Do I recall you were complaining about Metro 2033? I finished it now and it was a bit short really, but not that short. 

I don't think it was me, but I was probably in #tf when someone else was complaining about it. Shambler maybe? 

 

OK, after spending 5+ hours playing the multiplayer trial, I actually have take back most of the negative things I've said.

It's problems are that it's way too spammy (though seemingly less so in the Hardcore gametypes) and I still dont like the weapons too much and having the publisher have the capability to effectively pull the plug on the multiplayer portion of the game is retarded. Those thing aside, the game is extremely polished and well done. It also runs very very well and the game types are fun.

Is it worth a 60 euro normal price purchase for me? Nope. Is it worth the 51 euro weekend sale price? Undecided, leaning towards "probably still not". However, I looked around and managed to find a local finnish online gamestore selling the PC version for 38 euro. THAT was a buy. 

Good game. Totally had me hooked, spent like ~18-20 hours on it this weekend and beat it in under 30 hours total. Probably not going to do a 2nd play through, Friction agrees it's a good time.

You can't seduce every member of your crew though and have a huge inter-species orgy. So it doesn't get a perfect score from me. :( 

But it ran so extremely poorly (bad port apparently) that it was pretty much unplayable for me. It also seemed to be a game in the same vein as SW:KOTOR, which I didn't enjoy, so I quit and uninstalled ME quickly. 

Pathologic: Semi-RPG that takes place in a worn-down town that is plagued by a mysterious virus to which you have to find a cure. I thought the game would offer a nice bleak atmosphere and a certain degree of strangeness. Unfortunately, it didn't grab me at all. The graphics are dated, but the actual problem is the lack of variety - most houses look alike and the inside of every single shop uses the same mesh (and shopkeeper npc). What really put me off, though, were the dialogues. The first mission has you investigate a series of murders and naturally involves talking to witnesses and related npcs. However, the dialogue options as well as the npcs' replies are so weird and sometimes seem only vaguely related. It almost seems as if you're listening (reading actually, for it's not fully vocalized) to a conversation where every other sentence is missing or something.
In consequence, the game didn't generate any desire to continue playing after some two hours.

The Void: This is a sort-of adventure game (actually, it doesn't really fit clearly into a single category) with an interesting premise. You die and end up in the Void, some sort of limbo where everything depends on colors. You interact with the world through it, by drawing gylphs on the screen (think Black & White), and use it as health by filling your hearts with it. There are different colors and each one has a special property, e.g. azure makes you faster, crimson stronger, gold makes donating color to objects or npcs cost less, and so on. It has to be collected from the levels, can be grown on trees and harvested in mines.
Then there are the Sisters which you have to resurrect by donating certain colors so they help you, and their evil counterparts, the Keepers or Guardians, cenobite-like creatures roaming the Void. First you have to fulfill a couple of tasks to be accepted by the Keepers and eventually have to choose a side, join the Sisters and fight the Keepers or vice versa.
The game is kind of strange, and pretty hard. It seems to require you to restart a couple of times until you've figured out how it works. For example, at one point I needed to donate color to a Sister, but since I was out of gold, it was impossible to give her enough of the color she needed, but I couldn't get more gold, either, because all my trees were empty. Didn't want to restart and replay a good two hours, so I cheated.
In the end, even though the game is oddly compelling in a way, I lost interest. It wasn't always clear enough what I had to do (and how). I would have loved to fight one of the Keepers, as they look pretty cool.

It seems I'm turning into Spd when it comes to games... :) 

How do you girls have so many time to play games?

Go study and get job lazy bitches :) 

You didn't say anything about getting a girl friend :D That's who we have so much time to play. 

that a true thing... my "boss" ops wife... is always comand me :( 

bitch. 

i know aye, ya bunch of slackers. with work & gf, i don't even have time to play a single q1 map, let alone an entire game. i'm getting behind again :( 

 

The opening of the "On their own accord" mission is so epic it quite easily ranks as one of my top moments in gaming. Watch in fullscreen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DRE9blQAvA&hd=1 

I beat the single player of Bad Company 2 yesterday (on easy mode mind you.)

The good: Absolutely the most gorgeous environments I've ever seen. Simply breath taking, ginormous maps filled with foliage and awesome terrain, this game engine should be used for the next Elder Scrolls game. Seriously, the best I've seen in a game.

The bad: Lots of stuff - dust is so prevalent in the game it frequently blocks off the rest of the environment because it's so thick. You end up not being able to see to the enemies who are shooting at you even though they can apparently see you through the dust crystal clear. And those enemies are really accurate, which is annoying. Also, the game is really over the top. And well I could go on, but it's not really bad, it's just that the game was hyped up to be amazing, and it's on. Multiplayer also not my cup of tea, but I admit I haven't spent too much time on it. If you like the Quake Wars style of multiplayer, there you go. 

Seems like Quake 4. 

Yeah that part is great, the guy in that video kinda rushed through it all though, when I was playing I kinda took my time coming out of the bunker at the beginning and music just started to swell as I saw the broken monument, it was perfect timing =)

Theres another frankly awesome opening scene later on, but I won't ruin it =) 

Having just recently purchased and played through Modern Warfare 2, I decided to go back and buy MW1 as well, it's downloading on Steam right now. Since MW1 has an SDK out, are there any good custom singleplayer maps worth checking out once I've finished the SP campaign? 

None that I'm aware of. I heard there are a lot of mp stuff though. 

I haven't heard of any single player maps at all, which is strange if the editor is out :o 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vml_Czbc0dg

Jago will love it. 

I won't love it because I won't be getting Alan Wake. I am not going to buy a 360 when I already have a PS3. 

Having now played through the SP campaigns of both (first MW2, then MW1) as well as having played multiplayer of both as well, I thought I'd comment and compare the games. First of all, both games are definately worth playing and you should own at least one of them, which one however, depends on your personal taste for things.

System requirements for both are surprisingly light: a 3-4 year old rig should have no problems running MW1 completely maxed out and a 1-2 year old rig can absolutely run a maxed out MW2.

Singleplayer-wise, both games overall, offer an EXTREMELY polished gaming experience. The developer must've spent really retarded amount of manhours making things look and feel just right, my hat goes off to these guys. MW1 definately has a more believable story and MW2's story has a few large holes in it and is generally rather crazy, as someone else put it pretty well: "24 post-season4 crazy".

Both games follow a similar formula of: some heavy action missions, some stealth/sniping missions and sometimes you get to use some really heavy fucking guns. While generally, I am a big hater of these things in other games and usually consider them an unneeded gimmick, the occasional gun/vehicle parts in the MW games are fun, done right and contribute to the overall immersion in the game world.

Some of the oldtimers probably know that I am a big sucker for games that offer a "cinematic experience" with strong atmosphere and build-up of emotions during gameplay. In this regard, MW2 wins over MW1. I had to look up the names of individual people who had worked on several set pieces of MW2, because to put it all together so well is nothing short of genius. Yes, some of these moments were actually kind of cheap if you go deep into analyzing them, but they WORKED, worked well and that's what matters.

Multiplayer-wise, it's again a question of preference. The problems of MW2 related to the lack of dedicated servers are well documented. Most of the time it works very well, but if several games in a row the host leaves the game and you have to wait 15-20 seconds until the game moves to another host (and sometimes fail) it can get rather frustrating. Additionally, giving the publisher an actual killswitch capability to completely turn off the multiplayer portion of the game IS retarded. You can find Quake servers and players today, over 14 years since the game's release and will probably continue to be able to do so in another 6. Do you really think Activision will be keeping up the Matchmaking service for MW2 for 20 years? Who are you kidding, it probably will be gone in 10. The original XBOX Live was shut down just a few days ago, it was 9 years old. You will no longer be able to play any XBOX1 games online ever gain. MW1 has dedicated servers so it's not going to dissapear anytime soon (or ever).

On another hand, MW1 uses Punkbuster for it's cheater protection, which while probably works alright for most people, causes a lot of hassle for others. Over the years it has evolved to be really picky regarding what software running in the background it considers a cheat, resulting in you sometimes getting kicked from servers for no obvious reason. Again, this doesn't happen too often, but when it does, it can be rather annoying.

Comparing multiplayer gameplay, MW2 offers a more arcade style of gameplay compared to MW1. There is more running, more big bangs and more grenade/etc spam. MW2 also offers a more varied set of different gameplay modes. MW1 on another hand, since it has an SDK available (yes, it's COD4Radiant actually) offers custom maps, obviously giving the player more choice in this regard.

If you've read this far, you definately have way too much free time on your hands, I definately did, since I actually wrote this :) 

play Metro 2033 then.... 

People keep saying this particular level, the Opera House, was pretty scary, or that the whole game has a pretty threatening atmosphere. I actually agree. You're conceptually in Venice here, but it's not really Venice. The sky is black. The windows are black. Actually, the windows seem to be painted on, which means this isn't Venice at all. It is some dark, fake, ultraviolent scary place that is largely inexplicable. The ambient sounds are frightening. The opera house is apparently abandoned, and doesn't really resemble any opera house that you've ever seen, except in nightmares. Also, in this old engine, there is a sort of fog-of-war effect where everything beyond your visual range just fades to black. This was especially nasty in some of the underwater levels, where you have to swim long distances (the levels are rather big for such an old game), and the water around you faded to black - you couldn't see the surface.

There is also often this feeling that you're all alone - there are no NPCs, which you would expect in a city like Venice, there are only pretty brutal enemies. They are thugs, but they seem totally mindless. They attack you without any sign of alertness, they are like mindless killers. Not many of them, though, so for a lot of the game, you *are* all alone in places that aren't what they seem. Pretty deadly traps, too, and nasty death animations.

Lots of diving involved, too, so there is always the fear of drowning in those dark, watery areas.

There is also inexplicable stuff like breakaway floors that just float in the middle of nowhere, a whole level where you travel through a sunken ship (and the ceiling is the floor), and a lot more of this sort of stuff. Just weird.

I found it quite stunning back then, and still do. Just hit upon this video walkthrough of the Opera House on 'tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BR7zQlrWlY&NR=1

I already posted the famous multi-trap gauntlet from the same game (Great Wall level) elsewhere. Here it is again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_dP53CPuk0

By the way, I never knew the great wall had T-Rexes. T-Rexes stomping towards you out of the darkness of some gigantic dark cave, wanting to kill you. Tromp, tromp, tromp! I thought there were only little spiders there!! I want my money back! These pants were expensive!

The darkness...

And this is "The Deck", one of the sunken ship levels... and again, it looks not really like a sunken ship. More like large parts of a ship in some incredible cave. The fog of war thing is pretty visible here. Hey, that guy has a flame thrower... burn, Lara, burn. Crumple, whimper, suffer, die. She dies in pretty horrible ways - no simple falling over yelling. There must be a dozen or more death animations. You actually hear bones breaking when she falls, you watch her suffocate while drowning, and a number of other unpleasant things. Not here, luckily.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2md6GHyrK_w&feature=related

The whole game is pretty great, it involves this rather moody, at times downright weird level design, the often seemingly fragile surroundings that strangely contrast with the gloomy feel, quite a lot of shooting for a TR game, vehicles (boat and snowmobile), ominous monks that turn on you with their kung-fu crap should you be stupid enough to hurt them, and a really rather large dragon.

The challenge mainly comes from the fear of falling, and fear of drowning. Plus the traps, and the enemies. The main thing about this game is the oppressive atmosphere, though. The lighting is primitive in a way that creates an almost eerie effect. Plus the ubiquitous darkness.

There is even a sort of void level, The Floating Islands. You have to jump across screaming green blocks floating in blackness to get from one floating temple to another, while some statues come to life and attack you. Yeah, right. Why are there floating cages in China? What were they smoking?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj8AEjjS9g8

The game ends (if you found the secret level, which is reached by beating the "end" level on a timer) by Lara shooting the player for watching her in the shower. "Don't you think you've seen enough?" *BLAM* A protagonist who shoots the player, breaking the magical bond of immersion because she wants to take a shower. Yeah. What's not to love?

One more thought about the level names. There is stuff like "40 Fathoms". Hmm, that sounds like a lot of water... and if you know diving in TR, with the constant fear of drowning, and the sheer darkness, and the pretty nasty sight of your in-game avatar suffocating and struggling against the inevitable because YOU messed up again, player! ... this alone is enough to make you feel uneasy. 40 fathoms of darkness... and sharks... and rusty wreckage full of dark tunnels. Shudder.

A game chock full of weirdness. And dying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMwk-TsY58