I've noticed that as well. Norm mapping does present some problems for facial animation.

I haven't played MP2 in a while, and my copy is a
few hundred miles away at the moment, so I can't check this for certain, are the photosourced textures adjusted to eliminate the natural lighting from source material(quite evident in the original Max Paine's texture set, but I don't recall for MP2)? 

bleak textures... reminds me remotely of console games. 

When I ran T:DS on the upstairs computer (2GHz Celeron, GF 5600 XT [256 MB]) I might of had to lower some graphical options, but it ran smooth.

Now running it on a 1.8GHz AMD Athlon 64 and a GF 6200 LE (128 MB) and while it should run smoothly even on low detail, there seems to be a constant but small stutter - I can tell it's not a framerate issue. But I'm attributing it to the CPU - possibly the card, but I don't know. Other games run better on the 6200 than the 5600 could dream of, of course. 

I just finally got around to playing it over the last few days, and every (every!) time I hit a level transition, or quit the game, my computer would hard lock with a black screen and I had to hit the power switch (Intel 3.2 Gig w. 2 Gig of RAM and SLIed 7800s).

After reading a few threads on the Eidos forums I turned down resolution to 1024x786 and turned down shadow detail a notch or two, and turned off bloom. I'm not sure what was actually the fix, but it seems happy now.

From the reading I did, I got the impression that the game was very rushed toward the end, and has some issues with memory and optimization. A buddy of mine worked QA on it, and said pretty much the same thing...

I'm enjoying it though. 

Doesn't support dualcore, it crashed all the time for me, had to manually set it to only use one core, and then it ran fine. 

So I played through it on Hard-Boiled mode now. Mona is dead again. And I have not noticed any different ending. I don't have to play it AGAIN on Dead-On-Arrival, do I? 

yes. Not "new york minute" though, thank fuck.

She lives, but it is 1 frame in the novel that is different from what I remember. I enjoyed it all three times though actually. It's a damn fine game, and Remedy corrected a lot of what was wrong with the gameplay of the first one (slightly less reliance on quick load and slightly less annoying dream sequences) whilst improving the visuals and story a bit. 

including twilight princess and resident evil 4... so far I've been mostly playing re4.

I'm not really feeling very enthusiastic about zelda. Feels a bit like some chore I have to do - knowing that it's a long game and feeling a bit worried that the actual gameplay feels pretty dull. Haven't played much yet though and I'll give it more time but unless it gets better I'm not sure I'll play through it despite there being plenty of nice designs. 

RE4 is a seriously cool game. Massive too - it took me 25 hours, give or take, to get to Krauser (the penultimate boss), but I never managed to defeat him :{

I tried playing Wind Waker. My first experience of the Zelda universe, but after about 2-3 hours in I was bored out of my mind. I meant to pick it up again but I never got around to it. I will probably try Twilight Princess on Wii.

Tonight I just started Metroid Prime 2. Doesn't feel as immediately cool as the first one, simply because I've already spent 25 hours in the Metroid Prime universe with the first game, but I'm hoping I'll warm to it.

Bizarrely mirroring RE4, it took me ~25 hours to reach the last-but-one boss in Metroid Prime, a boss that again proved impossible for me to defeat. That thing is fucking nails :{ 

I gave up after Ripley because when I died at the final boss I was spawned before those rooms of metroids and just couldn't be arsed. Also, having forgotten to rescan some bosses after dying, I couldn't get 100% scans so I was a bit downhearted anyway. I basically gave up at that point but didn't feel short changed as I had played 99% of what was on offer and spent a long and enjoyable time doing so.

From what I played of RE4 recently, it's a big improvement over previous RE games, but the controls are still a bit awkward, and it still has Capcom's awful interface design ("Would you like to take the ammo pack? YES/NO" when you have 3 bullets and nothing much in your inventory) and unfathomably bad voice acting. What the hell is it with that? I gave it back to the mate I borrowed it off just because I know it's a game I am very likely to get pissed off with and I have a lot of other games I've yet to play much of (Zelda!) that I would rather play.

You are unlikely to warm much to the start of Twighlight Princess if Wind Waker pissed you off. Whilst it is great, there are some annoying laws of three things that annoyed the fuck out of me, although Nintendo have learned and do try and make it stay interesting. The Twighlight Realm is also exceptionally lonely, and the battle music is quite grating after the 4th or 5th time you hear it. I hear it gets REALLY good after the third dungeon though :) 

I never managed to beat the final boss, either. That really annoyed me since I was really impressed with the rest of the game, which was mostly pretty easy, and of all the games I've ever played, there are only 2-3 that I've never finished. 

Beating the Metroid Prime wasn't half as difficult as Omega Pirate or that ice boss. 

and if you loved all the fucking BOSSES in metroid prime, the sequel has about 3x that many.

...but i really liked the first one. Bosses were hard, but there were relatively few of them, and most of the game was exploration which is what it's all about anyway. They must have had a focus group tell them there weren't enough bosses in the original, so they had to add more. 

creating a Console Gaming Thread was UTTER BULLSHIT! This is beyond stupid.

Dammit, please someone locked that one and rename this one?
There is not a 100% difference in game art, game design or whatever. There in fact is NOTHING justifying a split of PC and Console games here. 

I finished it a few days ago, and I found it to be very good.
The start is a bit slow, like most 3D Zelda games I think, I guess it suffers a bit from trying (and succeeding) to be completely accessible to any player.
After the first dungeon, things get much better in my opinion. The dungeons are really great, every room has it's purpose, and the layouts and puzzles are really nicely thought out, as are the boss fights. I just wish the combat was a bit more challenging at times...
Oh and I was sceptical about the Wii controls at first, but now I really enjoy them, adds a bit of extra immersion to the game. 

czg: yes, the ice boss was an absolute cunt and utterly impossible to defeat unless you had at least a certain number of health tanks at the start. The only way I got past him was to trawl back through the entire game to uncover secret health tanks which took ages. I eventually had to use a guide �_�

I don't remember the omega pirate being that impossible, but then by that stage of the game I was pretty p1mped up with all the secret shit I had uncovered earlier.

Metlslime: ugh. I hope the bosses are somwehat fairer this time round :/

Than: the only thing that really sucked arse about RE4's interface was the retarded inventory system not giving you a quick way to change weapons during combat. The game would be so much cooler if you could map items to a button, like a hotkey, to use in realtime.

Spirit: Hear hear. This retarded split only exists because Shambler got out of the wrong side of the bed one morning 

I'm hoping Metroid Prime 3 is gonna be the Wii's "killer app" (jesus I hate that phrase).

Metroid Prime on Gamecube would have been the perfect game if:

1) The lock-on targeting control system was ditched and replaced with Halo-style dual analog controls for moving and aiming. Seriously, what were they thinking? This would have made combat a tad more challenging, but about 100x more satisfying.

2) The bosses were toned down a bit. I mean come on.

As it stands, non-boss combat in metroid prime is a bit boring, thanks to the dumbass lock-and-strafe tactics. Bosses are basically brick walls that bring the whole game to a shuddering halt.

Exploration and puzzle solving elements (the bulk of the game) are already really cool and chillax and don't need to be changed.

I played a little bit (the beginning) of Metroid Prime Hunters on my brother's DS over christmas and was really impressed that they had implemented the proper mouselike control system using the stylus :D It actually felt like Quake in terms of the speed and wide FOV. I didn't care much for the level design at the start though :/ I'll have to pick up a DS and play it properly... 

I hope MP3 has proper online multiplayer, that would help the Wii quite a bit I could imagine.
The multiplayer in Metroid Prime Hunters is nice, although very hectic, and lacks proper options when joining games and stuff, which is a shame. 

I don't remember the bosses in MP being that hard at all, apart from ripley, who was a cunt. The final boss was easy in its first form, but when it turned into the floating head thing I couldn't figure out what to do, died, and then couldn't be arsed to traipse through 2 or three rooms of platforms and metroids to get back to it.

Didn't bother playing MP2 because of the time the first game ate up, and I'm not sure I will bother with 3 because I have access only to the Japanese version, and I am not sure how kid/foreigner friendly it will be. Zelda is ok in this regard, but I require a lot of help from my electronic dictionary. 

I liked the aiming in Metroid Prime because it allowed me to relax a bit more than I would have if it were dual analogue (on a fucking GC controller? no thanks!) and concentrate on exploring and not get bogged down with insanely difficult fights. I also think that it let them be a bit more creative with the bosses. I honestly can't think of any other FPS with bosses that cool. 

As far as I have heard other people say, the boost ball guardian is fucking impossible, but it was pure joy compared to the fucking spider ball guardian a bit later, which is possibly the most insanely difficult boss ever.

Bomb jumps are ok to pull off to progress, but pulling off several jumps in a row with split second timing while constantly taking damage is infuriating.

I liked the lock on aiming bit of the Prime games. It made the combat more of a timing/spatial puzzle instead of a test of aiming skill. 

3) Note to the designers of MP3: At least use a modicum of common sense when deciding how to distribute the save points. Having twenty minutes of navigation gameplay and jumping puzzles between the last save point and a frustratingly difficult boss battle is BAD DESIGN. Just make sure there's one right before each boss, you cocks.

As a side note, I have just played enough of Metroid Prime 2 to realise that the designers have learned nothing in this regard since the original game. 

yeah. My year-old savegame is right before one of those bosses -- where you have to travel 10 minutes to get to the boss room after loading. It's the boss that swims in a circle and has endless mosquitoes coming at you. 

Stop whining you toddler.

It would have been more useful if that lot had been posted in the console thread. Would have saved some of us skipping over it at least. 

Is that the one, Metlslime? I play Echoes every so many months hoping I've accumulated enough mustard to get past it but, alas, I have given up hope and am considering hiring a twelve-year-old to get me past that boss :)