actually it felt a bit easier than regualer, but then i also got shit pieces and bored:/ 

It's just tetris . . . I got bored as well by level 2. 

Played night vision mode, it's pretty cool, and less headachening.
...Although my vision is blurred as fuck right now. 

A very nice version of Tetris. 

Another game down for the holidays, this one relatively a mystery to me. My little expectations were pointing towards another bland Star Wars game with the same old setting, mixed in with more of this 'tactical strategy' I explored in Rainbow Six.

The game ended up, in fact, being quite a good looking shooter with enjoyable gameplay; but not without its flaws.

The highest points for SWRC go to the level design. You battle through three episodes - Geonosis, Assault Ship and Kashyyyk. I won't pretend to be familiar with these places, or the entire Star Wars story for that matter, as I'm definitely not a Star Wars fan (and yes I've seen all six).

Geonosis is some desert world, while the Assault Ship episode all takes place within a ship that you must regain control of, and is ultimately the dullest of the episodes. Kashyyyk is a world inhabited by Wookies, as you attempt to rescue a Wookie leader. The highlights were the rooms built out of huge wooden trees. It wasn't as good as Serious Sam II's attempt on the giant tree village, but everything still looked good as there was a decent mix of outdoor terrain and indoors.

Design was packed with detail and the Unreal Engine 2 was put to good use. The only niggle with design is that some of the levels and rooms became a little repetitive. Overall it reminded me of Halo. Similar design settings; only looking much, much better.

The gameplay was a mixed bag. Overall it was fun with your three team members improving the experience. They weren't stupid, but certainly lacked the skill of a multiplayer bot. They worked best when placed behind a structure and instructed to use grenades or the sniper rifle.

The tactics with your soldiers were all fairly easy. Tell them to charge in, hold back, open a door, sit behind something and snipe. When they die you or another soldier can revive them, and when your own player dies you can also be revived. I found this to be much more enjoyable than having to reload. Your ultimate death comes when you're all killed and there's no one left to revive any of the team. A lot of the enemies in SWRC can take some firepower, so you definitely need all of your team members.

Unfortunately the gameplay can be frustrating at times. There's one particular enemy that flies overhead which is far too hard and can take your entire team out in 30 seconds, while some of the other enemies such as the Super Droid or Spider Boss become a real bore as your all blasting away for an eternity. The Droids, which are weak and hopeless, end up being the most enjoyable enemy. But overall most of them aren't that fun to fight and there's not a huge variety in enemies as it is. What is there, has fairly average AI.

A few times the gameplay suddenly got extremely difficult with just too much thrown at you at once alongside endless replicating machines which you need to shut down. This is the other major problem with gameplay. Throughout the game your tasked with turning off these endlessly enemy-spawning replicators. It takes 20 seconds to shut one down, and after doing it 50 times it just gets mind-numbing. I can understand their inclusion to spice up gameplay a little, but in the end they became tedious and annoying.

The final problem which spoiled gameplay, was the abysmal collection of weapons. You get the Quake2-cloned blaster, a machine gun which annoyingly shoots sideways and takes quite a few levels before you get used to it. The sniper rifle aka Quake 2 railgun which never has enough ammo. Your fourth weapon is a grenade launcher I think; but I'm unsure since I only used it a couple of times due to it only carrying four grenades at once and not wanting to waste them. The fifth weapon varies depending on what episode your in. The shotgun in episode 2 is decent, but all your alternatives in the final episode are junk. Even worse, the final level didn't seem to have ammo for any of the weapons I had.

If a mod was created that removed most of the replicators and gave us much improved weapons and perhaps tweaked some of the monsters, then STRC would become a great game. As it is, it's just a good game; thumbs up but little re-playability. But since I was expecting much worse, I'm fairly satisfied. 

is annoying. 

but then, i like Mega Man 2. 

pretty much any megaman game on NES or SNES. 

MegaMan 10 wooo!!!

Just recently beat Mega Man 9 (within the last month or so?) and I'm so ready for MM10! 

Megaman ZX on the DS, apart from the fact it turned my hands into crippled little claws. 

lol Yeah the ZX games were fucking tough. Apparently Capcom is releasing a MMZero collection in Japan soon. Want. 

bland art and the performance is slow, but the puzzles are kind of clever:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Komix/grayscale 

The 20 levels are good ;) Nice find ! 

anyone been watching Brink? the setting looks pretty cool and the 'smart' movement thing looks quite interesting. 

 

I am highly anticipating Brink - I hope the multiplayer will be as fun as I think it will be. I'm not sure about the Smart system, not because it doesn't look good, but because I'm not sure how necessary it is. I think it's mainly for console players, and well, I will not be playing it on console. 

I think the smart system is there to allow you to navigate the environment with ease and coolness, not necessarily specifically for console players. I mean, wtf, console games have had jump and duck buttons forever.

That said, it will take a very careful implementation to make it work. I don't want to go vaulting over something when I meant to get into cover and other situations like that. 

have been in games for years, what about the cover system in GoW anyone! I remember Crysis being littered with AI smart objects (how I hated placing the damn things everywhere and then testing them), to jump over walls, special cover / best facing direction, retreat/backup positions and even idle stuff like pissing or smoking! Personally I dont see this as anything new, just very good marketing hype. 

trigger_monsterjump anyone? 

Internally it's the same stuff we've all been doing for years.

It's like the 'AI Director' from L4D - entity randomisation I first worked with in Lazarus Q2, so a good few years ago now.

Granted they've improved it a bit with route randomisation as well, though It'dve been nice if there were more than 2-3 distinct routes in the game.

Never heard of Brink - I go to google. 

yeah brink looks pretty sweet! almost too intense. i hope there's a good linear single player campaign though, not just a bunch of bots thrown into an arena. 

It looks pretty nice - seems that L4D has opened up the coop FPS side.

Not a WOW player so that whole stage passed me by really. 

If Brink works out the way I kind of hope it will, it might replace TF2 as my go-to FPS. But then it does have coop, but it can't really compete with zombies imo, so L4D2 will still be my go-to coop game. 

Okay so I wasn't really expecting much besides a Diablo clone, and I was right. But it's a lot more fun than I anticipated. They added a lot of fun features, like being able to load up your pet with gear and then sending them back to town to sell it while you continue to battle it out in the dungeon. That was pretty cool.

A lot of stuff seems to have been streamlined, and there is simply tons of loot. Very fast, light on story, lots of different angles to the game to keep it fresh. But yeah, basically I would think of this as Diablo 2.5. 

Bioshock 2 Four Pack anyone?