I'm probably thinking back to Planetside with the rose tinted spectacles of +4 nostalgia ;)

But it was really quite something back in the day, like battlefield only with hundreds per side. If SOE don't balls up this sequel it could be something quite special! 

Darksiders. Looks like fun. 

Stalker series.

Now to find the time... 

I would recommend an xbox pad for darksiders however, the combat feels a lot better when using a pad to control it (one of the few games I feel comfortable saying that about!).

To be fair I only used the kb controls for a few minutes so maybe they are not so bad :)

Have fun with stalker :), SOC is awesome, clear sky not so much, and COP is awesome also. I think the first one is my favourite, so many good moments I remember having, one of the most atmospheric games I have ever played. 

Yeah so Planetside 2 seems to be a direct remake of Planetside with some new mechanics to fix broken things from the first one like generated missions. 

Looks like it might be a diversion from the general meh-ness of games/first person shooters:

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/07/08/bioshock-infinite-footage/

While I'm not a 100% sold on the art style it still seems a lot more interesting than all the generic stuff being pumped out.

(oh, and that rage stuff looked pretty nice too) 

yeah I have a gamepad I've been meaning to try but havent yet found a game I preferred it on. Will give it a go. 

Just played through the Cold Stream beta campaign in l4d2, and it was pretty damn good for the most part. HDR was very nice in some spots. The last level was kinda bleh, mostly because the bots weren't doing much, the nav mesh probably isn't done or something.

There should be a l4d icon. 

run like dogs??

The gfx look good but not that good compared to other games which run fine. 

It's been out for a while, but I'm finally getting around to playing this, and it's really pretty fantastic, and I'm sad that it got shitty enough reviews that it looks like there's not going to be a sequel.

You're "the new guy" at the titular ultra-secret government agency, and you're first sent to Saudi Arabia to investigate stolen missiles, and then, when that's resolved, sort of, you have three safehouses in Taipei, Rome, and Moscow from which you can take a number of missions in any order you wish as you progress through the game, level up skills, and try to get to the truth behind a fairly complex plot and and broad cast of trustworthy (or not-so) individuals.

Good stuff:

-various ways to approach gameplay, depending on your specializations. Great feeling of progression as you increase your skills.

-various plot twists and aspects of the game that you may or may not ever even see with one playthrough, depending on the choices you make.

-very good VO (for games anyway), and an interesting dialogue system wherein you select the general "tone" of your response and see how it plays out.

-combat is fun and generally pretty forgiving, if not groundbreaking.

-the levels look good (UE3).

Not-So-Good Stuff:

-pretty iffy UI; you can tell this was made for a console first. (Which actually makes a few of the mini-games significantly easier on PC). Speaking of poor conversions...

-quite poor job of handling keybindings and suchlike, to the point where if a key does multiple things, it will sometimes only rebind *some* of those things, and you have to figure out what proper (default) key to use on others. There's even one tutorial where you are specifically told what (WRONG) keys to use. I had to go look up online what the right ones were. :( If you're going to play on PC, be prepared to get really pissed at the hacking minigame until you figure out wtf.

Highly recommended. I haven't finished it yet, but I probably will today/tonight. 

finally got l4d and l4d2. playing through, SP style since everyone else out there has beaten it a billion times and is on to difficult mode by now, I'm sure. only two campaigns in, but I think I'm fully addicted.So far I've completely avoided all witches because I'm absolutely terrified of what dealing with them might entail. no spoilers please - just sayin.

The only thing is that the bots seem a little too good at times for me. And NEVER use explosives, ever. 

and the two latest PoP games too. I'm now officially a games hoarder! 

lol amateur 

i liked borderlands. :) i didn't bother with all those addons, but the main game is quite fun. 

I grabbed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. off the bargain rack on a whim. So far I'm somewhat under impressed, I got the idea that everybody hyped this game so much, but it really isn't very interesting.

The atmosphere is sort of nice, but right now bandits are respawning all over the map, faster than I can loot their corpses, and I just run out of ammo. Apparently it's not possible to "clear out" a level, which diminishes the feeling of achievement. I don't like the bleeding/bandage crap either. Nor the fact that you have to eat in this game. Clicking on a sausage is neither very fun nor very engrossing. And having to use the inventory screen to equip another weapon is just horrible (say you're under fire and run out of ammo, do you want to fuss around with the inventory while they take pot shots at you?). Same for the carrying limit and the fact you simply cannot move when you're burdened. How are you gonna move the loot to the trader when you can't carry it?

I also forget to save, and in this game you have to save all the time. Can't stand shooters without checkpoints anymore, all the manual saving breaks the immersion for me.

NPCs are faceless and forgettable. So are most of the "quests". You help an NPC by giving him a medpack, he becomes your friend, and a minute later he lets himself be killed by bandits (NPC AI is pretty bad, the stalkers just sit there and let themselves be shot).

The radioactivity feels like a gimmick. Hey, you have to drink vodka to cross the next 5 meters of the map! OK...

Some gaudy items in the game as well, just like in RE4. Dog's tail? All right... it tells me that some of those things can be used to create anti-radiation medicine, but I apparently can't do that myself. Or at least I haven't found out how. Just atmosphere?

The overall production value seems to be on an indie developer level. The weapon animations suck. The UI is seriously flawed (the inventory, argh...) The NPC dialogues are largely uninteresting. "Flawed brilliance"? Maybe... it's hard to trace the brilliance, though. Somewhat reminescent of Mount & Blade in that respect, only M&B was less flawed and more brilliant.

I might continue to dabble in it, but I'll also be honest and say I found even Bioshock more entertaining, despite its entire gimmicky linear art-deco adventure-ness. 

http://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-soc-oblivion-lost-2010

I enjoyed vanilla STALKER, but there are problems. I mean the game isn't Quake or Painkiller. It's gritty, realistic and unforgiving. BUT it get's irritating.

Install Oblivion Lost Mod! Just try it, it's great. It 'fixes' STALKER. 

Was chuggy on my Radeon card, because of the ridiculously hi-res textures. This version might be better:

http://stalker.filefront.com/file/Oblivion_Lost_22_for_1005;93039 

That publishers shouldn't release games in an un-finished state, I know this. I was really annoyed when Stalker Clear Sky came out because it was full of CTDs and even BSODs and was aloms unplayable.
But the Oblivion Lost mod is nonetheless good :) 

I feel Stalker is one of those kind of games, if you can't get immersed in the world then you probably won\t enjoy it nearly as much. I love the game (vanilla) and a while back replayed some with the Oblivion Lost mod. Very atmospheric and tense. The feeling of hiding out in an abandoned complex during night or a blowout, then suddenly I can hear a creature or bandits taking shelter. Whether or not I should fight. Managing my ammo, food and other supplies. Or even hanging out by the fire with other NPCs while one plays his guitar, and minutes later we all get attacked and fighting alongside them. It honestly all felt like a big survival adventure where everything is out to get me. It's that kind of game I can immerse myself and just play it how I see fit. And because its unpredictable what happens and how many places change, it's worth going back for other loot and possibly getting mauled by a Bloodsucker since these places are never always left empty.

I have yet to play CS and CoP though. 

and no one answered my question :)

Is it just my system or does this game (in all its iterations) run like balls? 

Stalker is a wierd one. I played it first time back on a (burning out) Radeon 9800 and ran perfectly fine. Upon upgrading my card, it ran like garbage and crashed everytime I stepped outdoors at the start. It wasn't until I got an extra gig of ram would it run well again. So I couldn't really say, perhaps the latter... 

STALKER Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat will run slow if you set all or even most of the graphics options to maximum. Clear Sky was one of the first DX10.1 (one of the only infact) games, and CoP was one of the first DX11 games. But IIRC all of the games will downscal to a DirectX 8 level. So try lowering some settings.

And what are your specs? 

I'll try that mod. 

you're trying to force the game into patterns (quake, diablo, etc.) you know. You won't have any fun that way.

Also stalker is a game that needs to be explored (e.g. dog feet). 

it's not super fast like source, for example, but source is a lot simpler engine.

on a 1.8ghz cpu + nvidia gts250 it runs great, but obviously that's overkill for what the game SHOULD run at.

that said, when i first played it with recommended specs, it ran fairly poorly and i had to set it to basically run in dx8 mode.

it's still one of my all time favourite games. the atmosphere and feelings it invokes are good enough that i can pardon the miserable ai, stupid voice acting, retarded excuses for quests and occasional crashes.

playing morrowind again actually, and i've found the lack of any voice acting does not bother me one bit.