Doom 3? Surely, you are joking? 

i wasn't sure if that was a joke or not. if it's not, then we didn't play the same doom3 :P 

yeah there wasn't enough variation in gameplay, but the biggest issue for me was the running speed. made the game way too fkn slow. any d3 mods i now play with it increased a bit. much more fun. although i've played them all now anyway. shamblers castle is a must play for d3!

actually i'm not saving up hl2 for xmas... i'll probably play it in a couple years, haha. once i've had a run of a few bad games and need something good, it'll be time for hl2. how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat? 

Doom 3 was so frustrating for me.
So much untapped potential.
I hated those squid armed dudes, and there were like 2 cacodemons in the whole game.

also, the expansion pack was shit. 

And had no squid arms in the first.

The cacodemons were a joke though. Literally funny.

100% programmer game design; drunk on technology that nobody really gives a flying fuck about.

So much potential in that leaked beta . . . 

But the Half Life series had a more involved story aimed at a more mature audience

That's probably why there's scientist father figures and large breasted women with robot pets at the center of it. Serious drama, guys! 

If HL2 had more boobs I'd probably give in to Steam. After all my room moisture would go up several degrees so a little more steam would not hurt. 

Wait, exactly WHO in Halflife had big boobs? Because I certainly missed that character. 

I deleted a post because I thought it was the whisky talking.

I realise it's the whisky still talking now and I was just being a pussy:

Alyx' arse was nicer than her tits. 

You're talking about the traitor bitch in a white poloneck I felt like smacking with the crowbar even before I knew she was a traitor. 

That's probably why there's scientist father figures and large breasted women with robot pets at the center of it. Serious drama, guys!

Holy shit my dad is a scientist too, how unrealistic!

Also, good job on also picking on one of the least sexualised female characters in mainstream video games. That stupid Alyx and her big tits! So big they went all the way back round to being small.

I guess you never played Doom 3. This is the plot of Doom 3. Drink every time there's a cliche. Wait, actually, punch yourself in the balls.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28pjq_doom-3-intro_videogames 

My balls are now the size of melons and I have to bathe them in ice. 

i remember being seriously impressed when the camera moved away from the monitor and you could see that the gui was part of the game world.

it wasn't just the unified lighting that was cool about doom3. i know in-game guis are old hat nowadays, but i still think it's pretty awesome. 

I think the doom 3 engine still does the best in-game GUI's, at least I have not seen anything better in any other competing engines. 

to be fair, i seriously hate that delay where your gun has to come back up after you leave a gui. if there's a gui in your LoS when you're fighting something and your crosshair passes over it, you get locked out of firing for a second or so... 

Great great fun: http://armorgames.com/play/3614/crush-the-castle
I got weird looks because I laughed so much. 

Try this one if you have half an hour to spare:
http://jayisgames.com/cgdc6/?gameID=9 

I played through both of them just now and enjoyed every minute. Nice finds! The second one is especially cool--pixel abstraction as art...

I played through this the other night, and had a lot of fun (although my patience wore thin on the bonus levels):

http://www.kongregate.com/games/TheGameHomepage/red-remover 

Very cool idea: http://giantsparrow.com/games/swan/ 

I remember someone linking this. I didn't like it, because it became incredibly boring and hurt my eyes. 

Torchlight is only $5 / �3.74 today on Steam! Just bought it and 2 other games for less than 7 quid. I'm a happy boy, merry christmas valve! 

For 20 euro it was a really solid purchase.
For 10 euro it was a steal.
For 5 euro you have to be retarded to not buy it. 

This.

I play it sparingly and its surprisingly good if you enjoy the Diablo style gameplay. 

I just wasted 14 hours on it. I played Fate as well a few years ago, and this is a serious evolution.

Annoying how all the dungeons are one still though, apart from the Hatch quests. Would have been nice to have the metamap a bit more developed. 

Lockdown certainly wasn't next on my list of games to play, but I'm yet to play a tactical shooter, or any of the Tom Clancy titles. So, I was curious about what kind of games they actually are.

Lockdown is a tactical shooter; which I always assumed would require a lot of tactics rather than run-and-shoot gameplay. I don't know if this was just a bad example of a tactical shooter or not, but it just seemed like another realistic shooter to me. There were no tactics to speak of, apart from pressing the space bar every so often to get your team mates to catch up. The main difference in gameplay between other shooters, is that you get a limited amount of ammo on each mission, so you need to make your hits count. Anything below 20% accuracy and you'll end up running out and have to resort to the useless handgun (thankfully I never had to).

For me, this means constantly pearing around corners with my zoom scope and sniping enemies in the face. There's not much running into the room guns-first, because a couple hits and your dead. It's much more meticulous and strategic in the way you shoot enemies. Unfortunately, the enemy AI was useless. You can quite easily snipe out a room of enemies from the door frame without them even shooting at you. And when they do, they'll often then just run off.

Your team mates AI is decent - they don't get in your way and certainly don't rush in. They usually only ended up with a few kills each after each mission, compared to my 60-80 kills. So your still a one-man-army, with just your friends along as company you might as well say. Just the way I like it.

Hostage AI was a problem though. On one level they refused to move at all and I had to restart. They also had a tendency to stupidly run ahead of you right into enemy fire.

Another problem were the weapons. You get to pick from around fifteen weapons which one you want to go on the mission with. Yes, you only get one. I played with the same rapid fire rifle with scope for the entire game. With such a limit on ammo, I saw no point in using a machine gun, and shotguns would be far too short range. It would be nice to have had a couple guns to switch between. On the other hand, it did take some focus off looking for ammo and health during the levels.

The graphics of the game looked good. The textures and lighting were consistently great. The levels were well designed in most areas, with just some of the design looking a little bland. Nevertheless, this is supposed to be realistic, so real buildings aren't necessarily laced with intricate detail. Despite the realism achieved in the design, it still looks very good most of the time; helped along by the good textures and lighting.

Overall, Lockdown really isn't that different from your other realistic shooters. The only tactic is your approach in hitting your enemy in the head before he sees you. Therefore I enjoyed all several hours of Lockdown.