Fuckin' ell, fucn_tabbed again =/ 

I'm now on my second playthrough on this game, and enjoying the hell out of it. It's not really a "pure" RPG (whatever that means)--it actually reminds me more of Deus Ex than anything else. You can approach problems in a number of different ways, depending on your clan/skills/attributes, the story is good, the HL2 engine keeps it looking relatively nice, and the dialogue and voice-acting is mostly really good.

Bad stuff: It could have really used another week or three of QA. The dialogue subtitles are full of misspellings, there are various small dumbass scripting issues, at least one encounter is ridiculously hard, IMO, and, although I didn't get it, there's at least one show-stopping script bug that crashes the game out and requires fixing via the console.

That being said, I really, really like the game and recommend it to one and all. If you get it, there's a fan-made patch that fixes the crash bug and a host of other bugs and dialogue problems available here:

http://www.planetvampire.com/bloodlines/files/patches/ 

I'd been wondering about that one. Sounds like it could be my kind of thing.

Lots of people have been saying that although it is source-engine based, it is nowhere near as pretty as HL2. Would you agree with this? 

Out of all the new MMORPGS (EQ2 and WoW), this is the only one that really holds any interest for me. Plus, no online fee. I haven't played any of the open betas, but all the articles I've seen say it looks/plays amazingly well. It cracks my defense against MMORPGs. Anyone try this in open beta, and if so how does it play?? :O 

Calling it a mmorpg is a sham. It's no more massively multiplayer than Diablo was. You start off in a town where you do the whole merchant / find a party thing, and then when you take a quest you end up in an instanced land or dungeon. So basically it's Diablo except you have avatars in the chat room.

For a hack and slash game it's not bad. I didn't feel that the abilities tree was particularly intricate or creative. The terrain is pretty though. 

it is nowhere near as pretty as HL2. Would you agree with this?

Yep. Don't get me wrong--it's not ugly by any means, but the aesthetics aren't as good.

But the boobs are better, complete with Boob Physics(tm), and a console variable to make them bigger. You go, Troika. 

and a console variable to make them bigger.

Come in id software, your time is up. 

Yeeeees. Hmmm.

In other news, I finished the Riddick PC yesterday. It was still really short, although there was a new combat sequence during the doublemax section which was cool, I won't spoil it by giving specifics on it though. I suspect there may be a few more cigarette packs around than there was on XBox, but I'm not certain of that (finding cigs unlocks stuff in the 'extras' menu). Directors commentary mode adds floaty icons scattered around the levels that can be used to pause the game and hear some blather from Starbreeze folks.

One thing that I've noticed is that most of the weapons are hopelessly inaccurate at ranges greater than three feet. I think that this is to encourage you to move closer to guards before initiating combat so that you can hear them swearing at you properly. 

Doom3's physics have realistic boob movement. Spawn one of the dead female actors and you can fondle her realistically with the physics grabber thing... That's totally better than just being able to increase tit size on the fly 

I actually noticed that the first time I played it. The part where you go into the lady's office...right before you have to battle a ton of Pinkys I think. The lady is a zombie, but when she's dead on the floor, shoot her a few more times and you will see her tits jiggle. 

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through this game:

Goods:
- Nice semi-fantasy settings - quite enjoyable settings to see and good variety
- Navigation puzzles are mostly fun as are most of the other in-game puzzles
- Offers some rewards for exploring and is pretty intense, especially for those who fear heights
- Good voice acting and good story so far
- Sweet East Indian female companion who travels with you and mostly stays out of the way. She's not Superfly.

Bads:
- The movement of the Prince using the movement keys moves him relative to the screen view and not relative to the Prince himself. When the camera is moving around on its own (and it can really jump a lot), there are times, especially during tough multi-enemy combats, that this becomes incredibly frustrating. It is equally frustrating during timed navigation puzzles as well. I found Heretic II to have a way better 3rd person control. The funky movement frame of reference made PoP4 feel very unfair at times and really made controlling the Prince a struggle when you had to fight the controls as much as the enemies. When this wasn't a problem, the fighting was a lot more fun.

It's a good game and beautiful to look at but did it ever make me mad too.

Any other opinions on this one out there? 

Tried POP3 demo. Looked nice. Camera blew decaying goat ass. Uninstalled straight away. Basically a nice game setting rendered entirely awful to play by the deliberately shite camera (compared to Heretic2, Rune, Blade, FAKK2, Enclave, etc). 

Sands of Time is basically a console port, so it is really designed to be played with a pad... I'd imagine playing PoP with keyboard and mouse is just as rank as playing the average PC FPS with a joypad would be. I think that why it feels wrong is that basically, if you're controlling a third-person game with a keyboard and mouse, your expectations are usually that the camera can be used to steer the character. If you're playing with a pad, your expectations are that you push the analog stick in the direction you want to move the character, and the camera follows. Does that make sense? I do think it sucks that completely unsuitable control modes get tacked onto so many console to PC ports. Either put a huge "REQUIRES JOYPAD" logo on it or don't fucking port it.

I haven't gone anywhere near the new PoP: Warrior Within yet, it looks like they've thrown away too much of what made Sands of Time distinctive in a misguided effort to appeal more to "the kids".

Drifting back to control issues, on the console side of things, I think that The Suffering is the only third-person game I've played recently that had FPS style controls without feeling dreadfully wrong, probably because it was mainly about shooting things (and had a first person mode you could pop into, which I didn't really use). It was an enjoyable romp, although far from flawless. There is a PC version I think, no idea how it compares. I hated the controls on XBox Enclave: It really felt like it had been built with the keyboard/mouse controls of the later PC version in mind. I did play the PC version later and the controls were indeed better, but didn't persist as I didn't find it that engaging, mainly because the melee combat felt a bit wooly. Back on PC I have previously enjoyed Rune and Heretic 2, never got around to playing Severance, and was recently frustrated to find the FAKK2 doesn't work at all in Windows 2000. 

Just curious - was that demo PoP 3D (which was pretty much considered crap compared to the 2D PoP and is now an old game) or was it a Sands of Time demo - the recent release which has been very well recieved.

I agree with your comment about the camera if you are talking about Sands of Time. 

Was a little annoying (on xbox/gamecube) but most of the time worked. Note: the camera system did improve between the xbox demo and the xbox shipped game.

My only complaints were that the combat was a little bit too button-mashy, and that the final boss was too easy and too simple. Oh, and that the voice-overs were hard to hear when the camera wasn't really close to the characters.

I'm getting PoP5 for christmas probably; i'm worried by what i've read about it but hopefully it's still fun. 

I'm at 81% completion. Just finished the battle after the torture chamber section.

Thank god the boss is easy because the gang wars are nothing but mashing the mouse and keyboard and hoping you get lucky. It's as if there is a rotten brat on another controller trying to steer your character into certain death while you're trying to coordinate your attacks and retreats.

Also, the torture chamber had a really hard jumping puzzle section (the two timed switches for the two moving walls) due to the poor camera/control link.

This would be a truly great game if they cared enough to independently design control methods for PCs and consoles separately. Either that or have a setting to slave the character movement relative to either the Prince or the camera. It's a simple transform mathematically.

But I'm compelled to finish because the settings and puzzles are very cool.

BTW, I also finished Deus Ex 2 - Invisible war and also found the PC/XBox duality to be a pain for managing weapons and inventories. Nowhere near as bad as PoP4 but holstering your weapon in DX2-IW was clumsy.

Most of the game development money must go into content, AI and engine coding. Is it really too much to ask for more effort to go into the separate control needs between PCs and consoles since this seems to be current business model for many new titles. The perfect game would have you not even thinking about what your hands are doing - the challenge is in the game world alone.

Like Quake. 

Is it really too much to ask for more effort to go into the separate control needs between PCs and consoles since this seems to be current business model for many new titles.

Or in the case of Deus Ex 2 'we gave this a shite new name so it would appeal to the console retards - oh and shite gameplay too' ; it needed more effort put into the seperate gameplay needs between PCs and consoles i.e. the former can actually be remotely sophisticated. Only played the demo and the inferiority to DX1 put me off. Way to lose a sale, Ion. 

If you're finding the combat button-mashy then maybe you need to sit down for a second and rethink how you're doing it. Springing off of walls and jumping over heads is fun for the first third of the game, but after that blocking and retaliating is what you need. The only exception is the big fat guy who can hit you even while blocking. He takes a huge wind up you can see comming a while away and attack to interrupt it.

I didn't think the final battle needed to be hard. PoP is a puzzle game and the battle only serves to being colsure to the plot. I don't think the gaming public at large understood Sands of Time, which resulted in the sequel. I worry that gaming is being taken over by fratboys and is getting mainstreamed in a bad way. 

I've only played up to the first boss, and I'm thinking of just getting a refund tomorrow. Mushy controls. Horrendous first boss. Feels like Ninja Gaiden done by EA. 

do you actually *need* to have sp1 and sp2 installed in order for the game to work? i don't want to buy it and be forced to apply the service packs... 

The game is half combat and half puzzles. The last puzzle in the game forces you to use all of the acrobatic tricks you'd learned up until that point. The last fight in the game really should do the same for combat -- specifically, almost all fights in the game involve juggling multiple opponents, so the boss fight should involve using that skill. Fighting against 1 vizier, then 2 viziers, then 4 viziers in order to win would be a really nice way to 1. use the existing "you have to beat him three times" mechanic, 2. make each round more challenging than the previous, and 3. make the player use all of the fighting-multiple-guys skills he learned throughout the game. A boss fight is not just to provide closure; it's also supposed to be somewhat climactic. I don't think SoT's boss served that purpose at all. In fact, having the prince kill him in a cutscene might have actually been better than the current fight.

You're probably right about my button-mashy complaint; it wasn't until late in the game that i began to use the block button very much. 

Having the prince kill the boss in the cutscene probably would have made more sense. There was already a lot of cinematics before though, maybe they just wanted to break it up. I really consider the post-dagger level to be the boss. It makes sense that for a puzzle game the boss be a puzzle, not a baddie. 

Shambler: Dunno what your problem with the camera was exactly. I found that generally it was very well behaved and made navigating the environments fairly simple. However, there were a few spots where the camera angle changed just as I was making a jump, which also affected the controls. There was a spot where I was required to leap from some stalactites and the camera kept changing and I kept falling down into the abyss.

Also, I found fighting easier when I zoomed the camera out, but then sometimes it would close in. I'll admit that the default camera wasn't so hot for the fighting sections all of the time.

My problem with the game was the drawn out fights. Sometimes I would find myself fighting the same battle for around ten minutes, but nothing was really changing, only more monsters were appearing and I was becoming bored.

I stopped playing the game fairly near to the end because of the battle in the lift up the tower which lasts forever. That bitch kept getting killed and I just couldn't cope with the stress of losing because of her inadequate AI. "JUST STAND IN THE CORNER OUT OF THE WAY AND LET YOUR MAN TAKE CARE OF THE SITUATION!" Jesus. 

My girlfriend bought me a PSP as a combined birthday/christmas present... initially with no games, although I bought Ridge Racers and Lumines myself. So far it seems absolutely fantastic, with only a few problems.

Ridge Racers is brilliant. I never really got into the Playstation/Arcade games (mainly because I never had a PS) but I've always been a fan of arcade style driving over semi-realistic simulations like GT.

Ridge racers has a fantasic sense of speed, and really simple handling - although not so simple that you will master it straight away. There are three types of car, and each one differs in the way you can perform drifts (drifting, or sliding around corners is perhaps the main characteristic of Ridge Racer's driving model.) I think later on in the game you need to use the car which has the most drifting ability to win

My only real criticism with the game is the difficulty. I am finding progress on the PRO league very hard now, although BASIC was really easy - there hasn't really been any kind of gentle difficulty curve. The computer car in 1st place tends to start about half a lap in front, and even after driving a near flawless race, it is very hard to place first (which you need to do in order to win a league.)

Lumines is a simple puzzle game, where you groups of four blocks of two colours (orange and white) in order to create squares consisting of four blocks of the same colour. The game is played to music, and the choice of music affects the speed of a timer bar, which sweeps across the screen and deletes the blocks.

If you are skillful, you can arrange MANY groups of four or more before the timer bar sweeps the screen. This can give large bonuses - so far I've managed about 18 groups of four at once, but there is a picture in the instruction booklet of a 40 bonus multiplier, so I think I:ve some way to go yet.

The PSP also comes with a demo disc, containing game and movie trailers as well as music video clips. The PSP screen and audio capabilities do a seriously DAMN FINE job of displaying movies and although I'm unlikely to buy UMD movies for my PSP, I'd certainly consider renting them for a long train ride or something.

Which brings me onto the minor(ish) problems I've noticed with the PSP. One, the batteries don't really last long enough (anywhere from 3 to 6 hours, depending on the application, although I tend to get nearer 6 playing games.) This lack of battery stamina could be a problem on long journeys, although the rechargeable battery is removeable, so you could take a couple for a long plane journey.

The second problem is that movies are supposed to be region encoded. The only time I would be likely to use the movie playing capability of the PSP is for long plane journeys (and potentially train journeys in the UK, I've used it a lot in Japan on the train, but I'm less worried about it getting nicked by some puffer coated thug.) If I could rent a movie at Heathrow, and drop it off at Kansai or wherever, then that would be great IF they movies were special region free discs. Train journeys are less likely to present a problem, since travel would generally be limited to one country. Of course, I have a Japanese PSP, so any movie rented outside of Japan would need to be region free also.

Hopefully Sony will see this potential problem and address it (many people have said they are not interested in buying UMD movies in addition to DVDs, but IMHO, a rental market for UMDs could be successful.) Maybe then I won't have to sit through hours of awful in flight movies, viewed on the worlds smallest screen, with the worlds most uncomfortable headphones. I would sleep through it, but I can't sleep on planes for some reason.

Has anyone else managed to get a PSP that wants to give some thoughts? I'm also still interested in the Nintendo DS, although my first impression of it wasn't so great. Any thoughts on those anyone? 

I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but I:ve been playing Flat-Out a lot at work. The demo was great, but the full game is so much better, thanks to the inclusion of multiplayer. Flat-Out took over the office network as most popular game for a while, with two separate servers needed to cope with the demand (the player limit is 8, unfortunately.)

Generally, Flat-Out is brilliant, the driving model is brilliant with a great feeling of control given to the player (this was using an XBox game pad) when executing drifts and turns - although it certainly takes some practice to get used to turning so early. The single player mode is very long (with three cups, each consisting of 12 or so races) although not too difficult. The bonus games are a fun diversion, but could be better implemented. Multiplayer is where the game really comes into its own, although that may be partially due o the lack of similar competition.

There are a few problems. Sometimes the physics feel a bit random, with cars flipping at the slightest impact, and drivers flying through windscreens for seemingly no reason whatsoever (although this is more rare.)

The multiplayer set up menus are quite poor, and don't allow for any pre-race (or mid-race) chat. The option to change car class restrictions is also only available when starting a new server, which can be annoying.

Problems aside, Flat-Out is certainly the best PC racing game I've played in a while. It's well worth a try if you like your racing arcadey.