Gimbal

Not to completely derail the New vs Used debate here, but I see a completely different problem with this news:

I would love to jump in some co-op games to help out my Shepard in the single player part of the game, but you know what is going to happen?

[Gimbal has joined the game]
[xXsNIP8rXx] "...and I can't believe Garrus is Shepard's father!"
[knucklehead589] "Yeah, and then they go and blow up the space shark in the end"
[Gimbal] "WTF! Spoiler!"
[xXsNIP8rXx] "Whatever dude. The game has been out for over 3 hours now. If you haven't beat the game by now it isn't our fault"

But I'm betting on my second play through on insanity level difficulty, Shepard is going to need all the help she can get. I'll play the hell out of the co-op stuff then.

@SpideyBR In most games the dialog options are not that complicated. In a Rainbow 6 game I can tell my team to stack up on a door, go silent, regroup, etc. That level of speech recognition is already present in some games. But now imagine my team is stacked up on a door ready to move in and I say "Where's my toast!". As it stands right now the game will fail to find a match, or make a false match to a command. A teammate will say "Unable to comply" as a blanket response to a voice command that wasn't recognized, or they may think I meant to regroup.

But in a future game they may look at me strange, then look at each other, before one of them says, "Toast? Sir, what are you talking about?"
Meanwhile a flag has been set in the program that my ai teammates may start to question my leadership if I continue to talk about things that aren't valid to the situation at hand. They remember I talked about toast.

Then I have them open the door as I toss a incendiary grenade in the room. One of the teammates sees the burning body and says "Hey, you were looking for toast?"

Highly unlikely scenario that would require all kinds of word tagging to objects and situations in games for it all to come together like that, but I'm talking about dynamic dialog, not scripted dialog trees.

I think people need to stop looking at this as some video chat avatar thing and think of this technology for video game development.
If one day they can get the synthetic speech part down to where it sounds right, and also speech recognition, then this would open up huge possibilities for more dynamic dialog interaction with NPCs in games. I'm sure realistic sounding text to speech with convincing emotional inflection is much further off, but developers could write way more text in a smaller disk/memory footprint than trying to pre-record all that from voice actors.

If anyone wonders why us old timers get cranky over remakes, it is because of crap like this.

To help you understand, here is the comic that came with the original Atari 2600 game:

http://www.atariage.com/comics/comic_thumbs.html?MagazineID=48

Now look at this trailer again. One of these things is not like the other...

Maybe the unwashed masses really do like the "my first walk cycle test animation.mov" on display here, but I really think any sense of the exotic and imaginative sci-fi setting that the comic provided our early imagination to help fill in the gaps that the screen resolution was unable to has been completely crapped on.

Maybe not completely. I mean, the other creatures in the video look vaguely bug-like. And then, for almost no reason at all, some freakshow-faced human female is there...wanting revenge.

I should wait for a gameplay trailer, but I'm just too old and cranky I guess.

"The quick and the...'stiq"....no?

"The killer apps"? No, that rhymes with assless chaps.

"The low ping bastards" ...eh

huh, this is more difficult than I thought.

MOH: Airborne has some of the absolute best surround sound of any game I've played. Story-wise it slowly progressed towards Castle Wolfenstein near the end but the cover mechanics in the game were fantastic. I really don't understand why this game didn't fare better except that it must be due to WW2 fatigue at the time.

I just moved my entertainment center to another room in my house and played some of the game to tweak and test the surround sound setup. I moved into cover somewhere and then closed my eyes and listened to the sounds going on in the game. If there is any other game on the market that has paid such attention to detail, clarity, spacial/directional depth and overall quality, please someone tell me what that game is. COD has good sound but nowhere near the quality of MOH:A. And as much as I love the hefty sound of gunfire in RB6, it looses some clarity when I turn the sound up and doesn't have as much environmental sound going on.

My paragon of virtue Shepard will not be pleased to be working for Cerberus, who I am assuming is the group they are talking about when they say a shadowy pro-human group.

I was curious how they were going to handle people who have done multiple playthroughs and on each playthrough a different cast member may have died.

Technically I was already told the answer but I never found out if it is ok to talk about it or not. Plus, things might change before release. But I didn't think to ask about how your skills will transfer. If you start a new Shepard will he/she be level 1? If you bring in your Shepard from the first ME will he/she have to start at level one or do the skills transfer over?

Well, as long as the inventory system is fixed I, and everyone else, will be much happier.

I wonder if IW is going to make a political statement about the "ticking time bomb scenario" reasoning for torture, judging from the scene at 1:10.

I wish *any* company would do that now. I miss my beloved Spider Fighter patch.

They could do it with the Call of Duty series. Get all 1000 achievment points and they send you a patch. Then they would sell your name and address to solicitors to recover the cost of the patch.

Damn solicitors! They ruin everything.

Yes, I am aware there are still gamer pics. And I am aware I don't have to have a gamer pic of my avatar if I don't want to.

What I want is to not have an avatar. Now I'm going to be forced to spend money on something, anything, that will obfuscate the irritating look of it since I can't opt out of it.

Don't get me wrong, I actually like the idea of having an avatar, I just think what they ended up looking like is...well. Rare worked on it, didn't they?