I don't think I can add much to what has already been said, but I now have this game under my belt. So as not to repeat too much, I'll make a few brief points:

- Excellent environments, models and character models. The quality and detail in so many differing environments shows the level of research and skill within the PK team. Excellent work - not a bad level in the game from a visual POV.
- The final level Hell was the most freakish and creepy and wickedly original game world that I have ever seen. Incredible. It will freak you the first time you run through it.
- The Shipping Docks level gave me real vertigo as I walked along those cranes - this is the first time a game made me feel really uncomfortable about heights - it was great.
- Physics: something about that hanging cross in the Monastary level that was irresistable. The physics was useful and fun.
- Rich ambient sounds that are bizarre and effective. Great moody music when you're not listening to Battle Rock.
- The right number and effectiveness of weapons.
- Except for the Swamp Boss, I found the boss fights to be okay and I normally dread boss fights. The puzzles were good.
- It really ran great on my older system.
- It could often be fun.

Some lows:

- Why deny the Prison and Forest levels to those that don't play at Trauma skill? I may not be good enough to get that far.
- Long load times - but that's the price of content so I'll deal with it.
- Very immersive environments combined with totally unimmersive gameplay and battle music.
- It could sometimes be not fun. The desire to see more of the great settings pulled me through. The Railway Station and Military Base were really hard.
- Most secrets that are too difficult to get at.

I found that the best way for me to enjoy PK was to spread it out over a long time. That way, the boring gameplay seemed less boring after returning to it after a long hiatus. Horde slaughter then seems entertaining for a bit.

I have Battle Out of Hell but something makes me think that I'll have to reinstall PK for it to install properly.

I've seen it so cheap that I'd highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in gameworld design. 

A platform game, where you play a bouncing blue ball, yay!
Quite nice really, gameplay is fun, visuals are cute, music fits ok.
http://withinadeepforest.ni2.se/ 

tried playing call of cthulhu - way too puzzle oriented and a bit buggy. The atmosphere is thick, despite shitty engine/effects (everything is blured, like on a bad old tv) and rather sketchy texturing and animation. Hard too (solving puzzles whily being chased with no idea what to do - causes replaying). Im not sure I will bother playing it much more, (so far its been ~4hrs)

new lara - 20 minutes of the demo was it. just boring and annoying camera. looks ok.

btw havent finished PK - too repetative/flat 

PK has some very nice architechture, yet a lot of shit leveldesign
with killboxes, no logical route/progression etc 

Painkiller's levels look great, yes, but for the most part they are just sprawling architectural backgrounds created solely by an environment artist, with gameplay fudged in by the trigger slaves as an afterthought. They're just arenas. 

~1hour into it

hm, interesting, i like how it's so puzzled oriented. so far�
i hate:
- the 2002 graphics (mainly textures + lighting)
- the amount of fixed scripting
- so many doors, so few open
- clichee characters
- 'scifi' stuff
- story only through reading in parts? myst anyone?
- i can't set the sensitivity low enough!? It's at the lowest setting and still like way above my normal sens :/
- rain effects look worse than in descent 3
- 'horror' games really need SOME kind of dynamic lighting

i love:
- characters look nice most of the time and have a nice modeling style.
- puzzles in an fps
- voice of player
- cigarette smoke
- blurring / bloom is cool here
- 1930'ies setting
- static lighting tries to be good
- "it won't budge" (daikatana reference?) 

Fun game :) I like it very much. The music and sounds are great, the bouncing balls also. Thanks for the link. 

Seconded. It's a nice hangover-recovery game, though at the moment I'm a little frustrated by it because as far as I can see I've done everything I can do and I only have five balls. D'oh. 

Look around more, there's always somewhere new to go using different balls. =)
I really enjoyed it myself, nice addition to my small list of great free 2d platformers (like Cave Story and Lyle in Cube Sector). 

A friend of mine already found all 10. I love the music and mood in the game. 

...with god mode, yes I know its lame, but I do that with the horde oriented games. Also Im playing on Trauma skill so as to access the maps you would otherwise be deprived of... However Ive ran into a problem. It wont let me into episode 5. I beat Alastor, it goes to a montage style cut scene of the various bosses and a glowing silhouette.. and then it rolls the credits. I go back to the map, click on V and it does nothing. I have found no mention anywhere on 'how to access episode 5', is it locking me out because Im cheating? Technically youre not supposed to be able to use cheats in Trauma difficulty (how you do it is load a normal game, turn on god mode, and then load a Trauma save, the God mode status will carry over).

Notes regarding it in general - crappy secrets, these are some of the most inane things ever crafted... Many of the jumps and tricks remind me of the QW acrobatic style maps to show off your skills - I shouldnt have to do that, over an instant-death pit only to have to endure the level load times once more to try again... That and I encountered a secret I should be able to bunnyhop to, but they blatantly put a clip brush blocking you from reaching what would otherwise just be a minor step to get over. 

finished it. finally!
compared to other rpgs, the playing time was extremely long - in the end (after having finished the main quest) i had played for about 115 hours and done 153 quests. easily more than twice as many as other games had. in this respect, it was worth the money for sure.

on the downside, it became somewhat boring after a certain time. the quests were nice, some even very imaginative (like the painter's quest), but the locations showed little variation. i'm mainly talking about the many caves and ruins - they were way too generic (all somehow looked alike and didn't offer anything interesting after having been to a couple of them), with unrealistic crate/chest placing. the items didn't really justify or rather encourage exploration, either, since there were mostly weak weapons and ridiculous amounts of gold to be found. the same applies to the oblivion realms.
the difficulty was ok (slider in the middle) for the most time, although in some situations i got annoyed and temporarily moved it down a little - not because it was too difficult, but because it just wasn't fun having to fight some 20 ghosts/minotaurs/orwhatever in one dungeon, especially if one fight takes quite long already.

some stupid bugs, too (likely already mentioned), like poor translation in parts, npc staying silent despite the dialogue option (though still giving quest-sensitive information that went straight to the diary), having to readjust the keyboard config everytime i started the game (beta patch fixes that, but i only installed it before the last session) and some strange issue with ingredients (couldn't finish the vampire cure and sheogorath's quest, because the ingredients needed were not detected although they were present in the inventory).

i don't want to compare it to morrowind too much, but i was a little disappointed that oblivion's cities are lacking the architectural variety of morrowind's (the mixture of different races or blah - solely human buildings, not houses built into trees, or those worm-like buildings in balmora?). i understand it's a different part of tamriel and therefore has a different style, but still... at least one doesn't have to fight 10k cliff dancers or whatever those flyers were called. ;P
a nice feature would have been some corpses (outside of dungeons) with items and some background story bits like diary pages or something. near the borders maybe. i assume there are a few, but not as many as i had been able to find them (gothic fanboy speaking).

dunno, what else to say. by and large, it was an enjoyable game, but i'm glad it's finally uninstalled. now back to mapping (or not). :)

btw. don't get the 2$ plugins - they are not worth the money. 

Holy god yes lovely.

Taking me 4 hours to beat, it's just a bit more of HL2 really.


(maybe spoilers)




Alyx is cool, and you get to meet Barney (he's hurt, poor thing :( ), and Dr.Kleiner talks about sex.
Cutscene with dog and the car was awesome.
Weird stuff with the vortigaunts and G-man.
I wonder what happened to Judith (besides her finally putting on a jacket to cover up those huge tits).
Really not much story was told, except about people escaping the city.
It ended on a cliffhanger and I dammit Valve I want ep2 now!




In conclusion, yay! 

I agree with you totally about the secrets in Painkiller. In any other game, I love finding counted secrets - in PK, I guess they feel that only trick jumpers deserve secrets (okay, perhaps 5% don't require l337 skilz, but that's not enough.) I have seen secrets I could get to but then I wouldn't know how to return to the psth. The really long load times is a huge deterent to experimentation. Also, arbitrary clips placed just to block you and for no other reason are also a big deterent to exploration for secrets. The secrets seem more geared for those that built the maps and not for those that play. There's a website with videos of all the secrets - perhaps I'll just watch them all and be done with it. Movement in PK feels imprecise because of a high player inertia.

I am at the final level of Battle Out of Hell - playing on Daydream to start. One level is locked out for Daydream. Levels are all good and some are outstanding - the Pit is really impressive and the Funhouse map has totally weird enemies and a wild ride. BooH is just more Painkiller with all that is good and bad intact. I suspect that Insommnia will be really hard for me.

If PK didn't have such a pandering to trick jumping, I'd enjoy it a lot more. I'd love to see a proper SP game with this style of map making. 

Bought the gold edition for $30. I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy it, the demo was okay but not a good representation of the game. I'm almost through with the main set of missions and I've found this game grows on you. I've gotten over the lack-of-detail nitpicks (i.e. small amount of physics, can't shoot out lights, etc.) but I'm enjoying it as I progress.

Have yet to play the Stetchkov add-on included in the gold edition, but it gives you a dozen or so missions - and an extra weapon or 2, plus you can punch! So $30 is a good deal. 

are there any new aliens or anything? Weapons? How are the combats if there are not any/many new enemies?

Are the "secrets" still as box pilingly lame?

Is it just more HL2? Really worth the cash? 

Zombified combine soldiers. They don't shoot, but they run faster sometimes and they sometimes pull out a grenade but forget to throw it, so you have to kill them before they get to you and gravgun the grenade away.

Ep2 supposedly introduces a new alien species, though. 

hl2 ep1 is a well thought out way to get your money? 

[nt] 

...but, hell, it is an "other" game, and a bunch of the designers here got sucked into it at lunch yesterday. I finally beat it (Lvl 30) last night.

Pretty addictive and fun.
Oh, and level 16 is a dirty, dirty whore.

http://www.microgames.info/game_info.php?products_id=205 

[nt] 

Okay yeah I'm stupid, but now I am stuck on 15 :( 

I want PC games that would be mostly action-oriented (more than rpg and not pure puzzle adventure games) and would be sort of an open world/nonlinear.
Like Fable or BGE.

If you know games like that - please tell me.
Could be old games too (anything that runs on w2k) 

is a bitch, yeah :D 

first game I played on my new computer, no real reason but already had it lying around since my brother bought it for his laptop a while back.

Pros :

- cel shading is nice, although it does admittedly wear off after a while.

- some of the outdoor levels are very nice

Cons :

- most of the level design ranges from average to poor. Out of 30 or so levels, 5-6 are good.

- poor gameplay. Some of it is compounded due to the next point but although the makers have tried to keep it varied, it's fairly mediroce in its execution.

- Fucking lame checkpoint system. This pissed me off no end, especially since the checkpoints became scarcer as the game went on and because you were forced to sit through entire cut scenes upon each reload.

- Plot. a C grade attempt at redoing the Bourne Identity storyline in a noir like fashion. It's terrible and takes up too much gameplay time too.

I'd rate this 5/10.