Just finished Half Life 2: Episode One. Although this seemed more linear than I remember HL2 to have been, it was still an enjoyable couple of ours over several evenings play. And well worth the $9.95.

I'm looking for some other games to play. Is Dark Messiah a safe bet for my Radeon 9700? I like plain fps style without too much thinking and no spells or side missions.

I want something like Q1, Doom3, HL2.

I don't want to pay top whack so I wont play HL2: Episode 2 until the first price drop (2008?). It also cuts out any 'latest' release.

Any suggestions? 

I've just read that it's Action-RPG with spells and stuff, so I guess it's not for me. 

prey sounds good from what everyone else said. 

Prey is killer, although it does feature some thinking puzzles with the spiritwalking, but these are really cool and imaginative rather than dull filler puzzles. I would recommend it Mike. 

Prey FTW definately.
did you play Q4? its a good shooter

try Alpha Prime (demo, pics http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/alphaprime/index.html 

Q4 isn't really worth your time unless you must play every FPS. It's pretty bland and gets a bit tedious at times. The vehicle sections also suck, whilst the ship sections in Prey are pretty damn cool. 

has a lot of high quality fan-made episodes, that you might like. 

I really liked it! It's a good game and well worth the time in my opinion. I played it three times now. 

Is pretty cool. Good solid FPSer, apart from the crap vehicle parts. The team-mates and stuff give it a good vibe, and some of the updates to Q2 monsters are great - Gladiator railgun...

Sure it's simple but it does what's needed.

Prey is good too though. Probably better and definitely more creative.

Dark Messiah has a demo, it convinced me straight away. But I still haven't got around to buying it.

Far Cry is always recommended. 

I haven't played a lot of new FPS recently because very few games seem to hold my attention these days, but Prey sounds like exactly what you're after. It reeks of plain simple FPS and it's got no side missions or any fucking about, just extremely solid gameplay with some awesome new twists. 

Xcom. Many of you loved it back in the 90's.
Many of you still love it. well UFO2000 is xcom, minus the geoscape but with a real live opponent (either online or hotseat). If you haven't played this game, you do owe it to yourself. IGN even rated it number 1 game of all time. The soundtrack alone is killer.

if so far you're still interested - can get it here - http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net/

Bambuz and I for the past 2 or 3 months have been working semi diligently on our own map tiles to be used in the game. If anyone actually takes interest and would like to have a look, please do here.

http://www.jesselawrence.com/terrain-burbs.rar

simply throw the 'terrain-burbs' folder into your ufo2000/extensions/ directory and it should be available (as long as both players have it, but you can take a look in hotseat to)

also we have a little irc channel on quaknet at #ufo2000 where mostly I sit and idle, but it would be cool if we managed to get a couple more players in the circle. 

http://www.pixeljam.com/ratmaze2/ 

Nicely 8-bit; nostalgic. The music was good, always just on th cusp of being irritating.

Seems strange there weren't any cats in the maze though. 

so far so good but could they get any boxier and could they possibly fit more crates into a level than ins ome of these maps?

on the plus side, the gameplay is still fun if repetitive and the texturing is very nice. 

Ist it the shortest 3d action game ever 

It's not bad, just not as good as the first one in terms of gameplay.

The physics and graphics are much more advanced though, making it a typical modern sequel. 

but I have heard that shortness comment quie a lot. 

Agreed with Shambler. The combat's interesting too. I'm playing it through for the second time. Raven make great games ;>

Favourite bit is when the you race across massive crossfire and then see the *absolutely huge* mothership take enemy out, pivot, and touchdown.. (the sound should have been better/deeper though). 

Is awesome.

That is all. 

decent game, but too linear, short and repetitive. The first one actually had more variety. 

Is enjoyable, but really doesn't feel like anything new.
Kind of a mix between BF and Wolf:ET I guess, I probably still prefer Wolf:ET (and still hate BF), but maybe once people learn to play better things will work out more.

Runs fine on my machine otherwise (Amd x2 4200, 2gb RAM, GF 7900GT), and haven't had any crashes or other problems, so looks fairly solid for a beta. 

fairly close to my specs bal, better cpu notwithstanding.

so I look forward to it. 

This is cool, I haven't seen a puzzle quite like this before. It's like a lot of other sliding block maze type puzzles, but with an odd-shaped block that restricts how it can move. Reminds me a little bit of the "knight's-move" type puzzles, but it's a bit different even from that. 

And the all-important URL: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/bloxorz 

i hate that game :>

for one, it has logical flaws: if you roll half-way over void, you fall, if you roll half-way over the hole, you don't sink in a bit. That's some extremely nicely fitting stones you got there.

then: how the fuck does that stone move? why does the magical power not enable him to just move without rotating?

lastly, the theme is so fucking boring. so boring. needs fun. It'd be kinda cool if pinkish and bluish care-bears ( http://www.myglitterromance.com/carebears/1.gif http://www.edutainingkids.com/review/dvdcarebearsjoke.jpg )would jump around your stone and you had flower particles fly up on every move, or even just some dust flying up, or whatever, just NOT nothing at all.

The game itself mostly consist of memorizing patterns to move to different combinations of fields, doesn't it? either that, or you're the next genious who calculates all that in his head (in which case you'd be better off beating whoeveristopatm-chessmaster), or you just brute-force try to get there (better get some ROCKS and HIT SOMETHING!!!!! maybe birds!).

oh, and what's with the conecpt of the switches?!wth, just introduce concepts for them that aren't so similar, or go the hard way and think of somethingh better than '"soft" and "hard" switches, and then there's teleport switches, too'.

On the other hand, it'd probably be interesting to write an ai for this.

/rant