I didn't know Prey was out yet!!! I thought it came out like the 11th or something. I need that game - 3dRealms can have my soul if they want it - I just need it fast and hard!!!!!!! 

is not out yet unless you pirate a gold beta or something. 

http://phaitplays.blogspot.com/2006/07/review-call-of-cthulhu.html 

oh my god, how could i miss this gem?

i just got my hands on it and it ROCKS! Arguably a very dissappointing start, but oh boy does it get nice after that.

It feels weird at first and arguably has shitty (tm) lighting all over the place (vertex lighting only?) and it looks kinda washed out, but the leveldesign gets better and better, vehicle missions actually make sense when you can destroy the environment and it has all the non-linear FEEL to it that hl2 and doom3 so miserably fail to produce.

the level-layouts are just so much nicer and more thought through then box - corridor - box (and yes, it feels like that in hl2, too), and the destroyable stuff adds a cool realistic flair.

woha, im blown away, more to come :) 

OMFG

I won't spoil the story - but hands down the Best Game Ever. My only complaint is that it's short - it shouldn't take more than 10 hours to beat. But my god, what a feast this game is. It's just... really really good.

Get it and play it. 

http://img53.imageshack.us/img53/6938/zwiffle6wv.jpg 

by the way, the ending continues on after the credits...

if only this game had more monster types... 

how does it run compared to q4/d3 ? 

slower for me
but u can turn off all the extra glitz to make it run fine. why not try the demo? 

as for demo, I'm annoyed at having tried demos that require different specs to the final game. 

hm. it loads and runs faster than doom3/quake4 for me on the same settings in 1024x768. 

on the new comp, god this game is stunning ot look at. The textures are so sharp and the design is great. I like hte levels too, free to explore and do what you want most times. Nice enemy variety, I dig the gameplay here.

If only it had a proper save system and some better model animation, especially the player. It seems a bit stiff.

Is it mappable ? some killer maps could be made or it. 

so far it's like everyone said, fairly so-so.

There's some stunning design, but in other places the levels look overly cluttered, much like a lot of new games. Rorshach's skinwork is amazing, especially on the Skaarj who just look brilliant IMHO.

The atmosphere is fairly good too, but what is clearly lacking is gameplay. The weapons are pathetic and weak, there is no sense of intensity in any of the fights. The best level so far has been the one where you rescue a team of marines than hold the dropship landing zone for 5 mins whilst being attacked from multiple points.

Dnt know how far into it I am, but hopefully the gameplay picks up (I doubt it). till then, the occasional brilliant design and the cool Skaarj will ekep me going. 

I started Unreal2 multiple times, and hated it multiple times. Then one time I pushed myself and got past a certain point... and really liked it.

The weapons are weak, they have very little sense of impact... but the fact is, I found myself giving a damn what was happening. I enjoyed talking with the crew members, finding out more of what was going on, and actually cared. It has a lot of significant flaws, but it does something no other FPS has done - made me care about the other characters in the game or what happened beyond whether or not I died. 

Enclave is mappable but unfortunatly I don't think there has been any custom map made and due to lack of community and good documentation it's probably very hard to get into at least when it comes to doing any script stuff but please do try!

Look here for info and tools: http://www.starbreeze.com/ogier.jsp 

Its one of the most underrated games 

So I gave in and purchased WoW, currently playing a lvl16 Night Elf warrior on Ravenholdt.





(see you all in 6 months or so) 

Ok yeah so I played the demo and gave my thoughts a few posts above. "So far so good" I mused. Then I got the full game.

I'm not sure how far into the game it dawned on me, but when it did, it went something like this:

"Whoa whoa whoa, wait a fucking minute - I can't actually die in this game???."

So I'm playing the game in a thinly disguised God Mode, where "death" is just a minor inconvenience, costing you only a few seconds as you are sent to a brief shooting gallery minigame to raise your health (but even shooting stuff is optional because you're given a nominal amount of health even if you don't hit anything); you can never run out of ammo as it regenerates slightly when you run dry (as does your health just in case being effectively invincible was too much of a challenge). No it's nothing like quicksave/quickload (it has that too btw) - if you "die" halfway through killing a monster, when you "respawn" (in the exact same place you died, conveniently) the monster is still half-dead. This made the first boss encounter laughable as I just stood in the middle of the room shooting him because I wanted to get a close-up look at the cool model, and also I couldn't be arsed to find cover - I only needed to visit the shooting gallery 3 times before he keeled over.

So ok, combat is now trivial and meaningless - what about the rest of the game?

Spirit walk puzzles were fun until I realised that the game tells you exactly when to go into Spirit Mode by conveniently placing a glowing blue "Go Into Spirit Mode Here" decal anywhere you needed to use it (do you see a pattern emerging here?). I had to groan when they started using this to do crap Doom3-style "find the access code" puzzles to open doors.

Portals are cool I guess, but they're just teleporters - even Unreal had the ones like here where you can see through to the other side - so I'm not going to get too excited about them.

Gravity dickery is the only real innovation here and it is cool - makes for some very confusing navigation in parts, but sadly it does little to disguise the fact that the game progression is still mind-numbingly linear.

So yeah - who's the target audience for this game? There's a big red 18 certificate slapped on the box - I guess because they wanted the player character to say "fuck" a lot (he does), and they wanted gibs and gore, but the difficulty level surely means that only casuals and those new to gaming will get any lasting satisfaction from playing this. 

http://images.cafepress.com/product/5155571_240x240_F.jpg 

...it's weird, I can't really argue with any of the facts you've pointed out, and yeah, in a way all those things do make the game sorta weak and hand-holdy (which I normally despise), but all that being said, I'm still really enjoying the game.

I know that the wall-walking/gravity tricks are at least a good chunk of it--I love shit like that, and I love creative level layouts and lots of vertical and so forth, but...I dunno. Maybe I'm just getting less critical in my old age. It's a fun, pretty game and I like it.

Anyone know the status of an editor? I'd love to make a map with lots of gravity stuff that will make people projectile vomit five minutes after the match starts... 

About Unreal2: I thought this was really a horrible game, gameplay was just awful, and the story is insultingly stupid, they make you play a complete idiot. Only some of the visuals were ok.

About Prey: I totally agree with Kinn, but I still kinda enjoyed it. A shame they didn't use the spirit walk and death thing in a more interesting manner (like requiring you to use up spirit energy to come back from the dead maybe, and making more interesting secrets with spirit walk, for instance opening up areas to attack enemies from more a more advantagous area or something).

pjw, type editor in the console. =) 

I don't have the game handy; how do you bring up the console? I tried hitting tilde, and when nothing happened, couldn't be bothered to mess with it further and went back to playing the game...

Or is it some config setting, allowconsole 1 or something...? 

You can make a new short Prey.exe shortcut, but add "+set r_fullscreen 0 +set r_brightness 1 +set r_multiSamples 0 +wait +wait +wait +editor" after the prey.exe, without quotes.Really all you need is +editor, but the other stuff is supposed to help out too. I stole that from doom3world.org or 3drealms forums or something. It's basically the Doom3Editor (sad face.)

Kinn: You are right about everything really. That's one reason the game is so short - because it's just overly easy. The "self-adjusting" style of difficulty has, at least in my experience, never been pulled off well. After a while, the spirit walking puzzles basically just got tedious, as they all became "walk through barrier, push button, /spiritwalk." The level design was never fully realized imo, they could've done a lot cooler puzzles and everything.

Still, this is probably my new favorite game. I had a total blast playing it. 

This sounds like a situation where our preconceptions about what makes a game good or bad (saving, death, puzzles) fails to explain whether the game is actually fun. So what is it about Prey that makes it fun even though it shouldn't be fun based on our pseudoscientific analyses? Is it the medal-of-honor effect where all you need is a lot of flash and sizzle and "cool moments" to ignore that it's shallow, or unchallenging, or overly linear?

(note: i haven't played it myself.) 

Thanks Zwiffle!
(I should have known...)