Metro was nice, but after playing Stalker, and reading a bit of the Metro book, it really makes you wish it was a bit more open-ended.
Still better than any silly CoD solo campaign.
Will probably get the new one myself, looks nice. 

Ranger Hardcore is the way to go if you want to tackle Metro 2033 the best possible way. No HUD, scarce resources and bullets hurt like a bitch. I played it like this on my first playthrough and had a blast. 

yay or nay? 

this is what a DOS prompt would look like if it were a horror game
http://www.datatragedy.com/wipmoabd/ 

Loading bar fills to 100 percent and then just sits there. Anyone else? 

But I don't know what it is. 

If you have a copy of DUKE3D.GRP somewhere in a long forgotten directory on your hard drive. DNF is out.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/duke-nukem-forever 

what games are the best for showing it off nowadays? First person to say Crysis 1 gets a pint of nanobots down the japs-eye 

Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, Witcher 2, Bulletstorm, Metro, Modded Skyrim, Modded GTA4... all different engines 

The thing that always bugged me about it was the purely flat ambient light. Made everything look fake. The SSAO just made it worse. There was also plenty of pop-in, weird looking clouds and strange noisy shadow filtering. The skin shading was also really weird looking, it looked like subtly backlit wax from all angles somehow. And all the hard surfaces have this plastic sheen to them. When Doom3 did it everyone complained about it, seems by 2007 everyone just got used to it.

Maybe if the art direction wasn't so bloody generic it could have worked. Crysis 2 was like being locked up inside a Michael Bay flick with the visuals. Latest Crysis really improved in all those areas, tough it all still looks abnormally slick to me.

Meh, screw realism, boring... 

With TressFX switched on. I get about 0.5 FPS that way, I expect you can do better :) 

With TressFX switched on. I get about 0.5 FPS that way, I expect you can do better :) 

Battlefield 4 isn't out yet... right? I imagine BF 3 would be a good bet though. I think Witcher, Skyrim, modded GTA 4 are all pretty solid choices too.

Hmm, nothing in there really sets my heart on fire though. Blame the current console generation, but PC graphics aren't really moving forward very fast are they?? 

What Spiney said...

But if you just want to see photo-realistic pixels patterns in realtime, rthdribl is my choice, until we get photon mapping in realtime. 

http://youtu.be/9k-N49P5N1I

uncludes download link.
my issue with it is that's it's really hard to make up foreground from background 

But yeah, it's hard to distinguish what's solid and what's not. The gunshots are hard to see as well, and they made a mistake when going through doors - they shouldn't move where your character is on the screen after going through them.

It's a bit odd as well - it looks like most of the work done was on converting the Q2 assets. Why not just make a game?

Maybe I'm being too cynical. 

Pretty awesome looking! I haven't downloaded but I shall. 

Judging from the videos the guy is mostly a coder and he generally takes other game stuff to test/show off his engine. 

http://openxcom.org/index.php/2013/05/its-finally-here-version-0-9/
OpenXCom 0.9 (fully playable)

I hope it is ok to post in this thread as it is available for not only Windows but also MacOS, Linux, OpenBSD, Haiku and some consoles (handheld!). 

Well, I bought this during the Steam weekend special at half off. I was expecting to really not like it. I generally find 3rd person games to be awkward and difficult to control. I was right about that, but I ended up actually enjoying most of the game.

The QTE parts of the game can have serious problems on the PC. During QTE "combat" sequences the game often would not respond to the keyboard "button mashing". I also experienced loss of mouse control in several "escape" sequences. I found out that these problems mostly went away by temporarily using lower video settings and turning v-sync off. Unfortunately I didn't find out about this work-around until toward the end of the game.

The environments are very nice. The level design, texturing, etc. are all top notch. The models and animation are some of the best I've seen in a game of this type. For once Lara's chest is actually pretty normal. The storyline was good as were the puzzle parts and overall the game was interesting enough to keep me playing almost non-stop for days and actually continuing all the way to the very end.

I ended up at 91% completion overall (I gave up on trying to find all the exploration type items about halfway through). I played on normal difficulty for almost the entire game.

If it wasn't for the control issues I'd rated it 9 out of 10 stars easy. Even though those issues only occur in a few short parts of the game, it causes a lot of frustration and really detracts from the overall experience. 

and its fucking amazing. A bit on the easy side I suppose but fuck is it beautiful and well thought out and expansive. HL was my 1st love and this rekindles the flames and then some. If you have even a passing interest and a copy of HL on your computer, check it out.
Hopefully, unlike me, you'll have the time to absorb it in long sittings, instead of 30 minute chunks. Fuck. not like the old days. 

So far (1/3 the way through), I actually agree with Ricky about this, gasp.

QTEs are utterly irredeemably awful.

Oft-changing and randomly fixed camera perspective is very poor.

Constant switching between controlling Lara and just watching Lara is pointless nonsense.

^^^ all of the above are immersion-breaking bollox.

BUT:

Graphics, lighting, and effects are superb, environments and atmosphere are very good, characters are very well done, Lara in particular is portrayed convincingly, the progression in intriguing, and the actual combat gameplay is fair, slick and pretty good fun (and shows how good the game could have been if they hadn't spoiled it with QTE shite). Like Ricky all of those aspects are strong enough to keep me playing it despite the clear (and deliberate) control flaws. 

 

(probably) 

(probably)