but just got myself Witcher enhanced edition, Crysis, Crysis Warhead and Stalker - Shadow of Cehrnobyl for $AU30.

Bring on christmas holidays. 

Good move. Crysis and Warhead are GREAT games! Regardless of what anyone says, they are a real blast, certainly on the firstruns. STALKER SOC is great too, really gritty and atmospheric.

The witcher - well I didnt play that one (yet), so I cant comment, but I have heard some good comments from other people about it :) 

and worth your time. 'nuff said ;) 

It's an enjoyable game by and large, but I thought it also dragged on quite a bit at times. And I found its semi-linearity unncessary, maybe even a bit of an an immersion killer. You can't revisit previous regions (not an open world), and there are silly console-like barriers in the levels to make them feel larger, like small fences or rocks you can't jump over and are forced to run all the way around them. At what were they thinking when making that totally retarded mouseclick combat system? 

I never had a problem with it myself, at least, it sure feels more involved than simply mashing the attack key until an enemy is down. If you rush the next attack, you'll only break the combo and risk getting yourself hurt. And I liked that aspect since it works great with multiple opponents circled around you. It's not perfect, but it works for me. 

i like the sword combat system in witcher.
it's similar to gothic 2 which, incidentally, i found far superior to gothic 3.

you've got to time your attacks and in the heat of battle, this is what makes it a challenge. i wish more games would do this instead of just favouring button mashing.
also, i like that there are the different styles of attack for different types of monsters. it's not a very deep system, but it does make it a little more interesting.

i never finished this game as i borrowed it off a friend but i've been thinking of picking up the enhanced edition for myself.

my only gripe is that the over the shoulder camera is sometimes a little strange... usually it doesn't bob much but sometimes (randomly?) the camera will start to bob alot which is distracting. i think there's a mod out there that gets rid of that though, which would be great. why would you put view bob on a !3RD! person camera? 0.o 

It's basically like a quick time event: click the mouse at the right moment. In this sense, it's indeed better than Gothic 3 which is just click the mouse as fast or as consistently as possible (or at least hit the enemy before he can). Gothic 2 is different insofar as it allows for some variation (left, right, up) as well as blocking.

The ideal combat mode would require the player to both attack and block the enemy on the right side (dynamically), e.g. strike left when the enemy is blocking to the right, and counter his attacks accordingly. 

Has anyone tried Two Worlds 2, yet? I thought the first one was too flawed in comparison to other RPGs to be enjoyable, but maybe they've fixed the most glaring shortcommings. 

yeah that's what I figured, 4 games for under $AU30 is a steal and I remembered readin positive comments about them too.

Might also finally fit in HL2 plus eps 1 and 2 in the holidays too :) 

Controls can be a bit clumsy, but apart from that I love this game. Good level design, very immersive, magic button which tells you which way to go is useful.

I dunno, the game is meat and potatos. The monsters are quite scary, the graphics are good, there are some good puzzles. The music is good. The guns feel good, and you can upgrade them. If you try hard to explore you find more useful stuff, things like that add to the experience.

For me the game is like Resident Evil but with less bull. 

One thing about STALKER - I would recommend installing the Oblivion Lost mod. You dont need to install it, but it does improve the game a lot, without altering the feel of it too much. There are some things which the dev team removed just before release (which are still in the game data files!) like monsters, and O.L. puts them back in, basically. And it makes the guns more accurate, and whenever there is a "blowout" O.L. makes the effects a l00t cooler ;) 

I just bougt the id super pack on steam, which comes with doom 3. Anyone know of any good mods besides the dark mod and the new hexen mod? 

jt make sure you get the shamblers castle:

http://www.doomwadstation.com/doom3tc/quakemod/ 

noted, will look into it. 

for the first time, and I'm loving it! Absolutely awesome game, almost as good as the second part. I recommend installing the mouselook patch though. 

Better actually, imo. 

SS1 

Almost forgot about that one. Downloading now. 

There are, surprisingly, quite a number of really high quality doom3 packs. Not necessarily mods, but just level packs and episodes.

Can't remember which ones (I played probably a good 50 releases for d3). Check here for some:
http://doom3.filefront.com/files/Doom_III/Maps/Single_Player/;4340?sort=downloads&order_in=desc&limit=100&descriptions_in=0&summary_in=0#files 

i don't think it's that surprising actually. the colossal amount of work required must weed out all but the most diehard mappers/modders.

it sure weeded me out. ^_^; 

Yeah it must have aye. I mean there's some shitters in the bunch, but I would have thought Doom3 mapping would be fkn hard. And yet there's probably a good 20 high quality releases.

Perhaps it's the opposite and the great engine and ability to build a box room then throw in all sorts of prefabs makes it quite easy to map for. One thing I did notice - 95% of custom map releases follow the exact same indoor lab bullshit of Doom3. No one much branched out to other themes.

Necros does that mean you scrapped your d3 map? You bastard I was looking forward to that! 

That's because the game's resources allow for nothing else. If you were to make something entirely different, you'd also have to be a good texture artist and a proficient modeller. And I take it the number of available custom texture sets is limited - not least because everything other than base style looks odd at best in that engine. 

necros is one hell of a scrapper... 

http://www.systemshock.org/index.php/topic,211.0.html 

is Stalker SOC meant to run like total shit or is there some performance tweak I cant find?

GTX465 that's had no issues with anything else so far, including CoD MW1 and 2, but maybe this is a real resource hog?