BTW I've finally finished playing Fallout New Vegas. only tried a few mods. Project Brazil is completely overrated and just an ugly unfinished vault quest. Might be good when parts 2 and 3 are done, if ever, but at the moment it's pretty boring.

But Beyond Boulder Dome was awesome. As good as the official DLC's.

http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/46907

Anyway back to the real world of playing full titles in a single sitting, played James Bond Blood Stone today in 6 hours. Nice game, like everyone says Splinter Cell with better environments, slightly more forgiving combat (in other words less stealth), boring story, linear levels. 7/10. 

are definitely unique and good (in the same way quake's graphics are) but I would still call them lo-fi to temper someone's expectations. 

impressed me a lot. Good stylish visuals, great sound and atmosphere 

I've been playing The Swapper throughout the last night. As of now, it looks like it'll be another favourite indie sci-fi game of mine after Waking Mars. 

weird controls? 20 degree fov? insanely slow movement? i'm so glad i didn't pay full price for this. is this worth muddling through? it's really awkward just playing the intro. 

i've been told it has a terrible PC port, due to control issues. 

That definitely seems to be my take on it. I got this funky 'widescreen fix' memory editing hack utility so I was able to increase the FOV to more normal levels, but all the menus are very very awkward to navigate and the game doesn't pause while you're doing it so you can get attacked while struggling to get an item.

don't get me wrong, that is an AWESOME mechanic. I loved it in system shock 2, for example. But not when the UI is working against you. :( 

FWIW, i think it's a good game and might be worth buying it for console, if you have a console. 

 

I don't have a console and am not willing to take the time to learn how to play with a gamepad (I'm absolutely terrible at shooters with gamepads).

It's ok though. I can stand not playing it as I only got it as part of that EA bundle from a while back. 

Use a gamepad for platformers.

You'd have to be some sort of degenerate savage to use a gamepad for FPS. 

I try to use the input type the game was made for. And avoid FPS games that were made for gamepad. 

nice level design, but broken pc controls (at least for me) and yeah the slow movement is pretty bad. it's not really as good as made out.

maybe the sequel fixes some of that, but i haven't played it yet. 

I've been playing SS2 instead. :) Haven't played it in like 10 years, so I've forgotten enough I don't mind that I know the story. 

Turning off V-Sync in-game and then forcing it on through the NVidia Control Panel for it (alongside Triple Buffering) helps improving the mouse control. Appearently the game is locked at 30FPS with its own V-Sync on, whereas NVidia CP locks it at 60FPS which is a definitive improvement for mouselook smoothness. As a side note, this workaround is for 1 only, 2 is much better in this sense. 

I adjusted the maximum sensivity of my mouse and game became really fun. It is too slow to rotate without it. 

...remains on my personal short list of favorite games and I don't see it getting bumped.

It's a hard game and can be punishing on resources and some of the battles but where it won me over was on atmosphere (which was really helped by the sound design) and the depth of gameplay for its time. The story and premise kept you interested and it did this without breaking immersion like other games that take over movement control or have cutscenes.

Like Deus-Ex, I think it's one of those games that when people talk about it, it gets reinstalled and played by others who have and have not played it. 

I'm playing on hard and not really finding it hard at all actually... I'm playing as Navy but aiming for maxed out standard weapons (haven't gotten 6 yet, but I do have the perfect condition rifle sitting in a chemical storeroom waiting for me).
So I'm using Pistols and Shotguns for now and between those two, I have no shortage of ammo. Probably because I have a high hack skill so I can open all the locked boxes I find.
Mind you, I'm still on deck 4 of the Von Braun. As I recall, it does get a little tighter as you near the end of the game. 

Thanks erc, that does seem to help. At least, aiming mode mouse seems smoother now with less 'deadzone'. 

I'm glad to hear that. Personally I prefer 1 over 2 in terms of atmosphere since the original feels much more dreadful than the sequel. So it's kind of relieving that the mouse control can be made better with a little tweaking.

As for Shock 2, Navy with Standard Weaps, Hacking, and a little bit of every Tech skill is the best way to go. Be sure to keep and eye on that Condition 10 AR (and your AP ammo) since it'll most likely be your weapon of choice towards the end of the game. 

SS2 was not nearly as strong as an RPG as Deus Ex was towards the end. It falls into that trap where the RPG stuff is fun for most of the game, but the end just turns into a FPS that's dragging an RPG system along behind it. If you didn't spec into a character that was a standard FPS tankbro, the design just isn't going to support your choices any longer.

No RPG is "perfect," and they'll all have paths that are more or less optimum, but SS2's ever-widening diversion between 'more' and 'less' was much more imperfect than most. 

Yeah, I definitely remember that about SS2. The ending isn't bad or anything, but it feels like more and more of the core of the game is being removed as it gets more and more linear and single minded in its purpose.
But even Deus Ex was like that. Less maybe, in that you could choose how you were going to end, but it was still very much on rails. 

But even Deus Ex was like that. Less maybe, in that you could choose how you were going to end, but it was still very much on rails.

I'm gonna waffle a lot about Deus Ex here. Obviously there can't be anything much better than a choice of a few endings in a game where you have NCPs, dialog to record and triggers that need to be set up. What I liked about the setup of the Deus Ex ending was how you had the characters from the earlier parts of the game acting as advocates for the choices.

For me, it meant that I went with Tracer Tong's advice because Tong's section of the game was the bit I enjoyed the most - I trusted his character. There were lots of things across the game that built up to subtly affect this section: if you didn't save Paul then his bit of dialog isn't there to affect your decision (but if you did then you probably valued what he had to say). If you did a lot of poking about in Morgan Everett's base, you found things that undermine his trustworthiness - and if you found Morpheus, his conversation largely advocated the Helios ending.

The important thing here was that all these things that influence a player's decisions come out of the way they played the rest of the game - which secrets they found, which bits they enjoyed, what judgements they drew of the characters etc. It made the ending, in a Role Playing sense, a proper culmination of what came before, rather than just the point events stop.

Ok, in practice it didn't work that well in Deus Ex, there was the flavour there, but not strongly enough that every player and every playthrough felt like that. But if you could take the concept of a free choice of endings, yet where the narrative you wove through the game makes one of them clearly compelling, and turn the implementation up to 10, that would be awesome. 

I was really just responding about that feeling you get in any RPG or RPG-like game as you near the end. Bits of pieces of the game that made it feel special disappear as things wind down to the finale and it tends to give these games a downer feel. 

The actual choice of endings in DX wasn't very meaningful, because it's not like everyone didn't just quicksave before they chose, check out all three, and then decide in retrospect which one was their favorite.

The "boss" in DX was a big super-room full of crazy tests and mech spiders and James Woods suspended in a big hamster ball preparing to ascend. That's cool. Even if you didn't just spec totally into pistols and healing you could still finish the game, all three ways. Your choices were never ever invalidated. (I recall a particular level in a cemetery that ended with an MJ12 ambush being particularly impossible if you were going for a no-violence playthrough, and there were other moments in the game like that too, but it's much better than the way SS2 just turned into a pure hallway shooter at the end.)