Connorrrr

I sent you a review of Bastion. Kinda rough, just so you can see that I can in fact speak English

nice sentry rocket reflect, I can never get the hang of that.

The difference in that scenario is that I'm not paying Dean to be here, and Dean isn't charging people £30 for entry. The ads are fairly small and not very intrusive, I will admit, and as I already said, this isn't going to dampen my enjoyment of the game, but I do believe there's a real problem when developers can just patch in advertisements without any warning. Like Johnny said in Rocky's status, they've avoided any bad words being said about them in the press and through initial word of mouth, ensuring sales wouldn't be affected (because as small a problem as this may be, some people would decide against buying it simply because of that) and how long is it until all developers start doing this, and they are more intrusive?

No one ever said anything that retarded. It's still a perfectly natural reaction to be annoyed that advertisements have literally been tacked onto a loading screen in a game I have already paid for when they were not there before. Yes I will still play the game, yes I will still enjoy it, but that doesn't mean I have to swallow whatever bullshit Eidos wants to do next, and no one is blowing anything out of proportion by saying that these adverts are out of place and lazy. Edit in reply to your edit: You don't get to tell me or anyone else what I or they can and can't be annoyed by. People use adblocker on the internet because they don't want to see advertisements on a website they visit for FREE. Why should I have to put up with them in a game I paid £30 for?

The bottom part of that post was supposed to be part of the quote too, not sure why it didn't stay in the box... Anyway, I'm not saying that advertisements can't be creative. You've already given one good youtube example, but the tipp ex youtube channel was awesome too... (As I was writing this Rocky already posted and made the same points but I'll continue). More to the point, however, is the fact that those adverts shouldn't be there. If they didn't have the foresight to include them in a good way while the game was under production, then just because it is now released doesn't make it okay to just tack them onto the loading screen. It looks retarded and as people have already stated, we've paid for this game already, why are we now getting advertisements in it, a month or so after the release? It's bullshit. I don't mind supporting a developer when they create a great game like Deus Ex, but I did support them by pre-ordering their game at full retail price without a demo or anything, and I won't even mention the "slippery slope" argument that could be made for this.

I'll throw my two cents in too... I'm fine with in-game advertising if it's done in a way that makes sense. The examples you posted Atomsk are horrible, and that's the sort of thing I hate. I like the adverts to be subtle and have some sort of context. I mean there's been adverts in games for a while and they don't always bother me (though I'm having trouble recalling one right now). The banner ads in Deus Ex just feel lazy, tacked on, and generally shite. I'll quote this comment I saw on Reddit about this as a way I'd have liked advertising to have worked in Deus Ex: The problem with product placement is that the decision makers at most of these companies are the worst combination of greedy and stupid

So, I just posted a status about this, so lets open up discussion here. Apparently, there are now advertisements like the one pictured above in the game. I've yet to see one, this was posted on Reddit... How do you feel about this? While it doesn't impede on an excellent game, I'm still a little annoyed they decided to patch something like that in.

Anything, really. If I had an idea for an opinion piece or something of that nature, I'd go ahead with that but I'd do reviews and news too. Platforms I'd be able to review for are PC, occasionally PS3, 3DS and iOS presuming I can coax my iPhone into letting me download from the app store again (keeps sending me to the forgotten password page despite resetting it many a time).

No deal! (I'll just start writing a review for something and send it in to the E-mail address listed later on tonight.)

I'd love to join up Dean, what sort of writing sample would you like to see?

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I thought you'd all appreciate this:

Yeah, I can't help but notice they're only ever showing it on 360... At Quakecon, Howard got heckled for it and said the PC version would look even better but it's not really the looks I'm worried about. UI wise, I don't think they did a bad job with Fallout, having played it on consoles and PC, but the pip-boy is a fair bit less fancy than those menus.

That sounds like the polar opposite of what was given to us in the game. I'd imagine that they had to change the whole thing to make it more appealing to a wider demographic in order to get more sales or something. Either that, or the PR team is made up of compulsive liars. I've found areas in the game that appear to be placed for emotional weight. You just really have to search and stumble across them. And I felt like there were several parts of the game that didn't outright say or acknowledge the fact that this place that you've either discovered for the first time or returned to has witnessed something horrible. Personally I wouldn't count a few dead bodies in a room as carrying emotional weight. Those are people I know nothing about. For a game to really strike an emotional chord it has to humanise these characters a bit, which is even harder in a video game than it is for movies, but until then it just feels like shock value or filling the environment.

I have repeatedly stated that I know what a trailer does and that I knew that the families story was not going to be the focus of Dead Island. I wouldn't usually have a problem with a trailer not being all that related to the actual product. However, it's the whole tone it sets. It sold itself entirely as an emotional story-driven game and it isn't, not just in that trailer but through all the promotional stuff, they really rode the hype all the way to release, selling it as a certain type of game. See also this trailer released not long ago, after the original teaser http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O7BjRlUeBc&feature=related and also a quote I found from one of the guys in an interview, "The game is driven by a dark story with some great twists and turns. We are going to tell it through cutscenes, dialogue and quests. While Dead Island is definitely an action game, it does show a spectrum of other people’s reaction to a zombie outbreak. Some of it is emotional and disturbing, whilst some explores really interesting questions about human nature and possible origins of the undead plague."

Yeah the soundtrack sounds nice so far... Clearer picture shows for some very nice looking environments and enemies too. It's certainly challenging Bethesda's usual trend of releasing games that look like ass, which is a welcome change... I like the new magic system and I may be more inclined to create a character better versed in it now. With Oblivion, my characters never specialised in magic because of the horrible way it handled for me, but this looks a lot smoother. On that same route, I like the new UI, everything is a lot less cluttered and neat, though I haven't yet seen a stats screen if I remember correctly..

Alright, to continue this whole "Trailer vs. Game" debate, allow me to re-state what I was saying in the status... Basically, I think everyone remembers how good that trailer was, and it had people genuinely excited for a genre of game many had denounced as over saturating the market. Now, I've said this twice already but I know that someone, somewhere said something about a zombie game with a deep, human driven story, not merely the "kill zombies" stuff seen in Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising. Again, I know that a trailer is supposed to build hype, but it just feels like the game was falsely advertised. If a trailer is meant to advertise a game and build interest in the game, then why did it decide to instead tell a short, touching story of a families fight to the death when that level of emotion wasn't injected into the main game? Then, all the trailer actually tells us is that there are zombies, and it's on a resort island, and oh wait, the title of the damn game tells us that much. As I said before, that trailer was genius, and kudos to the guys who made it. Techland owe a lot to that animation studio, because without that hype, Dead Island wouldn't have done nearly as well.

Yeah in all their demonstrations they've gone through exactly the same track as far as I can tell. I watched the leak footage from Quakecon and everything happened exactly the same. Seems very scripted.

The Experience Points articles were cool, but let's not forget that Cyber has written those upon just under two thousand hours of experience. So while more experience points articles would be neat, it'll be hard to have quite as much to say, I imagine, if the writer were to go into an MMO with the soul purpose of documenting it in such a fashion.

I was in school, eight years old.There was an assembly called where the local priest told us that there had been a plane crash in America, and that they weren't sure whether or not it was an accident yet... I can't remember much more other than that one line, how it might have been an accident. I remember finding it quite odd an "accident" of that magnitude could happen. Of course, I later found out the real situation but I never really understood what was going on, and at eight years of age living in far-away England, I was kinda disconnected from the whole ordeal. That's not to say I didn't care, of course, it's just at that age, and being so far away, it's hard to feel connected. Thinking on it now, more mature and more understanding of what happened, why it happened and the consequences of it, I feel very different, but it's hard to put into words. I think the video below explains how I felt and feel about it. It's a great video.

Persona 3 characters also going to be in the Persona fighting game. Aegis wasn't in Persona 4. And I'm disappointed that I have to tell you that. Go play Persona 4!