--- Miscellaneous ---

From the forums: Reality vs. Believability.

As video games' graphics, sounds, and sometimes themes approach reality more and more closely, the more obvious it becomes when they do not achieve it. 

Suspension of disbelief is a required skill if you intend to enjoy Hollywood action movies.  You'd better have a much larger store of it, though, to shoot your way through World War II in a video game--and convince yourself that the experience was "realistic".  Those couple of hundred bullet wounds were no problem--'couple of field bandages, couple of 'medical canteens'.  :-)

Below, I've got video of my favorite example of Reality vs. Believability:  Red Faction.  

Red Faction is a game whose claim to fame is "Geo Mod" Technology.  That means you can blast holes in the game world.  If you want to go through a wall, and you've got a rocket launcher, you can.  In theory.  And yet, the game still requires keys to get through doors.  Because doors are WAY tougher than walls!

In practice, the game's "Geo Mod" gimmick is nothing more than a glorified key itself.  When the time comes, you HAVE to blast through certain walls to progress.  Any other time, blast all you like, you won't get any further along in the game.  And much of the game's world is NOT destructible, which makes the parts that are look kind of silly.

Here's a great example from the game's training mode:

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