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 ;) 

Not yet Ricky... my playlist for the remaining 2005 games looks like this:

Battlefield 2
Call of Duty 2
F.E.A.R.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

So it's not far away :) Then I can move on to about a dozen 2006 games I missed, which, apart from maybe Gears Of War, all look ho hum. I guess 2006 was a bad year for PC shooters. 

Gears of War 1 is, imo, pretty bleh.
Gears of War 2 improves on it a lot. More varied enemies, more weapons (and the weapons that were already in are tweaked) and more imaginative locations etc. Real shame it's not on the PC, and that it is clearly still designed to be played in coop. Single player the game is twice as hard and quite infuriating in places.

It is also still horrifically embarressing to play though... the stylisation and dialogue are so cringeworthy.

Simple rule: You can't have a meaningful story about war and death, and have chainsaws. It just doesn't work. 

i learned on Descent, where you need two more movement keys easily accessible (and space feels shitty for anything but single pressees), so my setup was wasd but shifted to the right so that my thumb could rest on the alt key (usually ijkl). Switched to 8uio for more keys a few years ago, though... 

finally played through it today. loved it. pretty much knew what to expect from the gameplay but it was the narrative that impressed me the most.. from the dark humour, sarcasm and mind games to the eventual descent into madness, GLaDOS was a fantastically developed character, and the end credits were just plain awesome

the only letdown was that i was hoping it would tie in with the HL2 story a little more closely and provide more insight into aperture sciences and what happened with the borealis. it's a completely different game though at the end of the day so i probably shouldn't have expected too much... although i did notice the aperture vs. black mesa slideshow projecting in one of the conference rooms, which was a nice touch 

Plus Bioshock 1 & 2. I've played through the Bioshocks, Portal, and the Left 4 Deads on the 360. So many games to play.. 

Hopefully cs:s/q3 will replace CoD:BO for me in terms of a mp fps I play regularly, I'm really starting to hate duty. 

play Garry's mod and do anything you want. 

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=56465 

Installed Battlefield 2. Turns out it's single player is just capture the flag style botmatches. Fuck that.

So I played through Chaos Theory instead. Review: I am, first and foremost, a fan of action-oriented shooters. Not stealth. However I can tolerate it. I played through Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, and it was one of the most memorable games I've ever played. The Chronicles of Riddick also had it's fair share of stealth. Just as long as there's a good story and atmospheric design to go with the game, then I can tolerate stealth.

Now Thief 3 definitely had an enthralling story and it's graphics, with great level designs and lighting, were excellent. Which meant I could put up with the sometimes frustrating gameplay.

Chaos Theory, on the other hand, was weak the in the storyline and the design sometimes looked a bit bland. However the actual stealth gameplay was a fair bit more enjoyable. Probably 90% of the enemies I ended up taking out; by means of strangling them unconcious, hitting them in the head or a gun shot. So it meant I wasn't going back and forth creeping around enemies. The actual gunfights in Chaos Theory were frustrating though. If you only have one enemy to hit then you have no problems, but taking on two or three is a problem because your weapons are very useless. Same enemies seem to take quite a lot of bullets before they finally die, and you simply don't have that many bullets to begin with. I guess it's designed this way so that you use your guns as little as possible. However I would have preferred more accurate weapons, but perhaps less ammunition.

In the graphics area, Chaos Theory's lighting looks great. There's high contrast throughout and some great lighting effects. But you would expect this from a stealth game where shadows are an important element. The level design, however, could have been better. For most of the game it looked decent, but considering you move at snails pace and there's only ten levels, which are all fairly small, they could have focused on a lot more detail or set pieces. I mean they do all look good, but I could have designed these levels all single-handedly in six months. Ubisoft is one of the biggest game studios in the world. They had a dozen level designers working on the game. So, I'd expect the level design to be amazing, not just decent.

The story is supposedly a big part of the game as your chasing terrorists in a plot to launch Korea and USA to war. However it was convoluted, boring and confusing. The story fell flat. The only positive here was the often amusing humour of the main character.

So what is the best thing about Chaos Theory? The soundtrack, composed by Amon Tobin.

Overall Chaos Theory has no replay value for me. By the end of the game, which was a good ten hours, I was getting bored with it. Not helped by having to repeat the entire last level after because a killed one of the enemies, not realising I needed him for a retinal scan. The game has a few of these gameplay bugs that should have been ironed out in testing. Another time a scripted sequence never triggered, meaning I was completely stuck.

If you like stealth games though, it's fairly enjoyable. 

You mention enjoying Thief 3, ever played the first two? Not going to get in any 'superior' debates, just wondering out of interest is all. 

^__^
Perfect inspiration for the new quaddicted theme! 

Nah quakis, I tried to play the first one when it first came out. Didn't like the gameplay much. I found the gameplay in Thief 3 a little frustrating as well, there's just a little too much shadow crawling. It'd be better if you could more successfully take enemies out like you could in Splinter Cell. But I loved the level design and story of T3, which is what made it memorable to me. The older 2 wouldn't look as good, so I wouldn't go back to them now. There needs to be more games in the style of T3, instead of realistic settings all the time. 

First two Thief games are probably the most immersive and enjoyable games I've played so far. Such a rich setting with so much background and detail, the non-linear(ish) approach in each mission. Some few years ago when I almost finished up Thief 2, I was getting upset that this will be pretty much it, until I discovered all the fan missions that have been released (and continue to).

As for Thief 3? I absolutely cannot say anything about it (besides clunky movement) since the game crashes too often to get a good session out it, which kinda sucks as I want to actually play through it. 

proved good. Also picked up Batman:AA and Far Cry 2. Now need time to play all these, Wich is about 70% complete I think.

As for L4D2, managed to get hack around Low Violence but only for Single Player, not online play :( 

Feels a lot like PC puzzle/platform games from the 90s to me.

http://jayisgames.com/games/boondog/ 

it sucks 

What's your Steam name OR poke someone to get you into the Func Steam group so we can get some L4D2 games going. 

it's nitin77.

I havent played it yet though so total newbie :) 

Just play through each campaign in SP, that should be enough to get into it. Then you're basically ready to shoot Shambler in the back or vice versa. 

Is it n_gul-something ;) ?

L4D is frantic. Just get on a server and start playing.

Rules:

Dont shoot eachother. You can vote abusers off.
People dont mind a couple of accidents though....

Stick together. If someone goes off on their own for example, a person should try and keep close to them, 2 by 2 if you see what I mean, but really you are better off as a unit of 4.

Right Mouse Button to push zombies back (when trying to reload for example) is invaluable, and used all of the time. It will also get special infected off of a person sometimes.

Set a Tank special infected on fire where possible.

Conserve health - when you are going to die (get knocked over too many times) the screen will go black and white. This is a good time to use medikits if they are sparse. Even if it means hobbling around slowly for a while. If you know you are gonna get owned by zombies then save the health.

Dont startle the witches unless you know you can kill them. Which you dont. Keep the flashlights off.
If a witch is in a bottleneck area then go past her one at a time. If she startsn to sound more agited then wait for her to calm down before the next person.

I think I added you. Send me an invite for a L4D2 game if I'm online, if im not busy I still play that game, love it!