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 :) 

Apparently everyone and their mother are trying to get this at the moment, so the dl rate is pretty bad.
If the game is fun, let's get some coop games going. 

Yeah, 47k/sec for the win :P

Looks fun though, screenshots and vids remind me a lot of Shadowgrounds which is awesome! 

Fairly unoriginal story (biological weapon experiment gone wrong, you're the virus mutant overdude), but a fun game after all. Sort of a cross between Oni and Mirror's Edge, with DBZ- and Matrix-like physics bending. Awesome gore.
The game basically consists of jumping and runing through a sandbox Manhattan on a constant kill frenzy, leaving an insane bodycount behind (after each mission you get a statistic about civilian/military/infected losses and destructions costs). Lots of combos and upgrades which can be bought with the EP points gained from free-roam wreaking havoc, story missions of average quality, and timed events like speedrunning, gliding, combat scenarios, and collectibles. Fast gameplay with smooth movement/navigation.

Not the greatest and most sophisticated game in the world, but a fun blast nevertheless. Well worth the $15 (Steam summer sale). 

I don't care if it's a japanese anime looking arcade game, I want to play this on PC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiQKZTLq2jI 

Darkspore looks cool. Half diablo, half spore and with L4D's director. 

I was just noticing that. Does look interesting. 

Needs more than 2 players tho.

Speaking of which, Alien Swarm; 'sup? 

Quite nice for a free game. Too bad it only has a single campaign so far. So, go mappers!
Fairly easy with a 3+ team. The parasites in the fourth level are evil, though. Probably pretty challenging on hard skill and above. 

As an fyi, if people have not looked into it.

It uses a tile based mapping system whereby you create a seperate map for each tile and then you can either snap them all together yourself or use the games in-built map generator. Looks very easy to do, and you can use the pre-existing "official" tiles you simply generate your own new map if you are getting bored with the single campaign.

More info : http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Alien_Swarm 

You can also mix and match. You can stamp the prefabs together and when you're basically happy, open the merged map in Hammer and customize the hell out of it. 

i've actually been thinking of trying to make a map this way... built a couple of corridors, corners and outer walls for rooms that all snap together.
you could make something pretty big that way at the risk of it being boring, i guess... 

I actually tried that with Left for Dead 2 since Hammer supports instances. I made a bunch of standard sized rooms and hallways and tried to piece together an office building. It kinda worked but I got itchy to customize it very quickly after I started and it sort of fell apart. But I think the idea is sound... 

I made something like that for quake years ago - it requires a custom engine like dp so that statically* rotated bsp objects work. It was posted at qexpo
http://qexpo.quakedev.com/booth.php?id=32&page=113

The way it works is that a single bsp file contains a 'set' of tiles. Each tile is an individual bsp entity with entry points marked in the entity's fields. The progs then generates maps from these tiles each time you load the map. It obviously doesn't create the most exciting maps known to man, but I think the caverns map actually looks quite good.

Anyway, I'm sure I've posted about it before, but you know how it is when you did something first...

*ie SOLID_BSP entities which have an angle set, but no avelocity. 

automating it would be cool too, but i just meant like make a bunch of func_groups and CnP them yourself.

as willem said, i think the hardest part would be resisting the urge to start customizing at least until you're done. :P 

watched a few prototype gameplay videos on youtube. looks like you start in a street then randomly walk down more streets back and forth until all the innocent people are dead. absolutely no linearity, variance in gameplay or even a point. am i wrong?

people were raving on about this game, but seeing it in actual it looks crap. 

Almost feels like they created the environment and then just tacked on a few missions and game modes. But it's still fun - I enjoyed indulging in an excessive killing spree. 

Watched a few Quake gameplay videos on YouTube. Looks like you start in a hallway and then randomly run down other hallways and go through rooms shooting monsters and finding keys with no variance or point whatsoever. Am I wrong?

(sorry, had to be done) 

Sometimes you find secrets.