i remember being seriously impressed when the camera moved away from the monitor and you could see that the gui was part of the game world.

it wasn't just the unified lighting that was cool about doom3. i know in-game guis are old hat nowadays, but i still think it's pretty awesome. 

I think the doom 3 engine still does the best in-game GUI's, at least I have not seen anything better in any other competing engines. 

to be fair, i seriously hate that delay where your gun has to come back up after you leave a gui. if there's a gui in your LoS when you're fighting something and your crosshair passes over it, you get locked out of firing for a second or so... 

Great great fun: http://armorgames.com/play/3614/crush-the-castle
I got weird looks because I laughed so much. 

Try this one if you have half an hour to spare:
http://jayisgames.com/cgdc6/?gameID=9 

I played through both of them just now and enjoyed every minute. Nice finds! The second one is especially cool--pixel abstraction as art...

I played through this the other night, and had a lot of fun (although my patience wore thin on the bonus levels):

http://www.kongregate.com/games/TheGameHomepage/red-remover 

Very cool idea: http://giantsparrow.com/games/swan/ 

I remember someone linking this. I didn't like it, because it became incredibly boring and hurt my eyes. 

Torchlight is only $5 / �3.74 today on Steam! Just bought it and 2 other games for less than 7 quid. I'm a happy boy, merry christmas valve! 

For 20 euro it was a really solid purchase.
For 10 euro it was a steal.
For 5 euro you have to be retarded to not buy it. 

This.

I play it sparingly and its surprisingly good if you enjoy the Diablo style gameplay. 

I just wasted 14 hours on it. I played Fate as well a few years ago, and this is a serious evolution.

Annoying how all the dungeons are one still though, apart from the Hatch quests. Would have been nice to have the metamap a bit more developed. 

Lockdown certainly wasn't next on my list of games to play, but I'm yet to play a tactical shooter, or any of the Tom Clancy titles. So, I was curious about what kind of games they actually are.

Lockdown is a tactical shooter; which I always assumed would require a lot of tactics rather than run-and-shoot gameplay. I don't know if this was just a bad example of a tactical shooter or not, but it just seemed like another realistic shooter to me. There were no tactics to speak of, apart from pressing the space bar every so often to get your team mates to catch up. The main difference in gameplay between other shooters, is that you get a limited amount of ammo on each mission, so you need to make your hits count. Anything below 20% accuracy and you'll end up running out and have to resort to the useless handgun (thankfully I never had to).

For me, this means constantly pearing around corners with my zoom scope and sniping enemies in the face. There's not much running into the room guns-first, because a couple hits and your dead. It's much more meticulous and strategic in the way you shoot enemies. Unfortunately, the enemy AI was useless. You can quite easily snipe out a room of enemies from the door frame without them even shooting at you. And when they do, they'll often then just run off.

Your team mates AI is decent - they don't get in your way and certainly don't rush in. They usually only ended up with a few kills each after each mission, compared to my 60-80 kills. So your still a one-man-army, with just your friends along as company you might as well say. Just the way I like it.

Hostage AI was a problem though. On one level they refused to move at all and I had to restart. They also had a tendency to stupidly run ahead of you right into enemy fire.

Another problem were the weapons. You get to pick from around fifteen weapons which one you want to go on the mission with. Yes, you only get one. I played with the same rapid fire rifle with scope for the entire game. With such a limit on ammo, I saw no point in using a machine gun, and shotguns would be far too short range. It would be nice to have had a couple guns to switch between. On the other hand, it did take some focus off looking for ammo and health during the levels.

The graphics of the game looked good. The textures and lighting were consistently great. The levels were well designed in most areas, with just some of the design looking a little bland. Nevertheless, this is supposed to be realistic, so real buildings aren't necessarily laced with intricate detail. Despite the realism achieved in the design, it still looks very good most of the time; helped along by the good textures and lighting.

Overall, Lockdown really isn't that different from your other realistic shooters. The only tactic is your approach in hitting your enemy in the head before he sees you. Therefore I enjoyed all several hours of Lockdown. 

So yeah, with Rainbow Six Vegas 1+2 on Unreal Engine 3, that outta look real fkn good. Look forward to them.

What's the gameplay in the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series like? Any tactics or pretty similar to Lockdown? PS... I don't want tactics at all. The less I have to think during a game, the better. I do enough thinking for work.

I did get a couple from the Splinter Cell series, but the trailers/reviews look a little too much like Thief (ala creeping around in fkn shadows) which, unless the design is fantastic like Thief 3 was, then it's not worth trudging through. 

mix of stealth and action really. 

rainbox six was tactical/strategic because you had to lay waypoints for your other teams before you played the missions. 

http://www.flashphysicsgames.com/flashphysics.html 

easily the worst in the series (that I have played anyway). For a start, its very short, there's 6 maps that are admittedly gigantic and very open but I'm sure better players than me could knock this off in 4-5 hours (it took me double that).

Secondly, its ridiculously frustrating, you will be trotting along merrily with full health and some sniper will take you out instantly or you will get ripped to shreds by someone with a heavy machinegun. I died a lot. Now the game does have a reasonable quicksave system that is checkpoint orientated and any objectives you complete stay completed upon death, but it repopulates enemies to keep it challenging. The problem is a lot of those repopulated enemies ensure that you pretty much have to play most the map again even though some objectives have been completed as otherwise they ambush you. So it gets annoying very quickly.

As for the looks, I wasnt that impressed in that department either. There's a shift to the UE3 engine and while the maps are gigantic, very open ended, and very detailed, they are not memorable at all and look pretty generic.

Overall, maybe 6/10. 

Painkiller is a game where you either love it, or hate it. Developed by a new studio from Poland, People Can Fly, Painkiller is one hell of a debut. I'm reviewing both Painkiller and the expansion pack Battle Out Of Hell, which is basically more of the original game.

It features the same kind of gameplay as Serious Sam, but it looks a lot better than not only 2001's Serious Sam, but also 2005's Serious Sam II. Although not by much, as Serious Sam II was a spectacular looking game.

The difference is Painkiller is much darker with levels taking place in cemeteries, cathedrals, asylums, castles, palaces, monasteries, an orphanase and even a very twisted and unique version of hell. In fact the entire game takes place in Purgatory (though why there is a funpark or Leningrad in purgatory I don't understand).

This is where Painkiller really shines; the levels look fantastic. Released early 2004, Painkiller hails above just about everything from 2004 and previous. With the exception of perhaps Farcry and Halflife II (neither of which I've played so I can't confirm), Painkiller is the best looking first person shooter up until 2005. This mostly comes down to a great looking engine, great gaming effects and flawless textures. The set-peices and architecture is all fantastic, however the game is let down slightly by its lack of vertical gameplay. The same problem Serious Sam had, the levels are all too flat. There's very little vertical variation (apart from the insanely vertical climb that was Stone Pit in the mission pack). Which means all the gameplay is in huge flat areas.

The other major flaw in the gameplay is it's focus on checkpoint type gameplay. You enter a room, a door behind you appears out of nowhere trapping you in, and you fight through hordes of enemies until the doors open. Enter the next area and the same tactic applies. The entire game runs like this, and it becomes one mindless battle after another.

Fortunately, after battling through way too many realistic shooters lately, I was eager for some high-paced gaming action. But this can get old after a while. It also doesn't help that just about every enemy in the game requires 1-2 hits from the shotty and seems like the same enemy as the last just with a slightly different close-range weapon or projectile. There's very little enemy variation. Even so, there's more variation here compared to a realistic shooter that features the same human enemies throughout the entire game.

The models all look great. While some are a little silly (puking or burping at you as an attack), they aren't as cartoony and out of place as Serious Sam's enemies.

There were plenty of great weapons to use, absolutely tonnes of ammo for them all. The game on normal difficulty really wasn't that hard at all, but does force you to replay at higher difficulties in order to unlock the secret levels (bad idea People Can fly!). Alternatively you can download Powermad and unlock them anyway, but all three hidden levels were pretty short. The BOOH hidden level was just a poor boss fight.

A lot of players won't like the repetitive arena style horde combat, but I enjoyed it. With fantastic design which is completely different on every single level (there are 24 in Painkiller and 10 in BOOH) makes Painkiller one of my favourite games. Pity about the sequels... 

Think I'll hold off on playing Far Cry next as I've got a few duds on my list to play for a while...

Although Republic Commando got a decent IGN score, in the video reviews I've looked at the game design look like ass.

Apart from Quake 4 and Prey, the fps games from 2005 and 2006 all look a bit average.

Star Wars - Republic Commando (2005) - 79%
Vietcong 2 (2005) - 60%
Project: Snowblind (2005) - 7.7
Second Sight (2005) - 71%
Area 51 (2005) - 6.9
Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005)
Pariah (2005) - 6.3
Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) - 84% 

was quite fun actually. Not a fps though.

And if you have low expectations, Unreal 2 is quite fun too. Mostly. 

yeah i played unreal 2 when it came out (one of the only games i played between 2002-2007). i actually thought it was pretty good, couldn't really understand all the bad press it got.

what's next on your list nitin? you seem to be playing catchup like me. 

and then CoD 4. That's all I have left I think before I can go restocking :)

oh and Splinter Cell - Double Agent. 

Picked this up last week on pc. If your in the UK, then know that Tesco is selling it for �30 not the stupid price of �40 almost everywhere else...

Single Player Mode : I loved it, much better than the 1st Modern Warfare, which I also enjoyed very much. Dunno what all the fuss is about the airport level, I thought it was very well done and setup the story excellently! Some of the set pieces are jaw dropping and is great fun all the way through.

I love how Infinity ward manages to sneak in some sets from popular war movies all over the place, a few that I noticed were the alcatraz shower room from The Rock, The insurgent desert base from Iron Man, and the suburban street with a crashed plane in it from the War of the Worlds remake. Im sure there are others but I cant recall them at this time.

It is short though, It took me around 6-7 hours to complete the game, and that was usually pausing to take in the sights and sounds of each set piece.

Special mention must go to the music which was done by Hanz Zimmer (gladiator, black hawk down etc), its epic. wtb OST!

Multiplayer : I've been addicted since I first loaded it up to "take a brief look" which ended up as a huge 6 hour marathon =) Its brilliant fun running around shooting people in team deathmatch, and unlocking all the different attachments and camo patterns for the various guns (of which there are tons!).

The new killstreaks and deathstreaks are great too, my favourites are the placeable minigun turret and pilotable ac-130 gunship.

A lot of complaining was made about the lack of dedicated servers and the matchmaking system. Honestly the matchmaking system is actually very good, not perfect and has a few niggles attached to it, but it does all the hard work for you and gets you into a game in less than 10 seconds usually. A few problems do arise from having the multiplayer p2p based, such as if the host has a crap connection things can get a little laggy, but the game will pause and find a better host if this is serious.

Special Ops Mode : This is 2-player coop mode on specially designed maps, I haven't actually played any in 2-player mode yet, but in single player mode they are short but fun maps that award you more stars the better you do, with more stars you unlock more and more chapters and maps, etc etc. Looking forward to playing them in 2 player! 

It's ok for a COD game, I guess. Looks great and impressive motion capturing. In the long shot, gameplay seems kind of dull, though. On rails and stuff. The airport mission wasn't such a big deal really - how is shooting civilians more disturbing than killing hundreds of armed enemies?

Lol at the Russians. Always waging wars...