Tried to play Shadowrun, some multiplayer based (but with single player bot matches) fps from 2007. Played 2 maps and decided i'd rather go take a shit then play it again.

Gameplay was crap, the game looked crap, don't know what the critics/reviewers are on about saying it looks good. It looks shit. Quake3 looked better. Next (which I believe is going to be Hellgate: London... my first attempt at an RPG). 

Was crap, btw. The company that started it was bought not too long ago and the new peeps are trying to fix it so it's not so much suck, though. 

hgl is fine. there's a memory leak bug that was never fixed, iirc. if you have a lot of ram it probably won't bother you though. i have only 3gb and i never had any problems when i played it again, although i did when i only had 1gb.
i do recommend you take a look at the aforementioned peeps's work on the SP mod. basically adds in some missing stuff from multiplayer and other improvements. 

Well ultimately it doesn't matter, because it appears to be yet another game where you can't remap the mouse buttons. I've never used WASD & i'm not going to start now. Don't know why these developers just assume everyone on earth uses WASD and is fine with the mouse buttons being set to whatever they think they should be (shoot in this case). 

you can change movement keys to whatever you want, and you can change the button to shoot to whatever you want.
just go in the controls menu.
you can also drag/drop any ability into the mouse 1/2 buttons to use, and remove shoot completely, if your class doesn't use it much. (evokers/summoners tend to rely mostly on their powers, and rarely need to shoot except to break crates or to finish off a mob). 

Are we both talking about Hellgate London here? There' no shoot in the controls menu, supposedly because it can't be changed, and when I click on any other function and try to rebind it, clicking mouse buttons 1 or 2 does nothing, it won't accept it. Only mouse button 3 and the scroller it accepts, and all keyboard keys.

Unless they fixed it in an update, but I doubt it... 

Portal.

Good game but design was a little too basic for my liking. And a bit short.

But good original game. 

well, you should always update your games, regardless. that's just good practice.

anyway, i was wrong about shoot though, sorry. you can't change mouse 1 and 2, those are always action buttons. you can bind jump to mouse 4 or 5 (if you have a mouse with the extra buttons on the side) if you want a mouse button for jump, otherwise, spacebar is a decent one (and what i use).

you can bind your active slots to whatever you want though. for example, my active slots 1-6 are bound to number 1 - 6, slot7 and slot8 are mouse4 and mouse 5, slot9 and 10 are q and e. etc...
and if you want to assign a skill/spell to your mouse1/2, just click and drag the icon (ingame) in your skill menu onto the icon on the left and right sides of the screen.
for example, my evoker has mouse1 as spectral lash and mouse2 as firestorm because they're both spells that need to be aimed while being held down.
other spells like arcane shield, which are one shots, i assign to keyboard keys. 

unless you are finding the game really hard, i recommend putting elite mode on. the game is too easy on normal mode. 

That smells like producer fear. 

i dunno, i just figured it was to stop newbies from getting destroyed, but it's not like elite mode is a huge leap in difficulty either.
there's more modes after you beat the game (nightmare i think?) where it is pretty nuts though.
isn't this par for these kinds of games? to get you to replay and all that. sort of the same as achievements 'oh, you beat the game, so now you can play it again, only harder. :D' 

I meant where the prototypes of games are usually much more hardcore than what gets released, and then things get simplified, a lot in the case of consoles.

It's not so much upping the difficulty level, but rather changing the basic game rules.

The one we're doing now is a top down shooter with some melee, and, indeed, unlocks a harder difficulty once you complete the game on hard.

This reminds me of the 'realsim' mode in L4D - where some features of the first concept survived, like the witch killing in a single hit.

Granted the zombie health is stupid in that mode though. 

ah ok. and yeah, that sounds like a possibility. the game is fairly tame on normal difficulty. you only encounter the more interesting monsters on elite. you also get better loot though, which makes it totally worth playing on the harder difficulty. 

how many people finished Portal in one sitting? Just curious, I did but only because I was fooled as to how long Test Chamber 19 was :) 

~8 hours 

The first time i finished portal it took me about 6 hours, the last time i finished it it took about 3.5 hours. 

says 3 Hours for me all up. It felt longer though, I would have guessed 4.5-5.

How long is Portal 2 comparably? 

and thanks again for gifting it jt. 

Is a lot longer. Took me about 8 hours for the first play through, just in single player, i haven't finished coop yet. Definitely worth the $44.99 i paid for it. 

haven't played coop - Negke and I keep not being on at the same time to do so - but SP alone is, in my opinion, worth the money. It isn't as long as many other SP campaigns, but is of consistently high quality. I loved it dearly.

replay of portal took me about 3 hrs, last time. But I've played it 3 times now... 

I asked a few people about p2coop but it hasn't worked out yet. I didn't want to pry and annoy them with frequent chat inquiries. If anyone wants to play this (not the whole coop campaign in one go, just a few levels/chapters at a time), message me if you see me online.

Time zones are a problem. Usually the only way for us/US to play is when it's evening my time and around noon or early afternoon yours. 

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2011-prey-2/714962 

I'll be on line tomorrow around noon, EST time zone, if you want to get started 

I initially started playing this game, got to episode 2 (out of 5) and hit a game-ending bug. Up until that point it had been a confusing, challenging mess. After a short break trying a couple of other games, both of which I quit even sooner than Jericho, I decided to return and give it another shot (having found a fix for the bug) because too many games lately i'm having to not finish due to major glitches. And i'm glad I did resume - it actually turned out to be a very refreshing and memorable game.

Now I remember Clive Barker's first game; Undying, fondly. Sure it's really only his name and story attached, he isn't actually directing any of the gameplay since he doesn't even play games. But it had a great, spooky setting and was a really chilling game. Not to mention under-rated by the critics. So Jericho comes along six years later, again with average reviews with a 61% aggregate. Great looking screenshots so perhaps this one is under-rated as well? No. What it does well, it does very well, but it falls flat in too many other areas, which i'll cover below.

Firstly what makes Jericho very unique is that you can play with any of six characters throughout the game whenever you want - all of which have their own weapons and abilities (powers). And it's even part of the story that you're playing through the soul of a dead soldier that is able to possess the other characters. So it's not just an explained part of the game. The problem here is that swapping between characters is very messy.

On top of that you have five attack keys (two for weapons, one melee and two for your supernatural abilities). Only the supernatural abilities are added as the game goes on. So every time you switch to a character you're having to remember what their attacks are. You'll get halfway through the game before you start to figure out who your preferred characters are. For me it was Delgado with the chaingun, Black with her sniper rifle and Church with her sword. Once you do, things start to get a bit easier. Nevertheless the characters are all worthy of some use throughout the game and are quite well-balanced. If I were to play through again I'd probably try to use some of the other characters more as well, as they all have interesting attacks.

And then there's the storyline, a very unique plot in which you travel through time to stop The FirstBorn, a creature God created prior to Adam and Eve that wants to escape from it's hell and destroy mankind. Fairly epic and well told throughout the game, only to abruptly end in one of the weakest game endings ever. Very odd considering Clive Barker is the writer. I can only assume it was left this way to leave room for a sequel, which will probably never happen now. 

The atmosphere in Jericho is very unique because you get to play through some very unique settings such a Sumeria and the Tower of Babel, Rome 38AD, The Crusaders 1213AD. The other two episodes that start the game are Al-Khali, which appears to be some old middle eastern setting and WWII. And it's these first two episodes that let the game down slightly as they' look nowhere near as good as the last three episodes. The engine itself is standard 2007 with all the bells and whistles you'd expect. Playing on a 2011 spec gaming PC, everything was happy to be on full without any framerate drop. Now the problem with the level design is that it's very, very linear. You're on a tight path throughout the entire game, with no deviation, and this path itself just feels like one open outdoor corridor scattered with rocks and barricades after another. The outdoor areas get repetitive very quickly. The game also suffers a similar fate as Gears Of War; there's just not enough colour. Everything is very desaturated and drab. However there are some good set pieces every now and again, and despite the extreme linearity and drab colour palette, their is always plenty of detail on screen. You won't find bland cube rooms here like F.E.A.R. had. With the engines lighting abilities, the game does look quite good.

The difficulty level is the main issue. Too often you're madly running to each team-mate reviving them after they died for whatever stupid reason. Their AI is abysmal. In some situations you need to shoot enemies, usually mini-bosses, in certain places to kill them. Your team-mates just don't understand this concept, nor do they try to retreat to avoid explosions. I eventually threw on the 'fast health regeneration' cheat, which made the game much easier (too easy in fact as I only died 4-5 times after that), but replaying from checkpoints over and over again because of useless team-mates is not my idea of fun.

Furthermore, there's no easy way to reconfigure the mouse buttons without hacking the config file. Which in turn, for me, broke my movement keys in relation to these little mini-games, where you have to press one of the movement keys in a certain order to proceed. Without any keys responding, I had to skip past each and everyone of those mini-games. And most of them were terrible anyway.

So overall we have a memorable storyline and setting, great set of different characters you can play with and a decent looking game. The linearity is extreme, but the difficulty level and having to replay from checkpoints ruins the game. It's only saving grace is putting a cheat on, pumping up the difficulty slightly and we've got a much better game.