Along the same lines, I find it strange that Command & Conquer: Red Alert, in which the villified Russians invade the US, is a game that's very popular among Russians. From my experience playing Red Alert 2 online, Russians outnumbered everyone else by a high margin. Not that I care about race so much, but it's weird to see games that portray Russians or Germans as the big, bad evil guys that the just and noble good guys need to kill and murder to save the day, are popular with Russians or Germans. I mean, I would be hesitant and weireded-out to play a game made by Russians about, say, an alternate history or present where the big, bad Americans launched a surprise attack against their allies, captured Moscow, and hung American flags outside the Kremlin, where you play as a Russian hero shooting and pushing the Americans back out of the country, taking the fight to America, and blowing stuff up to force America to surrender and restore world peace. That's exactly what Red Alert 2 did in reverse, which, to me, never seemed anywhere near politically correct to do, even (or especially) in the cheesy, silly way it was done, yet those I would have expected it to be controversial with ended up loving it. I'm glad there wasn't any controversy (I hadn't seen any), but it's weird, isn't it? I'm shrugging my shoulders.

Dang it, I'm trying to not make it sound racist, but it's so hard to be sure how you're going to read this, I'm almost certain I'm going to get into trouble. Maybe I'll just delete the entire thing so I won't have to worry about it.

The shorter the game, the more times I go through it. People will complain when a game lasts less than ten hours, as though they wait years for the game, play it once and put it on the shelf. A huge, Final Fantasy-esque RPG, in truth, doesn't seem to stay with me as long as a short game does because starting it up again from the very beginning is really daunting, as though I can't really get to the good parts without a serious investment, which I'm usually not inclined to give to a game I've already thoroughly explored once before. Usually, I'd put the game away, satisfied with the experience, but never touch it again dispite the occasional, dismissed thought to.

Enter the short game, like, oh, Metroid Zero Mission. I really don't know how many times I've run through it over the years. Starting a new game doesn't feel like stepping back in time 65 million years because of how quickly I can get to and play all the good parts.

More important than the length of the game would be how it's designed for replaying. Those big RPGs often have big cutscenes and non-interactive dialogs that can't be skipped over, so playing it again and again gets tedious. I don't know how those testers do it. A game like Bioshock, though, is pretty good at replay, as many of you know. Skip over the diaries and such when you want to, and keeps you in the game when things happen more often than not. In fact, a lot of shooters do that.

So yeah... I play games again when the game encourages it. They all should, of course. It sucks to have hundreds of people work on a game for years and years only for you to be done with and disinterested in their game in a matter of days. (It's worse with movies, though; millions upon millions of dollars and several years spent for... a measely two hours of entertainment? Is that really worthwhile?)

I'll just get both, glue them together, and create my own creature......

Mass Creed

Kon323

I'd take Assassin's Effect over Mass Creed any day. :)

The M rating is too wide a net, I agree. Even when a parent pays attention to the rating, there's discussion on if it's a light M, or a heavy M. (Like The Matrix and Hostel are both rated R.)

So is Halo 3 really going to be inappropriate? I'd say there is certainly less violence, gore, and language than Gears of War, and might only earn its M rating from the relatively mild bloodsplatter. Still, eleven years old wouldn't even qualify him to play a teen-rated game, so even though I would say Halo 3 is really only barely above a T, it would still probably be inappropriate for a person his age, but that's for you to decide.

Demos aren't about playing what we know we want to play, they're about getting to know games we didn't know we wanted.

In alphabetical order, I'd like demos for Alone in the Dark, Assassin's Creed, Battlefield: Bad Company, Fallout 3, Haze, and Splinter Cell: Conviction. I have doubt for each of these games, so I want demos to know if they're worth getting.

I played it on Hard mode first, and explored a lot so it took me a long time to get through it. My third time through, though, I played on easy and didn't explore since I knew where to go and had listened to all of the audio diaries and stuff; I got to level 3 in what seemed like fifteen minutes or something. I was amazed, but stopped playing because it didn't feel right to blow through it like that.

I played on the PC, for all of you checking my gamertag.

Interesting no one on this thread cares. The difference is huge. 30 fps is just fine and dandy, but there's nothing like 60. You can shove a game full of shaders and neat effects to create a stunning Slide Show of the Gods, but a game is only beautiful in motion. Frames-per-second is motion, and the better it moves, the better it looks. And plays. It's why Call of Duty 4 amazed so many. You can say Crysis has better graphics, and I bet you'd be right to say it has more great-looking technology under the hood, but CoD4 gives it a run for its money because... and really only because of its frame-rate, and that says a lot about frame-rate.