I couldn't even get through the tutorial without it losing the connection. I'll return to it in a couple of days, but I'm done buying EA games at full price. ME3 was generally good but flawed, Crysis 3 would have made a better movie than game (It was OK, but not worth a 2nd playthrough) and now SimCity loses its edge as well.
While Ubisoft and Activision aren't perfect (particular in terms of online DRM), they don't seem to mess up franchises (Far Cry/Starcraft as prime examples) quite as badly as EA does.
@hdalive Let's see - it gives you invulnerability regularly towards the end (a weak plot device), it regularly takes control away from the player so the game plays out *exactly* how the developer wants it to (e.g. knifing a trooper and eavesdropping - something C1 would have got the player to do), it utilises on-rail sections once in a while and it regularly turns into a fairly generic corridor shooter. Crysis stood out from the crowd because it didn't follow convention, Crysis 3 is just another face in that enormous FPS crowd.
Games devs are getting worse than politicians. Instead of accepting that they may have done the wrong thing they blame everyone else and turn out the same old rubbish.
The visual appeal remains in Crysis 3...but that's about all of the series that has remained intact.
I suspect the problem isn't violence, but the potential for addiction. While a reflection of the individual rather than the game, games have an effect on people (adrenaline and so on) which some are going to find harder to manage than others.
In terms of violence, only those with a potentially violent personality or find it difficult to distinguish between fantasy and reality are likely to be affected by the violence presented. As was discussed in the video, the media's attempts to generalise beyond specific cases and make (baseless) causal links causes a lot of issues. Which is no doubt down to the fact that the average reader of papers like the Daily Mail don't have adequate experience of playing computer games.
@CW1252 There are different categories of violence. Mortal Kombat is different to CoD which is different to Deus Ex which is different to WoW which is different to C&C (and so on). All have elements of being a 'Violent video game' but the form that violence takes in each is not strictly comparable.
The violence of MK is necessarily contrived while the violence of most FPSs is situated in some form of story, often against some justified enemy (e.g. They're evil/terrorists/whatever). It's hard to say at what point games stop being violent (Is jumping on a Goomba violent?).
The PC version being out first/with the others hasn't happened since GTA2. Typically we have to wait for up to a year for a PC version to be granted to us.
Sure, GTA grew up, but I wasn't playing the series for its gritty realism. While the kill frenzies of 1/2/3 were pretty out of step with any form of realism, the overall tone was quite playful. There is a place for 'serious' or 'grown up' crime games (I'm playing Sleeping Dogs), but it didn't feel like a natural evolution of GTA.
GTA moved away from being subversive towards being mainstream and 'safe'. To me, that's a big loss (even if the quality of the series is still good).
For me, the series went downhill after Vice City. While SA was a good game with a good story, you could feel that Rockstar were stung by all the media criticism about the violence of the series and added in the largely pointless RPG elements (work outs, eating) as some way to bring 'realism' to the series.
Granted, GTA4 brought the series back to playing the game again, but it lacked a lot of the soul of the previous games even if, again, it was generally well executed. GTA stopped revelling in being a game at that point and began to share more with the frequent crime retreads you get from Hollywood.
While Saints Row is blatantly derivative, it has at least managed to innovate within its own little sphere and continue to not take itself seriously. GTA, while well executed, is an experience you can easily walk away from not feeling particularly happy (which in some respects shows how powerful it is), but is not really what I want during a 20+ hour gaming experience given the roots of the series that was not overly serious.
@blockbuster An average implies there are scores both above and below that point.
Games reviewing is entirely subjective and thus always needs to be taken into account alongside other opinions and ratings. You need to look at all of them and spot the themes and issues, regardless of whether you agree with all the reviews or not.
That subjectivity makes a 4.5 a minority *opinion*, it doesn't make that score *wrong*.
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