not sure if I brought this up before, but this is pretty cool and addictive :
Anyone here playing Team Fortress 2 yet?
oh yeah the new shadowrun’s just a FPS using the shadowrun license (quite loosely)… hopefully a new RPG’ll follow one day…
yeah i know what you mean about seeing only what’s on the screen… seeing everything “matter of fact”… i think it takes a certain unique something in game design and atmosphere to go beyond that… with SNES Shadowrun i think the dialogue, gameplay and music played a huge part in the feeling of immersion - i’m not sure i’d call it visual… i don’t really visualize books either… but i get a real sense of being somewhere with that game and it feels like a real environment even though the matter of fact mechanics of what goes on are really basic.
i think it is something along the lines of uncanny valley… when you draw two dots and a mouth on a stone it immediately has a personality because our brains are hardwired to recognise the fundamentals like that… but when you see a stunningly raytraced head shot done in Maya or something, it looks like a real person WITHOUT any real character or expression… it’s the polar opposite…
david shrigley often draws faces on things
i think that balloon conveys the human emotion far better than this
cgi movies and game cut scenes really feel emotionally vacuous to me, where crude cartoons often don’t… i think i’d call the cgi face a hollow shell of expression, where the balloon, to me, has some kind of inner radiance…
that are two amazing pics nailing the subject down totally …
i don’t know man… if you hadn’t told me that the 2nd pic was cgi, i would have 100% thought it was real … the uncanny valley has always intrigued me, but i’m not sure i believe it
Play Dwarf Fortress?
I like stylistic graphics way more than realistic anyway:
that last one (shadow of the collossus i think?) looks more like a result of the technology behind realism push combined with style as well (although mostly just looks like a sepia tone)
personally lately, i’ve been really impressed with the graphical quality of a lot of 2d sprite based games… even if they look antequated, you can still appreciate their lush beauty and the amount of time someone spent to draw each pixel by hand. it’s really impressive
Well this is an interesting thread 
Warning Forever is badass!
I’ve played a bit of Dwarf Fortress, but it’s a bit complicated and requires more focus than I can muster after a day’s work.
I sometimes log in here: http://alt.org/nethack/
It’s online nethack (not actually multiplayer, but you can spectate on games)
I’m currently enjoying Bioshock, but I feel there was something special to System Shock 2 that it hasn’t replaced, and is only mimicking. Overall it is great that it’s pushing the limits of graphics but hasn’t compromised gameplay - it “feels” solid.
Playing Jello Car now - tricky game
jellocar seems nice, but I hate those games that use the Z key and keep forgetting that german keyboards have Z and Y swapped (don’t ask me why). the game is very, very hard to play because of that.
How do you do the “Boulders” level? 
you could always use a gamepad & use xpadder to map its buttons to the keyboard keys … that’s what i do with my beloved modified snes controller
wow, xpadder seems to be what I need. thanx alot !
no problem man 
NetStorm FTW!
http://www.netstormhq.com/download.php?view.1
here’s another one for your enjoyment
Re-Volt
Racing game with small RC-cars… wanna do stunts and dirty races(with weapons)… leech it and have phun… i really like this game 
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/908/Re-Volt.html
oh yeah… if you search for old or abanndoned games… try abanndonia… they have a lot of stuff…
Yayyyyyyyy!!!
ta for those links bantai.
the other day i found a box of old games in the loft, one of them was quake 1. installed it and had a quick blast and it was still as fun as it was 10 or so years ago. infact the gameplay beats anything i had played in the last 3 years!!
I remember purchasing the quake demo cd. The first day that the retail version could be unlocked using the special keycode from ID I was on the phone purchasing my copy.
The rush was incredible. I don’t ever remember being so scared while playing a game as I was with Quake I. I really miss that in current games.
My favorite games have awful graphics by todays standards, but like some others here I am far less concerned with graphics than I am with game play.
Some of my favorites…
Absolutely love paradroid. I still play it extensively from time to time.