on it. Even if it doesn't work, at least it'll light a fire under Project Aces' ass so Ace Combat 7 will live up to The Unsung War.


Also, going from this...

I'm releasing a new air combat movie from our upcoming game next week. Wait'll you see it. Then compare to this rubbish. It is quite clear the their Bucharest (or was it Budapest) studio is cheaper to operate than their North American one. So this is the result.

...immediately to this...

Take a game. Any game. Smack Tom Clancy's name on it. Sell it. Watch the Lemmings come.

...is kinda funny, but I'll refrain from putting a strikethrough in Tom Clancy's name and replacing it with someone else.

This comment was edited on Jan 22, 2009, 20:15.

Tom Clancy's Ace Combat

Tom Clancy's "I wish."

Why in the world would civilians be wandering around on rooftops? You could bring the game to the ground, but then it's pretty much just losing itself. Considering the quality you'd be losing doesn't save it to begin with, why bother? I'll just give Assassin's Creed (and the second one when it comes out) another playthrough while not caring that Mirror's Edge's "actual gameplay" is just "push buttons more to do the same thing."

Hell, Prince of Persia is more fun, and that doesn't even have enemies, let alone civilians.

This comment was edited on Jan 22, 2009, 19:13.

...what's Endwar? I'm busy trying out the 'nids in the DoW2 beta.

Om nom nomnomnom omnom omnomnom...tasty biomass...

What they need to do with the Spy is simply remove the visual cues that a disguise is a diguise. Let a Spy switch weapons and fire fake, non-registered shots. Even better, a medic!Spy can pretend to heal someone, and he'd only be revealed if the "patient" realized he had a medigun on him without getting health.

Removing the visual cues would basically reset the Spy to what it was when the game first came out and people didn't know what the signs were. There would still be signs, of course; a Heavy letting loose with his minigun but edging over to someone else, a Demoman spamming 'nades or a Pyro spamming fire but nothing happening...but they would be more subtle and give the disguise back its ability to, well, disguise.

Spy is my best class and I don't understand why people are unable to adapt to the awareness, I'm quite effective probably 80% of the time...but still, it'd be nice if I could be effective by sneaking a little instead of camping while my cloak recharges.

This comment was edited on Jan 21, 2009, 01:51.

Lets hope Iceland isn't auctioned off to the highest bidder... and that the game doesn't suck. The MMO scene really needs something new and different.

Naturally, the problem here is that while the MMO scene could certainly use something new from an artistic standpoint, it needs absolutely nothing new from a business standpoint. WoW is the the only thing making piles of cash because it's all anyone wants.

Schreber I used to be in your camp. The OWOD was the way to go and the NWOD sucks, or at the very least, wasn't remotely as good.

My problem with nWoD isn't so much that it's different, but the underlying philosophies that went into the process of changing it. I don't know why they just had a big fit about metaplot and decided "Okay no more metaplot because it's Just Too Much" considering every oWoD sourcebook had a note somewhere that basically said "This is our canon, but feel free to completely ignore as much as you want." The world was just more interesting. The factions in the new Vampire are all built on cliches (really, one of the very first red flags for me was reading descriptions like the ones further down and seeing phrases like "they're like vampire Christians!" and "they're like vampire Pagans!") Granted, the never-goddamn-ending pissing contest between the Camarilla and Sabbat could certainly get old, but there was always room for creativity. An ST with half a brain could sit down with likewise-endowed players and come up with great characters and great NPCs on their own. One of my fondest memories is a rather long campaign where the players were Camarilla, one was a Lasombra antitribu, and an important NPC was one of the five or six Tzimisce that might be skulking about the Camarilla at any given time. The ST and the players were all intelligent enough to make gonzo stuff like that work and turn it into something new.

I even had fun with NanoWrimo one year by making my plot the further adventures of my character from Bloodlines, complete with fridge logic about the player-character (I don't think Troika intended it, but the PC in that game is like, eighth-generation, considering the amount of total blood points you have, and the fact that LaCroix is probably ninth but can't dominate you. Which makes Tourette even scarier than she/they already is, considering a Ventrue PC can't dominate her. But I digress.)

Of course, half the reason the nWoD is the way it is would be because most players and STs can't make something like that work without either powergaming or being absolutely ridiculous like terrible fanfiction, so I guess I can't really fault them for that...

I get excited every time I hear something about this until I remember there's no way in hell it's going to be based on the old World of Darkness; aka, the one that was actually interesting. Blech.

I ended up on one of those servers the first time I hit multiplayer, and I just thought they were already having a free XP special at the time.

In addition to everyone pointing out that there's no reason you can't just post a link to a hotfix download (like every other dev does) the game is on Steam, ffs, but there's no infrastructure? It's already on the goddamn over-arching service. They are sitting in the Failboat while saying they just have no failboat at all.

This comment was edited on Jan 17, 2009, 00:46.

On helmets, they're really not magical bullet-stoppers. I know it's the forty-first millenium and all, but I doubt that much has changed from today, considering everyone else's weapons will have advanced much more than today's to go along with whatever advancements in helmet-making the Imperium may have made (considering the Imperium's problems with technology...ugh, let's not even get that silly with the fluff.)

Helmets are on your head to stop shrapnel, not so much gunfire. A modern-day helmet stands a decent chance of stopping pistol shots, but rifles (like the rifle the Eldar ranger has in the DoW2 intro, for example,) will go right through. Commander units have no helmets because looking badass and thus boosting morale is a fair trade-off for removing what really isn't that much of a safety.

(And because they look better, which is what players usually care about. )

http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot29.htm Some pictures on the subject.

This comment was edited on Jan 16, 2009, 00:16.

Problem with Doom 3's story was horrible presentation. In a videogame, pausing to listen to a bunch of rambling about stuff that's already happened long before you arrived is not good storytelling. If they want Doom to have a storyline, then the fundamental concept needs to change; you simply can't have an interesting narrative based on the idea of one lucky guy surviving the demonic invasion and fighting it off single-handedly. Remove the Diabolus Ex Machina of the demons instantaneously possessing everyone and their mother and make it a more traditional kind of invasion and you'd have something to work with, certainly something that could have some decent parallels with any conflict of the twentieth century or today (personally, though, if Doom was going to be an allegory for something, I'd rather it be an allegory for World War II than the war on terror.)

Oh, and Mr. Famous Fantasy Author who has nothing to work with because the chances of id changing the concept of Doom to accommodate actual writing instead of a complete, obvious Excuse Plot is slim to none: please write in that Mars has duct tape.

Your complaints seem to suggest that you do have a problem with it. What TR games have you played and what do you consider a good platformer by comparison?

All of them to some extent. Legend was the only one I didn't get excessively annoyed at and finished. Uncharted and the Legacy of Kain series, even Blood Omen 2, which certainly had...issues, are the height of the genre for me. Again, I don't care that Uncharted has more shooting than platforming (you said it yourself, Soul Reaver is always more puzzle-oriented,) I care that the platforming it does have controls well and severely reduces the frustration usually caused by such a thing. Soul Reaver's always taken it one step further with intricate puzzles that are still easy to figure out; they weren't very visually interesting in Soul Reaver 1 what with all the blocks, but controls were never a problem, the camera was smart, it was a simple matter to make Raziel go where I wanted him to, especially with his gliding and fairly generous ledge-grabbing. And it was certainly a pioneer in removing death as a game mechanic, so the occasional slip-up was never much of a problem and the fact that it was sometimes required was absolute genius. (My biggest complaint about Defiance wasn't the combat-oriented direction the gameplay took with Kane, it was that Raziel's puzzle-heavy segments no longer really required much in the way of the spirit world to solve.)

Sorry but if that's all you see, you're looking in the wrong places. TR is about challenging platforming and puzzles that actually make you think. You're presented with some crazy environment and you think "How the hell am I supposed to get over there?" That's what TR is about and really what any platformer should be about.

It's never been challenging in Tomb Raider, though, it's been broken. The puzzles are so ridiculously oblique and violations of common sense that solving them isn't a matter of parsing the room's layout and contents, but of thinking, "Now, if I were a game dev lacking equally in design sense and user-friendliness, possibly on purpose to make the game seem longer than it really is, how would I design the solution to this puzzle?" I'm sure your immediate thought here is going to be that my intelligence is lacking because you've "never had a problem" with it, but I've never had a problem with it either, I just think it's annoying, obnoxious, and terrible design. Just because you have to expend mental effort on something doesn't make it smart by default.