I prefer L4D2 - more weapons, better effects, much better gore. But if you like the game and want more then get L4D1 too. They are both great. 

There's a pack of both games I think - you lose money buying L4D1 alone now.

Well reccomend it as well, you also get a lot of additional content in the form of free DLC and the game is maintained - very polished gameplay. 

If it's on sale for $5, grab it. The question whether to get both became more valid when they ported the first L4D campaign to L4D2, so the first game is kind of reduced to three individual campaigns.

Also be sure not to get the Low Violence versions if you're buying from Australia!!! 

at the moment. Grabbed 2, will consider grabbing 1 before sale ends.

negke, cant seem to avoid the low-violence versions for Aus (no R rating for games) but have googled a couple of hacks which supposedly work. 

You need to have someone gift it to you. Hope the hacks work. 

 

Not a very good game IMO. Very poor plot, game dynamics are "blow up a building and grab these random pieces of metal as 'salvage'".

I think they were aiming at 9-11 y/o boys with that game. 

The main game I haven't played, that's true. But just running around demolishing shit is a blast. 

Installed, played and completed today. Fun game, lovely art and level design and good parkour mechanics. I also loved sliding along the floor to pick up a gun and firing it an enemy during the later stages, really made gunfights more interesting.

Though three specicif spots really annoyed the hell out of me as they didn't seem to 'work' as intended. Example, during the last segment of the Jack-knife level. There were three pipes I had to jump between, but Faith would never jump for the last one as she should do causing a painful death. Did this everytime, and only got lucky when she decided to 'glitch' onto the bottom and managed to climb up. The other two problem areas were also similar unresponsive situations, one I succeeded by screwing up with a double 180 key tap. Ironic. 

Mass Effects 1 + 2 on sale on Steam for $10.00 each. If you haven't picked these up, pick them up, they are amazing. I beat Mass Effect 2 basically in a weekend, this game was so damn good. Remember it is fundamentally an RPG and secondarily a shooter, but man were these games good. 

That sucks, a lot. The violence and gore in L4D2 is very good, proper 18-rated zombie carnage. Hope the hacks work. 

thanks for that, will grab those when I get home. They must have gone up on sale today. 

anybody played? decent? 

for $9.99 each (a;though you cant still get 1 for that price).

But picked up Batman Arkhan Asylum today.for $7.50. 

Tried to play Resident Evil 4. Needs a tonne of mods to make it decent on PC, including mouse support. But there was no way of customising the mouse buttons (I use mouse buttons for forward and back), so I won't be playing this fuckin game.

Such simple things to fuck up on. 

halfway through The Witcher and great game really.

Only gripes so far:

Combat system seems a bit shit at first but you get used to it and its no less daft than others I've seen in the genre, in fact the varying combat styles and different skill moves work quite well in large group combats.

It does feel a little easy though, playing on medium but dont seem to die or feel threatened all that often.

Everything else: first rate. 

I use mouse buttons for forward and back

I thought I was the only person in the world who does this. Every time someone finds out (or, God forbid, tries to do something in-game while my config is running), they look at me like I just declared my love for eating dirt, or that I regularly speak with aliens or whatever craziness... 

Weirdo. Next you'll be saying you use an uninverted mouse... 

I can't think of anything else that works better than the mouse buttons for forward/back. I think Shambler does it that way too.

Just playing through Brothers In Arms Road to Hill 30. Fuck this game is ass. I'll still finish it I guess... 

I used to have a similar config myself. But at some point I got tired of always having to customize the controls when starting a new game, so I switched to the default one. Haven't regreted it a single moment ever since. 

inverted feels weird.

But mouse buttons for movement is crazy! 

There's no need for inverted movement controls. 

I was never really into Quakeworld or Netquake, and when I played Quake before HL1 I would have used the arrow keys for movement etc. But the Half-Life 1 tutorial, that's how I learned my current style of playing. 

No one here probably cares about a review for a crappy 2005 game, but I make a point of mini-reviewing every game I play, just for my own record.

Now that i've played this, I guess Aliens: Colonial Marines isn't going to be my kind of game either when it's released next year. Oh well.

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 REVIEW

This is probably the least enjoyable first person shooter i've played since Halo. Which isn't something I would have expected coming from a studio like Gearbox Software; although they were involved in the PC version of Halo. However their Half-Life expansion packs were both excellent.

I'm probably biased, because what I really want is one-man-army style gameplay. I don't really want to have to use strategic war tactics with my teammates in order to defeat the enemy.

The idea in BIA is to have one team firing on the enemy while you (and another team) flank them to catch them off guard. This gets boring pretty quick, and in the end I just got tired of having to use these tactics. Unfortunately if you don't, it's a very difficult game. Even on easy skill setting you can't play the entire game as you would any other first person shooter. The enemy will mow you down with bullets in no time.

The other problem is that there's no quicksave. Now a few checkpoints per level aren't too bad in some shooters. But when you have a realistic shooter where a few shots could kill you and there's no way to replenish your health, it's very frustrating to have to go back several minutes to a previous checkpoint. What's worse is your health meter is useless. Eventually after a certain amount of shots it'll go red, then after a certain amount more you'll die. It should have been an exact progressive meter, not an inconsistent colour change.

To add to the frustration your teammates are quite useless. On a few levels they managed to get themselves killed by mortar attacks within minutes of the level starting. If I didn't micro-manage them, they'd walk directly into a machine gun and be dead in seconds.

Gearbox made the weapons more realistic than standard shooters. That means you can be standing point-blank in front of your enemy and still somehow miss them. The aiming is designed to be imperfect. I simply found it frustrating rather than a good realistic feature.

And finally we come to the level design and graphics which, again, are a big let down. The levels are all very flat, decorated with bland buildings/houses and fields. The textures are all uninspiring and drab. The only memorable parts of the game were defending a couple of good looking churches.

Overall, the design is not up to the standards of Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, while the gameplay was a nice try for something different, but for me it got frustrating by the end. 

Have you played FEAR? If not, I think you would like it ;)