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 :) 

could be... there's like an energy tank or something missle expansion or something right before it... you stand in a middle platform and he makes waves sometimes? I think... 

Especially since he has a somewhat difficult first form as well, and then when you get to the second form (already weakened by spending so much time in the damaging atmosphere) it just becomes a stressing hell to navigate around the thing in the precious seconds when it's dazed.

And Quadraxis! Jesus!

Metroid Prime 2 has generally been a complete pain in the ass, and I never bothered finishing it once I got the final suit and I just needed to do the last key hunt.

Posting just to annoy Shambler here. 

than: I also found the controls annoying when starting but now I've gotten used to them and it's definitely a game worth playing. Have to agree on the voice acting and that they should have made weapons/items switchable/usable with some button instead of having to pause the game and bring up the inventory screen.

When I've finished re4 I'll probably write a bit more of what I liked and what I would have liked to see done differently.

The thing that kind of puts me off about zelda is that after finishing the first temple I've spent four hours on it and haven't really had any real challenge at all wich means that my brain has only gotten very small bits of stimulation from appreciating some of the designs (wich btw seems to range from awesome to blah). 

playing fear now, writing down thoughts:

1) There are no locked doors. Is the common conception in games such that locked doors i NEVER get a key to are 'irritating' or 'misleading'? Or why would a pretty realistic game like fear not use the concept of locked doors to make their levels more realistic?

2)This brings me to the next point: the leveldesign is pretty... obvious to me. That may very well have everything to do with me own level design experience and nothing with how much fun the game is, but most levels up to this point felt.. like built from a certain formular. Maybe that will change.. ?

3) Don't just completely refill the player after and before each fight(-ing area). that makes 'being good' at the game so fucking pointless it's a shame. (that just stopped though, so maybe the first levels were like that to make life easier for newbies?

4) Why have fighting areas at all? The game could feel much more tense if there weren't these supposedly completely saled off areas with about 5 enemies in them.

5) points for the enemy ai: it's just stupid, not ultra-mega-duh like most other games. Still feels stupid though.

6) having 3-dimensional layouts is awfully important for fpses. The amount of fun of an area is almost proportional to the degree of how much the third axis is put to use.

7) long quicksave times are pretty annoying

8) What's up with the player speed? It's ok for fights, but hello, even diablo introduced running...

9)only one way (or one way camouflaged as a fork to two ways) is always bad. Always. Seriously. In a game where you're up against a huge numer of enemies that act in a team, having more than an entrance and an exit to a room is vital to have more interesting gameplay and more afraidness of the player.

10) It just crashed in idle while i was writing this. hrm. 

Well, the enemy AI is pretty good. I haven't seen enemy AI done better in an FPS or 3PS to date, and I've had to look at these things in quite some detail.

Other than that, I found the game somewhat unimaginative and boring. Recommended as an AI case study only. 

11) Autosaves should be intelligent: if i just saved 2secs before the auto, it's much less confusing to just use that savepoint when i load.

12) Don't make enemies fall down stuff when they die via scripting. looks bad, and every enemy on a ledge does this. it's old.

13) we need an alternative to hard hitboxes. something that fits more into the way humans move through obstacles. i just bumped my head and got stuck under a 5cm metal thingy.
Maybe you could make this into a realistic falling damage model: when you jump against a door with your shoulder, your shoulder hurts / is slower. this would put an end to ledge crawling, too, i guess. And rocket-jumps... :/. But this is for realistic games anyways.

13) while you're at that, put hitpoints to rest, and model real injuries.

14) oldie: consistency. In fear there's numerous valves everywhere. about 2% ofthem are important to the game (ie. you can turn them). it'd be cooler to have all of them functional and make me figure out when there's one that's actually useful

15) love the way you can destroy grates with two hits in this game.looks so cool. 

hrm, they sometimes try to get in your back. what else is good about it? They mostly just run stupidly into my fire. They feel pretty lifeless, ie. like computer players.

Game with best AI is still descent2 for me ;). of course the robots didn't really react in swarms, but each kind had their own behaviour and felt unique. I personally hated those green small fuckers with laser lvl4. i don't feel hate against the greyish anonymous soldier in fear. and some robots tried getting behind your back, too. also, they hid, were defensive and then suddenly came at you. the smaller, faster enemies tended to come at you in groups. Also, there were dumber and more intelligent (evil) robots. oh, the joy of a homing robot hiding in lava filled passages... </fanboism></nerdiness. 

Essentially, the FEAR AI uses an implementation of Jeff Orkin's GOAP architecture. I'm not an AI programmer, but those that I work with never get tired of telling me how good GOAP (Goal-Oriented Action Planning) is at producing emergent looking behaviour in AI with no scripting, far superior to more traditional systems such as finite state machines. FEAR probably doesn't show off the potential of GOAP as well at is should because the enemies have a pretty simplistic set of goals and actions (get to cover, kill player etc.)

The reason they run stupidly into your fire is because the designers chose to make them exposed all the time, so you can see all the cool animations of them running around, jumping through windows and vaulting over boxes.

In this case, sophisticated AI does not amount to "intelligent" looking soldiers, but it does give the illusion of fun dynamic combat, with enemies running around all over the place and flanking you etc.

This is why unless you're making some kind of neckbeardy realistic tactical shooter, where the enemies stay in one place most of the time behind cover and occasionally pop out and headshot you, enemies will seem dumb. After all, you've got to give the player a chance to shoot them sometimes. 

gril 

gril 

gril 

o_O

That's the oddest spam ever, Nintendo trying to do advertising or something? 

I can't find the original Imageshack links so I uploaded them to my server. There are 1600x1200 wallpapers of Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life and Doom 3:

http://www.phaitaccompli.com/gamewalls/ 

It sounds good.. Anybody already played it, or a demo ? In anyway here is the website:

http://lostplanet-thegame.com/flash_index.php 

but it's 360-only. Bzzt! wrong thread! :) 

I hear it's quite cool, but you can get into an infinite loop of falling down after damage and taking another hit that floors you the instant you recover and so on until you die.

Other than that it sounds quite cool. 

lengthy pain anims on bad guys = yes
lengthy pain anims on the player = nooooo 

I knew that, but as the game looked very good, I decided to post anyway...
BTW a friend of mine played it on X-360, and it reminded him "StartShip Troopers" movie.. It told me that is it really frantic: many exploding stuff everywhere, a lot of hordes of monsters, etc.. etc.. Very intense gameplay it seems... Well, I'll try to test it ASAP :) 

Currently playing the PC version of R6:Vegas at work and the 360 version at home - yeah I don't know why either :/ I find the game really pisses me off constantly, but there's something about it that keeps me coming back for more.

The games are identical in terms of content on both platforms, although the 360 wins imo due to the controls working out better.

Not far past the Vegas Strip, so I won't post a proper review yet. 

I watched a few minutes of someone playing it at work last night, plot seems a little weird (from what I gathered you kill the creatures to harness their "precious thermal energy") but from the few minutes of gameplay I saw it looked like it could be fun, if a little clumsy at parts. Apart from nice graphics in the into cutscene (which I'm assuming was being rendered ingame) there wasn't much to make me want the game though. 

funny thing is, I knew it was japanese as soon as I saw the subtitle "Extreme Condition."

And it is apparently a Capcom game, and has lots of console-y designs and stuff (the look of the alien creatures is very metroid prime-y, for example.) 

metroid prime-y bugs and aliens that move in wierd ways and you don't know what to expect. Generally more interesting than shooting the same old bloody terrorists/nazis/other blokes-with-guns etc. 

Generally more interesting than shooting the same old bloody terrorists/nazis/other blokes-with-guns etc.

Oh, I get it; so you're one of those bleeding heart liberals, eh? Next you're going to want a game where you get to bomb American infrastructure.

I can see the terrorists have already won.