I spent nights of my life playing Zuma. Yes. Reaaaly addictive if you ask me. A friend of mine had to trash it from her computer cause it was swallowing all her afterwork time!
I really think you don't become a Zuma fan. If it's in your genes, that's it, you're hooked and there's hardly a cure for it! This game just drove me mad! I too had to remove Zuma from my comp and never installed it again!

Hooga hooga booga! ;) 

If your chromosomes are XX 

Chaser is an older, forgotten title dug up from the grave. Released in 2003, the game was developed by Cauldron HQ based in Slovakia, using their own CloakNT engine.

The engine was definitely an improvement over competitors such as the Quake 3 / id Tech3 engine. But this is 2003, and id Tech4 is only one year away. Chaser's main competition would have to come from Unreal II, and I'm afraid the two are hardly comparable.

Chaser had a variety of environments, plenty of which looked good such as; the sewers of Little Tokyo, a cold and snowy Soviet Union, the Mars Spaceport and underground Prison. In fact there were a few levels that really reminded me of Quake2, but being reminded of a game five years old isn't saying much for Chaser. The problem is, while there were good looking levels, there was nothing truly spectacular. And on top of that there were plenty of levels that looked well below average. There are too many rooms and corridors that look the same as the last, which makes the game rather disorientating. There were times when I was completely lost, despite the game being very linear.

On to the gameplay; it started off action-packed as you get a weak gun and face a plethora of tough enemies. The guns took some getting used to, as they seemed to lack firepower and substance. It felt like I wasn't holding a real gun, but a little toy that spews millions of rounds a second. And when the enemies get hit nothing really happened. After a while I did get used to the weapons and there are a LOT of weapons to choose from. Ammunition was never a problem, nor was health. Gameplay was in fact very fun, but only if you don't mind reloading aplenty. Your enemies can take you down fast - their weapons are quite powerful, so you need to make sure you kill them quick. The enemies were very repetitive all the way through the game - it might as well have been the same opponent with slightly different guns. But even until I finished the game I still enjoyed the gameplay, despite there being absolutely no big finale - the game just ended. Speaking of which, the disappointing and confusing ending did nothing for the game whatsover.

One last criticism of the game is that there are some parts that are very frustrating. The submarine levels were not only ugly, but disorientating and possibly the worst levels I've ever played in a first person shooter. Fortunately they don't last long, and most of the game is enjoyable. The graphics are a bit outdated and level design can be average at times, but it's still worth playing for the hardcore FPS fan, especially seeing as it's quite a long game. 

Why aren't any of you playing World of Goo yet? This game is awesome. I stayed up far too late last night playing it without realizing - it's one of those games.

The puzzle design and the types of goo are so far extremely awesome, and the game has a very tongue in cheek sense of humor about itself. Intensely cute and squeezable on the surface, but there's an underlying note of sad mystery that really pulls you along, wondering where the bizarre Burtonesque story of these gooballs is going.

I want to play it right now, but I have to wait. 

Yeah I bought it off steam yesterday, quite fun, should have brought it to work, would help to get through these long boring days... -___- 

Seems I bought it at the right time, it's released has just been pushed back till february/march 2009 in Europe, so steam has to stop selling it, fortunatly, I already bought it and they can't take it away! =)

Fun little game anyways, smart and funny, I'm dissapointed I can't recommend it to more friends now that they have to wait 4+ months to try it... 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSyCf3bVuNc

Doesn't show much, though. Apparently one plays a Ninja :P 

http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=45725 

A cynical and premature review by Lunaran:

This game does pretty much exactly what's advertised: it's Alien, it's Event Horizon, it's Doom3, it's System Shock 2, with glowing idiot-lights on everything, and for a game that aims to be scary, absolutely nothing is unexpected. You play Isaac "Asimov Arthur C" Clarke, the guy lucky enough to be stuck in the work suit that enables him to push buttons and open doors for everyone else while they stand around impatiently reminding him that he hasn't done it yet.

The story is *exactly* what any of us would predict, and I will describe it here without fear of spoiling anything because it's nothing you haven't heard before: giant ship sends out distress signal and goes quiet, tiny ill-equipped repair shuttle arrives to help out but a totally unexpected disaster strikes and the shuttle crash lands on the ship, stranding everyone. The NPCs all lead the player to a bloodstained room that's divided in half by an impenetrable but very large and clean window, which the player conveniently finds himself locked on the other side of when the beasties come out of the air vents and eat everyone except the important characters that will forever remain separated from the player, where it's easiest to give him explicit instructions on where to go and what to do.

Monsters are defeated not by shooting them in their fat torsoish parts, which does nothing, but instead by dismembering them by shooting them in the shoulders and thighs, which is where all their vital organs apparently are. This would be a lot more fun on the PC imo, where, faced with dozens of monsters, you could just click on the aforementioned parts with your mouse instead of struggling to do it to one or two monsters at a time with two twitchy little sticks. Fortunately, the monsters so far are all nice enough to walk in a bowlegged spread-eagle kind of way to make it nice and easy for you, and if you still fuck it up and they get too close (which I admit I let happen a couple times) you can also just punch their limbs off. Your character is seriously the most badass martial artist in any game yet - you can completely disassemble the corpses of monsters and humans alike by stamping on them (with the ridiculously satisfying curbstomp button).

Similarities to Doom3 are almost hilariously common: the guis with lots of diagonal shapes, the semi-useless audio logs of scared whiny people who express frantic concern before being audibly eaten alive, a tram, the shadow that moves at the end of the hall, the bodies that stand up when you get close enough, monsters that only crawl on the ceiling in their canned intro cinematics and then never do it again, and of course the environments. If you still pop a stiffy from space-tech themes, this game should keep you happy for a while, but don't expect anything terribly new conceptually.

You do, however, have a flashlight on your gun (don't celebrate yet) and the only way to see in the dark is to raise your gun and thus go into extra slow walk mode (see I told you).

That said I still kind of want to keep playing because, as brimming with cliche as this game is, I'm still a sucker for this stuff. 

there's monster closets and monsters sometimes appear behind you. No idea how I forgot to put those on the list. 

Now I can continue to feel smug for boycotting EA games. 

having only watched Lunaran play the game, I will mention the horribly cliched setting is at least pretty, with some nice colored lighting choices. Plus, you can curbstomp crates, which I believe made Lun far more giddy then it should've. 

We had a demo of it at work today. I was not impressed. You could easily predict when the body would rise up in front of you, when you would open a door and a corpse would fall from the ceiling, etc etc.

The combat looks ridiculous. The puzzles look ridiculous. The monsters looks ridiculous (I've only seen two so far though.) The game just looks ridiculous. I could go on about weapons, level design, characters, etc. The whole thing just feels like a glorified haunted house, and it feels very game-y. I didn't feel any immersion whatsoever.

Red space barrels what explode when you shoot them and are placed in convenient areas to dispose of multiple enemies? Check.

I was kind of looking forward to it, but I will probably not be picking this thing up. 

so if you just press it over and over you can walk down a hallway pretending to be a big dinosaur 

I have clearly misjudged this game. 

Do the Dinosaur Walk for 100feet. 

ROFBBQMAO. 

:D 

But I'll need friends to play it. 

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

is it full of copy protection spyware rootkit trojans? 

Get it from steam. 

started to get annoying, then it got worse. I kind of just want to be fucking done with it already.

megaman, your continued paranoiac terror of absolutely everything on the internet continues to amuse me. when are you going to completely snap and go off the grid? 

Where you at Lun? I'm finishng up island 3 and still find it amusing, almost wish the puzzles were a bit harder though.