LOPcagney

Did you not want to see this? Sorry. I'll fix it.

I'm excited to see what else besides Episode 3 will be included in The Orange Box 2

Yeah, I meant commercial, "big-budget" games. And I'm unsure about this whole remaking classic games trend. I guess it's a good idea to expose a new generation of viewers to classic titles and to make them available again to old fans but something about it seems lazy. Whether it turns out to be as mediocre as it looks or not, I'm more interested in how they can rework the classic mechanic for current-gen technology. The purist in me wants to say that the original artwork is invariably better. Though I'm sure they're offer an option to play the classic game as well.

And it's surprisingly being developed for the same consoles as the first remake. I don't remember the last time I've seen a current-gen side-scroller on the PC...

I think he's losing his touch. I'm not laughing as much as I used to, and I rewatched some earlier episodes and I think they are better... I was surprised he liked Crysis though! I expected him to bash it for being desinged for "some hypothetical future-computer", but he seemed to like this one a lot more than usual.

Haha, yes. We are on the same page you and I. I was too shy to actually go right out there and say: "New smiley?"

"So... have you... met an SP?"

OMG! There are 36 lines in Yufters first post and 13 in the second! 36-13=23! 2+3= 5! The infallible law of fives! It's an Illuminati conspiracy!

OO. I feel we might as well go way out there. That would be easy enough for them to do and very convenient, but I always wanted a game that reeeally changed based on the decisions you made in a sort of spore-ish procedural way so that you could play through the entire game and then, depending on how it ended, the sequel could play out in an entirely different local with each run-through. Haha, I can dream.

Yeah, I don't know first hand, but I think I remember someone saying something about Steam automatically splicing the chapters together so that when you chose which one to start at you can look at the entire time line and, like you said, play through them all as a single game. On a completely different note, the cinematic recap of Episode 1 took me completely by surprise at the start of Episode 2. I was so used to HL2's interactive, real-time cut scenes that when I realized I was watching a movie, I felt so helpless.

They're each individual games, although I could be wrong, but isn't there some special way to play directly from the last chapter of each game into the first chapter of it's sequel? Either way, you need to download all three.

On another note, I just saw an interview where the game's creator said something about how they chose Yoda and Vader. Basically, they said guest characters get fans excited, so they tried to think of what guests would fit in the Soul Calibur universe, and "naturally" they thought of Vader and Yoda... ... ... ...Am I missing something?

So there we have it. Here we are arguing about how they are going to be able to write Vader and Yoda into the series mythology when what we should be wondering is where in the time line all the female characters went and got their breasts enlarged.

I think think first of all that after the big reveal, it began to disappoint. Up until that point, I admittedly had no problems with the believability of the characters or the setting or the respawning enemies or any of that because, as I think some people have mentioned in the Zero-Tolerance discussion on Resident Evil, a good narrative will make you forget the actual gameplay flaws. I'm not sure that the very ending failed because they tried to do too much. On the contrary, the developers have said in an interview that the endings were essentially afterthoughts, and written according to a very limiting schedule. If anything, they failed because they built-up and built-up this story to a spectacular ending that they didn't try hard enough to make as incredible as the rest of the game. I think the problems also came from the binary morality system of the game (and I know this has been said before), which would inevitably lead you to one of two endings,

Oo. I am utterly useless with C, but can we get a taste of what the game'll be like? Homebrew/indie gaming ftw.

Number 1 is up. Some sick part of me wants him to start counting into the negative integers. Just to fuck with people.

Haha, it's a great topic. No-one thinks to bring it up but it's a good issue.

No I agree. Thats my point. One of the major restrictions is that programing character deaths into a game as cinematic as HL2 is impractical.

Yeah, apparently FlatOut is the PC equivalent, but I can't imagine it being better that Takedown. It will just always feel like a rip-off of the original.

I agree. I think that the way to solve the issue isn't really to prevent the player from doing anything but, like Cliffy B said, expect them to try to break the game and account for it. I'm going to use the example of Deus Ex again, with its utterly complex story line, and how it managed to write in character deaths without interrupting the narrative. The designers simply made sure that the only differences the NPC's death would make would be with certain conversations and periphery events later in the game. I think that the difficulty in dealing with this problem nowadays is the high level of integration each character has with the flow of the game. That is not to say that Deus Ex's characters weren't twice as complex as your average modern-day NPC (they were), but scripted events were just simpler back then. The same is true for linearity. When the overall quality of the game rests on the presentation of each of it's individual elements, open-ended dungeon-crawlers can feel empty by the standards of cinematic experiences like Bioshock when you take into account the detail that goes into creating a believable or (more importantly) an involving world. People now expect much more of a roller-coaster experience from their single-player games. In Deus Ex, taking out a character was as simple as removing their model from the level (though their dialog and cues were scripted, their paths through each map and their actions in combat were non-specific). However, in HL2, Alex's specific actions are so closely intertwined with the narrative that by eliminating her character, the game grinds to a halt. Logistically, the designer has to account for a missing character (using Dog as an example) by contriving other ways to catapult the player over a ravine and into the Citadel or pick up a tank and fling it into a storefront. Especially with HL2, scripted sequences are critical in moving the player through a game at the intended pace, and invincible characters are the price we pay for experiencing the game on a deeper, more cinematic level. Obviously there are other ways of obtaining this level of involvement, and HL2 is certainly one of the more extreme examples of modern linearity in games, but I think there is a trend among first-person shooters to provide experiences that are character-driven as opposed to event-driven. Each character has such a tangible connection with the game world that to allow them to be removed at the player's whim would be impractical.

Although in Bioshock's defense, they did give you the option to murder Cohen late in the game, although there was little motivation to do so. Still it's a valid complaint. I feel as though mechanisms to prevent the murder of vital NPCs are inherently constricting, and players should be responsible enough to allow for the story's continuation. Where in Bioshock can you break the game though? Now I'm curious.

Do you know where to find the screenshots? This is the first time I've heard about this and it sounds interresting. And correct me if I'm absolutely, utterly wrong, but wasn't there already a Monkey Island 3? The Curse of Monkey Island?

Does anyone know if there's any talk of this coming to PC?

Exactly! It's unfair. I was also thinking about whether or not it's legitimate to nominate "The Orange Box" for GOTY. I've seen some publications treat it as a single game.

Yeah, I think it doesn't get it's fair share of publicity because it's "episodic" as opposed to being either a full-on sequel or an original title.