And the willing suspension bridge of disbelief came crashing down....

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Auto Leveling.

Because it makes everything pointless. It removes the very essence of role playing, which is the satisfaction of progressing. Dead Island is a perfect example. If I 'leveled up' to the point where I can carry ungodly amounts of gear and supposedly became a master with blunt weapons... why the hell would the designers think that the walkers from the beginning of the game should still be able to take the punishment I dish out. They should blow other just from my walking by.

Seriously, after a while with any RPG game that auto levels, I become more and more disinterested. It's a waste of time.

 

[curlycrouton]

Vertebral arteries still transport oxygen to the brain, so although blocking of the carotid arteries would impede blood flow and therefore oxygen supply, it wouldn't cut it off completely. It's still a slow death, I believe.

With enough force, you can collapse the arteries. The person will lose consciousness within seconds, and then die, even after the choke hold is released. It's still pretty quick, there are all sorts of accidental deaths from improper blood chokes.

Recently on Fringe some woman said that an injection of restriction enzymes would cause "massive hemorrhage", but that's not how they work. It's nice that they name dropped restriction enzymes, but it's mostly an in vitro tool.

There have been others, but I just saw the episode yesterday and went "that's not how those work".

Vertebral arteries still transport oxygen to the brain, so although blocking of the carotid arteries would impede blood flow and therefore oxygen supply, it wouldn't cut it off completely. It's still a slow death, I believe.

Strangulation involves the carotid arteries and the jugular veins, the mechanism of injury is cerebral ischaemia, not aphyxia, yes the vertebral arteries still supply the brain but in much smaller amounts. Combined with the carotid sinus reflex, where pressure on the cartoid can cause hypotension and bradycardia, it's a lot faster. It's still probably a minute or two to make sure they're dead, but loss of consciousness occurs quite quickly.

It seems your medical knowledge vastly eclipses mine, I'm going to go ahead and assume you're right.

Thank you! I shall now view/read about scenes of strangulation with far less skepticism. At the very least this means I'll be able to enjoy the beginning of The Return of the King more.

 

[Lord Quirk]

I got Final Fantasy XIII thinking it would be good. it took about 10 hours until i convinced myself that a Final Fantasy game could actually be NOT GOOD! In fact, it's one of the worst games I've ever played. And it's from my favourite franchise! I couldn't believe it! Long live FFVI, btw.

 

[Saulkar]

The part where in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" the narrator says that you can servive for thirty seconds in a vacuum on a lungfull of air. I have had this point argued before but if you were exposed to rapid decompression and held your breath, your lungs would explode or severely rupture (but not your chest, that is only in the movies)!

 

[Vault101]

So Escapists, has your own knowledge ever broken your willing suspension of disbelief?

It may not be a deal breaker, you can still enjoy the game, movie, show, book whatever but something just niggles at the back of your mind? Has something ever been so wrong that you just couldn't enjoy the subject matter anymore?

Recently I learned that the LD-50 (lethal dose for 50 percent of a population) for ionizing radiation for humans is 4 Gray or 400 rads. Playing Fallout 3 and my character is suffering radiation poisoning at 600rads. so either she is very very lucky or she is Dead!
Like I said not a deal breaker it just bothers me.

oh come on...its fallout, anything remotly acurate got nuked into obvlivion in favor of lasers and super mutants..

I would find it less belivable is they were "realistic" in the first place..I think suspension of disbelif depends alot of what rules the "world" sets itself

generlaly a movie game whatever gets a pass from me if i dont notice first time around..because you can find flaws in anything if you pick it apart enough

worst offender ever though was Robots, the animated movie...nothing in it made any logical sense and at the time I was only 12 or 13

 

[Vault101]

The Neverending story...once I read the book, the movies were forever ruined for me.

Also Assassin's Creed for some reason. It just makes me give funny looks to my monitor even though I like the game and think it's pretty good.

Well, the shit ubisoft made up about genetic memory is pretty laughable.

Given the grand quality of the games, though I personally suspend that disbelief by just telling myself genes work completely differently on Planet Assassins' Creed-ia.

Also the animus has shown us scenes where Ezio/Altair were not present. The fuck's up with that?

I wondered why the hell Renaissance-era Florentine aristocracy knew free-running.

Well, the assassins (presumably Ezio's brother too) have the blood of the pre-humanity alien peeps, making them much stronger and more coordinated.

assasins creed brotherhood really bothered me in that ezios outfit was so rediculously conspicuois (more so than AC2) I couldnt belive he couls go arouns unoticed

that was untill I changed its colur to red or "venetian wine" it made him blnd in soo much better, and especially in a crowd...even from a distance on a rooftop he could be mistaken for a gaurd

 

[schiz0phren1c]

Only thing that makes me sigh is watching action films and seeing people fire off dual handguns.

For 1, handguns are not that accurate to start with but have a slight kick back to them.

And for 2, firing off one in each hand would mean whoever is shooting would hit nothing but the sky.

On top of that they never seem to reload or they have a clip that doesn't need reloading until the shootout is over.

on the button,
I have a vid of me doing just that on Youtube for the laugh(also the guys on the range in Thailand kinda begged me to do it for the giggle)
Glock 17 in my left hand,CZ 92 in my right 34 rounds in about 30 seconds and if I WAS actually trying to hit someone I would have hit everything BUT them...I did hit the car door a few times,
but it was fun for the laugh AND to prove to myself that the "John Woo Stylee" thing really WAS nonsense.

Gun fu is silly when you are trying to be lethal over 5-10 feet, but if your job is to lay down suppression fire who cares if you hit?

I absotively agree,
but unless you have NO choice(and in a situation like that where do you get two handguns from? we're veering back into "hollywood plotline" territory here...)
you should not be laying down suppressive fire with handguns,but rather long rifles or shotguns.

 

[chaosyoshimage]

I have a word for this, it's called "ENHANCE!"

 

[Jedoro]

Pretty much anything that has to do with guns:

-Cocking a semi-auto handgun after firing seconds ago
-Racking the slide right before shooting someone
-Excessive muzzle flash, especially from weapons with flash suppressors
-When every round is a tracer
-Extremely wide spread of buckshot
-Lack of recoil
-When bullets don't hit the brain or spine, yet cause instant death
-Lack of ejected casings when firing or racking the slide when a round's chambered

Probably more, but I don't want to completely piss myself off.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Like how, in Oblivion, slashing a dagger fatigued you, but running around in a suit of full plate didn't.

My current bug-bear is Battlefield 3, whose enemies can see you even if you're lying prone in a patch of deep shadow with your tac-light switched off and have the uncanny ability to headshot you despite the fact that, from where you are, they are merely an indistinct pixel in the far, far distance.

Didn't wearing plate make you get fatigued faster by whatever you were doing (or at least by running)? I might be remembering wrong, but I'm pretty sure there was a correlation between the two.

Wearing armour may have increased the fatigue points for performing an action, I'm not entirely sure of the engine dynamics; all I do know is if you sapped all your fatigue by fighting, blocking and jumping you could run in circles in full Daedric armour and watch you fatigue bar refill.

As for BF3, singleplayer or multiplayer? MP that's not really a game issue, more a "nerf that dude's eyes" thing. Also sounds like a case of the IRNV scope. If it's the singleplayer, I very much share your hate of the AI's abilities and wish it was only the case with BF3, practically every single stealth title is plagued by it (that or completely stealth-stupid AI).

Isn't that called Farcry-ai?

But about the fallout thing I remembered and you can get a mod that adds the Hardcore mode of FA:NW to F3 if you want you bullets to weight.

It's just on SP. Admittedly I'm playing through on hard, but I swear those eagle-eyed buggers all have telescopic thermal vision. So yeah, there are some quite large AI issues. And the number of rounds that hit home from one of their five round bursts at long range is almost enough to make me think their weapons don't suffer from spread either, but that's probably me just being paranoid.

And as for the Hardcore mod, that sounds awesome as the Hardcore mode really made New Vegas for me, but unfortunately most of my gaming is done on a 360 so mods aren't an option. Cheers for the attempted heads-up though.

 

[tahrey]

Recently I learned that the LD-50 (lethal dose for 50 percent of a population) for ionizing radiation for humans is 4 Gray or 400 rads. Playing Fallout 3 and my character is suffering radiation poisoning at 600rads. so either she is very very lucky or she is Dead!
Like I said not a deal breaker it just bothers me.

Rads and Grays are a fairly old skool and very technical way of measuring radiation exposure. A more modern - and easier to measure - unit is the Sievert. Typical exposure limit for someone working with nuclear material is 20 millisievert per year...

400-600 in a short space of time would probably make you feel a bit ill but not kill you, IIRC. Probably increase your chance of dying of some malignant cancer by a couple-fold. It's only when you start getting up into the thousands (i.e. full Sieverts) over a short period that the issue of lethality comes up.

Personally, I have a big SOD problem with a lot of racing games. A lot of attention seems to be paid to getting the car models and track layouts spot-on, which I have no problem with... but then everything else suffers and it's the little details that kill it. Terrible, unlifelike handling (usually for the worse, rather than unrealistically GOOD!), crap engine sounds and behaviour (torque output, revlimiters etc), cartoony gearing or drivetrain behaviour (and bizarre AI clutch handling), lack of crash damage, driver-bots that follow a preordained racing line and nothing else when real life drivers follow it more loosely, terrible skid-physics, lighting bugs that make the track look like it's made out of painted bathroom tiles when the virtual sun is facing in a certain direction, terribly mismatched grids in random-opponent races - giving you either an impossible challenge, or a walkover (no real life race series would put cars with a 2x or worse power-to-weight disparity together, at least not for more than one season before major rule changes came in), particular otherwise wildly popular models from a manufacturer's line up not being available on the list (esp if there's a "used/classic car market" element). Which is why I see the supposedly realistic ones as a decent challenge, engaging sandboxes in which to play with vehicles I'd otherwise never even get to go near let alone drive, or a way of checking out various theories in a very vague manner.. but not so much as fun diversions. The more cartoonish racers - Burnout, Mashed, the Colin McRae series (for all its paper thin "reality" posturing, it's still an excuse to fling a hatchback down a dirt track at 100mph and have a massive rollover at the first corner), and a host of retro ones like Micromachines or Stunt Car - get a free pass from having to provide SOD and become a lot more fun in the process. And oddly, the TOCA series, which never really particularly stunning graphics, comes out as a lot more believable than some rivals, as the cars handle and get smashed up in ways that actually reflect what you see on TV coverage of saloon car racing.

 

[Vegosiux]

Things that get my goat as far as willing suspension of disbelief is concerned? Oh boy, where to begin...I suppose I'm quite pretentious and nit-picky when it comes to this.

Enhance button...actually, sod it, let me just say "CSI" on this one and move on.
Most of the stuff described above with firearms.
CPR being clean, reliable and romantic. CPR used as resurrection magic.
Defibrillating a flatline.
Every time a reactor is said to have "gone critical".
Speaking of reactors, a meltdown equaling a nuclear explosion.
Inability to grasp how mutation works (hint: it doesn't make you grow wings, but maybe your offspring a few generations down the road may have them...if you're lucky)
Computers exploding when presented with a logical paradox instead of simply returning an error message.
Slot-machine password hacking.
Countdowns to disasters that have no clear point of no return, and monotonous, completely accurate progress bars.
Whenever hanging is presented as death by strangulation (yes it can happen, but that's not how it's supposed to work).
Noise in space. Explosions in space having blast waves. Actually, anything that behaves as if space is anything other than vacuum.
"Laser shots" moving way, way, way slower than the speed of light.
Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship(tm)
Every time a wizard does something.

I should stop now. Of course, I have no problem with any of the above when they're being parodied or otherwise played for laughs.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

You keep that ammo in your socks I guess, eh Duke. Or your hair. Your stupid, stupid hair.

Ohh, but then again, I love TARDIS pockets. It really should bother me more than it does.

 

[CulixCupric]

amnesia: the dark descent never scared me, although, as i am hard to scare without any consequences to my actions, it couldn't scare me because nothing was lost upon death. i merely went through most the game on full insanity, seeing that your character's vision adjust to the dark.

 

[tahrey]

Speaking of reactors, a meltdown equaling a nuclear explosion.

More an exaggeration or a focussing on the worst-case scenario rather than an untruth. The Chernobyl incident is thought to have created a small ("fizzle" style) nuclear detonation when a supercritical mass of molten fission material ran together - which is what differentiates it from 3 Mile Island (venting of gas, very minor meltdown) or Fukushima (more major meltdown, but only a explosion of coolant material that exceeded the maximum sustainable pressure).
A meltdown doesn't equal a nuclear explosion, true, but it CAN lead to one.

Computers exploding when presented with a logical paradox instead of simply returning an error message.
Slot-machine password hacking.

Hahaha ... I think I saw an entire article about this sort of thing in PC Format back in the 90s. Some things never change.
The more likely thing when presented with the logical anomaly is it would probably get into an endless loop of condition-checking, if it didn't have well written code. In exceptional cases this could cause certain components to overheat and either fizzle out and cause a small fire. But the monitor exploding in a matter of seconds is unlikely.

Noise in space. Explosions in space having blast waves. Actually, anything that behaves as if space is anything other than vacuum.
"Laser shots" moving way, way, way slower than the speed of light.
Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship(tm)
Every time a wizard does something.

I guess you just don't like George Lucas, then?
Can't space explosions have blast waves if there's enough material being ejected, or they're in a nebula etc? At the very least you'd have a powerful radiation burst, and intense radiation can exert a small physical effect... solar wind etc.
And who knows, given the size of the star destroyers & so on, maybe their laser bolts ARE moving at light speed? Or it's some kind of technology similar to the light saber where what's being sent out is a highly concentrated energy packet that is limited in travel speed, but imparts as much damage in one zap as a minute of full power actual-laser fire aimed at a steady position on the enemy hull? (Now, laser bolts moving slower than bullets, and therefore slow enough to dodge, THAT'S a big ask)
Stormtrooper marksmanship is sort of handwaveable if we assume they're mass-recruited grunts with minimal training, rather than the Kenobi description of them being the elitest of the elite. Any time we've seen a popular uprising on the TV recently, they seem to be employing a Stormtrooper style spray-and-pray approach to shooting at the enemy...

 

[Devon Dent]

BF3, a foe i was fighting walked into 2! of my AP mines and then took a face blast from my shotgun and killed me with two shots from some flashlight with a gun in it somewhere.

 

[tahrey]

You keep that ammo in your socks I guess, eh Duke. Or your hair. Your stupid, stupid hair.

Ohh, but then again, I love TARDIS pockets. It really should bother me more than it does.

D'yer remember an entire game being made on this premise in the 90s? Bitmap Bros' "Magic Pockets". A reasonably enjoyable platformer...

Though the question was asked at the time in the gaming (literal) press that, if the player character is exploring his own TARDIS-like pockets as the game environment, when he reaches into the pocket of the jacket he's wearing on-screen... is there a chance he will eventually end up pulling himself out instead of a weapon and causing a huge universal paradox (if one hasn't already been created by the jacket with the magic pockets now being located inside a magic pocket... meaning there's an infinite string of ever-smaller pocket universes inside each other) ???

You have to be so careful when creating loopable portals...

 

[Vegosiux]

More an exaggeration or a focussing on the worst-case scenario rather than an untruth. The Chernobyl incident is thought to have created a small ("fizzle" style) nuclear detonation when a supercritical mass of molten fission material ran together - which is what differentiates it from 3 Mile Island (venting of gas, very minor meltdown) or Fukushima (more major meltdown, but only a explosion of coolant material that exceeded the maximum sustainable pressure).
A meltdown doesn't equal a nuclear explosion, true, but it CAN lead to one.

Yes, this is true, however a meltdown leading to a nuclear explosion would mean that the plant in question was most certainly NOT only producing power, since its fuel would have to be highly enriched to go Little Boy if the core melts down

I guess you just don't like George Lucas, then?
Can't space explosions have blast waves if there's enough material being ejected, or they're in a nebula etc? At the very least you'd have a powerful radiation burst, and intense radiation can exert a small physical effect... solar wind etc.
And who knows, given the size of the star destroyers & so on, maybe their laser bolts ARE moving at light speed? Or it's some kind of technology similar to the light saber where what's being sent out is a highly concentrated energy packet that is limited in travel speed, but imparts as much damage in one zap as a minute of full power actual-laser fire aimed at a steady position on the enemy hull? (Now, laser bolts moving slower than bullets, and therefore slow enough to dodge, THAT'S a big ask)

When there's a lot of material being ejected, I suppose it would be alright, but even a nebula is mostly vacuum, so that wouldn't matter much. The thing with lasers and light (any EM waveform) is that light absolutely always travels at light speed (in the respective medium, of course). You can't slow down a laser shot, which is basically a ray of light, unless you shoot it through something.

So yeah, I usually just keep convincing myself that those aren't actually lasers, they are some kind of energy weapons that are called "lasers" without actually being it. Doesn't quite work but it does help.

 

[tahrey]

1. There are plenty of "Breeder Reactors" in the world that both produce fusion-weapons grade material, AND civilian power. Chernobyl was, for example, and we have/had a few in the UK.
Not all of them, of course, but for the sake of argument we can presume that any story-featured reactor that's at risk of nuking itself is one of those.

2. Can't light be slowed using magnets, gravity, etc? Nothing can go faster than the speed of unencumbered light (or even restricted light) but it can be deviated and slowed as far as I know. Science has managed to slow photons down to less than walking pace, almost to a halt, last time I heard, without having to send it through some kind of weird newly-discovered transparent material?

Anyway, the guys in Star Wars have warp-capable star ships the size of cities, space stations the size of large asteroids, fighter jet sized ships that can sustain the pilot for several days of interstellar flight AND turn in space like a plane would (presumably subjecting the pilot to double-digit G-forces at the same time), intelligent robots, hover bikes, and live amongst hundreds of species gathered from across the galaxy. And fight each other with swords made of beams of light contained by unexplained means, concentrated so intensely that they act like red-hot, infinitely thin blades. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on having a similar technology that allows weaponisation of laser light into bullet / missile style bolts (and also ball-like torpedos) at the expense of a lower maximum speed through space or atmosphere.
And there's nothing to say some kind of microscopic containment device isn't being ejected with each one, and a fully charged blaster magazine doesn't come with a large reserve of such things. It's a setting several million light years, and probably several million ACTUAL years, distant from our own.

 

[Aeon_COR]

the things I really hate are those that would only require editing a bit of text, as in thats all you would have to do to fix it, no change in gameplay or plot or art/models, just one line of text to increase immersion.

For example, in ME2, the universal thermal clips. If their universal why don't I have a shared ammo pool with weapons that simply consume different amounts of ammo. Why can't I reuse heated clips by letting them cool off.
It would be so easy to just say that the clips use a chemical compound to absorb/negate heat and what im picking up is refill vials/capsules of the compound that can't really be emptied from the guns with out taking it apart with tools.