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. 

 

Chasm City was sharp to you? That book is not worth something really worthless.

Beestings. It's not worth beestings. Whatever, you know what I mean.

Watership Down was a great story, what I've read of Alistair Reynolds and Iain M Banks were not. Of course you wouldn't make the connection. Forget the genres, they're just not good books. I mean seriously, unless you like book-versions of made-for-tv Syfy movies. 

Yes, sharp. Hard sci-fi concepts presented clearly and succinctly to give them a good impact.

Clearly you know nothing of stories or book quality. Are you sure human is your first language??

Beestings = your cock. 

Human is not a language, perhaps that's your problem. American, mother fucker, do you speak it?

As for Chasm City, forget the hard sci-fi concepts, (of which only 2 or 3 presented I thought were interesting in any capacity) the story sucked hard. The characters were really flat, the dialogue literally made me groan out of disgust, and the 'twists' were both predictable and lamentable, mainly because they added absolutely nothing to the story.

Excession, on the other hand, forced me to wonder why there were any human characters in it at all. The only reason there seemed to be human characters was so they could fuck in zero Gs and make stupid comments about pointless shit. For people who lived for centuries they sure acted like a bunch of fucking angsty teenagers. The ships themselves were the only interesting thing (truly, they were very interesting,) but regrettably were so nondescript and generic they essentially became background props for said zero G fucking. Also, the story was pointless and I wish the main characters ended up dying in a very horrible way, yet somehow, for some reason, ended up getting exactly what they wanted. Fucking rubbish.

Arther C Clarke, mother fucker. 

Animal Farm has talking animals, is that also a child's book? 

... I hope you are not refering to zoophilia....

OMG !!! 

Hi JPL, long time no see. 

... who are you ?