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Complete Failures Of All That Is Logic
Posts
Oh, and at least one mainstream FPS has done backblast from rocket launchers. I doubt it's that much more realistic, but I remember being highly amused when I nearly killed myself in Far Cry 2, not because I shot something from point blank as is the most common cause of comedy deaths in the genre, but because the backblast from the weapon set the grass behind me on fire.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Um
Maybe the reason something that shows up in one multimedia piece of entertainment because it's visually thrilling is showing up in another multimedia piece of entertainment isn't because "Game developers watch too many movies"
In other words, balls of fire look cool, provide visual feedback for an explosion, and video games aren't a fied that has to be more accurate in its portrayals of explosions than film.
I just think your reasoning of "Game developers watch too many movies" is a little post hoc ergo propter hoc.
If you think Guilty Gear is the weirdest 2D fighter ever, you'd be wrong because it's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cho_Aniki (specifically, the SNES one, which is a fighting game instead of a shooter, and probably one of the few games which can unironically be called "totally fucking gay".
FFXII: Oops, you opened these three random chests, now you can't find the best spear in the game later. Um, why? Just because, that's why.
Another one, I just found out that because I missed a scene in an early part of Tales of Vesperia. Rita names a blastia in her house and if you miss this then you can't find the thieves later in the game that have stolen Judith's spear. How the fuck that is related in any logical way is beyond me. I should also mention the fact that you have no real indication of where these thieves are located in the first place. You literally have to search every fucking area in the game, get lucky, or look at a guide.
Quests that have obscure, unrelated requirements or mindless backtracking with no clues whatsoever are total failures in logic.
Something else that grinds my nerves about RPGs:
Generic Dude: "Quick, you gotta go save my girlfriend or the villain will kill her before the sun sets!"
Generic Hero: "Okay dude, sure thing. First though, I need to rest at the inn then go scour the world for the bromide of happiness, then go fishing for a bit. Don't worry about your girlfriend though, the villain always waits for the hero to show up before doing anything diabolical."
Generic Dude: "Thanks man, you're awesome!"
Just once I'd like an RPG to fuck you over if you took too long to continue the main storyline.
To be fair, space combat in games in inherently unrealistic. Any type of ship using parts that are possible according to physics will be composed, on a mass basis, of almost all fuel. It takes ALOT of fuel to get any appreciable speed.
Even ignoring that, theres also upper limits on the output/size ratio of engines, and more importantly, structural integrity. If you have a ship that weighs billions of tons, and is a couple kilometers long, theres a very serious limit as to how much acceleration it can stand before buckingling like a soda can between a lead plate and a rocket.
What I hate far more in these games, is not max speed - you would have governors to prevent you from accelerating to too high of a speed in the heat of combat - but the amazingly LOW top speed so many games impose. Freespace, while awesome, was horrible for this, in that the fastest strike craft in the game could only pull ~150 M/s, or a mere 540 KM/H. Of course, few games feature anything more than point blank knife-fights, which is what you call anything under 10 miles or so... which is why I'm looking forward to Infinity:The Quest for Earth. We'll get to play around with weapons whos range is measured in tens of thousands of kilometers, which will make me giddy with glee
It's a reply to the post above, genius-type.
That's a failure in game design, but not really in logic...
It's far more of a failure in logic when everyone knows the location and series of steps required to get a legendary artifact that can kill the guy threatening to destroy all life but no one does it 'till the hero comes along.
Fallout! Take too long and your Vault dies horribly!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ieq8IB0kCwA
Some games can get away with this - sci fi stuff where introducing a rocket into the anti-matter containment field or whatever might actually be bad.
This comes to mind because of a little obscure game (that I actually played the hell out of) called Mobile Forces. In fact - it wasn't even shooting the gas tank, just the gas CAP. If you wanted to halt the enemy's advance to your base, you got up on a mountain with a sniper rifle and picked off some tanks. Of course, in the less armored vehicles, you could just shoot the driver too.
But, it was still a lot of fun. One of those obscure niche FPS's from the early 2000s.
In X3: Terran Conflict, when you buy a used ship from someone, he will bail out in his space suit in space and float away. Using "Video Game Logic" I suppose the pilot could have suddenly stopped existing once he had the money and the ship was yours, but for some reason the developers thought it important to actually have a little man hop out of his ship and "walk" back to the nearest shipyard.
It makes sense that it looses control and even flips on the uneven terrain at high speed.
But when you shoot a trucks tire out, it loses control, flips, and then EXPLODES....
Of course Crysis is a B-action movie that you play through anyways so it's fine.
I forgot about Fallout. It's definitely an exception to the rule.
Terminus will let you rip your ship apart if you go past a certain speed without proper support or the wrong type of ship.
It was actually quite fun to tweak the thrusters and increase your acceleration by 1 in/s at a time to get the most speed without smashing your ride. Unfortunately you had to start decelerating the moment you hit it so that you wouldn't overshoot your target.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Yeah, I wasn't aiming the second criticism at Japanese devs specifically. As for the tank thing, I think the easiest explanation is that it just fits the theme of how the Soviet Union is generally portrayed in U.S./Europe v USSR settings - an oppressive behemoth slowly but steadily grinding Europe beneath its heels etc. etc. Russian tanks are usually drawn/animated as if their main purpose is to run over your house (IIRC, virtually all games/films adhering to this trope have at least one scene of a Russian tank flattening a building). Even in End War, which is set in the future, the Russian tanks have slightly better health and are dubbed "Ogres" or something
I'm only repeating what I've been told, though. Anyway, I prefer the way Soviet technology is depicted in slightly-fantastical scenarios. It's not like depicting the USSR as a huge bastard is particularly unfair.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the lack of interesting gravitational or other physical changes when on alien worlds. Half-Life did it with Xen, but only a little.
For the most part, games are incredibly boring about those sorts of setting ideas. Why can't there be a world where the color of an object determines the strength of it's gravitational field or where loud noises cause flowers or something?
Logic in our world is exactly like logic in their world. What you mean is physical circumstances and the nature of the universe might differ. If your world is not logical it's almost certainly shit.
Coding? *shrug*
I've always wanted to create a game where sounds create physical things. Like a high-pitched noise would be able to create a bridge due to how close the vibrations are; a low noise might be useful in other ways.
But I lack skill, so.
Oh, didn't you get the memo? The poor defenseless Soviet Union was in fact ground up by the evil western bourgeoise's greed, warmongering and military industrial complex!
Whoops, sorry, had a college flash back there. Back to reality.
Also, how the hell did Tyler Perry's Madea get promoted to Commander of Starfleet? What the hell?
As for video games, any game where shotgun blasts send the enemy flown back about 50 feet is pretty ridiculous. Either that or every protagonist weighs approximately 800 pounds.
I havn't seen the film, but implausibly stupid 'oh noes defenses are down' plot devices like that do tick me off. Seriously, they shut down an entire planet's defenses?!
It's actually amusing how this has worked out, since in WWII, all of the Allies concentrated on smaller, faster, more maneuverable tanks (e.g. Sherman) than the Nazis, who kept building bigger, more heavily armored tanks (e.g. Panzer, which was great, then the Tiger, which was good but bulky, and the King Tiger, which was strong but massive and clunky).
XBL: LiquidSnake2061
A number of prototype panzer designs practically constitute self-parody. For a taste, here's an idea of the intended scale of the P-1000 and P-1500 "Landkreuzer" models:
Sadly, the designs never left the drawing board.
It's all got some ironic value. Because, as we all know that the USSR never made any sort of scientific contribution.
Because the first living being sent into space was a dog named Rover, launched aboard the satellite 'Freedom II'. Anything else is communist propaganda.
And while we're on the subject, we were doing those Iranians a favor by bringing back the Shah! Ever see Return of the King? IT'S LIKE THAT, DAMN IT! We had to protect ourselves, the Reds were putting stuff in our drinking water! Love it or leave it, you dirty hippies!
Whoa...sorry there. College in the Biblebelt flashback. Back to reality.
To game developer stereotype's credit, the USSR did use larger cannons historically, going back to the T-34/85, which, I think, had a larger (though not necessarily more effective--I guess it was though) gun than any American or British tank produced in similar quantities (I know there were really upgunned Sherman 'Fireflies', but I don't think those were very common among the sheer number of Shermans built?). The early Cold War Soviet tanks--the T-54, etc., left impressions on the West for precisely this reason (they were still much smaller than, say, the Tiger I or the Tiger II--so they weren't impressive size wise). I will leave the issue of effectiveness up to the gun/war nuts, however, who are better informed. The developers also have a problem from the western perspective--it would suggest that the US, the UK, Germany, France just cannot build a half-decent tank to save their lives, though they will polish it like a 1978 Corvette right before it gets blown up. Obviously, this isn't the case either.
On the issue of micro-management, I would certainly hope the US Army (and other armed forces) didn't center around the doctrine of "Soldier stands still, waiting for specific instructions on where to move, unless someone shoots him first". If anyone's ever played the fantastic Close Combat series of games (not including that bizarre one that had to do with the Marines, I think), I think this is well handled--squads need specific orders (i.e. where to go), but you can order them to seize a building on the other side of the map, and they'll fight and protect themselves--and take the route with the most cover--along the way. If necessary, they will flee (on their own--and they might not listen to you if they are really scared).
Close Combat had some fantastic AI, for the time anyway--there was something like six (maybe eight) mental states for each soldier in a squad (from "heroic"--insane with rage--to panicked to cowardly, etc.,) and AI would even salvage weapons from corpses if they were firing beyond their ranges of running low on ammo.
Tank control was similar, though not as impressive--you sometimes had to manually guide a tank through, and if you were really desperate, you had to manually order its target, but otherwise, it worked quite well.
I miss those games.
To quote My Tank is Fight--it's a damn shame, since building one of those things might have ended the war a few weeks earlier, and it would have been one hot damn museum ticket in Moscow or Washington.
"Tuesday: 2,000-ton German 'Landkreuzer' Exhibit! Tickets on sale!"
Apparently, the 'UZI' submachinegun, in real life, is very accurate. Whereas, in games, it is often the "spray and pray" weapon.
Though this could be explained by saying most games use it in a very compact form, and have the player using one in each hand. Again, I defer to gun nuts.
I think it appeared in a game that was based on a German Invasion of the East Coast of the US, after a victory in Europe.
Winston Churchill, apparently, died in a car accident (much to the relief, I would assume, of millions of Indian people), leading to a different timeline. Because, you know, he was the Luke Skywalker/Obi-Wan Kenobi of the British Empire. "Help us Winston Churchill, you're our only hope!"
Apparently, the game sucked. Which is unfortunate, because the thing itself is pretty badass-looking.
Agreed on the tank points though -- I only had A Bridge Too Far, but trying to navigate tanks through some of those cities is hard enough tactically, and could be compounded by the wacky AI. Sometimes, though, it's eally on-the-spot with targets and the like.
EDIT: Ed, you are awesome for those pics. Is that your model?
XBL: LiquidSnake2061
Lol no, I couldn't even put together Warhammer models when I was a kid. The second image used to be on wikipedia, the the model I just found on either a German or Chinese forum by typing "Landkreuzer" into GIS.
Yeah. I maintain that Close Combat III: The Russian Front was the best, despite its slightly misleading name, with the company/unit system and the scope of the game. But tanks would still get stuck a third of the way to their destination, either mired, or because they couldn't calculate their way around a building. The later is not very realistic, but at least they'd tell you.
Plus, the game had persistent vehicle wrecks from earlier battles, so you'd run into a big tank corpse you didn't know was there. Would be nice if you could push it out of the way though....
Men of War is basically Close Combat with scaled down ranges.
I've been meaning to play that. So far, I've mostly just played various Company of Heroes mods than aim more for realism. They make up for their lack of depth by their sheer scale and fantastic visuals.
Gotta try out MoW though.
The one thing I miss about Close Combat, though, was the sheer level of humanity in the game. Every soldier had a name, a specialty, and various degrees of intelligence, cunning, skill, bravery, and a number of things that could determine his behavior. I for one became emotionally attached to my Fallschirmjager Squads, who'd fought with me for a dozen operations, and I'd given the Knight's Cross to. I didn't want to send them to their deaths, because there'd always be that thought of writing Frau Meuller a letter than her son is coming back in multiple boxes because I'd accidentally clicked next to a hidden Soviet Tank.
So many needless deaths....O_o
Infernal.
I kept wondering why I was running out of bullets so fast because I reload constantly by force of habit.
Someone had mentioned BF1942 earlier -- BF2 does this, as well. I don't know how many times I only had one magazine because I shot 4 times and reloaded, tossing a nearly full mag away.
XBL: LiquidSnake2061
Ever single soldier in Men of War has a name, an inventory, and different skills with various weapons.
edit: a FUCKTON of games take away the bullets in a magazine if you reload before it's empty. Red Orchestra even lets you save the partially empty mags for later use.
You've sold me. Gotta try it.
I think the single worst example is the hover tanks from C&C Tiberium-something-or-other. The entire point of the unit is that it is a tank that is also pretty fast and maneuverable. But does it ever use this fact? No. If I tell them to go attack something, they will stand there and shoot at it and then die because their armor is god-awful. You have to manually keep telling them to move places in order for them to actually evade fire. FUCK!