[Descenterace]

FEAR runs beautifully on a GF7800GTX. It pretty much sucked on an X800XT (last gen tech; what do you expect?) even at Medium detail, but on the GeForce I can push every graphics setting right up to the maximum on 1280x1024.

That graphics card is sweet. Go buy one. Now.

[pyro-manic]

Give me three hundred quid and I will.

[TrashMan]

I do.. I did a seminar on Roman architecture. I know what is what.

But the average joe thinks all 3 are the same, so I'm not gonna lose time setting it apart. (and in game it IS the colosseum)

You're completely missing the point.  There's no reason for it to be a wonder, primarily for game balance but also because it's called a Colosseum in name only.  If you look at it in the modern era, it's just a football stadium.

And there is a reason for a Pyramid to be? It's not unique you know, there were many of those...
Anyway, I did modify my game and the Colosseum is a wonder on my PC.

[StratComm]

The Pyramid in Civ III gives a grainary to all continent cities, which thereby increases the growth rate of your civilization.  What such benefit would a Colosseum wonder grant it's builder?
Why is Magellan's Voyage something you can build?  That seems a bit out of place, doesn't it?  Or perhaps SETI, of which many such programs exist.  And so on and so forth.  The Civ games are games and the way they are set up and balanced was carefully considered.  You shouldn't throw that out just because you think "that should have been a wonder" without stopping to think about what purpose it serves in terms of the game itself.

[CP5670]

FEAR runs beautifully on a GF7800GTX. It pretty much sucked on an X800XT (last gen tech; what do you expect?) even at Medium detail, but on the GeForce I can push every graphics setting right up to the maximum on 1280x1024.

That graphics card is sweet. Go buy one. Now.

You sure about that? From the benchmarks I'm seeing it looks like the normal GTX falls into the high 30s quite a bit at that resolution. Only the 512MB GTX or two GTs can pull a decent minimum framerate of 50. This is really quite lame, especially given how inconsistent the game's graphical quality is.

[TrashMan]

The Pyramid in Civ III gives a grainary to all continent cities, which thereby increases the growth rate of your civilization.  What such benefit would a Colosseum wonder grant it's builder?
Why is Magellan's Voyage something you can build?  That seems a bit out of place, doesn't it?  Or perhaps SETI, of which many such programs exist.  And so on and so forth.  The Civ games are games and the way they are set up and balanced was carefully considered.  You shouldn't throw that out just because you think "that should have been a wonder" without stopping to think about what purpose it serves in terms of the game itself.

In civ 4 the pyramid gives you acess to all government civs and increases the chance of generating a great engineer. (+3% i think)
I set up the Colosseum to give a little happines and increase the chance of an engineer (+5%)

Like I said, the +2 culture of the orginal colosseum is totaly pitifull and the change isn't even felt in the game...

I cna put these modification for download if you fdon't belive me (3 XML files)

[aldo_14]

Um, IIRC the Colloseum name comes from a statue of Nero (I think 130 foot high - aka a Colossus) that stood next to the Circus Maximus.  So it is a name for that specific building, although ampitheatres were common across the Roman empire.

[pyro-manic]

Just finished the game, and I'm a bit disappointed. It was rather shorter than I expected, and the resolution (if you can call it that) was very abrupt.

The "horror" element (which was hyped rather a lot) was almost non-existent, I found - the whole thing was far too fast-paced for it to be effective, and every time something happened, it was a case of "oh look, another slo-mo bit, now back to the shooting stuff" rather than it triggering any kind of emotional response.

It was fun while it lasted, but it'll be a while before I replay this ( I might even take it back to the shop, to be honest).

[Ransom]

Listening to the commentary videos on the Director's Edition reveals that they didn't seem to actually want it to be a horror game at all. They keep saying things like 'Oh, yeah, we wanted to make this really cool action game,' or 'We wanted to make it like an interactive action film.' As far as I can tell they just threw the horror bits in as a kind of gimmick to make horror fans buy it.

[Prophet]

Usually when trying to scare the player game makers just teleport monsters behind his back.
"Hmm... This should be a intense fight... Lets teleport uglies behind the players back!"
"What? We have a dark corner? I know, lets teleport a guy in there once the player passes it!"
"Lets scare the player. Have mosters goming trought walls behind his back!"
You see where I am going at?

[Ransom]

No, that's just games like Doom 3 which don't really deserve to be in the genre at all. They're like the gaming equivalent of slasher films (which, incidentally, I don't regard as horror films). Boo tactics != horror.

Generally, real horror games - like Silent Hill - don't rely on such cheap tactics.

[Prophet]

Generally, real horror games - like Silent Hill - don't rely on such cheap tactics.

Thats right! But I was talking about action games.
If an action game claims to have horror. It happens like this:
"No no no! Scaring the player is not enought! Lets add blood to the walls1 And a few gutted bodies! THEN have zombies teleporting behind his back. There! Now we can hype this as a horror game!"

[Grey Wolf]

The Pyramid in Civ III gives a grainary to all continent cities, which thereby increases the growth rate of your civilization.� What such benefit would a Colosseum wonder grant it's builder?
Why is Magellan's Voyage something you can build?� That seems a bit out of place, doesn't it?� Or perhaps SETI, of which many such programs exist.� And so on and so forth.� The Civ games are games and the way they are set up and balanced was carefully considered.� You shouldn't throw that out just because you think "that should have been a wonder" without stopping to think about what purpose it serves in terms of the game itself.

In civ 4 the pyramid gives you acess to all government civs and increases the chance of generating a great engineer. (+3% i think)
I set up the Colosseum to give a little happines and increase the chance of an engineer (+5%)

Like I said, the +2 culture of the orginal colosseum is totaly pitifull and the change isn't even felt in the game...

I cna put these modification for download if you fdon't belive me (3 XML files)

They cut the contented citizen bonuses from Civ2 and Civ3 for the Colloseum?

[NGTM-1R]

No, that's just games like Doom 3 which don't really deserve to be in the genre at all. They're like the gaming equivalent of slasher films (which, incidentally, I don't regard as horror films). Boo tactics != horror.

Generally, real horror games - like Silent Hill - don't rely on such cheap tactics.

Silent Hill 3, at least, had me spending about half my time looking over my shoulder. But that's because I was freaked out.

Doom 3, as I've stated earlier, I actually played through walking backwards 90% of the time.

[TrashMan]

Yeah..people think torn bodies and lots of blood = horror..

and those cheap monster teleportation.Nothing pisses me off more than that. If the area is secure then it's secure dammit! If you're going to bring in monster then make it belivable - bring them from somewhere they actually might really come from!


anyway...if anyone is interested..the Civ 4 modfication is here:
http://dj.rogueserv.com/TRASHMAN/

[Flipside]

That has always irked me about Doom 3, and is the single most important reason why Doom 2 is a better game. In Doom 2 you could stand still in a room and listen, to your left you could hear Imps chirping, to your right you could hear a Demon roaming around, you could build your strategy using your ears. What's the point of having full 3D environmental sound if all it's ever going to be used for is 'Oh look bullets ricochet from left to right!' or 'My Guns Echo! cho! cho! cho!'?

[phatosealpha]

General impressions:

FEAR:  Lots of fun, if you quickly recognize that it's basically a game about kicking the crap out of small squads of super-troopers over and over again.  The supernatural, while an interesting plot point, is wholly irrelevant to the gameplay 95% of the time.  If they had replaced the fear operative with The Rock(TM), given the supertroopers turbans, and marketed it as Al-Qaeda SmackDown!.....well, actually, that would've been completely ridiculous.  But at least everyone would've known what they were getting.

I do like it.  Wish it had some more RPG elements to it ala SS2/DX.  And it would've been nice if the supernaturals hadn't been less dangerous then casper the friendly ghost.  But as it is, it's just a fun, straight out action game.


Civ 4:

Judgement Reserved awaiting a patch.  It's been a while since I've seen a game that needed a patch to fix the million and one stability issues - but the last game that did that was Vampire:Bloodlines, which turned out to be a first class game after they, y'know, finally got it ****ing working.