What did you buy a pack thinking you could gift the games you already had to other people? Apparently only Valve games do that, cause other publishers refuse.

I <3 Steam, so much good cheap games on it these days. 

Yeah, Valve can't control what limitations other publishers put on their games. They can only do what they're allowed to do. 

They do. Either way it's not a big deal, just irritating. 

In any case I'm buying licenses. What happened to the additional ones?

If I'd bought the games in physical form then I'd expect to have the additional copies in hand.

'Sorry sir but I can see from the sales history that you've already bought this game, so I can't give you this extra copy - company policy'.

Reading the terms and conditions its down to Steam - they can, but don't want to apart from for Valve games.

Maybe I'm being naive. 

I quite agree that there should at least be a clearer warning when buying duplicates, that you aren't getting any extra copies.

It's unfortunate they don't do it for all games, but to be honest, I'm not really surprised. Games are cheap enough on Steam already in my opinion, you can pretty much always wait a few months and get games at 50% off and stuff (except for a few specific publishers *cough*activision*cough*). 

I paid $50 for 19 games. I can't really complain too much. 

Companies are behaving like dicks. It needs to stop.

It wouldn't hurt if they were reigned in just a bit. Not fully socialized, but reigned in a bit. Meaning, slightly more rights for the consumer, and a couple slaps on the wrist of companies.

It's coming though. Slowly, but it is coming.

Let's start by giving every consumer the right to make up to 5 copies of something he bought, for personal, noncommercial use. Customers must also naturally have the right to resell their DVDs or whatever. This should naturally also go for electronic media, ie games on Steam. This must be enforced politically.

Finally, copy protection has to go; it is ridiculous that I can't legally watch a DVD on Linux, even after I paid for it. It is unjustified if something I bought is still somehow controlled by someone else. That is against the idea of the free market.

Naturally, it must be legally ensured that I am the sole owner of a DVD I bought. Not the copyright, but the right to do with this DVD what I want, ie sell it, make a normal amount of copies for personal uses, install those on my own computers etc.

We need to go back to a reasonable, relaxed, normal look at these things. And if someone thinks I'm a socialist or whatever, I beg your pardon, it is the companies who are acting like commies by taking away my freedom.

Monopolies are evil, mmkay. Trying to establish control over something that you have just *sold* is crazy.

In effect, they'd like you to give them money, but not get any say in what you do with the product you just bought. 

so it's half a year later and i haven't played dragon age yet.

can anyone who has chime in now that the dust has settled? is it worth playing and how does it hold up to other rpgs like neverwinter nights? 

I really couldn't get into it. I played a few hours, but there was just too much boring bla-bla, I didn't care for the characters at all, and the combat was uninteresting.
Lots of people love it though, so who knows. I much prefererd Mass Effect 2 myself. 

ME2 completely failed to make me want to play it and when dragon age finally came out, i had lost interest in it. :P

still, i've been replaying nwn1 and now on nwn2. i'm just in a fantasy mood lately, for some reason. :)

i remember reading one review of dragon age that was positively gushing all over the place. i think some of the spittle got on my keyboard. the author went so far as to say it was a modern day baldur's gate. nearly all the reviews i've read have been like this, so either this game is insanely good beyond realistic expectancies or everyone's a fanboy/girl. :P 

It might be for you then, cause I never really liked Baldur's Gate either. :) 

well, thanks anyway. :) 

Just when I didn't have enough DRM. Now I remember why I didn't buy DOW2 when it came out. 

Loved both ME2 (beat it in a weekend basically) and Dragon Age, but yeah the combat in Dragon Age got stale and repetitive really quickly. ME2 had the bonus of being a shooter as well as rpg, but it took me about 2x as long to beat Dragon Age as it did to beat ME2. Enjoyed both of them quite a bit, but both were pretty different from each other. 

Except I have not completed Dragon Age yet, where-as ive beaten mass effect twice and am on my 3rd play through atm! ME2 just suits my tastes better than DA, but Dragon age certainly has its epic moments.

I'm really looking forwards to bioware's MMO :o 

(I played the xbox version but since people have already talked about it in here, posting here.)

So I just finished Dead Space. Game clock time: about 11.5 hours (I don't think this includes the times where I died.) It's a pretty cool game overall, with solid core mechanics, and while it's certainly full of horror and sci-fi game cliches as Lunaran complained previously, I think the good execution (and the fact that it's actually fun) makes up for that.

Pros:

* Suspense is good, the tensest rooms/hallways were the ones where nothing actually happens because there's always a sense that something could happen. They set up early on for example, that a certain type of ventilation panel is often a place where monsters bust through. And then they put these panels in practically every room, so you are always nervous around them. I don't think i was ever really "shocked" by an attack, but since the NPCs are dangerous I was certainly nervous about being attacked.

* Combat works well, it's survival horror so you don't have a lot of ammo, the enemies are generally pretty lethal, and the damage system gives you something tactical to do while you're shooting at enemies -- since limbs (and occasionally other body parts) are the vulnerable bits, you spend your time trying to take careful, effective shots rather than just unloading into the guy's chest. Kind of like going for a headshot in most games, but with more variety. And the limbs are always moving in weird ways. Enemies that lose limbs keep coming but with alternate animations.

* Flashlight on gun, so you can actually see what you're shooting (and can't see when you're reloading, for extra tension)

* No on-screen UI; all UI was integrated into the world (ammo count on gun, player health displayed on character's suit, etc.)

* Zero-g gameplay is cool, you can't fly, so instead you leap from walkable surface to walkable surface (your magnetic boots grab on when you land) The maze-like layouts they create for some of these areas is pretty cool. And nice and disorienting.

* "Stasis" and "telekinesis" powers were used well, they build some nice puzzles and environmental obstacles around them, plus they are integrated into combat well.

* Boss fights were well-built and challenging, but not frustrating (there were only like 2 or 3, but they worked.)

* Enemy design was good, they're all pretty different in terms of appearance and function. And some of them are pretty creepy.

* Great environment art execution, really does a good job of creating the standard scifi/horror setting with a high level of detail and polish (mostly.)

* Sound/music was pretty cinematic and effective.

Cons:

* Too many NPCs sending me on constant small errands. I'd like fewer objectives that take longer to complete. Later in the game it gets better, though.

* A couple of annoying sections where you have to shoot asteroids and other stuff using a giant space canon. Not really bad, but didn't feel like it fit into the game that well, and it wasn't easy. I think if you put something that different into a game, you should make it sort of easy since it doesn't use the standard game skillset.

* Store mechanic where you buy ammo/health at specific kiosks throughout the game -- while it works as a game mechanic, it doesn't really fit the fiction of "i'm the last one alive in a disaster area." But it did serve the goal of giving the player a chance to get what resources they need.

* The storyline didn't really connect with me; they had plenty of twists and revelations, but for some reason i didn't get into the main emotional hook of the game, which was supposed to be the main character trying to locate his girlfriend among the few survivors of the ship.

* Weapons -- there were only a few weapons that really felt good, most of the others felt kind of weak. Of course it's survival horror, but in fact the plasma cutter (the starting pistol) was one of the good weapons because you could tell how to be effective with it. It was the "bigger" weapons like the pulse rifle which just felt ineffective and useless. Probably due to player expectations about how devastating those weapons should be.

* Text logs and some other UI was pretty much unreadable on my SDTV. I guess developers just assume that all xbox owners have an HDTV? Humbug! 

just got this game, started to play on my shitty tiny 10 year old tv. just got into it and i'm liking it a lot so far, but yeah, i have to get REALLY close to the screen to read anything. 

Project Offset has been canceled.

http://kotaku.com/5577979/intels-project-offset-game-cancelled

Now we'll never get to play with its editor. 

was 40 cdn at the local futureshop so i decided to grab it. this is like the first new game i've played in ages. since like bioshock i think.

i was preparing myself to have to deal with activations or whatever the heck they do these days, but i didn't have to do any of them. aside from putting in the serial code at install and having the cd in the drive to play and when the cd thing starts to piss me off, it should be easy to fix that later.

i've only played a few hours so far-- just enough to get through the 'origins' aka prologue for the mage class (i picked a human).

i think by far the best thing about this game is the third person 'exploration mode' camera is actually good and useful. i can't imagine how people played nwn2 in 3rd person and i hated how mechanical the movement felt in kotor.

i guess it would be best to say the camera and movement feel a lot like WoW. which really means the camera moves around quickly and precisely and movement is almost as responsive as quake. you don't strafe around, of course; when you press back, you character turns and runs towards the camera which neatly avoids having to have a super complex animation system and works very well. (my mage isn't a slipgater, afterall).

i'm sure everyone is aware that bioware finally ditched the dungeons and dragons system in favour of a more action oriented magic system. movement takes a larger role now which makes it feel a lot cooler. so far, i have yet to see any of the subtle spells have any effect (i took one that supposedly imposes penalties to a target for attacking and such, but i still seem to get hit anyway). aside from that spell, i took the obvious frost spell that can freeze or slow down attackers and a life drain spell for direct damage and healing. the cooldowns a rather long though, and there's no spell to spam whilst waiting for better spells to become available. resorting to the auto-attack 'staff bolts' are weak but i think some of these problems will go away when i get some party members that need to be healed and more damage spells that can be fit into a rotation to make sure there's always one available.
as far as i can tell, levels come fairly often and new spells come at 2 per level. the game alludes to unlocking two specialist classes (i guess like prestige classes in nwn) at level 7 and 14, so assuming you can get a decent amount of levels over 14, that's a lot of spells. i'm concerned i might run out of quickslot buttons (my warlock on WoW made use of nearly every key on my keyboard for all it's spells and i had to manually click some of them too) but we'll see.

as for the story and rpg stuff, the origin segment gave me one choice and made it so i had to do other quests anyway, but it's a prologue so i can't really fault it too much. i can honestly say i was surprised at the ending of it though, i really wasn't expecting it, which is a pleasant change for most story based games where you see stuff coming from a mile away and plot hints are delivered with a sledge hammer.

anyway, i'll probably post more about this later when i've played some of the proper game. 

First game i've played in six months, and to be honest the realistic war shooters are starting to get repetitive, and I'm only up to Medal Of Honor 2 so far!

The problem is that it felt just like Vietcong, with improved graphics having been released 1.5 years later, but with fewer set pieces. Much of MODPA felt like extremely linear corridors of jungle. Move from one little village with a few huts thrown in, through some tight jungle paths to the next village. The graphics, of course, were better than its predecessar MOD:Allied Assault and the mission packs, but with the repetitive design and lack of memorable levels, it doesn't stand out as a great looking game to buy against other releases in 2004.

Having said that, the Tarawa Beach sections (which probably made up 1/4 of the game), were definitely the highlight in atmosphere. They were a big improvement on the intense but bland Omaha Beach sections of MODAA.

The sad thing is, however, that the average design is still MODPA's strong point, because the gameplay was full of flaws. At the forefront, for me, were the atrocious weapons. Of course you can only handle two at a time, and normally you don't get much of a selection. There are a few good weapons in the game, but you rarely get to use them because unless your enemies are carrying the same weapon, you'll soon run out of ammo. What I was left with for the majority of the game were slow reloading, slow firing and extrememly inaccurate broomsticks. The rifle, for instance; there's a one second pause between firing, and a three second pause while reloading. You can point the thing perfectly at an opponents head, and still somehow miss. You can stand almost point blank and fire one into his chest... watch him stumble, then get back up again like nothing happened. There's no such thing as a headshot in MODPA, because the weapons are just too unreliable to even attempt it.

Gameplay is also very unbalanced in terms of difficulty. In playing on medium (although i'm well above medium in skill) I normally don't have much trouble getting through a game. But at times some of the fights were ridiculous, and forced god mode. The turret machine gunners are far too difficult to kill without being mowed down by bullets within seconds of revealing yourself. And no matter how well hidden you were, they always seem to find you almost instantly. There's a few times where you've got 2/3 machine gunners at once. Problem is your guns are hopeless at long range and you can't even see the enemy manning the gun to even aim at him. He could be standing on either side of the gun.

Tarawa Beach, as well, was far too difficult with poor weaponry and not enough ammo. In one jungle scene, your given a sniper riple (for the only time in the entire game) with one bullet to take out four enemies hiding high up in trees. I'd already run out of bullets with my other gun, so what's a man to do? God mode, noclipping up to the tree top and bashing them with my gun was the only solution. Let's not forget the section where your forced to man a plane, supposedly whilst drunk since the handling of the plane is rubbish. They inverted the up/down of the mouse aiming for the plane section, so when you finally return to two legs, your aiming ability is corrupted as your moving the mouse down to look up! This entire plane section was painstakingly frustrating and boring, and should never have made the cut in a first person shooter.

So my overall thoughts; average design and average gameplay, thanks to some inconsistencies in difficult and useless weapons, makes MODPA a far inferior game to the original. I hope MOD: Airborne makes up for it in 2007, but from what I've heard already, I might have to wait till the fourth MOD in 2010 for a good game again. 

Medal of Honor 4 looks pretty good though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v6lKPY1gAM

Supposed to be released Oct 2010 

I only liked the jungle bits myself. Airborne is even suckier btw, way too ridiculous gameplay wise and uninspired design.

I preferrred COD2 to both these. 

http://supermariobroscrossover.com/ 

Bit like a cheapo Deus Ex. Doesn't look too bad in trailers. English translation is appalling tho. 

http://store.steampowered.com/news/4081/

Roll on Monday :)