(it's possible to compare films from today and the 50s since they can be judged on largely the same standards)

Wrong if you consider special effects and digital images insertion in nowadays movies...

Technology evolution has to be taken into account, and comparing 50 years ago movies with nowadays movie is for me trying to compare horses and cars performances: let's do it apple to apple please ;) 

from a storytelling perspective, you can compare.

But graphics are such a big part of games, its much harder to do. 

What I said: just try to compare "War of the Worlds" original (1953) and remake (2005) movies.. almost same story, different results... 

"The Day the Earth Stood Still".. original movie in 1951, remake in 2008.. same story, different results....

Anyway 

The new ones are much better because they used special effects! 

When I played Unreal for the first time, I had already completed Quake, Hexen II, Quake II, Half-life, Heretic II, and most of SIN. I am not saying that the game didn't contribute anything to the FPS genre but, by that time, it wasn't offering much more than what I had already seen. 

day the earth stood still original shits all over the remake.

War of the Worlds not so much IMHO, but the original holds its own in storytelling, the remake has much better effects and uses them well to be successful as an action adventure. 

I didn't think anyone had seen The Day The Earth Stood Still remake. 

storytelling is not the same as story. 

I had to, just to see how bad it could be. 

I agree about judging old games by the standards of their times; I also think that the new/old movies things can apply to new/old games - new games seem a lot flashier and more shallow (hollywoodized) than games 10 years ago. It's harder to make new intellectual property in both games and movies now. 

... evilution of Humanity :P 

how do you do that? that seems like an invaluable thing for testing. a lot of times, i've died more than half way through and have no first run demo of the last part of a map. 

After dying, stop the current demo recording. Disconnect. Then start a new recording in the console but without entering the map name this time. Load the savegame.

It's indeed an invaluable method - doing a demo of one's "first run" should always be understood as recording a demo of the "first run-THROUGH", particularly for beta testing. Otherwise, it's pretty useless. 

that's awesome! i never knew you could do that, thanks! 

Tronyn: Yet the same doesn't apply to books, or music. There is still heaps of good music, just not in the mainstream charts... there are also heaps of good films for example coming out of Scandinavia or Germany. It's just that no one in Hollywood notices.

The Hollywood comparison is an america-centric view. 

negke: It's not useless to see where the player died, and the stuff that happened before that can still contain valuable info. 

Partly because of the dilution of talent to other media, partly lost skills, and also because the printing press is so accessible. (Look at the quality of the average forum post on the web). Not to say classics don't happen anymore, but they're hard to find.

Everything has changed anyway.. there's no chance i'd ever get round to reading tolstoy or hugo today. We're just too artsy busy with crappy electronic stuff i love like games, sport, cinema, music.

...Today my box set of Kinski/Herzog arrived from the UK for 18 quid ;> 

just that the timespans are much longer. Shakespeare or Music from the 17th/18th century doesn't appeal to me, while Music with the same instruments from this (or the last) century does. 

Yes, but if the demo ends after only a couple of seconds, it leaves the rest of the map untested. 

Alistair Reynolds, China Meiville, Iain (M) Banks, Greg Egan, Paul Auster, Christopher Priest, Jeffrey Ford nuff said. 

I've read a couple Alistair Reynolds and Iain Banks, imo they are no Watership Down. I actually just finished Chasm City this week, after forcing myself to slough through it for the past several months. It was actually really awful. Revelation Space was at least average-ish.

Would like to try that China Meiville person, but I'd expect to be slightly disappointed as well. 

Do you like anything? 

No, I kid, I don't like her either.

/asshole 

You need to drink enough household chemicals to wipe out the part of your deluded little turd of a brain that is responsible for understanding language and the written word, because you clearly can't be trusted with it.

Of course they aren't Watership Down because they're not fucking outdated kids books about fucking rabbits!! Banks and Reynolds produce some of the sharpest, most creative, imaginative, and punchily written books of recent times. Okay they happen to mostly be in the sci-fi genre but ffs talking rabbits.

I despair.