"Yet, somehow, Bioware and Bethesda seem to be able to do this consistently ;)"

Yeah. Sandbox and/or highly repetitive environments. Those factors make it possible. :) 

What I'm saying is that you can't have stuff like the levels in Gears of War 2 last for 40 hours of gameplay. There's just not enough man power to create unique stuff that will occupy the player for that long. 

I SAID STOP!! FFS I JUST SPENT $170 ON MY CAT'S TRIP TO THE VET I DON'T HAVE THE MONEY FOR DRAGON AGE! OR THE TIME! STOP SEDUCING ME!! 

yeah that new painkiller expansion sure got awful reviews. could it really be that bad?

i'm not keen on huge games either, i don't have time for 30 hours+. 10 hours is fine. once i get to the 10 hour mark i find myself looking at the level list just to see how many levels are left. it becomes a drag.

did someone say fallout3 is like 200 hours long? FUCK THAT! give me quake 20 times over. there's too many games out there to waste that amount of time on a single game, running through the same environments over and over again. 

Don't play long games that are a drag, play long games that are fun. 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1096-Dragon-Age-Origins 

to put off getting dragon age, i started playing quake4 again.

i like it a lot more now than when i played it the first time, for some reason.

the whole first segment (from the start up to when the mcc lands) is great. gameplay is fluid and continuous. radio chatter really conveys the sense that the war is more than just you. my favourite parts are when you're backtracking through an area but from a different path (you're on these catwalk things) and then some new guys are charging in through the original path through the area and they get ambushed by strogg, but the strogg don't see you.
it was really satisfying to blow them away and feel like you're helping someone else out even though they're just npcs. 

if anyone's interested, apparently, they released some of the music in the game: http://machinarium.net/blog/data/bonus_ep/machinarium_soundtrack_bonus_ep.zip 

Thanks for the link! 

Apparently you can get the .mp3s out of the game files anyway, all those .001 and .000 etc files are just .zips iirc. There's a post about it somewhere on the steam forums... 

http://www.mangledeye.com/ 

I shall "take one for the team". There's no pretending it's going to be anything other tha dreadful, is there?? 

There's no pretending it's going to be anything other tha dreadful, is there??

...I woefully overestimated that, then.

It is beyond dreadful. A proper low-quality Q3A mod, real Cranky Steve territory. Not even worth reading these last 3 posts about it let alone considering following links to the game. 

 

Seems a shame, since there's obviously alot of work gone into it.

http://www.darksalvation.com/screenshots.html 

We flamed those screenshots earlier (or maybe in #tf), still I gotta play it some time. 

Mostly bad VFX and neon complaints. 

Saying we flamed it isn't really going to help is it? ;p

(But yeh, we ripped those shots on here a while back. Can't see it playing any better...) 

http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=23795&start=2784 

The word shitty came up three times then. 

i meant non staged/promo pics, of course. to see all the badness. 

how far did you get shambler? i got to the first crystal, and then what? there's nowhere to go, am i missing something? haha lame so far. the intro was fkn shit, wtf was happening? and no save in the demo - not impressed. pretty cool textures and style though so i'm willing to give the full game a try if i can pirate a copy of it :D 

You press the button down below by the grate, this opens the door above. You then go into a lurid red box room with some lava and moving platforms. Lose some health to the lava because it's indistinguishable from the floor, then jump down onto a rock below with some health on it. Realise there's no way to get back up to the moving platforms, quit, and uninstall in disgust. 

Walkthrough. 

I think they pirated some textures too, someone said that. The voices are awful, lame Prey (etc) ripoff. Is it normal that I see no viewmodels? I use Wine...