Really? I'm playing as a knight, and I find that most of my misc skills are still nearly at the level that they begun at, with the exception of security, which I think everyone will wind up boosting as high as they can train it. Most of my magic is still under 10. The only ones that I found it really easy to raise were Acrobatics (jump around a lot), athletics, and the heavy armor and weapons skills. The rest kind of stays put - but then, I basically just run around wacking things with my Daedric Katana or Axe. I think my Speechcraft skill has increased one point since I started the game.

I want to start over and play with one of those Mage / Thief hybrids, but I'll probably never get around to playing through it again.

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"I don't really understand why people buy PC games for the SP anymore."

Jesus. Did you really just say that? Someone tell me this guy didn't just say that.

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God, this game's long. A good thing, but still - I honestly can't gauge how far I am from the "end", even after what's easily a hundred hours soaked into my first character. It's an odd feeling.

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Well, some of those are a bit nitpicky. For instance, your foes are probably throwing your grenades back at you because you're chucking them as soon as you pull the pin - hold the button down to hold on to the grenade for a few seconds, then chuck it into a room. This gives them less time to run and they'll rarely ever be able to throw it back.

Also, the expanding crosshairs is meant to indicate decreased accuracy due to recoil - this isn't a bug at all.

Granted, though - the rest of those are things I noticed as well.

My one main pet peeve with the gameplay itself is that the sniper rifle and the sniper function on the OICW are very rarely used, since most enemies don't spawn until you're close enough to make a rifle or shotgun your only option. I used the Sniper a couple of times, to lean around corners at somewhat distant enemies, but I found that the assault rifle on Burst mode was almost as accurate at medium distances and was a lot safer, since most of the time, if you could see the enemy, they could also see you. So I would've liked to see a couple of levels where you could pick off enemies from a distance.

I guess, while I'm bitching, I should reiterate my displeasure with the way the computer could fire at you without you being able to see them. Not only through walls, trucks, etc., but through the tall grass, sheets in the hospital, and most annoyingly, the smoke grenades.
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This comment was edited on May 31, 00:49.

"All the complaints are bogus anyway."

And you make this comment based on what? Is my complaint that I had three complete crashes during installation "bogus"? Am I just making up the fact that I had to completely uninstall and reinstall the game four times just to get it to load up a level?

I liked the game, but I didn't like it enough to pretend that there aren't some pretty serious flaws with Activision's QA program if they can let this stuff slip through. Granted, there will be problems with every new release, but enough people are complaining on the forums linked in the guy's .plan to show that these aren't completely isolated incidents.

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Personally, I think this is one of the better FPS' to come out recently. Not as good as Jedi Outcast, though. (Isn't it weird that Raven got Mark Hamill to do a voice in this game but didn't get him to voice Skywalker in Outcast?) The main problem for me is a terrible framerate / poor graphics. Admittedly, I'm on a 1.1 ghz machine, but I do have a GeForce4, and I could play Outcast at 1024 at excellent framerates, and it looked nice. Here, I have to knock all the settings down, play at 800, and it still chugs along. This, and the bugs, speaks of poor troubleshooting / optimization. I had problems installing the game, I had problems loading up saves, etc.

My main fault with the actual gameplay was the mixture of AI omnipotence and stupidity. They could generally see me through the high grass in Columbia, where I had no chance to see them, but they would also walk right around corners where they would know I was, so that I could blast their legs off with a shotgun. Anyway, it was fun, and fairly lengthy. Not Deus Ex lengthy, but long enough to not feel hesitant to play through it again.

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Was the single player any better than the demo they included in the SP demo? I thought it felt really generic and flat.

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Am I sure about what? They're all shooters, with an emphasis on action instead of story, but it's not like they're all clones of the first game, either. None of the single-player portions of those games are exactly memorable, but that doesn't mean that id can't try to make something scary and unique if they want to.

Why even bother playing new games if all you want is to repeat old experiences? Better just go back to playing Doom and let people make what they want.

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On the other hand, why make the same game over and over again? Carmack is interested in pushing the graphical envelope, and when the game is as detailed as it is, there's no way they're going to be able to put more than three or four enemies on the screen at a time (unless they're something tiny). Look at Diablo II - Blizzard got slammed for the graphics in that game, but it simply wasn't possible for the computers of two years ago to deal with the hordes of enemies in that game at any kind of graphical detail beyond what they provided. But jump ahead a year, and computers are that much more powerful, and they can bump the resolution up to 800 x 600.

So I guess id could make a "hordes of enemies" game, but it'd probably wind up looking something like Halo, or marginally better. Maybe they can be criticized for emphasizing the graphical side of things over what their fans might want to see (though I don't believe for a minute that there's a majority of gamers that are bitterly disappointed with the new direction), but that's always been the way they've done things. I think they deserve credit for not trying to force old-school gameplay (how I loathe this phrase and concept!) into an engine that probably can't handle it.

I'm sure people will experiment with massive numbers of enemies in homemade levels after the game comes out, though, so if you want them, I'm sure they'll be available one way or another.

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I just noticed that Circuit City is offering 15 dollars off SOF2 this week. Anyone play it? Think it's worth it? I really enjoyed JK2, but I've heard various things about SOF2.

I also noted that they're listing the XBOX as 199, but the PS2 is still 299 for some reason, even though the PS2 pricecuts were announced first. Weird.

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I guess the PVC version is the one with the pipe bombs added in?

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e3 is an abberation, much like the entire advertising/marketing industry is an aberration, a nonsensical creation of capitalism that creates nothing and produces nothing worthwhile. All talk.

Put more simply, GTA3 is better than Mafia, at this point in time, because I can play the former and cannot play the latter. Comparisons, therefore, are meaningless for me, but I can't speak for the people who may have been able to play Mafia for a few hours. I just always think it's amusing when people say things like "This unreleased game will blow everything else out of the water!" Go over to ebworld.com and read some of the SOF2 "reviews", especially the ones written by people who hadn't played the full version, for an example of this.

I just wish people wouldn't lower themselves and become mimics of the hype machine that surrounds so many games - boosterism and partisanship, particularly for games that haven't been released, seems to me to be a futile and inefficient use of one's time.

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Potential greatness always takes second place to actual greatness.

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I read an interview a while back where Card said he wanted Jake Lloyd, aka Mannequin Skywalker, to play the lead.

The problem with Ender's Game is that it's basically a bunch of kids, and kids in general aren't great actors. So I'm predicting a trainwreck.

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Well, I have a feeling this is more part of the army's advertising efforts than part of their efforts to make really cutting edge, exciting games. So it'll probably be shovelware by the time it hits the shelves. I'm sure they'll work pretty hard on the tech that lets flags wave really prettily, though.

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"Among other things, Substance will remedy Kojima's controversial introduction of Raiden by letting you assume the role of Solid Snake throughout the entire course of Metal Gear Solid 2."

Christ, that alone will make it worth getting. Probably. Have to see what kind of graphical upgrades they throw in.

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E3 is completely overrated? I went last year, and my single memory is of huge crowds and incredibly long lines to play any halfway decent games. I could've gone back this year (at no real cost to myself save pocket money), but I'm skipping it - there's really not enough to offer to people who can't get in to all the closed-door stuff. Sure, seeing the MGS2 video was cool, but I skipped out on half of the second day and didn't go at all on Saturday. I didn't really think it was worth the trip. There's also the fact that it's in L.A., "or Hell-A as I like to call it."

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Clarifications: I bought my PS2 about a year ago, so it wasn't among the very first shipment. And even though the sound that blue discs make is horrible, the discs themselves aren't damaged by the machine; they simply don't play.

DVDs are a special problem; some completely refuse to work, while others will spin up and play partway through before they skip to a halt (Blade), while others skip intermittently (U-571), while others get almost to the end until they start skipping (Thin Red Line). All of these discs work fine on my dad's standalone DVD player. It doesn't happen often enough to make me not rent DVD's, but it's a statistically significant portion of the discs I rent/buy that have problems with the PS2. No big deal for me, since I have a backup in the house, but there's no way in hell I would rely on the PS2 as a primary DVD player. One guy even told me that he called Sony Tech Support and was told that they don't recommend that DVDs be played on the PS2, though this might simply be their corporate equivalent of a game company releasing a Linux version of a game and saying that's it's not supported. Could also be a complete lie; dunno.

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I went to work, so I didn't get a chance to respond. The disc read error I was referring to is a very well-known issue and the bane of many PS2 owners. Many discs with blue bottoms refuse to play on my system (Dynasty Warriors 2), while others, like VF4, require special handling to start up right (like, I'll have to put in a non-blue disc, then start the system and switch discs, or stupid stuff like that). The system makes this horrible noise like the disc is being chewed up, so there's definitely a problem with the hardware. If your system is out of warranty Sony charges you 125 bucks to replace the parts inside the machine.

I've heard that newer models of the PS2 have updated parts and don't have this problem, but that doesn't help me much. I've heard people suggest that people with this problem find a store with a lenient return policy, buy a new PS2, and return it with the broken one inside, but this seems like it'd be screwing over whatever store you go to, which I have no desire to do. Still, it seems like Sony could take better care of its customers - this problem is quite widespread among owners of older PS2s, so it's definitely not just a few conspiracy theorists. Do a search for "ps2 disc read error" on google or any other search engine, should be plenty of stuff out there....

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So they chop the price 100 bucks (!) but are they going to fix the goddamn laser? The PS2 read errors (especially for blue discs) are a plague for PS2 owners, and these should really be addressed before Sony decides to pass the problem onto a whole new influx of buyers...

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