I thought it was good. The combat system is pretty original. The graphics were sweet, some good level design. It was a bit short though. Plus the cut-scenes were dumb. Also over here the christmas commercial for Gears of War had that bloody depressing Tears for Fears cover on it. I didnt get that at all!! Also, if any of you guys thought 'The Sickbase' was too hard, there are some very hard bits in Gears. (I admit the Sickbase was too hard, badly balanced gameplay BTW:(

Luckily loading times are quite short (on a 360) 

Gears of War had that bloody depressing Tears for Fears cover on it.

The HaloIII commercial had a freeze flash battle scene with Chopin's Raindrop Prelude playing in the foreground (sounded like it was coming from behind me on my surround sound television setup, gave a real tingly feeling up my headshaft). Kind of an interesting approach, but I need some hurtful (heh, see what I did there) metal for my FPS carnage. 

You invented yet another metal subgenre, adding to thousands. 

but I was going for this:

http://www.amazon.ca/Hurting-Tears-Fears/dp/customer-reviews/B00000K413 

only done 3 levels so far.

it's fun, but more of the same. i really am starting to hate the way they keep locking you in and spawning in monsters. there's very little variety for the horde combat this time, and the second level is very cramped and not very fun.

also, visually, i find the levels not as interesting as the original.

i'm hoping there will be some hidden jewels later on for maps though. like the mine shaft from the exp or like the island with the cathedral in the original.

to me, painkiller has always been about generally fun gameplay taking place inside amazingly beautiful maps. this new exp started out as a fan project, and i think they somehow forgot about that. at least so far. :x 

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/35419 

I liked the original as well, but the first expansion got lost somewhere, most of the guys here turn out better design consistently.

Forcing the player to rely on trick maneuvers like bunny hopping is a criminal, newbie mistake.

Sounds like this new expansion is repeating old errors - a shame. 

Somebody tried it? The time-suit generates great variations (slowmo, stop and reverse) on a known gameplay... At first, you have to get used to the kinda clumsy aliased visuals but once you're in, the well made lighting and design and colorful, quite cartoony textures add some olkskool fun to the experience. AI is correct, weapons are powerful. I'm not ashamed to say I really LIKE this game!

If you had fun with F.E.A.R. or HL2 (urban levels) and Painkiller type weapon effects, just grab the 1Gig demo (one full SP level) and see for yourself...

http://demo.timeshiftgame.com/

Settings and menus are plain and efficient. In the 'video' section, I found 'hardware quality' settings on 'good' might really boost fps without ruining the visuals too much. DoF might be turned off with no regrets too. And hey! There's a built-in FoV cursor in the 'game' settings!

Unlike Crysis or Jericho, this game runs fast and smooth in 1920x1200 here. Pent D 3.2 - XP SP2 DX9c - SLI GeForce 7900GTX (Forceware 169.04 beta required, but working well)

http://www.timeshiftgame.com 

Not convinced yet but will check it out.

I need more demos and stuff to try. Someone give me some links. 

Flash puzzle/platformer:

http://www.mousebreaker.com/games/tallstump/play.php 

Have any of you guys seen any space flying games where they focus on capital ship combat?

So far, the only one i know of is star trek: bridge commander. from what i can recall of playing it, it was pretty cool and was a lot more than you'd think.

the ship's weapons would basically work like capacitors, and there were a few all around the ship. when you fire at the enemy ship, which ever phaser was pointed at him would be the one to fire and it would deplete the energy in it which would slowly recharge.

the idea is to fly around the other dude while rotating your ship such that phasers that have a full charge are pointed towards him.

i think it was a good idea and a lot of fun, but i guess it didn't do very well because i never hear about it.

i was just wondering what you guys thought of a game that tries to do this type of thing. it doesn't have to be star trek or anything, of course. just something where you are maneuvering to get the upper hand while keeping track of which parts of your ship you want to expose to enemy fire and what not.

any opinions on that? 

if i'm wrong and there are other games like that out there, can you suggest any? :) 

That sounds a lot like the starship combat chapter of the Aliens Technical Manual I've mentioned already. There are no SW type starfighters, instead a picture of Hunt For Red October type manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre is painted, a game of outsmarting in silence.

The chapter is written as a fictional lecture "Excerpted from the STARTAC '76 introductory seminar to the USCM staff college by Colonel James Mortimer, USASF."

The closing paragraphs read:

"Good captains should have an assassin mentality - prepared to sneak up on an enemy and stab him in the back before he can react. Almost 90 percent of space battles are settled this way - without even an exchange of fire. The key phrase here is 'emission control'. A starship captain can't always use his radar and lidar, broadcasting electromagnetic emissions which are gonna light him up like a beacon for everyone to see. The good captains, the ones that survive at least one battle, stay invisible. They control their infrared and EM emissions to become an invisible 'blackbody' in space; they limit their relative motion against the starfield so as to prevent visual detection; they plan their attack pass to fall on the enemy from a sensor blind spot such as a system's star; and they disguise the flare of their ASAT launches. When they light up their radars, it'll be to obtain a firing solution for their weapons, and by that time it'll hopefully be too late for their enemy.

Stealth is everything, and in a battle in which both sides are attempting to find each other in a vast, vast sky, the winner will be the smartest, most alert and best trained.

This is the essence, the Zen of space combat..." 

I'd probably love a game like that, and would probably suck at it too :P

There's something attractive about the challenge of wielding an entire starship like an assassin's blade. It would certainly be a change from conventional space games.

You looking for project ideas..? 

Nice game, I like stuff that remakes oldschool concepts without needing to over complicate it.

And being able to wear a paper hat is pimp. 

I'm always expecting seizure man. 

Seizure man? This is close. It's a terrible game, but the story nearly makes up for it.

http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/game/gunlimb

You don't have to play, so don't blame me afterwards if you do ;) 

just doing a bit of research.

the thing is that i'd love a game like that, but i don't think it would be possible to make it so that it would appeal to a broad audience. :\

i've played one of those sub games (silent hunter #) and they are incredibly slow paced.

it would be nice to strike a balance between that and something like x-wing or freespace... i thought st:bridge commander did it fairly well, but the emphasis on movement is a little too much for me. i think that's just because it's the startrek universe that's like that.

if you think about it, real engagements between space ships would be on the order of hundreds or thousands of kilometers. add to that inertia and the lack of gravity... engagement ranges could be incredibly long and down to how accurate your targetting system was.

i dunno, there's a lot to think about. :S 

i totally agree about the role stealth would play in any kind of space engagement. it's much more akin to submarine combat than traditional naval battles.

crawling around waiting for some whisper of the enemy and then blowing the shit out of him before he even knows it.

on the other hand, you can't always rely on lying doggo to catch the other guy, sometimes you gotta light up your drives and let the other bastard see you... 

the speeds would be huge and targets tiny.

You could shoot (well, accelerate with multi-stage missiles) lead balls from the other side of a planet on an elliptical trajectory opposite to your opponent's trajectory (it's called retrograde) and they would hit him thus at double orbital speed relative.

In low Earth orbit that would mean 16 km/s.

(Normal weapons on earth have less than 1 km/s muzzle velocities.)

You could detect those projectiles by radar though. Radar echo weakens by the fourth power of distance, and even small balls hitting at 16 km/s do a lot of damage...

You could also shoot from multiple directions by varying the inclination and eccentricity of the orbit.

You'd have to know where your enemy is very very precisely.

I've been toying an idea of such a game where gravity plays a big role. I was such a fan of Star Control and wondered what it could do in 3D and with slightly more realism added to the dynamics. (Like no speed limit, that was completely unphysical.)

Could still be arcadey. The targets would have to be unrealistically big though so that humans could judge the targeting without calculations. 

I'd imagine it would be kinda hard to make a realistic game like this, as I'm guessing in space warfare, computers would really be doing most of the fighting anyways, everything would be going too fast, and the calculations too complex for humans to really take part in any way (other than in designing better, faster computers/AIs before the actual fighting). 

have to have computer helpers, ie dynamically updated trajectory maps. So you could move your mouse and these curves would move, bending with the gravity field and depending on the direction of your thrust... and the enemy location and speed would also generate a curve for the enemy future location. They could be ticked for certain time intervals. 

that sounds very interesting /me takes notes 

Got it Monday, completed it Monday night!

Very short single player mode, I would say around 5-6 hours on normal difficulty, but damn is it fun!

It follows the same formula as call of duty 2 really, if you loved that then this is more of the same but in a modern setting. The developers have been watching way to much "Aliens" and "Black Hawk Down". Some of the missions are lifted straight from that movie now that I think about it.

The game does feature some of the most awesome scenes though, from attacking a freight ship on a stormy night through to escaping a nuclear explosion in a helicopter, its just breath-taking.

One final thing I must mention, there is a Chernobyl level where you play as a sniper, this single level PWNZ Stalker in so many ways, it almost makes me sad that GSC Gameworld are going to play this map and be so pissed! :)

Also, you can shoot dogs.

The end. 

Anyone has tried this game already?