I just finished a 4 hour session of the Dystopia demo for HL2, and my mind needs readjusting to reality O_O

Outrageous exaggerations aside, this is really quite spectacular. It takes about 2-3 sessions to really get familiar with it, and definitely be sure to read the instructions, or you will be totally lost.

Right now there is only 1 map, but it's quite excellent. and has a lot to explore, so you won't get sick of it quickly.

The coolest part of it though, is that an integral part of the mod involves the player 'hacking' through cyberspace to unlock doors and areas on the rival facility. It looks like Tron, but there is no gravity or friction, and you have to hit certain areas in such a manner to get right side up and "hack" your objectives. What's awesome is that the other team is hacking too, so you end battling in cyberspace while the rest of your team is battling the "real world," waiting for you to unlock doors for them. It's a really unique and great gaming experience, and I highly reccomend it.

http://www.dystopia-game.com/ 

Dystopia is going to go retail.

Although I'm not remotely interested in it. 

tried ssam2 - same thing again

it just throws monsters at you, locking out areas until you kill all you are supposed to..yawn
and even at this, very limited, gameplay Sam2 is worse than PainKiller

there are some trendy "vehicles" (which dont change gameplay really)

everything looks like some cartoon that lacked good art direction

there are some spacious impressive environments (like city) but overall it seems tasteless and garish

I think I bothered to play 4 levels before giving it up

You might remember the game from ~`95 called MDK - great action with same-ish basics: fast massive combat, cartoonish designs, boss battles, humor, even some "snowboarding action
But it had more style, much more variety in gameplay and it was definitely more fun

and 10 years later we get this - plenty of pretty effects and absolutely shallow game
Fek, I would even say its less fun than many old school 2d arcades that wer about the same - brainless shoot and evade 

that was 

that style of gameplay is beginning to bother me more and more now... it was fine when i first played it, but having just replayed the game a short while ago, i was a lot more frustrated with being always trapped in an area until i cleared it. 

Wow, I remember that. I think it came with my parents' iMac, or something like that. Headshots were fun :) 

http://red.planetarena.org/

Another id-source-based free deathmatch game. Just released a couple days ago. Has anyone tried it? 

I tried looking at the screenshots, but I couldn't really make out much beyond the all-encompassing neon-glowing bloom-haze

http://www.planetquake.com/cor/codered/aa2006_4.jpg 

Bloom aside, is it normal practice to have someone saying "die bitch" in the chatbox on publicity screenshots? :) 

dude, you know if maps could be made entirely out of bloom, someone would do it, right? ;) 

Iv been talking with local developers team making some arcade-ish racing. It looked kinda shit and they admited, that they didnt care about the visual quality of the tracks and the the cars much. They just (ab)used glows and bloom and motion blur NFS-style to hide it and get the modern look :(

To me the excessive effects are not just unpretty and usless, they are mostly unwanted cause they only obscure the view and make playing harder and even frustrating. I dont want to crash or get fragged cause couldnt see much beyond the nearby huge glowing sign or overwhelming bloom effect.
NFSs, UT2k etc - I have to turn the effects off to make it playable for me.
The only game Iv seen where it was done well is Prince of Persia, IMO 

Just bought Doom 3, $20. Yay. Haven't really been excited for this game but figured I'll give it a try. 

I'm just reaching the Hell level of Doom3, and just for it, it's really worth playing till the end ! If you like "infernal satanic" level, you will be pleased for sure... ;) 

The only game Iv seen where it was done well is Prince of Persia, IMO

The version for mobile phone? =) 

I agree with you about the Serious Sams - both of them. I remember giving up on the last map thanks to suddenly realising, "Killboxes! All I'm doing is hopping through killboxes!"

Croteam had a good idea, but their overuse of the killbox style of gameplay ruined both games. Virtually no real use of 3D either. 

Over-the-top sillyness with inconsistent game/enemy design and hordes isnt my idea of fun.

I would however, like to see the SS2 engine in something like a Chrono Trigger of 2005. 

Chrono Trigger in the Serious Engine... you on crack or something? O_o

Oh, and I must be weird, I still find playing a bit of serious sam once in a while fun, and I actually laughed a few times at the stupid jokes and secrets in SS2. 

Chrono Trigger in the Serious Engine... you on crack or something? O_o

Chrono Trigger
- http://www.nofrag.com/images/0007e0.jpg
- http://rome.ro/rhaluka/hello/1830323/640/ct-screenshot-2005.06.06-16.07.42.jpg

Serious Sam 2
- http://www.nofrag.com/images/0007e0.jpg

Now imagine CT in 3rd person, isometric or whatever - with the colorfulness and expanse of SS2 in that screenshot. Remember that Chrono fan project that got canned? It looked quite nice... When I tried SS2 demo and the village level, I thought of CT's outdoor areas and especially it's map. 

ever heard of chrono cross?
__

maybe Im finding mindles shooting games boring cause I play dm online often and when it comes to slaying monster hords its just totally bleh - they dont even move much, dont have tactics, minimal use of environment cover required ..
just strafe-aim and no change of the pattern
its not that shooting is bad, just there needs to be something else

in PK atleast some foes needed different approach and the levels were not only open arenas. Still, not much variation or any involvment and 'bocked-out areas pregression' that makes halflife or quake look like nonlinear game 

Quake is a pretty non-linear game. A choice of 4 episodes that can be tackled in any order, and then within most maps there are often route choices and plenty of areas to explore. I'm still impressed when I got back and play the levels and see how many options you have as a player, compared to the games of these days. 

Yeah about that, I think what with how maps are becoming so much longer to create, most level designers just don't dare make too much content that many players might possibly just pass by without noticing (as in, areas to explores, proper secret areas, etc), cause it's not cost effective enough. And yeah, that is quite unfortunate... =(
I'd be curious in knowing if there is any precise design decision about what to do/not do with these kinds of things in popular FPS companies. 

esp notice romero maps (most of the ep2) 

One of the bosses at Rebellion (well, probably both to be fair) said that he didn't like the idea of extra routes because he thought players would just play through the games once, so any extra content would be wasted - and to him, money would be wasted.

To be fair, I doubt that many players would play through the likes of Dredd vs. Death even once - proably deciding they had purchased a stinker by the training level or thereabouts.

Anyway, when you are spending millions of dollars on making a game (slightly less at Rebellion, since they were able to save a lot of money on salaries) you don't really want to create content that isn't going to get seen. You want to make the bare minimum that will get the game reasonable reviews, pay magazines if they won't otherwise grade it well, and then market it a bit to get people to buy it. Then profit! (fingers crossed).

That's if you are a game company or publisher that sucks anyway. By that I mean strictly in a producing good games sense, not in the sense of making money for the bosses/shareholders, which is exactly the goal of any business.

With Quake, I think there were plenty of route choices and hidden rooms, but not that much where you can just skip massive chunks of the level (without trick-jumpery). Back then, it was easy to produce a fairly large amount of content for a game quickly, because there were less assets to create. These days it requires a lot more work to make secrets and extra routes, and hence a lot more money.

Look at HL2. 4 years in the making, and with a massive budget (I can only imagine) and the only secrets I remember were areas where you had to stack some crates to find an ammo clip*. Fucking awesome. Completely linear too. Still, that's hardly a reason not to buy it.

Imagine if Mario Sunshine had a pipe early on that took you to nearly the end of the game**... you don't see that sort of secret much anymore. These days games are judged heavily on how long they are, which I suppose is fair enough considering the cost of the average game. Some people will go on about how "Max Payne only took me 8 hours to finish. That was fucking lame!" and others will say "Shit, Final Fantasty 23 lasted for 56 hours before it was over." Really it is the quality of the experience that matters, not how long it was (within reasonable limits at least) but describing the quality is more difficult than stating the average length, so some games appear to make everything overly drawn out to keep players bashing away for hours upon hours until the game is finally finished - kind of like when you have to write an essay about something you know nothing about and it has to be 5,000 words long. You just pad it out with waffle.

*or lift some boxes over a gate with the grav gun.

**Actually, you could finish the game without seeing a lot of it. I think you just needed to finish 7/8 of the levels on each chapter, rather than complete each level. 

Just completed Doom 3. Thoughts:

Not even worth $20. Overrated. I knew not to expect much more than run and gun gameplay, but other such games haev stuck with me. Doom 3 just doesn't have that "keep" factor for me. I thought as a whole, it was a good game, but got boring too soon. I found myself going all out towards the later half because I just wanted to be done. The boss battles weren't so challenging either, at least once you figured out the trick to them.

Hell - bleh. It could have been done much more disturbingly (i.e. better). I did like some of the enemy animation. Running up to imp's and blasting them with the shotgun was fun. Trites were annoying. Cacodemons should've been much bigger. Hell Knight was fun to dodge and fight with. PDA scouring became annoying.

On top of that I don't really see any interesting mods out, either. I'd be interested in something that strays away from the base. Or if it retains the base, somewhere other than Mars. But whatever really, Doom 3 just isn't worth keeping. 

Anyway, when you are spending millions of dollars on making a game (slightly less at Rebellion, since they were able to save a lot of money on salaries)

LOL, you managed to get that very cutting without actually being rude...