: Not in M1. In M2 and Infinity you can, but in M1 it pauses. Unless I've got
: some weird memory disorder thing going on. Being attacked while reading a
: terminal is, indeed, realistic, but in my opinion it detracts from
: gameplay. For example, in Infinity, I often skipped or simply skimmed some
: of the highly interesting dream terminals for fear of any invisible s'pht
: or other baddies I missed coming and shocking me. I'd much rather be able
: to read terminals at my leisure, especially taking into account how
: central they are to the game.
Yup, nevets is right on this one – the terminals in M1 do pause the game. This was not true for M1A1, because that was really just an attempt to recreate the M1 assets in the M2 engine. But once Aleph One started using the original M1 assets and managed to duplicate the M1 behavior, terminals went back to pausing the game like they were supposed to. You'll notice this very obviously when, for example, you grenade jump to the secret terminal on Welcome to the Revolution – you'll jump up to read the terminal, open it up, and then when you close the terminal, even ten minutes later, you're still in the air and just coming back down from your grenade jump.
Vale,
Perseus