Slowtrain

It's reaching the point now where I almost expect any game that comes out of eastern Europe or Russia to be good and any game that comes out of the US to be crap. Sad.

I'm enjoying the heck out of this game. My only complaint so far would be that the combat isn't more twitch-based; I would prefer a more active role in loping off barghast heads with my claymore beyond timing mouse clicks. OTOH, combat is far superior to say Dungeon Siege. More than any thing I am just enjoying the complexity of the game: all the things to read and learn.

Too bad. You missed about 100 turns worth of rat killing.

Just started The Witcher. The opening cinematic was fabulous.

Many of the greatest posters on message boards everywhere are/were alts. To be an alt is a powerful thing.

A little history is good for the soul. All that stuff is pulled from my somewhat (OK, extremely) hazy memories of those days however, so to call it history is probably a bit too highfalutin'. Demented ramblings might be a better term.

Doom Clone was not a term used to actually represent games that were clones of Doom. It was a term for any FPS practically up until Quake was released, which happened to be 5 months after Duke Nukem 3D. Doom clone is somewhat derogatory in nature and implies that the game in question offers only a rehash of what Doom had done. Much like System Shock some years before, D3D was an anti-doom clone. People who played Quake generally did not like D3d; people who liked D3d generally disliked quake. The Quake fanboys considered D3d to be old tech and needlessly complicated. Duke fanboys considered Quake an unsightly mush of green and brown polygons that actually had less gameplay than doom/doom2. Both sides were correct, of course. Quake was the 3d fps in its ugly infancy, while DUke with its Build engine was the last, and most mature (development wise not gameplay wise), of the 2-d sprite based games Duke4 was a highly anticipated game back then because of the premise that it would combine its gameplay with an engine that equalled or surpassed quake/quake2. Of course ultimately Doom/Quake "won", partially because 3d realms appeared unable to finish their promised game and became a laughing stock and partially because the id machine was totally unstoppable until Valve gave id a big fat knuckle sandwich with Half Life (which owed a lot more to D3d than to Doom) My point being don't make the mistake of selling D3d short or likewise not understanding the significance that Duke4 had even in its promise of what might be.

Actually D3d wasn't really a doom clone at all. AT the time of its release its main competitor was Quake. FPS gamers were pretty much split into 2 groups: those who swore by the "true 3d" of QUake (which was a Doom clone of course) and those who loved the over the top gameplay and setting of D3D. DUke3d had an inventory, jetpacks, wild level design, laser trip mines and pipe bombs (which were unheard of in those days) A lot of the later fps enhancements really owe their development to duke 3d rather than doom/quake.

Duke3d was the first game I ever played in which the toilets flushed. A trend that has now been copied ad nauseum in every fps since.

What changes does that patch make? Gameplay changes? Or just bug fixes?

I laughed at that.

And here I thought DN4 was just kind of some tax write off. DN3 was actually my favorite shooter for a long time. It was one of the first games, along with Mechwarrior 2, that I first played in high res. High res at that time being 640*480. It had pretty good multiplay with the freeze ray and shrinker and the pipe bombs and trip mines.

XCOM IV (Not counting XCOM: Interceptor here). Doesn't even have to be a sequel, a flat out remake would be fine. Jagged Alliance 3. One that actually has the content of Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, not the content of Fallout:Tactics. STALKER 2. Oh wait. W00t!

FARCRY! In a fit of wild passion I installed it. Its funny how I remember playing this game 2 years ago or whatever, and I could barely run it at 1024*768 with most options on low. Now I'm running it at 1280*1024 with everything maxed it and it as smooth as glass. Ah, technology. Anyway, after playing Crysis so recently Farcry seems much easier than I remember. The mercs are totally awesome though. I think they are the best enemies in any FPS I've ever played. The things they say totally crack me up when you are marking them with the binos. I love that line when you are going through the oil tanker that you hear over the PA: "Hygiene alert: Remember to not eat anything that has been left too long laying in the sun." lol. Farcry does seem to have more personaility than Crysis in some ways.

The spectacle of the mountain collapsing in the distance when you are driving up the valley with the tanks was amazing though. I just stopped and stared.

STALKER: Clear Sky is supposed to be out in Spring 2008. Even with slippage, hopefully it will make 2008 at some point. I'm highly looking forward to that. My hope is that it will be everything that S:SOC was plus all the stuff they had to leave out plus refinements of existing systems.

I thought Razor was pretty good, although I had thought it was going to be more about Cain and the what happened to the Pegasus between the time they jumped out of the shipyards to the time they met the Galactica. I wasn't expecting as much present time story mixed with some flashbacks. I thought the flashbacks were more interesting than the present time story that played out. My only real annoyance was that the thing Cain kept fondling wasn't a razor, it was a knife. Petty, I know, but what can I say.

hmmm. You're probably right. Maybe I'll just let my current save rest for a while and come back to it in a few weeks when I am Bioshock fresh. I must be pretty close to the end at this point and I would like to see it through.

That's almost eternally quotable.

I'd advise you against it. The moronic AI and the unchallenging gameplay really make it a pretty bad straight shooter. Really, circle strafing is the only thing you need to deal with 99% of the enemies. Also, because the story is, in many ways, a critique of the straight shooter design paradigm, everything about Bioshock just becomes extra painful. That's a good point. I was thinking though that if I played it straight without all the extra stuff then using all the weapons and finding all the hidden health and ammo would become much more important, sort of like a scavenger hunt of death, and might make the game more interesting from a survival horror perspective.

I made it just past the volcano level, killed the good doctor, then opened the door behind him and saw a giant room filled with trigens that I had to cross and I said, OK that is enough of that, and stopped playing.

I thought the choices for turn base strat games were pretty decent, althought I think personally I would put Civ-type games in a different category from games liek XCOM and Jag 2. Also, even though I am not a terribly enthusiiastic fan of Half Life (Hi Alan!), I do agree that it was a pretty important game for bringing major change to the FPS genre. Though of course the original System SHock had already done all that and more years earlier, but Half Life brough tthose changes to much wider audience.

It's not the aliens themselves, per se. Rather the game seems to undergo a rather drastic gameplay change, moving from a relatively open freelance tacitcs FPS game to a pretty linear, do-this do-that do this, mess it up and the game ends thing. COmbine that with a nasty bug with reloading quicksaves that produces unkillable enemies and the whole affair became rather tedious. Yeah, I didn't like it there either all that much. The trigens were much less interesting adversaries than the mercs. But the gameplay didn't change nearly as drastically, and Farcry wasn't nearly so good as Crysis (imo) so the decline is enjoyment was not so noticeable there.

Oblivion? Right, all credibility right out the window then. And as Steve points out, considering how little is known about FO3, calling it a worthy heir is obviously a prediction of nostradamus-like magnitude. WHich is to say, total BS. I think that by "worthy heir", they meant games that haven't been released, but that they feel will keep that game's particular genre alive. Obiously the Codex and NMA were not consulted when this list was put together then.

Well, I've stopped playing at the alien levels. The game has lost a lot of its fun quotient for me, becoming very linear and repetitve. (The whole "Defend Prophet" section did me in.) the first 2/3's of the game were quite stellar though. Check out the awesome pic on this thread. THis is from the village where I ended up killing a lot fo soldiers, but not THIS many, tfg. http://www.crysis-online.com/forum/index.p...ic,16185.0.html