http://www.joystiq.com/2007/07/16/behind-sonys-echochrome-is-the-ole-coordinate-system/ 

I was just going to post a link about it! Actually I think I'll still post the dirct link to the page where you can download the interactive editor: http://tserve01.aid.design.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~fujiki/ole_coordinate_system/index.html 

didn't read here and see you posted it first :) 

a PS3 game in the PC games thread! I'm so confusedddd. 

http://www.videlectrix.com/videlectrix_demos.html

Play-in-your-browser versions of Videlectrix games. 

Since most of the discussion tends to be about general game design/mechanics rather than platform specific issues. It's much more interesting than "Recommend good PC games for Shambler". 

Way to miss the point. No need for bollox like that. 

I recommend the games on http://nifflas.ni2.se/ (just in case you didn't play them yet). 

But I didn't agree with the split back then and I still think that most of the material posted in both threads are of the nature that it would be more fruitful to have them in one place. 

it does feel like a sort of artifical distinction to me. For example, nitin was playing a PC port of Sands of Time, whereas I played the xbox and gamecube versions, yet we had a conversation about it here. 

suck. That is all. 

and concepts in Painkiller, but I didn't care for the horde combat so much nor the boss encounters. It got boring.

Kinn and Necros do horde way much better. 

At least they were varied and always required a special technique/thinking to beat them. 

that you never have any idea what it is till you die a few times. 

That's how it works most of the time. Remember Quake? ;)
If there is enough of a chance to find out the way to proceed in an entertaining way I'd say all is well even if the player dies several times (if there is a quicksave function!). 

some you can kill with weapons, others you have to work out some trick. but there's never any indication as to which ones are killable because you can nver see them get hurt. 

Never any indication? Fire a few shots, see if the giant health bar for them at the top of your screen goes down... If not, obviously you need to do something different. The first boss is just a straight shooter, the second one takes a trick but its extremely obvious, the third is obvious in how he regenerates... the fourth? Well I wouldn't know, the game locked me out for some reason and though I liked it, I don't feel like replaying the first 3 episodes once again because of its insistence of a bad savegame. 

That the hammer boss was just plain stupid. Kill the stick its waving around before you can kill it. Dumb.

In the expansion it got really convoluted; the orphanage miniboss was unkillable until you realised you had to burn the sarchophagus. But not just an accidental blast - I'm still not sure if it was up to a certain amount or on all four sides.

Lucifer was crappy as well - I reckon everyone checked a readme there.

The bosses were inventive but a long way from intuitive.

scar3crow - the corrupt savegame thing hit everyone a few times - lots of bugs in the card system as well, although they could be used to your advantage. 

hmm, I never got a health bar. I just thought it was a 'feature' rather than a bug.

And talking about bugs, I lost count of the number of times the game crashed during the swamp boss level for me. Got through and havent had other problems yet. 

Keep extra saved games in the open slots. 

Rock. Thats pretty much it. 

With nitin and ijed, of course. 

mixed feelings overall. Some of the levels were great and so were some of the design concepts (hell was a very good idea, the frozen nuclear stuff was brilliant), but overall I didnt really warm to it.

I know a lot of people liekd the tarot card and soul stuff but I didnt really care for it. And while the base monster designs were good, some variations on it apart from a different skin/model for different sections would have been welcome.

Also like frib said, too many levels felt cluttered and put together by artists rather than proper mappers.

As for the gameplay, I have nothing against horde combat, nor arena combat, but this was way too 2D for most the time. At least serious sam had a 3d element to most its arena combats (although the base weapon/monster design is better in this).

Still, going to play the expansion now.

Oh, one more thing, when you have such a D grade 'story', please dont have 5 minc cutscenes FFS. 

Is better in some ways, much worse in many others; it breaks alot of golden rules of design, like making the player rely on trick jumping in one section of the colliseum (bunnyhopping).

The soul cards thing could have been alot better; it was a bit too rigid to be useful; I'dve preferred some more complexity there since you just end up finding a good card set and sticking to it.

It was a nice evolution over the standard powerup system, linked over levels and tied into the secrets, but it just didn't go far enough.

The game is very flat and I agree with the put together by artists thing - its becoming a very common industry standard now.

Seems like the team had some very good artists and programmers, but a lack of designers.

Id've preferred if the episodes were thematically linked as well, sometimes there were style changes that made the whole thing even more incoherant. 

I have no idea if this has been previously mentioned, but Left 4 Dead is clearly the best game that hasn't been released to be coming out ever.

Created by Turtle Rock and Valve it's a horror/survival FPS where you work within a team to get from point A to point B while avoiding hordes of zombies in a cityscape environment.

"Super Zombies" with different, special powers are controlled by other players and they also work hard to get you maimed by the relentless hordes of undead.

Perhaps the best feature is the use of what seems to be called "The Director". It changes the flow of every level, so you never quite know what to expect. One time you play the game and you may walk down a passage, open a door and enter an empty room. In the next game you play on that level you may go down that passage only to find it burst open before you reach it while you shoot wildly at the sudden zombie rush.

Either way I am a total fan of zombies, teamwork, first person shooters, survival and horror stories so this game represents - to me - the absolute peak of gaming.

If only those bastards would release it...

More info @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_4_Dead


I haven't been so excited about a release since Diablo 2. I remember the countdown to that game... agonizing!