ApolloJ85

Been playing Lords of Shadow off and on for the past...4 months? I haven't been able to really get into it for some reason. The game just comes across as being very artificial.  And now you show me images of frikkin Portal jokes in the game. Not funny, and not needed in any form. 

There's no point talking about how it sounds, the differences in pronunciation vary so wildly from one person to the next. Someone from Bristol will sound completely different to someone from Leeds, and the same goes for Boston and New Orleans. The real difference is in the spelling, and because so many people can't spell anyway, what's the big deal if American English cuts out a few letters? Some people can't even use an apostrophe properly.

Your idea does sound awesome, but problem is not in the technology, it's in the expectation of how the medium delivers an entertaining experience. The medium of games almost always requires that the player is in direct control of the central protagonist, and the world that the protagonist exists in cannot alter his/her experience in a way that is detrimental to the player's sense of control.  
 
Movies and books can have a plot unfold before their audience in anyway they please because the requirement (expectation?) of control is not present. Good or bad, the experience viewers gain from a movie will never leave them feeling like they were cheated out of aspects of the plot. That is a great strength, and a great limitation of those forms of entertainment. The experience a player gains from a game is not held to those rules, and there is great potential and great risk in that freedom.
 
Because of the expectation of control placed in a players hands, I think that a game will create a feeling of being cheated if the game unfolds in a random manner. It might not matter so much if someone plays the game once only, but for someone like me who likes to play through games multiple times, if I know multiple choices are possible to me, having chance dictate the way the game unfolds would be infuriating. It wouldn't matter so much to me if the random elements were unrelated to the core plot, but having something happen that directly affected my experience in a major fashion would make me very frustrated. I guess that's like real life, but have an expectation of control of a game. I don't have that same expectation in real life.
 
I think ultimately it does all come down to control. The game would require a player to accept that events will happen outside of his control, and these events will directly impact his experience. Somehow I think that the expectation of how much control we have over our game experience will be a hard thing to break. But if a game pulls that off, I suspect it would be a bloody brilliant game.

The wheels aren't that great really, but yeah, impossible to find in Australia. 
If you really want a wheel that you'll use heavily, buy an expensive fanatec wheel. The microsoft wheels don't last long as a rule, so why waste money on them?

DS1 was definitely far better designed to instill a permanent state of fear in the player.
 
That being said, DS2 didn't suffer too much from the change of atmosphere. The set pieces were creative, the pace frantic, and the dismembering was better than before. It was just a different game, and I think it was a better one.
 
The story did go off the rails and really failed to explain much about what was happening. Having seen the the companion movie to the game, I suspect Stross was a far deeper character to me than to those that didn't see it. But I was still in the dark when trying to understand the finer points of the story.

Alan Wake by Remedy is a decent example of product placement in games. Batteries for the flashlight were exclusively, and obviously made by Energizer. Verizon ads were also everywhere.
Racing games like the Forza Motorsport and the Dirt series feature automotive product placement heavily.
Also the Madden series. I'm constantly reminded that my game is brought to me by Snickers.
 
Product placement in a game can increase immersion, a la the motorsports genre. It should also give a development team more money to play with. 
 
However there is a difference between product placement when it makes sense within the game world, and product placement that should make sense, but is being used in a way that makes you feel like you're watching an advertisement.
 
Some of the Verizon stuff in Alan Wake was clearly advertisement material. It sucked the big one.

Emu is a word that will probably always be fucked up by americans. Why does this even need a poll? There's no debate, its pronounced e-mew.

I really enjoyed Mass Effect, but since then I just haven't found any of Bioware's storytelling to be compelling. I get this strange sense of deja vu, all over again.
To be fair, I don't have a problem with any other aspect of Bioware games, it's just that the narrative is most important to me, and in all but one case, Bioware games that I've played have been shit/lazy when it comes to telling a good story.