<@Sundaybler> so
<@Sundaybler> alice
<@Sundaybler> no shadows
<@Sundaybler> uber low-res textures
<@Sundaybler> wtf is that all about? 

There's shadows, and even on the 360 th textures aren't über low, though they can look like that for a second while they're being loaded. 

hehe, the descriptions of the monsters and weapons make me want to play. :D 

but I wasn't even using the pepper grinder up until Vondur told me how useful it is for taking out the eyepots. I'd basically forgotten about it. Also, the eyepot seemed to be taking damage so I assumed it was a boss or something.

I've now gotten up to the part where the Mad Hatter is back up and running again, but my PC has been playing up lately and I couldn't get it started today, so I haven't played any further. I'm guessing it's quite short.

There are some quite relentless combats in the factory levels. I quite enjoyed that. Lots of platforming and nice interesting paths around the levels instead of just A-B make it feel like a game from 10 years ago, gameplay-wise. That's no bad thing though :) 

worth getting? 

Humorous games. The first Overlord has a lot of variety concerning the locations you visit and offers a puzzle/strategy-like feel to the different scenarios. There's also several optional areas to visit and makes the world feel more open which is missing from Overlord 2. The second game mostly focuses more on the action side, which can get a bit tiresome when fighting against the Empire. Didn't have as much fun with it as the first but it's still a good game. 

sort of a mini review for cardo:

22:37 megmn: cardo imho fc2 is pretty shitty
cardo: how so?
22:39 megmn: cardo the generated missions are so generic
22:40 megmn: cardo and there's not much else there
megmn: even though there ARE a few mildly interesting locations on the map, they're just all the same regarding gameplay/setting
megmn: cardo like, you come to the cool location but there's nothing there but the same random buddies that you meet around every corner
megmn: and everything else on the map is boring
megmn: cardo it's totally NOT like stalker, where it's simply aawesome to discover new areas
22:44 cardo: i never played stalker either
megmn: cardo and everything in the gamedesign puts emphasis on the genericity of it
megmn: like the weapon decay
megmn: you cannot find a good weapon
megmn: you have to do generic missions for the weapons dealer and then buy them
cardo: and that's good or bad?
megmn: cars are totally generic
22:45 megmn: they are around everywhere, so you just don't really bother
megmn: i think there's a cool looking buggy in a few places, but ultimately it's not any different
megmn: etc
rebb: you also get attacked by at least one jeep-patrol on every mission
megmn: yep
megmn: all convoys are exactly the same all the time
22:46 megmn: there are outposts at every 2nd corner which repopulate after a while, and all are basically the same
megmn: then there are generic save houses that are also the same
22:47 megmn: sometimes they are in a cool location, but it doesn't matter, because once you cleaned up the three guys at a house, there never will be any other enemies there (so leveldesign really doesn't matter)
megmn: also, level design from a gameplay pov is meh
megmn: it basically feels like diablo at lvl 80
22:48 megmn: you've seen everything, you always do the same shit
megmn: but contrary to diablo, there are no rewards as far as i can see 

http://www.mycrysis.com/dx11#

Download links don't work yet, but shit son it looks pretty :) 

22:44 cardo: i never played stalker either

Cardo! WTF!

Don't know what else to say... :P
I grabbed fc2 when it was on sale on steam, played about 8 hours then got pretty bored. I basicly agree with Megaman, by far the most irritating thing for me was that whenever you got a mission, the objective always seemed to be on the other side of the fucking map. It's the most ham fisted and annoying way to get you to travel I have ever seen. 

Last year I played 2005's Area 51 by Midway Studios. It was a decent effort for 2005 which led to expectations for Blacksite that it could only be even better. Strangely, despite the title this isn't related to the first game at all. It's a complete standalone title and mostly a different setting. Not for the better and expectations were not met.

Firstly the game runs Unreal Engine 3, so it's going to be hard to make a game that doesn't look good. For sure it looks good - levels are occassionally well-detailed, although sometimes it can get bland. Textures and art is average and there aren't very many set-pieces. The layout is very linear. The main pro is that the settings are a little different to a lot of recent shooters - you spend a lot of time in the American desert where Area 51 is located. Large canyons and roads, deserted caravan parks and a massive Area 51 base. The highlight of the game for me was battling a giant octopus-like creature on top of a bridge while your helicopter circles around it with you firing furiously to take it out. Other helicopters are doing the same. I normally hate on-rails levels, but this was very epic, possibly the best on-rails battle to date. Of course once you get to control vehicles it's the normal bad-handling rubbish.

So overall the game is helped a lot by the Unreal Engine 3 and some of the different settings, but overall from a purely artistic viewpoint, it looks pretty average for 2007.

Gameplay is where Blacksite really struggles though. You only get two weapons at once, of which there's only really one weapon you'll use throughout the entire game because the rest are rubbish (apart from the mandatory rocket launcher battles); and that's your standard machine gun. You'll also spend most of your time zooming in and attempting headshots, because there's no quicksave and checkpoints don't appear very often. I only actually died in the game a few times on the middle difficulty (which they call hard). Even the final episode of three levels I didn't die at all. The final boss is possibly the easiest final boss in the history of shooters. What I'm getting at is that Blacksite is a fairly easy game. This isn't helped by enemies that just stand around getting shot at, which will be by you not your team-mates since their AI is just as bad.

Just one main weapon, checkpoints and only 4-5 different regular enemies (not including bosses) make this a game you won't be playing for it's gameplay. Nor will you play it for it's visuals unless you're running out of shooters.

Perhaps in this respect the very short length of around six hours is a good thing.

Rating: 6.5/10 

No mention of 'level design' this time :D

Turns out the constant freezing of Timeshift wasn't the game, because Blacksite did exactly the same thing. It's the old "display driver has stopped responding and has recovered" error message that happens every couple mins, something which 1000's of other have had issues with and it could be just about anything causing it. Any of you guys had this error before?

Spent a day trying to solve it then eventually took my GTX560 out (which is only a few months old) and put my old 8800GT in and the problem went away - no more crashing on those games. So I guess my card is faulty. Gonna take it back tomorrow and demand at worst, a new one, and at best something that ISN'T Nvidia. Probably the Radeon 6870 would be the equivalent. 

I've had a lot of luck with the Radeon cards lately, for once on the performance scale AMD and NVidia are totally evenly matched. 

45% through, really enjoying it. Megman is entirely correct about it's repetitiveness and Daz is entirely correct about tedious travelling across the map.

But it's still a good game...

The atmosphere is good and the graphics especially at sunrise and sunset are great. The setting is strong and quite different to other FPSs I've played. The combat is decent and well balanced. The way vehicles and stuff work is functional. I like little touches like being able to look at the map and look behind when you're driving and really fuck your driving up ;). Blowing things up is great fun too. 

The combat IS fun, I like the fires etc and the explosions feel really good, it's just there is way to much "filler" between them. There really is no reason to go and explore the world because there is really only 5 things you will find.

- Checkpoint guarded by dudes.
- Dude in a vehicle.
- Assassinate some dude mission.
- Unlock new weapons mission.
- Diamonds!

While that sounds reasonable, it feels very very predictable after a while. Every time I see another vehicle on the road, I KNOW it will attack me if I get to close, every time I approach a checkpoint I KNOW it will have a few angry dudes there. There is just no variation at all.

I think if there were friendly checkpoints or friendly vehicle drivers that would help a good deal, certainly break up the encounters better.

I do love the bolt action sniper rifle they have in there, it feels very satisfying to use! 

True.

I think more variety in enemies / NPCs would definitely work better with the atmosphere. The "this is a covert mission so our dudes will attack you too" is a pretty lame excuse for the world being full of hostiles. Wandering into friendly bases or established conflicts would be much better. 

But it's the flaws that make diamonds sparkle.




Sorry, that was a bit gay. But it's true. I can spend hours hapilly bouncing around Far Cry 2 in a jeep from one repetitive mission to the other. Some people find the relentlessly hostile AI tiresome and unrealistic, but I find it adds to a constant feeling of tension in the world. On top of that, I might get paralysed by malaria or have one of my weapons jam on me during a firefight, but it's oh-so-satisfying to survive something like that!

It's a game of mini-games really, but the player has to be imaginative enough to find them. I always enjoy sniping a guy from 100 yards away and then see if I can sprint after him and finish him off with the machette before he can equip his pistol. It's also pretty fun to sneak right in to the center of a large shanty town and then unleash hell to see how long you can last.

That's just the nature of sandbox games really. If you want something different around every corner you need to play something more on a rail like Biocock or Gears of Poor. 

I think games like Stalker and the elder scrolls series do open world much better than fc2. Stalker in particular as you never know what your going to find around the next corner, even if you've been to an area 100 times before, the 101st time there could be a bloodsucker hiding in a mundane corner that rips your face off when you least expect it. Or a gang of stalkers fighting off a wave of mutants that you never saw happen before. It's random and unpredictable and that is what makes it work.

I guess that is the key thing that fc2 is lacking, the unpredictable and random element of it's open world. The checkpoints are always in the same place, guarded by the same npc's. Nothing ever changes. Even something as simple as enemy patrols wandering from village to village would spice it up some, as you would never be sure when or where you would encounter them. Add friendly patrols also and perhaps some sort of war for territory and it starts to get a lot more interesting!

Maybe it's a limitation of the console hardware, keeping track of all these different elements in an open world certainly isn't cheap on the hardware side I would imagine. Maybe Far cry 3 will improve things in this regard, who knows :) 

I bought it in a Steam sale a couple of years back but I got bored after an hour and haven't touched it since. Maybe it's just one of those slow burners that you have to play for a while to get in to it, but the early weapons were unsatisfying and there wasn't a beautiful landscape to hold my attention in the meantime. I'll give it another try sometime.

As for Elder Scrolls, Morrowind is probably my all time favourite sandbox game because it does break the mould in terms of variety. Then they made Oblivion and it all felt a bit too LOTR for my tastes.

I guess the other major SandBox game to mention would be GTA, of which I had the most fun in GTA 3 because once again you had to make your own fun. These days it's all about pretend girlfriends and horribly scripted set pieces. Dull dull dull. 

Accessibility and pacing are two of the numerous faults that stalker had. It's a curious game for me as the combat when you get right down to it is fairly boring, you basicly hide behind a wall and peek out and shoot the guy looking at you. Or just run backwards while shooting wildly and hoping for the best against mutants :)

Where it scores its biggest win though is the exploration and atmosphere, and the random unscripted elements. I swear I've never been so thoroughly absorbed into a game like I am with stalker, when its dark and storming, and i'm creeping around some barren russian facility with no idea what I'm going to find around the corner. it's pure gaming gold to me :)

Not to mention that abandoned industrial buildings are like architectural pornography to me, I'm sure that helps it's case ;) But I guess not everyone feels the same way.

GTA and Just Cause 2 (I guess) go about the open world differently I think as they give you a lot of tools to play with and make your own fun, as you said. That's probably another area where far cry 2 falls short perhaps, but I guess it wasn't the focus of the game to create a playground. Starting fire's that set off chain reactions around enemy camps is always fun though :)

Makes we wonder if the strong focus on story, setting and companions in Fc2 hurt it's open world design somewhat. It's hard to give the player some fun toys to play with when your dealing with some fairy serious and current topics regarding Africa. 

Usually I'm not a fan of realism shooter and slow gameplay where you crouch around, run from cover to cover and aim with iron sights, but it Stalker I totally enjoyed it. The atmosphere and the desolate style are great. It even let me not care about the glitches.

FC2... already forgot about it. But what you say sounds about right. Good looks, but generic gameplay that fun in the beginning but gets tedious after a while. I probably posted about it somewhere in this thread. 

The first game (shadow of chernobyl) is even better if you install the oblivion lost mod. It just nicely tweaks a lot of things like the gun-handling, and fices a lot of the broken story stuff that was in the game.

I loved all three of the Stalker games. It is a game which I often think about playing over and over (though I never do) just because I am convinced that there was a lot of stuff and exploring which I didnt manage to do the first time round. 

had a mixed feeling about that one. on the one side there's fantastic atmosphere and sense of place, those abandoned industrial buildings made me want to explore them because i just enjoyed wandering thru them. and nights were very moody. but on the other hand the gameplay was not my cup of tea. combat is slow and hard, quests (apart from the main line) were boring and repetitive, so after 1/3 of the game i focused on the main quest only.
i'm sure the game has found a plenty of true fans. 

Solved my game freezing issues by turning my GTX560 clock speed from it's factory 900 to 800. Thanks Gigabyte. 

How did you do that exactly? Might solve my 460 freezing issues too. 

AMD GPU Clock Tool to set graphics cards clocks.