if you go out the back entrance of Ardea there is lighthouse on the cliff with some pirate man in there. 

We know about you and back entrances.

BTW, isn't that Jack? You can leave him alive, talk to him, and get a couple of quests... 

thats the guy, but I felt it was time to test the open nature of the game so I decided that all pirates must die on site after talking to him and lo and behold it let me kill him!

Well I got about 6 hours logged in the demo and I have now uninstalled it. I gave the combat system a lot of time to see if I could adapt to it but in the end it just really pisses me off, and judging by ANY gothic 3 forum on the internet I am not alone by a long shot.

Sad really cos like I said the rest of the game is great 

...saw the full game second hand for �20 so snapped it up. Just got to upgrade to do it justice (will encourage me to do so).

BTW it tells you some stuff about attacks in the manual.

I still find it mostly mashing though - although that's no different to Rune or Enclave, for example.

Oh to have Blade's combat system in more games. 

make sure to apply the latest patch BEFORE starting a new game! otherwise the chests will only contain useless junk.

another patch is said to be released in a week or two. 

That posts reminds me, the game is also ridden with bugs which is unfortunate. 

holy fucking shit! this game ROCKS!

My bro got it the other day for his 360 and we played about 3 hours of coop single player, its the most fun I have had in a game in a long time :)

The weapons are really satisfying to use, particular mention MUST go to the chainsaw melee attack you can do on enemies, this is just amazing, sprays of blood and bits of bone and flesh spray all over the place as you cut though guys, sooooooo satisfying!

The coop mode is done really well. If one of you dies the other player can run over to you and revive you so you can keep on playing, and some levels feature split paths that you both take for some quick solo play, usually these areas have intersecting parts where you can help each other out such as player 1 being pinned by a locust MG while player 2 can get around behind it and take it down etc. I cant recommend this mode enough! Framerate is excellent too considering the graphical detail.

Ok some of my favourite bits so far (spoiler warning!)

1) The berserker enemy! This thing is blind but has a great sense of hearing and smell, you are in abandoned building with just this guy shuffling around, if you make a noise or get too close he goes crazy and just runs at you, breaking through walls/pillars and other things to get at you while screaming :) Amazing monster design, you need to "aim" his charges to break down doors and objects to progress.

2) The evil bat enemies that come out when it gets dark. They are afraid of the light so if you wander out of the street lit areas you get totally gibbed after a second or 2. There are various gas tanks lying around the level that you have to shoot to make light sources so its safe to progress, and some areas require a player to aim a giant spotlight at the other player while he progresses across a dark courtyard etc. Fantastic!

3) The cutscenes are in general, fucking cool, really well done with fantastic animations and effects, really enjoyed watching them.

Going to play some more when my bro gets back from work, cant wait :) 

XBlargh360Blargh.

Neg!ke, will do for sure. Any other tips to get it running as best as possible?

(BTW apart from slow loading and occasional but regular crashes (which seemed to be mostly related to the loading)) I didn't have many problems with the demo). 

do you or oyur brother have a home theatre ?

I've heard great stuff about GoW on a wdiescreen tv with surround sound. 

since you're going to get new ram anyway, I guess there shouldn't be much need to tweak.
i only have 1gb and somehow managed to minimize the preloading stutter by inceasing the windows swap file to 2gb and setting object cache to max (recommended for 2gb physical ram anyway). common ini tweaks only had negative effects for me.

i also recommend disabling post-processing as it seems to improve the lighting a bit (because i found the many fullbright spots to look spectacularly shit).

i rarely encountered crashes. some started to appear after installing patch 1.08 at certain events (only two actually), but patch 1.09 kind of fixed them - the game still froze for some time but instead of crashing to the desktop, i was able to continue playing eventually.
as for bugs, yeah, there are lots of them. but they are not that serious so i can live with them (apparently unlike the rest of the faggy emo community arose around this game). what bothers me more are certain gameplay decisions the creators made that i disagree with as they make the game feel more shallow and take away a good chunk of the immersion and atmosphere its predecessors had. also, it suffers a little from the oblivion syndrome: the world is too large. (but in its defence: it has three different environments, forests, ice land and desert, with a remarkably huge variety of creatures)

i don't know which version the demo is, but patch 1.08 fixes the hyperspeed attacks of some monsters, e.g. boars and bloodflies, as well as making the crossbow actually usable.
overall balance still sucks, especially when comparing monsters/npcs.. ah, what gives. my right index finger already looks like hulk hogan :D 

Sounds great. Using berserk to break doors for you - very clever design.
too bad its box-only :((( 

My bro has a medium-ish sized widescreen TV but no surround sound unfortunately.

It is a shame its 360 only at the moment, I hope they do bring out a pc version because this game kicks so much arse. 

Noted and saved. Demo is probably 1.08 as the attacks are not too bad. 

played GoW coop at work for the first time and I must say it's fucking awesome. Only played for 2 hours so haven't got as far as Daz, but I totally agree with what he said about it.

It's not perfect, but it's still fucking good fun and likely the best game you are likely to play this Christmas. 

- one of those likelys 

iiiiiiiiiiiii

anybody else have one of these yet? I think it's pretty fucking awesome myself. So shut up than.

Wii Sports seemed like it might just be a simple throwaway title for the sake of having one in the box, but it's kind of addicting. It's still simple, but a title deserving of shelf space. I got a hold of a Wii before Thanksgiving and brought it home over the holiday, and my dad kept challenging me to games of golf. The different sports all come with a variety of training gametypes, too - a tennis mode that trains you to time your swings to hit specific moving targets, a golf mode that has you hitting balls onto a big bullseye with a 9-iron for score, and a bowling mode for practicing power throws that pits you against larger and larger arrays of pins (up to almost 100 pins at a time).

But, here's the utter seal of amazement: my mom wanted to try it. That's something. She was still deathly uncoordinated, but it's a step forward. 

We have one at work and it's pretty popular...like people are coming in early and leaving late to play the Wii. So far I've played Bowling and Tennis and they were pretty cool. I watched other people play Red Steel (mehhh looks not so great and apparently controls not so great) and Twilight Princess (pretty cool, about what you'd expect from a "new" Zelda game)

I can't help but shake the nagging feeling that the core concept of motion controlled gaming is something that could have been done years ago but probably wouldn't have caught on because games were still improving graphically. This is the perfect time for the Wii because we have all these slight improvements being touted as next gen, and I think even "hardcore" gamers realize it's bullshit and just want to actually enjoy themselves.

The Wii, although gimmicky, is still a very cool concept and I think we could see some really crazy/innovative ideas pop up...hopefully :) 

...and it was ugly, unrewarding and unbelievably tedious. I don't think I've ever been so bored by something that claims to be entertainment.

I think Condemned tries to be something other than your average shooter, but it fails miserably imho. The slow player speed, sparse combat, heavy darkness, limited ammunition, claustrophobic environments and prosaic level design all add up to a game with little to enjoy and nothing to do but trudge through the cliche story and predictable set peices.

High points include believable environments, a strong atmosphere of tenstion, all around quality assets, and an interesting melee combat system. Unfortunately the visuals are let down by harsh minimal lighting and the combat is simply not that good.

It's difficult to recommend so much as spending the time to play the demo, let alone purchasing the game. Avoid 

they play xbox in japan? (ok it's a game company but anyway!) 

I think there were like 8 xboxes sold in october...
totalling to ~120 since the beginning of the year. source - NPD

xbox360 numbers are much bigger but still way ps2 

way below ps2 

So, my question goes to the XBOX360 owners here who DO NOT have an HDTV: Is the XBOX360 noticably superior to othe original XBOX in visual quality assuming you are using a regular widescreen TV (and not HDTV) ? 

I've never seen an 360 on hdtv but in terms of graphics quality you just need to look at gears of war in action and its easy to tell that its way ahead of the xbox 

It's hard for me to judge the 360 on a NON-HDTV TV and I've _ONLY_ seen it demoed on HDTV's in stores and thefore dont have the slightest idea about what kind of quality I should expect if I was to get the 360 since I don't have an HDTV myself. 

are just the console rendering in higher resolution. That's the only difference - no bells and whistles are enabled in 720 or 1080 that aren't in 480, the same assets are used across all settings ... it's just the same picture on a different size TV.

Universally.

Oh wait I guess I pissed off Shambler by mentioning a non-PC game so he had to change the thread title. I'd better not post this then!