what is this game like ? All the reviews seem to be spooging but what is it ? More action than rpg ? Fun ? 

I haven't player KOTOR2, but I REALLY REALLY liked the first one. Very fun game. 

can you describe the gameplay a bit ? 

"you create a main character and then explore many different areas, interact with many different characters, settle many different disputes, solve many different puzzles, and engage in plenty of combat."

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/starwarsknightsoftor/review.html 

It was released in september 1997 so it's quake vintage... the first 3d real-time strategy game. I played it only little back then, but now there's an open source version called Spring or TA:Spring, you can get it from http://taspring.clan-sy.com .
(get springsp and aai 0.42 if you want to play for yourself, otherwise it's a multiplayer game)

I've been playing and learning it a little, and it's quite fun. The idea is that there's two resources: energy and metal. You have construction units and then normal units, and then there's a commander which is a strong construction unit. There are also some fancy buildings like cannons that can shoot almost to the other side of the map etc. :) You can queue an unlimited amount of unit orders with the shift key, so managing all that moving stuff is quite easy. The community is alive and the game is being constantly upgraded and fine-tuned. If you want to play with me, come to terrafusion... it was voodoochopstiks who first introduced me to this game but now he won't play ffs.

Oh, and it's funny: this game can still bring a new computer to it's knees if there are a lot of units and you zoom far out of the map. I also like the sounds a lot. :) 

I completed Halo 2 on the Xbox the other week. Ok I enjoyed Halo, the first game - I thought it was a fun, balanced shooter with some satisfying weapons and vehicular combat.

Halo 2 starts out promising when you actually fight on Earth in the first couple of levels, but you soon get sent back up to space, where another "Halo" awaits (yay!), and you proceed to spend the remaining 90% of the game there. Sadly it's all downhill from then on. The architecture and variety of designs is a bit less repetitive than the first game, but that's about the only real difference in the level design.

Completely neutering some of the cooler guns from the first game (the assault rifle is gone), the weapons now feel totally piss-weak. They range from "ineffective peashooter" to "ineffective peashooter that overheats if you hold the fire button down too long". The new ability to dual-wield guns is about the only way to render any of the roughly 83 different types of peashooters cabable of killing anything, but dual-wielding also robs you of the ability to lob grenades (which are pretty much your only effective weapons in a largely redundant arsenal).

Vehicles seem to control a bit tighter, and have a couple of new gimmicks - you can do barrel rolls and shit in the Banshee to avoid missiles better, and you can do a nitro-like speed boost in a couple of the vehicles. Also, if you time it just right, you can jump onto a passing enemy vehicle, and hijack it after punching the driver for a bit (and enemies can do the same to you). These new gimmicks are kinda cool, but hardly add anything to the game. I thought the environments in which you used vehicles in the first game were more interesting to be honest.

Player movement has been dicked around with too. Bizzarely, the jump is even higher and floatier than before, with just enough lack of air control to make an accidental jump often send you helplessly plummeting to your death. Fun.

In another of the "Why the hell did they do that??" files: the health bar has now been removed - all you have now is your automatically recharging shield. This of course means that you are forced to take less risks and spend more time standing still waiting for your shields to regenerate, because further damage will now just kill you outright. BAD gameplay decision.

There's a few new monsters but none of them are any fun to fight against. Most of them can considerably out-run you, and coupled with the ability to kill you in a single melee hit, I heard myself utter the phrase "What a load of shit" and variations thereof, rather frequently during the game.

There are long tedious sections where you fight the Flood, and these are just as drawn-out and repetitive as the Library stage in Halo 1. I'm not sure why the designers chose to pay homage to what was arguably the very worst part of the first game.

In conclusion: considerably inferior to the first Halo, breaking much of what made the first game fun; and the handful of new gimmicks are pretty disposable. 

It's Halo? I thought that was supposed to be one of the best games ever or something? Can't say I was that impressed by the original myself, but there are a lot of serious fanatics for this game.

I guess it's another of those console FPS games with high popularity that I just cannot understand - like Goldeneye. Why did people spaz over Goldeneye so much? 

Was like the Halo of N64 - something fresh. 

I had so many arguments over the "quality" of that game. 

while I wait for my new comp.

Very nice game. Very nice.

But is there a way of controlling your attacks, at the moment I'm just button mashing really. And it's getting quite difficult, I'm on the level taht has lots of lava and a big lava boss at the end.

Any other tips ? 

Halo2 sounds like crap instead of 'of the best games ever' (halo1 is crap, and if 2nd one is worse...) 

No, there isn't. I asked bear a couple of times about this and he didn't give me a straight answer but having played the whole game it's clear there is no control to the attacks.

It can be a bit difficult, the lava boss was okay though, maybe there was some trick to him, I can't remember. 

http://www.sitesled.com/members/bogo/lyle.html
Oldschool 2d sidescroller, like Cave Story, but without the story and 400 tiems!!1 more difficult. Cool nes music and huge pixels. 

I found there to be a slight amount of control to the attacks based on directional movement and frequency of your attacks, but in sum there's basically no control because you're always trying to attack as fast as possible and you're always moving because you're trying to avoid the enemies. 

Did anyone finish it? I was having fun and then just kinda got bored and stopped playing it. Maybe I should go back to it, as it was rather nice.

Cube Sector looks cool, I'll check it out. 

somewhere in level 4 or 5 (the boss which is a giant vehicle on wheels in a cave.)

I got busy and then forgot about it, basically. 

I finished it a couple times, using the different weapons you can chose from during the game, and finding the various secrets etc. I spent a while trying to finish the hidden level which is pretty insane, but despite reaching the uberboss many times I still haven't managed to defeat him (but I'm sure I could if I replayed through the whole game and didn't use up my heart bottle before until I reach him).
I think it's an awesome game anyways. =) 

Haven't defeated the last "hard/secret" boss yet, probably my favourite game this year. I'll have to try that lyle i cube sector when I get back to my comp. 

...a second hand copy of Alice in a music store, discs were in good condition so I picked it up. Best 10AUD I've spent in a loooooong time. 

I concur! And I don't even know what else you bought recently. 

Far Cry: Instincts (Xbox)

A quick rant first:

I'm tempted to dock a fair few points off this game simply for the fact that you are forced to sit through an unskippable 5 minute advertisement every time you start - Even if you are 8 hours into the game and want to continue from your latest save point you still have wait for this advert to finish every time you switch on the console.

That said, here's my quick review - I'm assuming not many people have played this game on here, so I'll mention some differences between this and the PC original.

Instincts is basically a totally new game designed from the ground up to work better with the Xbox's ageing hardware. It shares the engine, and I guess a lot of the assets, but the gameplay is very different.

The game is linear as hell, but you do get some very wide paths to move around in, giving you many different ways of approaching an enemy camp. Stealth is important in the early part of the game, and you can adopt three different stances that affect your movement speed and visibility in the undergrowth. You can sneak up behind enemies for silent stealth kills and you can set a sprung branch trap around any tree, and lure enemies towards it by hiding and throwing stones to distract them. You can do other gimmicky crap like go prone and roll onto your back to shoot enemies in the balls from underneath wooden huts.

I would say that this early part of the game, where you are left seriously outgunned to enforce the stealth approach, is kind of underdeveloped, and often overly difficult and frustrating.

You soon throw all this stealth bollocks out the window when you get your hands on some decent guns though. It's not long before the game's other main gimmick comes into play and you slowly acquire your Feral Abilities(TM) - your health now auto-regenerates, you can run fast and leap huge distances, you can "see" scent trails (this looks pretty cool), and you get an insta-kill melee punch that can smash infrastructure. Most of this shit costs adrenaline though, so you can't use it constantly.

The difficulty level is completely fubared. First off, there are no selectable skill levels whatsoever (and no auto-adjusting of difficulty seems to be in play either). It starts off hard until you get decent guns, then it becomes a knife-through-butter run-and-gun fest for the larger part of the game, which is pretty damn good, before turning to shit in the last couple of levels, which are about as enjoyable to play as having sodium hydroxide solution squirted up your urethra, and yes, it all boils down to the distance between checkpoints. Life is too short (and sanity too fragile) to continue playing a game where the player systematically fails to get past the same checkpoint after about 16 attempts (because he has to escort a mission-critical NPC across a massive section of terrain - an NPC who has some cover-taking autonomy but equally will quite happily plough forward into a horde of enemies before you have had a chance to kill them). Don't even get me started on the endgame boss *_*

Overall: Definately the best FPS I've played on the Xbox so far (I've played three: this, Halo, and Halo 2). Oh yes, graphics are awesome, and vehicles are pretty cool too. 

Been playing The Movies Demo, pretty fun so far even though I haven't actually been able to make my own movies yet. So far so good.

Quit playing WoW, just got boring.

Looking forward to the GuildWars expansion, and definitely Warhammer Online. Sweet stuff. 

to quicksave in Enclave?

Getting picked up by archers and the less frequent checkpoints is annoying me. 

Dear Vondur.
I hate strategy games and oh boy do I hate this one.
I blame you. And Kinn (for good measure).

Yours faithfully,
cz-I haven't even been close to winning a single fucking scenario in this stupid fucking game. Maybe I just fucking suck.-g 

http://phaitplays.blogspot.com/2006/03/quick-review-thief-deadly-shadows.html

3/5