Dragonclaw on 29/6/2002 at 12:03

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Yes! And then there's the ballet skill! At basic, you can only hop around a bit, while at master, you can do pirouettes and such like you invented dance itself!

Unfortunately, as I heard, there will be little use to that skill...:sweat:

PowerCrazy on 30/6/2002 at 07:15

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We Win. Let the record show that this is the ONLY thread where an argument ensued, and someone actually won. With little to no flames, Amazing. Its like i've seen the oracle, and i can die happy. wow.


Oh and BTW dual, pistols. HELL NO!!! Its NOT Deus Ex.

King Ronald on 30/6/2002 at 12:36

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(groggily rises to his feet)

I only meant that I simply cannot be botherd to continue repeating myself, over and over and over into eternity, when you don't seem to understand what Amorpheus and myself have been saying. I still cannot see why you can't have the OPTION to use Dual Pistols, or Akimbo, or whatever the hell you want to call it in the sequel, if the INDIVIDUAL who is playing wants to, out of personal CHOICE. Who the hell are you to tell a hundred odd people who payed money for the game that they can't do what they want, i.e have a DP fight, just because you people think it's unrealistic?

But no, don't even bother responding to this - you haven't got this point by now, so you'll never get it. I'm going to bugger off to the Thief forum. Salut.

King Ronald on 4/7/2002 at 17:16

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Bollocks to reality. It's a game.

(This isn't THE PROPER DP ARGUEMENT, that'll be tommorow)

King Ronald on 5/7/2002 at 19:38

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(camera pans across grass moorland, and to the right)

Narrator (in deep I-drank-oven-cleaner-by-mistake voice): "It was a time of change...."

(camera pans up to the clifftop, on which a large orc, riding a wolf (no, not like that) sits, holding a big axe)

Narrator (in same voice): "The battle of Dual Pistols, won long ago, had destroyed the PowercrazyIceBreaker clan - those known as The Horde"

(Orc warrior holds aloft a big flag with the intertwined P.C/I.B logo)

Narrator: "However, the drums of battle now echo across the lands of Dhagestan, and the kingdom of Ronaldonia is at war."

(swivel camera and zoom to opposite side of cliff, skimming over a black raven pecking at the grass, giving savvy readers a post-modern chuckle at my reference)

(camera shows line of knights holding the aqua and silver logo of King Ronald)

Narrator: "It was a time of heros..."

(King Ronald, wearing Ubersoldat armour scrambles to the front of the line, and holds aloft his sword)

Narrator: "A time of-"

(With a cry, all 200,000 soldiers of Ronaldonia run screaming at the Orc clans. The Orc chieftans give a similar signal and run at the knights)

(cut to dramatic shot with horizon and rising sun in background of two armies swarming to each other, with a view of a flower (dandelion or buttercup) to emphasize the fragility of life and how the rain and land come together like two armies)

Narrator (triumphantly): "-WAR!"

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THE PROPER DUAL PISTOL ARGUEMENT (as promised)

Ahem. Now look - I've got Warcraft 3 in the post this morning, my GCSE predictions are mostly A's; I'm in a good mood and I highly doubt the people responsible for weapons design in Deus Ex 2 are reading any of this, so it doesn't really make much difference at the end of the day.

I'll begin.

List of things in Deus Ex that are unrealistic (to demonstrate the game isn't perfect on this front)

- J.C's inventory size can accomadate 40 locpicks and multitools, a vast pool of ammo, a flamethrower, an assault rifle, a shotgun, two pistols, a minicrossbow, 15 medkits, a riot prod, several types of grenades etc. and he can still run around.

- J.C can run without pause for the course of the entire game. He never gets tired, he never gets hungry, he never gets thirsty, he never gets too hot or cold (short of being set on fire) and doesn't once trip over, get scared, stub his toe, brush his hair out of his eyes, stutter/stammer or get lost for words in any situation, reloads flawlessly every time (never dropping his clip etc.).

- J.C never forgets any fact, no matter how minor, because a tiny computer implanted in his head reads information through his eyes (somehow) and records it.

- J.C can go into a menu, whilst in a firefight. Time stands still as he calmly shifts his inventory around, reloads guns with different ammunition types, performs surgery on himself with medical kits, looks at photographs (that are emailed into his brain/eyes) and so on. When he is done, he can exit the menu, holding a different weapon that is fully loaded, and blow away the NSF punk who tried to take him because J.C was originally holding a combat knife.

- J.C has a helicopter that flys him around. It can fly from New York to Hong Kong within 8 hours, not refueling once.

- An international conspiracy called Majestic 12 is trying to take over the world.

- Alien clones firing purple psychic rays run around in Area 51.

- A.I computers built for looking at Email messages can talk like an adult male of high intelligence, and concieve plans for world domination.

- MiB's holding plasma rifles walk around secret underground government facilitys that house giant man-eating rats.

- J.C can instantly improve his abilities in several fields, simply by clicking upgrade and spending "skill points" that he magically gets by progessing through his life. Presumably God gives them to him.

- A nuclear bomb can hit it's target without fail (this is fine, the next bit isn't) and only partially damage a few old aircraft hangers at ground zero, produce no radiation of any kind, leave hardly any impact crater and allow troops to survive even though they are at ground zero.

- Everybody, the world over, speaks fluent English. Even in Asia, or France.

- J.C is pursued by a German cyborg called Gunther Hermann that resembles the Terminator and has had most of his head replaced by machines.

- Sewers in France flawlessly lead to the destination J.C needs to go to.

- Trains in New York only go between two stations. In fact, New York itself consists of one block, surrounded by buildings, two train stations, Liberty Island, the Castle Clinton park and monument, LaGuardia airport and a few underground tunnels. Queens, the rest of Brooklyn and most of Manhatten don't exist.

- A plague called the Gray Death is killing everybody, and is in fact a (get this) Nanomechanical Virus, designed by the Illuminati, another conspiracy aimed at world domination.

......and those are just a few flaws in Deus Ex. By now, the beginning of an idea might be forming in your mind. This idea perhaps runs along the lines of "There are some plot holes, reality blurs, poetic license and whatnot within the Deus Ex game. In short, it is not totally realistic". If you are indeed thinking something along the genral lines like that, then well done. You can now see this - Deus Ex is not totally realistic. Philosophically, since it is in fact a computer game-world on a CD made entirely out of small coloured triangles called polygons, then to say it is real or realistic is to be flawed from the outset. And if anyone requires further enlightenement on this area of my arguement, simply read some Wittgenstein. He has a lot to say on reality.

Stage two. The phrase "Computer game" contains (If you look EVER so closely), the word "game". The word game comes from an activity played in a group of sentient creatures, or on an individuals own, for personal enjoyment, interest, and distraction. Games have been known to be based around a principle of FUN, in that by playing the game you experiance fun. As previously commented by myself, and proved to a degree by IceBreaker, a trend or style exists in fiction (such as movies) to have weapons. Not just weapons, but violence, which our repressed society feels the urge for daily, but rarely confronts. Ironically, if someone gives into violence momentarily, the rest of society physically restrains him or her, drags the individual to a bare room and proceeds to kill them. The Americans in particuar enjoy sending huge bolts of electricity through people, killing them horribly. Fiction takes this enjoyment that comes from violence, and because we live in an advanced Capitalist society tries to make money from it. Thusly, violence appears in most forms of media, along with its close counterpart of interest, sex. To take a jump here, that's why you have things in Capitalist computer games like schoolgirls wearing short skirts and high heels and pump-action shotguns - because it has sex and violence in it. In conclusion, things appear in media because they tap into a desire that in turn allows the media to exploit/profit from it monetarilly.

Three (god i hate rational arguements). Looking at violence as a media concept exploited in computer games (since.....ooooh......Pac-man) specifically, we see that films containing large amounts of violence are dubbed "Action Movies", as they feature action (i.e, violence). In this field of interest, various guns have been fired as ignorant cinema audiences (;)) get a thrill out of it. Since Westerns were started to be made, the concept of not one gun, but two, simultaneously fired, has been appealing possibly because of some "twice the noise, twice the weaponry, twice the thrill, twice the money for me" logic by movie directors. A particular director, John Woo has made the use of Dual (9mm or otherwise) Pistols as his trademark. Whether or not John Woo is a bit crap on the originality front is neither here nor there. The fact remains that movies (by John Woo in particular) have created an image of dual-pistol use as cool and violent - both concepts appealing to males. Since sometimes males play computer games, sometimes computer games ape films (particulary in the Capitalist sense) and sometimes games can fall into a glorified "Action Movies" category (i.e Shoot-em-up, Beat-em-up, Adventure) then we can see the reason why dual pistols appear as weapons in games from the hardcore sniping of Counterstrike, to the more knockabout fun-ness of Unreal Tournament.

Four. Now we have covered that Dual pistols appear in games because they contain stylish coolness and violence which is appealing to males, you might begin to see why I am suggesting that they are included as an optional weapon in Deus Ex 2 (which will contain over two dozen weapons and items), a game not that realistic in the first place. If your response is to snort - "well, I shoot with Dual Pistols all the time and I can't hit didly squat, rendering them not very usefull" then I will call you an imbecile and point out that a f**king plasma rifle is not particulary realistic, but you can still be running around a cargo freighter in the future with one of them, and I haven't heard a whiff of complaint from you about that.

Appendix A - To clarify my original question, I was merely asking whether or not DP could be used in real life. Then I got the answer - yes, but they arn't very accurate.

Then I wanted them in a fictional game. At that point my interest in realism dipped a tad, and although I do not completely subscribe to the idea of "screw realism for coolness", I would view the option to include a completely realistic (in the sense that it could exist in real life) weapon in a unrealistic game to be a good one.

Appendix B - Deus Ex is not a game for weapon realism. Soldier of Fortune 2 is a game for weapons realism, and even THAT featured dual pistols/uzis/kitchen sink so I think Deus Ex 2 could have it in it.

Help any?