there is some kind of bug with the captions though... the timing never aligns with the actual speech, and you also get captions for normal monster talking which is dumb... i don't care that the monster said "i'm gonna kill you", really. :P anyway, just turn them off. makes hearing important dialog difficult at times (vocals could have been louder, but i have both vocals and SFX volume maxed. i should mess with the settings maybe), but you can always go back in the log to read it again.

i really dislike the interface though... it's totally a console style thing. very very simplified, with button layout not totally optimal for a mouse (again, obviously the console controller in mind there). also, no inventory! maybe they mentioned that before, but i purposely didn't read too much about bioshock. you can't stockpile on food and drink to restore health and eve. it's also annoying because often there's ammo sitting alongside cigarettes/booze which have negative effects, so sometimes you'll chug a beer when you really wanted to pick up the bullets. >_<

otoh, the sound in this game is a big step up from most other games out there. there is a lot of intricacy just on player movement sounds, which, i find, add a ton to immersiveness. at the start, i was standing still and turning on the spot a lot just to hear the crisp footstep sounds... ^_^; 

i guess that's to fit in with the theme. or maybe blood really does look like a bucket of paint spraying all over when you get shot?

I once saw a chicken accidentally rip its own head off trying to get through a barbed wire fence. The blood spurted for a moment like the arc of a supersoaker as the chickens body flopped backwards.

Also, I was shot is the ass once but it only soaked my underwear with a dark blood stain. 

Necros, you can change difficulty at any time, it's a bit more challenging on hard, but still fairly easy in my opinion.

Yeah anyways, it's a great game, I haven't quite finished it yet, but that's mostly cause I've really been taking my time with it. What I enjoy most is the exploration, they really got it right, there are lots of side areas to explore, and little secrets.
The combat is ok, it's nicer later on when you actually use all your weapons and plasmids to help you.
Interface kind of sucks yeah, really annoying that you can't see how much of a specific ammo you have without having to reload, and it's silly that you can't see your inventory.
Yeah this game suffers from one of the many Doom3 syndroms: you never swim, which feels strange for a game taking place in a city built underwater...
Otherwise, story is good, atmosphere is great, definetely don't regret having bought it directly off steam. 

I haven't played bioshock but isn't rapture a bit deep down for you to just go swimming?

(where's the rotfish icon?) 

Well, I didn't mean actual swimming out in the open sea, but many areas are partially flooded, and your walking in water and stuff, but you can see they went out of their way to block out any areas with deeper water, I even noticed a few areas where I should be able to just jump in deep water, but there was an evil invisible clip in my way.
I'm not sure swimming would have brought anything to the gameplay, but it would have added a bit to the immersion probably. 

There is a bonus pack with more missions on the site.
http://nifflas.ni2.se/index.php?main=02Knytt_Stories&sub=04Get_More_Levels
A strange Dream is very nice but also quite short. I recommend the original Knytt and of course Within a Deep Forest if you like these games. 

Yeah the original Knytt feels better than any of these new ones I think, even though I still like them. Within a Deep Forest is still my favorite though.
I'm curious how making levels for Knytt Stories is, how much liberty you have with additional art content, will have to check it out. 

Playing in between Q3 sessions, so fairly slow going, but enjoying the simplicity and even the cuteness. 

Not as good as Stories, I'd say. Lots of wandering around being lost and very little gameplay. The occasional 'dodge a spider' puzzle was a tiny breath of fresh air - I'd have loved it if it had been full of that stuff.

downloading Forest. 

looks cool. Damn sight more interesting than the terminally dull Knytt. Also, Aquaria should be out this year I think. It's a super nice looking indie game. 

 

Games would look so much less shitty if people would/could use it without too much slowdown. Especially all those modern shader stuff often looks so pixelated.
I just noticed it when watching on MoH:Airborne screenshots:
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/246/reviews/931484_20070904_screen014.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/246/reviews/931484_20070904_screen018.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/246/reviews/931484_20070904_screen024.jpg 

in modern digital tv - the Osaka Athletics World Championships had horrible aliasing in the white track lines against the red tartan. 

i don't know why, but in a lot of newer games, you can't use AA if you use the fancier hdr lighting or bloomy effects. frankly, i rather use AA. :P 

but i think anisotropic filtering is awesome and much more important.

Also, AA becomes less important as you go to higher resolutions (I know this isn't always an option.) 

you can use AA and aniso together. both of them working at the same time make a big difference in quality. 

of course, I'm just saying that of the various features available, i think anisotropic provides a larger improvement.

AA also seems to only improve sampling on polygon edges, which doesn't help with some shaders that look chunky and aliased on the interior of the polygon. (for example the wet cobblestone texture in this shot: http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/246/reviews/931484_20070904_screen018.jpg )

Also, I believe (but haven't tested this theory) that AA also doesn't help with techniques that rely on the z-buffer and polygon inter-penetration. Like doom3 shadows... can any one veryify whether doom3 shadow edges get improved by AA?

It occurs to me that the term "FSAA" implies that all pixels on the screen are super-sampled, not just polygon edge pixels, but I don't remember if this is actually the case. If so, that cancels out all of my above rant :) 

Played the ad-supported version. Ads in menus and loading screens. Turned out there were none when not connected to the internet.

Though I haven't played the original games too thoroughly, I guess this new one is a worthy successor. The jump'n'run bits were nice and entertaining (albeit repetitive after a while) and just right in terms of difficulty. The fights, however, became tedious, even annoying, quickly. The camera behaved awkward in places.
At any rate, a nice free game. Apparently Ubisoft has already stopped the free distribution of the three games (POP, FarCry, Rayman), but I hope this might have started a trend more companies will follow. The ads were not very annoying, and worth the trouble for a quality free game. 

I got bored of replaying every time I fail a jump. prolly 30% into it 

FSAA simply means Full Scene Anti Aliasing, as opposed to edge detection or similar schemes. It doesn't imply supersampling to my knowledge.

The relatively fast technique that is used in current 3d hardware is multisampling AA - this is the one that only makes a difference on polygon edges, but sample resolution also takes the stencil buffer into account. Thus stencil shadows see improvement.

Lastly, multisampling simply doesn't work in a few situations due to various limitaions - deferred rendering, and when using HDR framebuffers on some hardware. 

I like AA, would never play without it. 

oh my, the Strogg now officially look like Borg. It's a ripoff.

:/

although I like Trek, at least the better parts of it. The Borg movie is the only good one :-) 

The Wrath of Khan is the only good one. 

But it would have to be supertastic to be as good as Khan.