SO much fun finding them all! And the extras from each secret are pretty additive to the experience. 

http://nitrome.com/games/canary/ 

It actually took a fair bit of effort to find this game. No second hand version, the Ubersoldier website is dead. Even two pirated versions wouldn't work. I eventually merged the two pirated versions into one working game; albeit with a bug in that the last two levels had no textures. Getting the game to run in fullscreen mode also took some playing around.

Now to the game itself; it was developed by a Russian developer named Burut. They would normally be enough to stear well clear of this game. But I persevered - the screenshots looked good. The reviewers had panned the game based on no multiplayer, poor voice acting and high system requirements.

Yes the voice acting is poor, very poor! But some poor voice acting is hardly going to ruin an entire game. If it looks good and is fun to play, voice acting is pretty low on the list of what makes a classic gaming experience.

Lack of multiplayer. Does every single game in existence require multiplayer? I for one haven't played a game online since around 1997. Multiplayer does nothing for me.

The system requirements for Ubersoldier do seem quite high. The loading times between levels are about ten seconds; too high in my opinion. However any moderately priced computer after 2007 should run the game without any noticeable slowdown or drop in framerates. It's really just the load times that take a while.

This game is slightly underrated and should have got a better rep, because the gameplay and design is all pretty good. The weapons are standard WWII fare, but at least feel powerful and mow down enemies quick enough. Your enemies are all the same, just with different weapons. Some can really pack a punch and drop you fast, however every second enemy drops a 10% healthkit. So while there are some tough fights, the abundance of ammo and health mean once you've made it through the tough ones the pressure is over as your restock.

This isn't to say you can run in, guns blasting. You still need to carefully duck around corners to pick enemies off one-by-one. Overall the game play is fun, although a little repetitive. Certainly no different from all your other war shooters.

The gaming engine and level design are both up to the par for 2006. The level design is, of course, better than FEAR. Certainly not amazing or awe-inspiring, but varied enough with just enough detail to make each level look decent.

This is just your standard shooter. The settings are different from the realism depicted in Call of Duty and Brothers In Arms. It almost feels more like a modern sci-fi game rather than 1940s Germany. But if you need to play every generic first person shooter, as long as it's fun and looks decent, then pick up Ubersoldier from the bargain bin. 

The loading times between levels are about ten seconds

holy crap, dude... i remember playing some games where it'd take almost a minute to load a level. 10 seconds is fast. like greased lightning. travelling through a really conductive material. 

there's still games now that take more than 10 sec to load levels. 

They all have horrid loading times. 

The majority have shitty loading times since programming is always the busiest department since they're the most expensive in wages.

Theres a scale for games - made for love and made for money, those too far on the money side of the scale will always have shitty loading times and badly polished gameplay.

10 seconds is good I reckon.

Kona, what got you to hunt that game down?

And yeah, fuck multiplayer. It a big lump of dev that should go into the core. Unfortunately its also a mandatory bullet point, like vehicle sections or RPG elements - irrespective of the game you're making.

A change to indie... 

Is a problem based on inherent architecture. The system is most likely full of odds and sods originally made for other games. 

Well, I haven't played any game beyond mid-2006. My rig, which was a pretty expensive one in mid-2007, loads most games pretty quickly. Probably won't with the latest games.

But yeah 10secs isn't too bad, but what made it annoying was that's for quicksaves as well. Usually a game has a long initial loading of a level, but once it's running if you do quicksaves it's very quick (within a few secs). Whereas in Ubersoldier there didn't seem to be any caching so it's like your loading the entire level again from scratch for everyone quicksave.

ijed... I wanted to hunt Ubersoldier down because looking at all the other releases in 2006, there's fuck all in the way of generic pure shooters. Here's my to play list for 2006:

Dark Messiah (action rpg) - 74%
F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point (2006) - 75%
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (2006) - 80%
Hitman: Blood Money - 82% (Stealth)
Condemned: Criminal Origins - 82% (survival horror)
Prey (2006) - 83%
Rainbow Six: Vegas (2006) - 84%
Gears of War (3rd person) - 87%

Prey and FEAR are the only mindless first person shooters from what I can tell. And Gears of War if you count third person, but the PC port of that is rare so I imagine it'll be a bad port.

Think I'll play Dark Messiah next. The last fantasy I played was Enclave from 2002, and that was awesome. There needs to be more mindless fantasy's instead of 200 hour RPGs. 

i've noticed that about saving in some games.

some games get away with like sub 5mb files. i've even seen some sub 1mb.

and then there's some that save like a 30-40mb file and take, as you said, 10 seconds or so to do it.
which on the surface, doesn't really make sense. there's obviously something going on that makes it take that long, but i have no idea what. :\ 

It's amazing. 

great game, i love how they start with a basic mechanic and introduce something new in each level. Hopefully they will ramp up the complexity and mix different elements more and more in the later levels. (only on level 9 so far.) 

it seems theres new mechanics all the time and they keep riffing on the old ones as well. Meaning it just gets more and more difficult.

Kona: Souns like a history of games thing. Over ten seconds for a quicksave means theres nothing going into RAM, it is reloading everything ie broken. 

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/cinematic-trailer-dead-island/710652

Higher res, no age filter, and cos Bal said it was "meh" :P 

"Theres a scale for games - made for love and made for money, those too far on the money side of the scale will always have shitty loading times and badly polished gameplay. "

So a load time over 10 seconds = the team didn't give a shit what they were making? :P 

I am 3 hours into chrono-trigger. What a great game! Really glad I gave it a chance with the boring beginning. 

Effort to make a game, if your heart's not in it then its a lacklustre result.

Making the game load properly, have a decent frontend, be bug free and without flaws in the gameplay logic are all things that happen when the team is motivated, and pride motivates better than cash. 

I'm merely doubting that long load times = shit design, or shit game, or uninterested coders :p
Technical issues can just be unavoidable, no matter how much people try. It's unfair to say that a technical problem shows some kind of character weakness in the team that made it. I'd leave that judgement down to uninspiring gameplay.

Crysis has its fair share of bugs (the physics mainly) and pretty long load times. But I wouldn't say that Crytek didn't inject creativity and love into the game.
Actually the further back you go the more examples pop up. I don't know whether this shows that technical standards are getting better or that I just don't like modern games as much.

But as an example: Thief 1 and 2. *awful* UIs, kinda buggy in places, dodgy engine. But Looking Glass weren't a team you could call money driven :P 

What is your games design background again? 

Sometimes its just bad luck, or bad management - 'that sounds like a great way to make a game! It's not, we tried it. Do it anyway.'

And the endless tug of war between producers, IP holders and dev teams.

Being inexperienced as well affects things - though I place less credence in this since it just means they weren't putting in the extra hours to get it right.

Spose what I was trying to say is that a lack of overall care usually tells a lot about the dev team more than anything else. 

I have a copy of portal that I got when i preordered portal 2, and since i already own another copy, i can give the new one away.

So, who wants it? 

You can't really measure load times as a sign of quality, you just can't.

I could go out and buy a SSD today, and suddenly any shit game is good cos it loads in 3 seconds? Really?

Crysis is a great example, it takes a buttload of time to load, but I would say Crytek poured their souls into it like they do with all their titles, there's just a lot of stuff to load for each map.

If a game takes forever to load a map for no conceivable reason then sure something is wrong, but you would have to go on a case by case basis, I don't think blanket statements work here or are fair. 

if no one else wants it. Not sure its my type of game but free is free :) 

What's your steam name? 

n_gulati should be it.