Ok yeah so I played the demo and gave my thoughts a few posts above. "So far so good" I mused. Then I got the full game.

I'm not sure how far into the game it dawned on me, but when it did, it went something like this:

"Whoa whoa whoa, wait a fucking minute - I can't actually die in this game???."

So I'm playing the game in a thinly disguised God Mode, where "death" is just a minor inconvenience, costing you only a few seconds as you are sent to a brief shooting gallery minigame to raise your health (but even shooting stuff is optional because you're given a nominal amount of health even if you don't hit anything); you can never run out of ammo as it regenerates slightly when you run dry (as does your health just in case being effectively invincible was too much of a challenge). No it's nothing like quicksave/quickload (it has that too btw) - if you "die" halfway through killing a monster, when you "respawn" (in the exact same place you died, conveniently) the monster is still half-dead. This made the first boss encounter laughable as I just stood in the middle of the room shooting him because I wanted to get a close-up look at the cool model, and also I couldn't be arsed to find cover - I only needed to visit the shooting gallery 3 times before he keeled over.

So ok, combat is now trivial and meaningless - what about the rest of the game?

Spirit walk puzzles were fun until I realised that the game tells you exactly when to go into Spirit Mode by conveniently placing a glowing blue "Go Into Spirit Mode Here" decal anywhere you needed to use it (do you see a pattern emerging here?). I had to groan when they started using this to do crap Doom3-style "find the access code" puzzles to open doors.

Portals are cool I guess, but they're just teleporters - even Unreal had the ones like here where you can see through to the other side - so I'm not going to get too excited about them.

Gravity dickery is the only real innovation here and it is cool - makes for some very confusing navigation in parts, but sadly it does little to disguise the fact that the game progression is still mind-numbingly linear.

So yeah - who's the target audience for this game? There's a big red 18 certificate slapped on the box - I guess because they wanted the player character to say "fuck" a lot (he does), and they wanted gibs and gore, but the difficulty level surely means that only casuals and those new to gaming will get any lasting satisfaction from playing this. 

http://images.cafepress.com/product/5155571_240x240_F.jpg 

...it's weird, I can't really argue with any of the facts you've pointed out, and yeah, in a way all those things do make the game sorta weak and hand-holdy (which I normally despise), but all that being said, I'm still really enjoying the game.

I know that the wall-walking/gravity tricks are at least a good chunk of it--I love shit like that, and I love creative level layouts and lots of vertical and so forth, but...I dunno. Maybe I'm just getting less critical in my old age. It's a fun, pretty game and I like it.

Anyone know the status of an editor? I'd love to make a map with lots of gravity stuff that will make people projectile vomit five minutes after the match starts... 

About Unreal2: I thought this was really a horrible game, gameplay was just awful, and the story is insultingly stupid, they make you play a complete idiot. Only some of the visuals were ok.

About Prey: I totally agree with Kinn, but I still kinda enjoyed it. A shame they didn't use the spirit walk and death thing in a more interesting manner (like requiring you to use up spirit energy to come back from the dead maybe, and making more interesting secrets with spirit walk, for instance opening up areas to attack enemies from more a more advantagous area or something).

pjw, type editor in the console. =) 

I don't have the game handy; how do you bring up the console? I tried hitting tilde, and when nothing happened, couldn't be bothered to mess with it further and went back to playing the game...

Or is it some config setting, allowconsole 1 or something...? 

You can make a new short Prey.exe shortcut, but add "+set r_fullscreen 0 +set r_brightness 1 +set r_multiSamples 0 +wait +wait +wait +editor" after the prey.exe, without quotes.Really all you need is +editor, but the other stuff is supposed to help out too. I stole that from doom3world.org or 3drealms forums or something. It's basically the Doom3Editor (sad face.)

Kinn: You are right about everything really. That's one reason the game is so short - because it's just overly easy. The "self-adjusting" style of difficulty has, at least in my experience, never been pulled off well. After a while, the spirit walking puzzles basically just got tedious, as they all became "walk through barrier, push button, /spiritwalk." The level design was never fully realized imo, they could've done a lot cooler puzzles and everything.

Still, this is probably my new favorite game. I had a total blast playing it. 

This sounds like a situation where our preconceptions about what makes a game good or bad (saving, death, puzzles) fails to explain whether the game is actually fun. So what is it about Prey that makes it fun even though it shouldn't be fun based on our pseudoscientific analyses? Is it the medal-of-honor effect where all you need is a lot of flash and sizzle and "cool moments" to ignore that it's shallow, or unchallenging, or overly linear?

(note: i haven't played it myself.) 

Thanks Zwiffle!
(I should have known...) 

atmosphere (ie. graphics), fuckedupness. That's about it.

I still don't get why not being able to die is a BAD thing though - if you're not exploiting it like kinn did (the game should punish you for that). I still try to stay alive, and i think prey isn't easy at all. Although a lot of that accounts to hitscan allways hit enemies..

Just occured to me while playing: even though they have larger and more complex rooms than d3, they dont use em for nice gameplay. 

What do you mean by nice gameplay? I thought some of the bigger areas had really awesome gameplay - snipers spawning in, flying monsters ,etc. But yeah, not being able to die contributes significantly to the shortness of the game. I do think the afterlife was a nice addition, but maybe should have let you come back only a certain number of times (lives/continues/whatever) per level. That would have made the gameplay a little more challenging. 

Prey had this type in 1997, so I don't know why they didn't put a portal gun in the final game...

http://xboxyde.com/stream_2793_en.html

That's how Portals should be used. 

Wow, nice trailer !! 

what tricksters could come up with that?
Someone make a fps puzzle game with push / pull guns and that portal gun. :) 

I'm not a Valve fan, but that looks fuckin sweet. I may have to reinstall HL2 if that's a mod. Nice find. 

They added deluxemapping to q3.
http://www.quakesrc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6038&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
http://www.quakesrc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=55762&highlight=&sid=954b4abba43d6c7bcdf714cc0b26b569
Looks doom3ish, but should be faster, since it's done in compile. Dunno. 

multiplayer lego building game :)
http://planetfreeware.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=30 

nah thats a new valve game called "portal" (heh).

Its ships with HL2 episode 2 and is basicly a huge puzzle game from I know. There is a full quality trailer available on steam, looks frikkin messed up :D 

teamfortress 2 video, cool art style:

http://www.worthdownloading.com/download.php?gid=2077&id=8083 

jfioafj
gh 

jfioafj
gh 

what 83.249.224.159 said, the mirrors are probably congested.
Maybe this works
http://www.fz.se/filarkiv/?file=mov/team_fortress_2/tf2_teaser01_720p.wmv 

http://www.titanquestgame.com/ Look very nice and have read nuthing but good reviews from most places. Dungeon Siege esque, how can it not be good? Has anybody here tried this game and is it worth shelling out the �17.99? 

i'm planning on getting that soon... i'll let you know when i do. :) 

Aye its good, its more Diablo than dungeon siege though (which is great!).

I currently have a level 24 elementalist, and I can see myself replaying this game a lot, as you can only choose 2 skill professions per character (and there are 8 (??) professions in the game) and each one is very cool and different.

Basicly if you loved Diablo you will like this a lot, I would say its not *quite* as good but its sure worth a look.

One thing that has really irritated me so far though is that 90% of the *good* loot that drops is for warrior type characters, ie. damn good armour pieces and huge swords, so my lonely little mage is feeling mightly left out, maybe its just bad luck I dunno but its getting tiresome :)

Also its just too damn easy (im playing on normal though...), my character seems to nuke everything (literally lol) usually before they reach me, and if they do my core dweller soon stomps on them :D 

Funny how you went from paragraph 4 to paragraph 5. Surely the irony there is intentional.