Justin258

OP doesn't seem to realize that there are more than just those three game systems. Honestly, what about the SNES? The PS2? The Game Boy Advance? The PC?

I picked Xbox 360 because that's what I mostly game on. It doesn't feel right, leaving out all those other systems.

@Claude said:

I always forget how fucking big Canada is. Hell, it goes from west to east just like the United States, not to mention the North. I live in North Carolina by the way.

Hey! That's where I live! Cool, I don't remember meeting anyone else on the internet from this state.

As for Canada's geography? No, unfortunately. Some names sound familiar but I couldn't tell you where they are. I just know about where the country begins and about where it ends.

I can't really say which one I prefer.

I'm surprised some asshole hasn't come on here and yelled MORROWIND yet.

@R3DT1D3 said:

@believer258: Last time or last game? I'm generalizing here but there's very few enemies on Legendary difficulty where you actually have to vary your tactics in Halo 1-3. Playing Halo (and most games on normal) doesn't really enter in to the discussion when they let you brute force the game without any mastery or knowledge of game mechanics. "Girlfriend mode" on Gears of War can be played completely differently than the other gamemodes but that doesn't make it better. I'm talking about higher difficulty making you think and adapt rather than just refine a low-level skill.

You're right that Halo is not entirely shallow and that it has some room for mastery but compared to classic FPS, it's still not very complex or deep. While I like the design of regenerating health/shields for multiplayer games, I find it typically makes singleplayer campaigns trivially easy with any amount of cover.

Bioshock was decent in this regard but I still wouldn't call the hardest difficulty that much harder. Once you got certain plasmids upgraded and research bonuses, the world was your oyster.

All right. So give me some examples of the types of games you're looking for.

And I guess what I've really wanted to say the whole time is written best here:

@MikkaQ said:

Games don't need complexity for complexity's sake to stay fun. If it drags the game down, lose it. Sometimes less is more.

Well, you could just not enjoy the Motorstorm series, for one.

I played the demo of one on the PS3 and the one on PSP. They were fun but there doesn't seem to be much to discuss.

@R3DT1D3 said:

@believer258 said:

So... are you saying that something as simple as Halo has very little room for skill improvement?

Well, let's see you do a Legendary playthrough right after your first one.

You're confusing depth/complexity with difficulty. By making the game arbitrarily harder, the game hasn't necessarily been made more deep or complex. Since you mentioned, Halo, I'll stick to how most contemporary FPS campaigns work. You increase the difficulty which can do any number of things but usually increases the damage enemies do to you, enemies take more damage, more/harder enemies are present. The usual effect on the player is that while they have to me more careful and cautious, they're still performing the same actions just at a slower rate. When the action turns into picking off one enemy at a time and taking cover more frequently, you didn't add depth just arbitrary tedium. Games like Metro 2033 and Bioshock Infinite's 1999 mode would be better examples for this.

In Metro, the higher difficulties increase enemy damage as well as your own damage. They also restrict your resources (ammo, health kits, gas masks) to force you to play smartly. Playing the game on the lowest and the highest settings are like playing an entirely different game. Ranger Hardcore (the highest difficulty) forces you to be extremely frugal and methodical while making deliberate choices that didn't exist on lower difficulties.

Bioshock's 1999 mode also looks to increase depth/complexity by restricting choice and forcing higher level decision making.

When is the last time you played Halo? Certainly it increases damage dealt by the enemy and makes elites, especially gold ones, essentially walking tanks, but it hardly makes you do the same actions, just slower. I play Halo on Normal completely differently than on Legendary. That's why I pointed it out - it's simple to grab hold of but requires a ton of skill and practice to truly master. Trying to beat Bioshock on the hardest difficulty without Vita chambers is of a comparable sort of difficulty.

While we're at it, is the complexity that you want more menu-driven, or do you mean something more along the lines of Bioshock's "what can I do to take these enemies out while losing as little resources as possible"? type of complexity? Both types are complex but the former isn't much fun to most people and the latter doesn't often get recognized as "complex".

@AhmadMetallic said:

I fucking love the default female voice of Saints Row 3, she's my dream woman. voice.

Which one? The first one kept sounding familiar to me until I caught it. She must be a really good and varied voice actress.

Yeah... it's because they use the same base model for pretty much every character and just build their features into that. This is why Chakwa's tits are just as robust and healthy as, say, Traynor's or another young character. You can literally see this in every single Bioware game from KOTOR on.

For story justification, remember two things. The first is that this is the future and plastic surgery has probably reached some sort of singularity, where anyone can look exactly like they want to. So of course many females who desire to be taller make themselves so. Also remember that almost all of the people you run into are military and probably extremely fit and have been from birth, something that can and does make people a little taller.

As a final note, I'm exactly 6'0 tall. There's a girl in my Creative Writing class in college whose breasts are eye level with me. I have to crane my neck to see her head (this led to a rather uncomfortable thing when I first talked face to face with her where I looked down for a minute and it seemed like I was glancing at her boobs, but didn't mean to). Yes, believe it or not some women are really tall.

I bought Halo 2 on the original Xbox, and then on my laptop when I got it in Summer 2010. Still haven't beaten it on the laptop due to GFWL being a program coded by a team of retarded chimpanzees. Intoxicated retarded chimpanzees with only their toes to type with.

...man, I really shouldn't insult retarded chimps like that.

@benspyda said:

@believer258 said:

@benspyda said:

@believer258 said:

So... are you saying that something as simple as Halo has very little room for skill improvement?

Well, let's see you do a Legendary playthrough right after your first one.

That's a bit like comparing chess to football. 'You think you're so good at chess, why don't you try beating me at football'.

Beating a game like Halo on Legendary is more physical skill like getting good at a sport and chess is like getting good at turn-based strategy game. You combine the two and you get something like StarCraft and look how popular that is. Maybe I'm onto something.

We definitely need to find a way to combine chess and football. I don't much like football but throw some chess in there and my interest will skyrocket.

A little more seriously, it seemed like the OP was saying that the skill needed to play Halo cannot be improved upon once one has mastered the controls. That is false. Competitive multiplayer proves it to be so.

I see $$$.

I do too. Say, a turn-based football game where one team gets a move, performs it, and then the other one gets to make their own counter-move. I understand that football - that is, American football, I wasn't talking about soccer - as we know it can't be played that way, but a little change in the rules never hurt anyone.