With:

"Oblivion: Lost 2.2"
and
"Worldwide patch 1.0005"

It Works!!! No CTD yet, my gun shoots straight, people die when you shoot them.
Also the main improvement is the mutant presence. Makes the game feel more exciting and unpredictable, some of the mutants are fucking scary!

I just hope they hurry up and do the same thing for Clear Sky. It is pathetic that it takes community members a couple of years to finish a game which should have been finished in the first place.

Far Cry 2 - saw it for �25 in Morrisons supermarket. Probably decide I can afford it on Thursday.... 

Yeah, the animations are great, Ubisoft have some really talented animators (this is also vissible in the Prince of Persia games and Assassin's Creed).
I pick up used guns just to watch the unjamming animation. 

So far negke is pretty correct. I, however, really like the engine. I think the world is one of the most beautiful I've seen. I often find myself not paying attention and just looking at the world and end up getting shot or driving off road.

Other than that, the missions are just "go here, kill people" so far, but the firefights are usually really intense. My experience is different from negke's, where enemies have flanked me to smoke me out, and have tried to drag wounded soldiers back out of the firefight. Maybe there's a difference in AI when playing on different skill settings?

So far I've had a bunch of "whoa" moments where something unexpected happened.

Last night while trying to destroy a convoy AK47s I blew up the truck with a grenade, first by stopping the convoy which were all gathered together on the side of the road. After killing the soldiers, I threw a grenade under the truck. I thought I was far enough away but because all the trucks were so close together the explosion was huge and sent one of the trucks way into the air, crashing down on my head.

I was pissed. :( 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/271-S-T-A-L-K-E-R-Clear-Sky

I actually think this guy has played it too, y'know... 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/24-Call-of-Duty-4 

I saw it in a shop and everything. Wanna buy it. So far I've resisted the temptation. Im re-playing SoC ATM, so I'll wait. To many good games = no time for mapping. (Which is still trickling along BTW) 

from a lot of different places. Though to be honest most of the people complaining were die-hard fallout - fallout 2 fans.

Im firmly on the fence on this one, if they release a demo (which I think they are not) then I will give it a go. 

But it's getting 'universal acclaim' over on metacritic. Most of those scoring lower saying they wanted to play another game, the typical whiney bullshit

<rant>
It's your fucking job to play games, deal with it. If you don't want to play a tennis game tough shit, you're getting paid to do it, don't write a bad review because you want to play a footbal game.
</rant>

And it sounds alot better than the usual tripe.

But $50 in these hard times . . . 

i would agree that 99% of the negativity towards Fallout 3 seems to be coming from Fallout1/2 fanboy faggots, bitter that Bethesda have stamped their trademark approach on it. That said, I wish Bethesda would just cough up and hire some fuckers who can animate worth a damn. 

"I wish Bethesda would just cough up and hire some fuckers who can animate worth a damn"

Yeah, they really do not seem to have improved the animations at all from the standard they had in Oblivion, which to be fair was wooden at best.

I also heard (dont know if its true) that Fallout 3 has a "point of no return" similar to the Stalker games, so if you are buying FA3 for the sandbox game, be wary of that and do some research to avoid disappointment.

Now then, Dead Space pc controls are fucked up I hear, far cry 2 looks pretty but is dull in the gameplay department, is the only thing to look forward to this Christmas Left 4 Dead? 

I wish Bethesda would just cough up and hire some fuckers who can animate worth a damn

man, i was really hoping it wouldn't be another repeat of this. oblivion animations sucked. morrowind animations sucked. you think these guys would learn-- or are they somehow not aware that their animators are shit? 

...to the anims, but I played for a while last night and am thoroughly enjoying it so far (just exited the vault-slash-training area).

I'm biased though; I've never played a Bethsoft RPG I haven't enjoyed--I even got a kick out of the horribly broken auto-generated dungeons in Daggerfall. :)

They've reportedly fixed one of the biggest shit parts of Oblivion, which was the auto-leveling enemies. The VATS turn-based combat option is interesting...

I suspect I'll sink a silly number of hours into this. 

it's probably the best post-ap game for a while, so i'll probably end up playing it anyway. 

 

The main story line anyway. At some point I stopped caring for any side missions and just tried to get through as quickly as possible. I found the game pretty boring to be honest. It's fun for the first few hours, but then it's basically just more of the same, with no variation and highlights. Just drive around and kill someone or destroy something on the other side of the map, then return and do pretty much the same mission for the rival faction. At least there were some nice-looking spots (e.g. that village)
I couldn't care less for the story - it felt shallow and tacked-on. None of the player's actions seem to have any impact.
A pity, as the game has some potential which isn't properly made use of. Or maybe I expected too much.

I found Uzi/silenced MP5+sniper riffle+heavy machinegun to be a good weapon combo, btw.
Also, the only game I played with subtitles on. :P 

The intro is delicious!
http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?story=55686 

that looks fantastic 

Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. I just got done with the 2nd barge mission, kind of struggling to continue on. It was really cool at first, but somehow turned into Assassin's Creed: Africa more or less.

Also, hate how you can't stop certain things from happening, even though your reputation with those people is super high. 

L4D! 

It was pretty damn good. I was unimpressed with the storyline and some of the poorly conceived set pieces, but the meat of the game is a fine, atmospheric shooter set in some of the best tech-themed environments I've seen.

Combat is tense, careful, and somewhat idiosyncratic. Instead of sprinting around blasting stuff, you stand your ground and place planes on damage into the enemy as they charge you. It works well, and the rather gory results are very satisfying.

There are mouse control issues, silly bits and endless shameless wallowing in cliche, but I enjoyed the heck out of this game. 

Fucking good game, very good visuals, nice concept, nice details, mega map are awesome !!.. Only complain, finger combos needed for playre control... took me some time to understand how it worked..;
I have now to finish it, and buy another PC that will support high resolution mode... 

Assassin's Creed starts out good. But the game gets fucking repetitive as hell.

ALL of the missions are identical to the first one. So you basically play the same damn thing 9 times (or however many times it takes you to beat the game.)

I think I'm on mission 5, and I just got bored of doing the same thing time and time again. The gameplay wasn't good enough to support that. 

Maybe you're right as I just progressed till Damascus, and just enter the city... but in anyway, it was quite good... Well, if it is as repetitive as you said, I understand your point of view, however, the fact you can explore many areas of the map, is IMHO very good... and if you take your time exploring, I think you can find something out cool... though... 

It'd be better if they had more of those free-running missions. If you haven't had one yet, those are pretty good. You have to run around following a stream of flags to collect. Those are pretty good missions simply because they capitalize on the strengths of the game - mainly the free running and exploring parts of the game instead of the combat, stalking, etc. If they had more of those it might have kept my interest longer.