Recent content by Brawndo

A friend and I were discussing why women were treated as the lesser sex across most cultures throughout history, and she is convinced that it is predominantly because women bear children, and not because women are (on average) physically weaker and smaller than men. That got me thinking: how...

When one looks at superhero franchises like Superman and X-Men, or fantasy works like Harry Potter, the common characteristic is the existence of a super-human class with genetic and innate traits that make them superior to regular humans. In all of these works of fiction, humans are at the...

It seems almost every multiplayer shooter since Call of Duty 4 uses an experience system that is used to earn or purchase upgrades, perks, and equipment. This kind of system encourages individualistic gameplay which, IMO, negatively impacts team-based competitive multiplayer (most players play...

Blow up from all those AAA releases EA keeps putting out and gamers keep gobbling up you mean. I don't agree with their business practices, but you cannot deny that they publish games that a lot of players want to buy.

Speak for yourself. I used to frequent the Civfanatics forum and there was a sizable minority of Civ veterans who hated Civ 5. I played about 25 hours before I got sick of it, compared to the 400+ hours I put in on Civ 4 and who knows how many on Civ III and II.

I keep hearing people on the internet and pundits on TV say that the "American Dream" is dead. Truth be told, I don't even know what that is supposed to be in present day. I'd like to think most Americans have outgrown the "Pleasantville" stereotype of the 1950s, but I might be wrong: maybe some...

Your avatar reminds me why I'm glad they went with the turn-based combat route!

1. Most video games involve violence 2. Thousands of years of human history proves that violence is best performed by large, burly-chested men 3. Ergo necessary stereotype So yes, we can have a protagonist who is a overweight science teacher who is handicapped and needs a wheelchair to...

For the unaware, "4X" stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. These games are typically turn-based strategy games, but they don't have to be. Personally, nothing can top Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, although Sins of a Solar Empire comes pretty close.

My concerns exactly. There's no way that hand-to-hand combat at the end was regular gameplay, and even if it was it was probably all QTEs.

"Gaben". Please stop saying that.

Why can't modern games just use motion capture? I mean, the first Mortal Kombat released in the early 90s had better animations than some modern games thanks to trained actors and stuntmen doing motion capture.

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BF3 cannot compete with BC2 in my mind because BC2 absolutely blew my mind when I first played it. The huge maps, completely destructible terrain, tons of vehicles; as a veteran of Counterstrike and Call of Duty, I had never seen anything like that. I went on to play over 800 hours of BC2...

Thanks for posting the video. It's a perfect example of what I was trying to get at. I couldn't care less that the graphics are circa 1998 because Gordon's animations are great. It's also important for NPCs to have excellent animations. I hate watching enemies flail around like wooden dolls.