Why on earth must every criticism of some Apple policy or product be immediately countered by "but MS does it too"?
All this means is that NO, MS can't just go and download the SDK and code happily for the iPhone ever after. It must first go out and shell out (a lot of) cash for some Apple PC it didn't want in the first place
Supposing the WinMobile SDK doesn't run in wine (not sure about it) and there is no alternative development environment (there are none for commercial applications on the iPhone), if you really want to develop for it, you still have to cash out money, but considerably less than you would for a Mac, as all you need is the OS, and not the hardware.. and that's supposing you don't have already a copy of windows lying around.
The iphone development platform only runs on OSX, so no.. MS (or Linux, BSD,...) users can't just get busy making apps for the iPhone, without shelling out for a Mac.
The way I understood Ballmer's remark was about allowing people who don't own a Mac running OSX (or a Psystar?) to develop for the iPhone.
correct me if I'm wrong, but currently the only way to develop commercial applications for the iPhone is to buy a Mac.
You should consider changing the pack of twats you hang around with, or just be happy they actually use it, and educate them gently.
Or you might want to hang around with Apple evangelists and get frustrated by their belief that Apple invented The Mouse, or with MS evangelists who think Ballmer was the first one to practice chair-throwing as an alternative form of stress relief.
The ones I can't stand are those linux users who look down at Ubuntu because it is actually easy to use and offers the advantages of a linux based OS to the technically challenged masses, on the ground that they were "Here First". Just because you used to code by punching holes in paper cards doesn't make you any wiser. It just means you're old.
Gibson's writing style is an acquired taste. I like it, I know people who hate it. What William Gibson is really good at though, is understanding how technology will/might evolves. The best example is "Pattern Recognition" (published in 2003) in which he foresaw youtube (created in 2005) and viral videos spread over internet. He's generally off about the technical details though, and there might be a chicken and egg problem in the way he influences people to actually create what he described in his books.
because most indie game dev's won't write their own engine, and a lot won't even be able to license one, and frankly a lot of them that do license one probably shouldn't.
There are plenty of free or lowcost engines out there. Torque (mentioned in TFA) is low cost and relatively easy to get into (mostly script based if I remember correctly). Ogre3D is free, crossplattform, and in combination with openAL and a good (and free) physics library you can hae a kickass game engine in (relatively) no time. And that's if you want to write some 3D game. If you want to stick to 2D, your options are even vaster.
I think the problem is that many people who think "I want to write games myself" should have watched THAT beforehand.
You do realize that very often, XP netbooks are more powerfull than their Linux counterpart, as otherwise XP wouldn't run in any useable way, right? You do also realize that installing a Linux distro on a (taking the Acer Aspire One as example, as I know its specs) 1GB Ram/120GB HD netbook instead of the 512MB/8GB SSD version you would have gotten if you had bought the Linpus version makes the price difference acceptable?
Having just replaced the aptly named "Linpus" distro with Xubuntu 8.10 on my Aspire One (8GB SSD/512MB Ram version), I'd recommend you check on aMSN and Skype. Both have good webcam support which actually ran out of the box on the AA1. As someone who lives even further from his family, webcam support was a must for me. Interestingly, everything else on the AA1 worked nicely with a default xubuntu install, except for the wireless adapter and using an older atheros driver solved that. Finding out about the driver issue wasn't much more difficult than finding older/newer driver for windows. By this I mean that I, being halfway knowledgeable, found the informations and howto's I needed easily, but someone completely a-technical would have have been lost (I can't even recall how many times I had to personally go to some aquaintance to download and install windows driver from the official manufacturer's site because they had absolutely no clue what they had to do)
Something people don't seem to grasp is how fast Linux is evolving. One year ago, using a webcam in any Linux distro was a complete pain indeed. Nowadays, if you don't happen to buy/own some really weirdo webcam, you'll be checking on your family faster than if you had been using Windows (no drivers to install) The same is true for most peripherals. They might not have worked well or at all a few months ago, but development doesn't stand still for 5 years in the Linux world.
Using Linux is still not particularly easy, but it's not more difficult than using Windows (or even Mac OSX if you're not used to it and are following MS Windows paradigm)
I have a Genius Traveler 350 trackball for my AA1. It takes some practice, and it's definitely not the best input device for a lot of applications (or first person games for that matter), but it's perfect when you're in a train, in a plane or anywhere else where you don't have a flat non reflective space for a mouse. It definitely beats the inbuilt trackpad.
Why do people always concentrate on the compiz cube?
Along with the windows opening/closing animations and the wobbly effect, the cube ranks among the most useless effects in Compiz (though I must admit I like the windows effects a lot somehow)
Expo, fading, windows preview, all the magnifier and zoom functions, the shift switcher, along with the shelf functions are actually very useful (and productivity enhancing, once you get past the WOW effect), but somehow nobody ever talks about them. Hell... even the water function is useful, as it can be used as a silent (and cool looking) system beep.
Yes, they are also very pretty and geeky, but so what? just because something does look cool doesn't mean it's useless
Actually, it really depends on where you live. I would LOVE to be able to turn off my computer at home when I'm not working with it. But I live near the beach on a carribean island, which means extremely salty hot air with 90-99% humidity. The constant airflow and current means more dust (and sand, and whatnot), but it also means things corrode much slower. The obvious alternative is of course having an AC running all the time in the room where my computer is, and somehow I don't think I'd save much energy or money that way.
In mainland US or Europe, of course, the equation differs
Interesting. I *did* advise my 63 year old mother and my brother to let me install Ubuntu on their computer instead of Windows BECAUSE it was easier to support (and approximately the same to figure out. Just some minor difference in paradigm)
There really isn't much excuse for the teacher's behaviour, apart from clinical fear of anything unknown coupled with maniacal control-freakishness
And Good riddance I say! The mouse is going to join books and keyboards in the list of obsolete and dead technologies! (just in case, as this is/. and people tend to misunderstand thes kind of things : that was sarcasm)
/. seems to have eaten up my lengthy reply to that, but the gist was :
maybe it's because, when they start their brand new linux powered netbook, all they get is a so-called easy mode instead of a full fledged desktop
If more people would realize that you can add software (including games which are not shareware and subpar, like the ones delivered with the AA1 for example) and comfortably work in a ~windows-like~ environment on any netbook, they might not be so fast at replacing the OS.
My AA1-210 (with a 16GB extension) runs Skype, VLC, Blender 2.48, Kryta, audacity, tons of OSS games (show pysol to any standard "I-only-play-solitaire" XP user to see some brain splattering over the walls, then start armagetronad) and other less ludite soft (code::blocks anyone?) nicely on the XFCE desktop underlying the Linpus' easy mode PoS. If I want to show off, I can even start compiz (which, by the way, is already installed by default, like many other packages which aren't shown in the "easy" mode!).
In my paranoid hours, I wonder how much pressure Microsoft puts on the companies bringing out netbooks to make sure Linux looks as bad as possible
(and if this is a dupe, then I put the blame on slashdot and/or CowboyNeal)
I own an Acer Aspire One with... well... something they called Linux on it. Upon boot you are greeted with big shiny colourfull buttons to start some of the applications which are actually installed on the AA1 and you have no way to add any application you might need (VLC or Skype) if you never used any linux distro before.
Of course, a 5 second search on Google will show you how to very easily remove the original desktop menu, revert to a real (xfce) desktop with way more applications, and all the nifty things anyone with some linux experience would expect (like the ability to download and add software easily through Pirut), but that means you have to know that it's possible in the first place. Most people buying notebooks don't have any idea about what Linux distros can or can't offer, so, for them, Linux IS the Linpus desktop... and it's a complete turn-down. Even the (shareware) games one can access by default sucks donkey balls : they didn't even think to include any form of solitaire, even though pysol, which would blow your typical "I only play the card game in windows" type of user's mind away, is in the repositories
I think the reason many people install pirated (or not) version of XP on it is due to the dumbed down distros netbooks are sold with, and in my paranoid hours I even wonder how much pressure Microsoft is putting on the netbook manufacturers to make sure that Linux looks as bad as possible.
My ~jailbreaked~ (if one could call "alt+f2"->"terminal"->"xfce-panel" a jailbreak) AA1 is happily running Blender2.48, Skype, VLC, Kryta (thanks to a non-standard gtk lib, installing Gimp is non-trivial), Audacity, Armagetronad, scorched3D, and a lot of other ~standard~ stuff on the underlying xfce desktop (It's still the original Linpus distro!). I actually modelled and rendered a rather complex scene using Blender while traveling, and then developped a minigame in python using Geany. I could run compiz quite well if I wanted (I only start it up when showing people what the AA1 is actually capable of, as it's the best way to drain the battery) If I had only known XP prior to buying the AA1 I guess I'd have been disgusted and would have had a completely wrong picture about what Linux is capable of... and would have looked for any way to install XP on it, even though it probably would have run like a dog, compared to linpus/xfce
I didn't finish the main quest yet (having been spoilt about the fact that it's a) The End and b) it kind of sucks, even though I made my best to avoid hearing about specifics, I'm doing my best to just push it as far away as possible), and I haven't been to Rivet City yet (one thing people don't complain about but which really bugs me is the whole metro system thing). But concerning the rest of your points...
Radiation, plentiful drugs (incl. stims), crippled limbs and some of the shortcomings of the VATs are taken care of by at least one mod (and that's even before the GECK is out). I don't have the link right now, but it's in one of my other answers to this thread.
Irrelevant areas : yes, they are irrelevant to the main quest, but they flesh out the world. Fallout3 isn't supposed to be linear, so it makes sense to have a lot of areas which don't add anything but make the world more believable (along with being self contained dungeons and sometimes part of side quests. Both Grey Ditch and Minefield are in that category by the way.)
Lack of individual dialogue for generic characters is something that will plague any open game you'll ever play, except if someone comes up with some really good speech synthesis. As it is now, Game developers have a certain budget, which they hopefully try to use as best as can be. Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout3 do a pretty good job (better with each iteration imo) at having relatively diverse chitchat. The same budget argument can be brought concerning the lack of towns and population centers, although, at the last count, I have found 6 in the wasteland, plus all the ones in the city itself, like GNR and Underworld.
I don't think you can bring out a turn based RPG nowadays and expect it to be successful commercially. As I told someone else, check out Wizardry8 for a turn based RPG in a completely 3D environment. It isn't as much fun as you might think. And I'm personally happy they didn't go for a pure FPS. It's supposed to be a RPG, so your stats and skills should have an effect on as much as possible. That's what the VATS is good for. Personally, I miss more often than not during VATS events and that's due to my character being more Social Interaction- rather than Weapon based. I have one weapon skill above 50 (small guns at 52 to be precise), and that's mostly because I stumbled upon a lot of "Guns and Bullets" magazines. There are plenty of mediocre to very good FPS (Left4Dead being my personal favourite right now) out there. The world can do with one less.
My opinion is that it's Bethesda's take on the Fallout Universe and that they succeeded. It's NOT Fallout 1 or Fallout 2, but the universe is definitely Fallout-ish and the game has been successfully brought into the 21st century, with all the drawbacks of increased reliance on shiny real time 3D that's expected from a modern game while both refining Bethesda's game engine (no point in denying that the Elder Scrolls legacy shines through) and still creating, as you say, a unique game experience you'll be hard pressed to find in any game currently available on the market.
And from my experience with the Oblivion mod community, I'm pretty sure it is bound to become even better once the Editor is out.
I think VATS is a step in the right direction to combine real-time 3D gameplay with a stat/skills roleplay approach. It's not perfect (especially the 10% damage thing is really stupid), but I'm confident most of the issues will be fixed by the community, thanks to the editor.
I don't hold a grudge against Bethesda for dumbing down the game. First of all they didn't dumb it down as much as Oblivion (proof of that are the 80 or so mods I use just to make Oblivion's gameplay more consistent), while trying to cater for a broad public (read casual console players), which is something they HAVE to do if they want to sell enough games. After all, they are a company like any others, just looking to make profit at the end of the day. But more than that, I think of Bethesda games as Sandbox games. They provide you with a game engine, graphical assets and a (more or less) barebone game, but they also give you the tools to alter the gameplay to your own liking. Oblivion, with the right mods, was a spectacular game in term of gameplay, and Fallout3 without mods is already great. Think about what the future holds once the GECK is released:D
On another note, you might want to try to find a copy of Wizardry8. That's the only roleplaying game I am aware of that tried to combine 3D-First Person View and turn based gameplay, something you sound like you would have liked for Fallout3 too.
Interesting and I agree THAT is stupid. Nice to hear that there is already a Mod fixing it.
It can be found here by the way. Once the editor is out, you'll probably be able to find mods making FO3 more like FO1 and 2 I suppose.
Yeah, right. You just showed incredible maturity and knowledge here. I wish I was as smart or old as you.
I particularly like the alternative better modern C-RPGs you name, and of course I aknowledge that you are a god amongst game developpers
All this apart, I think you should lay off the crack for a moment, chill out, forget your mom told you were adopted and that no one likes you (perhaps even grab some moist cake) and just stop playing Fallout3 if you don't like it.
Despite your superior writing and discussion style which might or might not earn you a -1:flamebait, I'll address your concerns:
Yes, tabbing and healing is too easy and should consume time instead of being instantaneous.
No, you don't take only 10% damage in VATS. Care to provide a link to correct me?
In my opinion, VATS is the right way to handle combat without losing the immersion created by a 3D real-time environment. Real-time-non-VATS combat is based on your skills and stats with a big proportion taken by your LUCK stat, as far as I've witnessed. It's like someone saying "I shoot generally in his direction without aiming" in a non-computer roleplaying game. VATS combat is heavily based on your skills with only a minimal LUCK element (though it's still there obviously).
VATS is indeed not an RPG. It's a mechanism inside a C-RPG
oh.. and you're right. I should have mentioned the other C-RPGs I played extensively, but my childish mind can not really remember all those names since Bard's Tales on the C64 when I was 14. Please put that down to my young age. I'm really SO sorry!
Slashdot Mirror
Only if he is jumping up and down while talking. Otherwise it means he is in his "chair" mood.
Why on earth must every criticism of some Apple policy or product be immediately countered by "but MS does it too"?
All this means is that NO, MS can't just go and download the SDK and code happily for the iPhone ever after. It must first go out and shell out (a lot of) cash for some Apple PC it didn't want in the first place
Supposing the WinMobile SDK doesn't run in wine (not sure about it) and there is no alternative development environment (there are none for commercial applications on the iPhone), if you really want to develop for it, you still have to cash out money, but considerably less than you would for a Mac, as all you need is the OS, and not the hardware .. and that's supposing you don't have already a copy of windows lying around.
The iphone development platform only runs on OSX, so no .. MS (or Linux, BSD,...) users can't just get busy making apps for the iPhone, without shelling out for a Mac.
The way I understood Ballmer's remark was about allowing people who don't own a Mac running OSX (or a Psystar?) to develop for the iPhone. correct me if I'm wrong, but currently the only way to develop commercial applications for the iPhone is to buy a Mac.
You should consider changing the pack of twats you hang around with, or just be happy they actually use it, and educate them gently.
Or you might want to hang around with Apple evangelists and get frustrated by their belief that Apple invented The Mouse, or with MS evangelists who think Ballmer was the first one to practice chair-throwing as an alternative form of stress relief.
The ones I can't stand are those linux users who look down at Ubuntu because it is actually easy to use and offers the advantages of a linux based OS to the technically challenged masses, on the ground that they were "Here First". Just because you used to code by punching holes in paper cards doesn't make you any wiser. It just means you're old.
Gibson's writing style is an acquired taste. I like it, I know people who hate it. What William Gibson is really good at though, is understanding how technology will/might evolves. The best example is "Pattern Recognition" (published in 2003) in which he foresaw youtube (created in 2005) and viral videos spread over internet. He's generally off about the technical details though, and there might be a chicken and egg problem in the way he influences people to actually create what he described in his books.
because most indie game dev's won't write their own engine, and a lot won't even be able to license one, and frankly a lot of them that do license one probably shouldn't.
There are plenty of free or lowcost engines out there.
Torque (mentioned in TFA) is low cost and relatively easy to get into (mostly script based if I remember correctly).
Ogre3D is free, crossplattform, and in combination with openAL and a good (and free) physics library you can hae a kickass game engine in (relatively) no time.
And that's if you want to write some 3D game. If you want to stick to 2D, your options are even vaster.
I think the problem is that many people who think "I want to write games myself" should have watched THAT beforehand.
you just had a car accident and the airbag didn't blow up
You do realize that very often, XP netbooks are more powerfull than their Linux counterpart, as otherwise XP wouldn't run in any useable way, right? You do also realize that installing a Linux distro on a (taking the Acer Aspire One as example, as I know its specs) 1GB Ram/120GB HD netbook instead of the 512MB/8GB SSD version you would have gotten if you had bought the Linpus version makes the price difference acceptable?
sigh .. there go my mod points ...
Having just replaced the aptly named "Linpus" distro with Xubuntu 8.10 on my Aspire One (8GB SSD/512MB Ram version), I'd recommend you check on aMSN and Skype. Both have good webcam support which actually ran out of the box on the AA1. As someone who lives even further from his family, webcam support was a must for me.
Interestingly, everything else on the AA1 worked nicely with a default xubuntu install, except for the wireless adapter and using an older atheros driver solved that. Finding out about the driver issue wasn't much more difficult than finding older/newer driver for windows. By this I mean that I, being halfway knowledgeable, found the informations and howto's I needed easily, but someone completely a-technical would have have been lost (I can't even recall how many times I had to personally go to some aquaintance to download and install windows driver from the official manufacturer's site because they had absolutely no clue what they had to do)
Something people don't seem to grasp is how fast Linux is evolving. One year ago, using a webcam in any Linux distro was a complete pain indeed. Nowadays, if you don't happen to buy/own some really weirdo webcam, you'll be checking on your family faster than if you had been using Windows (no drivers to install)
The same is true for most peripherals. They might not have worked well or at all a few months ago, but development doesn't stand still for 5 years in the Linux world.
Using Linux is still not particularly easy, but it's not more difficult than using Windows (or even Mac OSX if you're not used to it and are following MS Windows paradigm)
Can be found HERE and should run in windows XP too.
It's a remake of the old dreamcast classic "Chu Chu Rocket" (no online play ... yet, but at least it has got penguins)
I'll second Scorched3D if it runs on the rigs (which it probably will, albeit not in its full gory glory).
I have a Genius Traveler 350 trackball for my AA1. It takes some practice, and it's definitely not the best input device for a lot of applications (or first person games for that matter), but it's perfect when you're in a train, in a plane or anywhere else where you don't have a flat non reflective space for a mouse. It definitely beats the inbuilt trackpad.
Why do people always concentrate on the compiz cube?
Along with the windows opening/closing animations and the wobbly effect, the cube ranks among the most useless effects in Compiz (though I must admit I like the windows effects a lot somehow)
Expo, fading, windows preview, all the magnifier and zoom functions, the shift switcher, along with the shelf functions are actually very useful (and productivity enhancing, once you get past the WOW effect), but somehow nobody ever talks about them. Hell ... even the water function is useful, as it can be used as a silent (and cool looking) system beep.
Yes, they are also very pretty and geeky, but so what? just because something does look cool doesn't mean it's useless
Actually, it really depends on where you live. I would LOVE to be able to turn off my computer at home when I'm not working with it. But I live near the beach on a carribean island, which means extremely salty hot air with 90-99% humidity. The constant airflow and current means more dust (and sand, and whatnot), but it also means things corrode much slower. The obvious alternative is of course having an AC running all the time in the room where my computer is, and somehow I don't think I'd save much energy or money that way.
In mainland US or Europe, of course, the equation differs
Interesting. I *did* advise my 63 year old mother and my brother to let me install Ubuntu on their computer instead of Windows BECAUSE it was easier to support (and approximately the same to figure out. Just some minor difference in paradigm)
There really isn't much excuse for the teacher's behaviour, apart from clinical fear of anything unknown coupled with maniacal control-freakishness
And Good riddance I say! The mouse is going to join books and keyboards in the list of obsolete and dead technologies! (just in case, as this is /. and people tend to misunderstand thes kind of things : that was sarcasm)
/. seems to have eaten up my lengthy reply to that, but the gist was :
maybe it's because, when they start their brand new linux powered netbook, all they get is a so-called easy mode instead of a full fledged desktop
If more people would realize that you can add software (including games which are not shareware and subpar, like the ones delivered with the AA1 for example) and comfortably work in a ~windows-like~ environment on any netbook, they might not be so fast at replacing the OS.
My AA1-210 (with a 16GB extension) runs Skype, VLC, Blender 2.48, Kryta, audacity, tons of OSS games (show pysol to any standard "I-only-play-solitaire" XP user to see some brain splattering over the walls, then start armagetronad) and other less ludite soft (code::blocks anyone?) nicely on the XFCE desktop underlying the Linpus' easy mode PoS. If I want to show off, I can even start compiz (which, by the way, is already installed by default, like many other packages which aren't shown in the "easy" mode!).
In my paranoid hours, I wonder how much pressure Microsoft puts on the companies bringing out netbooks to make sure Linux looks as bad as possible
(and if this is a dupe, then I put the blame on slashdot and/or CowboyNeal)
I own an Acer Aspire One with ... well ... something they called Linux on it. Upon boot you are greeted with big shiny colourfull buttons to start some of the applications which are actually installed on the AA1 and you have no way to add any application you might need (VLC or Skype) if you never used any linux distro before. ... and it's a complete turn-down. Even the (shareware) games one can access by default sucks donkey balls : they didn't even think to include any form of solitaire, even though pysol, which would blow your typical "I only play the card game in windows" type of user's mind away, is in the repositories
Of course, a 5 second search on Google will show you how to very easily remove the original desktop menu, revert to a real (xfce) desktop with way more applications, and all the nifty things anyone with some linux experience would expect (like the ability to download and add software easily through Pirut), but that means you have to know that it's possible in the first place. Most people buying notebooks don't have any idea about what Linux distros can or can't offer, so, for them, Linux IS the Linpus desktop
I think the reason many people install pirated (or not) version of XP on it is due to the dumbed down distros netbooks are sold with, and in my paranoid hours I even wonder how much pressure Microsoft is putting on the netbook manufacturers to make sure that Linux looks as bad as possible.
My ~jailbreaked~ (if one could call "alt+f2"->"terminal"->"xfce-panel" a jailbreak) AA1 is happily running Blender2.48, Skype, VLC, Kryta (thanks to a non-standard gtk lib, installing Gimp is non-trivial), Audacity, Armagetronad, scorched3D, and a lot of other ~standard~ stuff on the underlying xfce desktop (It's still the original Linpus distro!). I actually modelled and rendered a rather complex scene using Blender while traveling, and then developped a minigame in python using Geany. I could run compiz quite well if I wanted (I only start it up when showing people what the AA1 is actually capable of, as it's the best way to drain the battery) ... and would have looked for any way to install XP on it, even though it probably would have run like a dog, compared to linpus/xfce
If I had only known XP prior to buying the AA1 I guess I'd have been disgusted and would have had a completely wrong picture about what Linux is capable of
Google is evil incarnated, Apple is style-over-function overpriced junk, and "The Year of The Linux Desktop" ain't coming soon.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has some really funny employees (and Reversi).
/em ducks
I didn't finish the main quest yet (having been spoilt about the fact that it's a) The End and b) it kind of sucks, even though I made my best to avoid hearing about specifics, I'm doing my best to just push it as far away as possible), and I haven't been to Rivet City yet (one thing people don't complain about but which really bugs me is the whole metro system thing). But concerning the rest of your points ...
Radiation, plentiful drugs (incl. stims), crippled limbs and some of the shortcomings of the VATs are taken care of by at least one mod (and that's even before the GECK is out). I don't have the link right now, but it's in one of my other answers to this thread.
Irrelevant areas : yes, they are irrelevant to the main quest, but they flesh out the world. Fallout3 isn't supposed to be linear, so it makes sense to have a lot of areas which don't add anything but make the world more believable (along with being self contained dungeons and sometimes part of side quests. Both Grey Ditch and Minefield are in that category by the way.)
Lack of individual dialogue for generic characters is something that will plague any open game you'll ever play, except if someone comes up with some really good speech synthesis. As it is now, Game developers have a certain budget, which they hopefully try to use as best as can be. Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout3 do a pretty good job (better with each iteration imo) at having relatively diverse chitchat. The same budget argument can be brought concerning the lack of towns and population centers, although, at the last count, I have found 6 in the wasteland, plus all the ones in the city itself, like GNR and Underworld.
I don't think you can bring out a turn based RPG nowadays and expect it to be successful commercially. As I told someone else, check out Wizardry8 for a turn based RPG in a completely 3D environment. It isn't as much fun as you might think. And I'm personally happy they didn't go for a pure FPS. It's supposed to be a RPG, so your stats and skills should have an effect on as much as possible. That's what the VATS is good for. Personally, I miss more often than not during VATS events and that's due to my character being more Social Interaction- rather than Weapon based. I have one weapon skill above 50 (small guns at 52 to be precise), and that's mostly because I stumbled upon a lot of "Guns and Bullets" magazines. There are plenty of mediocre to very good FPS (Left4Dead being my personal favourite right now) out there. The world can do with one less.
My opinion is that it's Bethesda's take on the Fallout Universe and that they succeeded. It's NOT Fallout 1 or Fallout 2, but the universe is definitely Fallout-ish and the game has been successfully brought into the 21st century, with all the drawbacks of increased reliance on shiny real time 3D that's expected from a modern game while both refining Bethesda's game engine (no point in denying that the Elder Scrolls legacy shines through) and still creating, as you say, a unique game experience you'll be hard pressed to find in any game currently available on the market.
And from my experience with the Oblivion mod community, I'm pretty sure it is bound to become even better once the Editor is out.
I think VATS is a step in the right direction to combine real-time 3D gameplay with a stat/skills roleplay approach. It's not perfect (especially the 10% damage thing is really stupid), but I'm confident most of the issues will be fixed by the community, thanks to the editor.
I don't hold a grudge against Bethesda for dumbing down the game. First of all they didn't dumb it down as much as Oblivion (proof of that are the 80 or so mods I use just to make Oblivion's gameplay more consistent), while trying to cater for a broad public (read casual console players), which is something they HAVE to do if they want to sell enough games. After all, they are a company like any others, just looking to make profit at the end of the day. But more than that, I think of Bethesda games as Sandbox games. They provide you with a game engine, graphical assets and a (more or less) barebone game, but they also give you the tools to alter the gameplay to your own liking. Oblivion, with the right mods, was a spectacular game in term of gameplay, and Fallout3 without mods is already great. Think about what the future holds once the GECK is released :D
On another note, you might want to try to find a copy of Wizardry8. That's the only roleplaying game I am aware of that tried to combine 3D-First Person View and turn based gameplay, something you sound like you would have liked for Fallout3 too.
Interesting and I agree THAT is stupid. Nice to hear that there is already a Mod fixing it. It can be found here by the way. Once the editor is out, you'll probably be able to find mods making FO3 more like FO1 and 2 I suppose.
or I do have a life and you don't. /shrug
Yeah, right. You just showed incredible maturity and knowledge here. I wish I was as smart or old as you.
I particularly like the alternative better modern C-RPGs you name, and of course I aknowledge that you are a god amongst game developpers
All this apart, I think you should lay off the crack for a moment, chill out, forget your mom told you were adopted and that no one likes you (perhaps even grab some moist cake) and just stop playing Fallout3 if you don't like it.
Despite your superior writing and discussion style which might or might not earn you a -1:flamebait, I'll address your concerns :
oh .. and you're right. I should have mentioned the other C-RPGs I played extensively, but my childish mind can not really remember all those names since Bard's Tales on the C64 when I was 14. Please put that down to my young age. I'm really SO sorry!