JohnXmas wrote:

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


I tend to agree. Whilst it basically 100% IS Half-Life 2 + bullet time, it is still pretty fun. The FPS basics are all present and correct and done well, and there are a few things I like:

Timeshift is easy and useful and fun (although will probably get old?)
Weapons are powerful and feel good - death animations and blood are rewarding.
Destructable enviroments are a nice touch (although the enviroments and currently visuals are pretty cluttered).

Overall it seems to do the job, albeit a derivative one. I could be tempted. 

There seems to be a few shooters and stuff recently.

Am I right that I should be buying / playing:

Bioshock
Crysis
Gears Of War
and Timeshift since I like the demo
???

Any others??

I am so behind with gaming it's ridiculous. Have still got to start Dark Messiah, Vampire and Thief 3, and make progress on Guild Wars and Gothic 3....hmph. Still it's always good to have straight up shooters to play, right?? 

You should buy the Orange Box and have some Team Fortress 2 with us online!

/me votes TF2 best game of 2007.

Anyways yeah, so many games coming out these days! Have to play Gears of War and Crysis, but will probably get a 8800gt first to play them in proper quality.
And have to get Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 on Wii! And if I had a 360 I'd be playing assassin's creed. =\

Oh and been wasting time on Hellgate a bit, Frib, what do you think of the full game? 

checked it out for a bit at the local shop, that looks like a great game. Although I wonder if the missions would get repetitive? WIth good level design they shouldnt. Either way, it looks cool. anyone know if its coming out on pc ? 

Yeah, apparently early 2008. 

I heard it gets a bit repetitive yeah. So far I've done only one assassination though, and I'm really enjoying every aspect of it. I take my time to explore and shit and just chill out on the rooftops. So far very little action for me, which I love, because I hate action.
It's a brilliant groping sim. 

Okay, this will sound dumb but can someone inform me here.

I played HL2 a while back, it was cool. I played HL2 Ep1 a while back too, it was also cool.

Ep2 is the one just out, that's been delayed for ages??

Now, what purchase options does this come with?? I presume you at least have to buy it with TF2 and Portal included (which is fine by me). Can you just buy it like that, or do you have to buy this Orange Box bollox with HL2 and Ep1 as well?? 

As far as I know you have to buy it all!

Still - Its OK for me - I now have 360 versions of all of them, I preveiosly had HL2 on xbox1, [HL, HL2, HL2 ep1 - PC] and now [HL2, HL2 ep1, HL2 ep2, Portal and TF2 - 360]

Oh well...

360 versions all look better... 

There will be stand-alone versions of them all, I'm sure, but I'm not sure how eventual that will be.

There was talk of "The Black Box" version for a while (that contained the three new games without the earlier content) but I seem to remember reading that it was shitcanned entirely. 

You can buy HL2 ep2 alone if you want on steam, it costs $30 though I think, so it's really not worth it considering the Orange Box is $50, and ep2, portal + tf2 are worth $80 total, and all 3 games are great. Just think of it as HL2 and ep1 being free bonuses you can give away as gifts to someone else. =)

I kinda wonder how much they were planning on selling the black box, cause the orange one is already really cheap. 

Orange box is insanely good value for money, even if you already own HL2 and EP1.

Hell its worth the entry fee for TF2 alone, and with the amount of custom maps that are no doubt gonna be released for Portal it will have a huge lifespan if you enjoy the 1st person puzzle gameplay.

I would seriously pick it up Shambler... 

Soldier Of Fortune: Payback

www.sofpayback.com

Built on engine used for Chaser.
No demo released. 

The 2 first games were fairly average, and the gratuitous violence completely puts me off now. 

i hate marketing like that. let's all not buy the game. 

Ordered the game yesterday, playing it today. Just what I felt like.

For anyone who was worried it might wildly deviate from it's HL2 + bullet time shooter on rails theme, don't fret...

It's fun though, and the slow mo deaths are great - shooting some dude jumping off a platform in slow-time and blowing him back onto the platform, very nice.

Does what it says on the tin, though that's a pretty small label. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS8utQ5x0oM 

That looks pretty nice - the soundtrack is pretty manic / insane though. 

Yeehaw, finally finished this sucker (years after everyone else)! And what great fun it was. Some missions were super hard because of the "bad" movement and control (laggy compared to Quake, but one gets used of it). I love the car feeling, greatest fun driving I have yet encountered in any game. I wish there was a patch to give a higher distance "cut-off" of the buildings and especially the entities. It's pretty weird to turn your back and make cars behind you disappear.

All the npcs are pretty cool characters. NPC AI sucks big time, I had to restart missions so often because of it.

The open ending is kinda nice, I have 50% completion (played 13 hours apparently, but this probably does not count reloads, duh) and will have fun exploring the city. Can't wait to try a race in the stadium. Also I need to get 6 stars. :>

But what a disappointing ending sequence. No, dear development team, you are NOT cool or famous or whatever enough to justify a 10 minute movie-style name text-wall with gay music and still pictures of the city which is not interruptable by the player. Nice wanking there...

Well, San Andreas is waiting for me. And its shiny manual & map already gave me the impression it will rock even more (seriously, what a great manual book!) :) 

There is a fun GTA Vice City multiplayer mod. Easy to install and great fun to play even with only 2 people (played with a friend last weekend). It's basically exploration, hunting down the other player, pursuit, racing, whatever you want it to be.

http://www.vicecitymultiplayer.com 

I'd sure like to give it try. Maybe even with a few more players (#tf?). 

This indy game has been in the works for quite a while, it's finally been released, and there's a demo, might be worth checking out. It's a 2D underwater exploration/action game, looks fairly pretty, and the basic gameplay seems nice and smooth.

http://www.bit-blot.com/aquaria/demo.html 

 

Ah yeah... seems their whole site went down cause of too much traffic I guess, they had quite a bit of publicity going. =\ 

Shivering Isles is to me final, definitive proof that Bethesda's designers and scriptwriters are largely unimaginitive and witless nerds, who just happen to be fortunate enough to be working on a vastly ambitious and successful game series. It really doesn't add up.

To set the expansion in the Realm of Madness was a brilliant move; if anything, Oblivion's dodgy-as-fuck NPC AI could be largely excused under the pretense that, now officially at least, everyone is meant to be badger-boilingly batshit.

Whilst it's true that everyone in the main Oblivion game still comes across - completely unintentionally - as barmier than a bag of carrots, unfortunately transitioning into the Realm of Madness doesn't amount to much more than the NPCs adopting a slightly eccentric theme to their conversation topics. Let's see, you've got that Orc who's a bit camp and calls you "Sweetie", then there's that one who talks in made-up words (but not that far-out so you can still kind of follow the conversation), Oh yeah then there's that lizard guy who steals forks...

To make the quests in the expansion so bloody mundane (the majority are basically just your standard dungeon-crawling fetch quests), and the NPCs such banal, one-dimensional, and childish caricatures of what are supposed to be "mad people", is a huge missed opportunity. The voice acting is just as painful as it ever was in Oblivion, but coupled with the turgid, humourless "crazy talk" of the expansion, meant that it was a race every time to skim read through the text dialogue and exit the fuck out of the conversation menu before I popped a blood vessel from cringeing too hard.

When all's said and done though, like Oblivion, I'm still playing the bollocks out of it and I can't see that changing anytime soon. 

...right after I finished the main questline. I kinda hated it, which is saying something, because I've been a Bethsoft fanboy since Elder Scrolls 1.

It kind of felt like the crew from Monty Python just came in and jerked off all over the game. And not in a particularly hot or even caring way. They were all drunk, and just didn't give a shit.

Oblivion certainly has it's flaws, but this expansion was being oh-so-witty in a "hey, wow, look at this! We're really wacky!" way that was seriously annoying to me.

If you want something good, check out the Lost Spires mod. It adds an archeologist's guild, and an extended questline and really does kick ass (at least so far...I think I'm about halfway through it).

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3295