Recent content by Tatter

Well, if you count games that never had a specific movie they were based on, but rather set in a similar universe to a movie, you could probably rattle off every video game in the world that didn't break totally new ground. Kingdom Hearts, Star Wars RPGs, some of the Star Wars shooters, tons of...

Goldeneye, Riddick... that's about it. Funny thing about games based on movies is that they have ENORMOUS profit margins, because parents will buy them for their kids no matter how crappy they are, looking only at the "name brand." And kids will play them, because it helps them pretend they...

Other people. Seriously, just today I was standing in line checking my e-mail on my cell phone, when some crazy woman starts yelling at me for using my cell phone in front of her, and demanding that I let her go in front of me in line because I was "being rude." I told her, "no," and she...

Providing food to a country USED to provide some means of controlling what went on in the country. However, with the rise of the UN and international law, food aid is guaranteed to any country facing a humanitarian crisis, which means they can tell us to go f*ck ourselves whenever we tell them...

I'd go with gunpowder. The typewriter was nothing more than an upgrade to the linotype machines (now, the original Gutenberg printing press was more important an invention than any of the three, possibly the most important invention of the modern world). The steam engine is harder to dismiss, as...

It's a DS game. Would you rather attack enemies by yelling into the microphone really loud? Whoa. Condemned 3, on the DS. Somebody stop me before I unleash something terrible.

It's a way to immerse the player, believe it or not. There needs to be some logical reason the player can't just say "screw you guys, I'm going home" to The Plot, and the world being destroyed is the simplest way to do it, because it represents a hazard the player can't run away from. Most...

The original poster of a forum thread statistically has only a 0.01% chance of retaining control of the subject matter beyond the first page. This statistic has been confirmed by the Institute of Somehow Managed To Find It.

Not just so many different ways, but in ways that can be used for basic distance calculations. A 30-60-90 degree triangle has the interesting property that the shortest side is always exactly half the length of the longest side. Various applications of Pythagoras's theorem and 30 or 60 degree...

I don't see that working so great, because it all too often ends up being the flip side of the "stole my puzzle from me" storytelling featured in this week's review. You select a dialogue choice along the lines of "Okay, I'll handle this," and it turns out that makes you blow the brains out of a...

They tried to impose a metric "degree" called grads in Europe... 100 grads per right angle, 400 grads in a circle. Radians are more useful than either, though. The length of the arc of 1 radian = the length of the radius of the circle. Makes translating linear motion to angular motion and back...

I'd rather read Snopes if I wanted to actually learn something. At least their stuff is usually researched better than "somehow managed to find it." Also, Imperial measurements are still used in the US and UK because, while it's easier to count things by multiples of 5 or 10, it's also easier...

Me, I'd go with the basic feudal manor system until we reach 1000 people, then build a bank and switch to a capitalist democracy, with the original feudal lords becoming an independent judiciary and law enforcement system. At 10,000 people, raise an army to deal with foreign threats and resource...

Sanitarium, Psychonauts, Majora's Mask, System Shock, System Shock 2, Bioshock, Portal. All awesome stories, though sometimes subject to really crappy graphics (Sanitarium) or gameplay (System Shock). Bioware games are hit or miss for me. I demand resolutions free of deus ex machina, damn...

Cliff racers were just an annoyance in Morrowind. There was this group of ogre slavemasters in Oblivion... by that, I mean a bunch of human mercenaries who kept ogres as slaves. I found out the hard way why the ogres were so obedient... if you got the slavemasters mad, they would literally track...