Shit is going down.
http://store.steampowered.com/news/3533/
"Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations"

Started people going crazy on the forums, recap :
-Portal gets surprise update yesterday afternoon
-People see new mystery achievement
-People play and see the radio in the beginning room now has a green light
-Carry it around and notice it makes strange broadcast interference noises in certain places
-Locate and place all 26 of these mystery radios for achievement
-Smart people yank wav files out of game content folders and run them through steganography programs
-Produces 26 weird cryptic image files in a numbered sequence
-Some dude runs the number string through an md5 hash translator and gets a landline number
-Internet traces it to Kirkland, WA (near Valve HQ)
-People find out its not a phone/fax line but a data line hosting a BBS and telnet it
-Use a clue from one of the files to figure out the BBS user/password login info
-End up with a bunch of weird ASCII artwork
-We're trying to figure out wtf it means

I love Valve. 

 

Cool game with some fantastic level design in places and mediocre in others, the main problem being that some areas just didn't seem 'up to snuff' compared to others. Some of the jumping puzzles just didn't work the way I thought and I had to try them again and again to get the right spacing/timing while others that seemed really tough were very easy.

Story was wonky, not very exciting, cliche, didn't feel like I did anything and not really sure what happened at the end. Did the bad guy get his or what? Still unclear to me, but it's my understanding Mirror's Edge was planned as a trilogy - correct? Also the cartoon cutscenes were balls, didn't really fit in imo. Dante's Inferno also had bad cartoon cutscenes but much worse. Why do they these things to games?

Gameplay was fun for the most part. Running and jumping on stuff is fun. The combat was sparse thankfully but got really tedious when they introduced the all-melee fights. Not sure exactly why, though, it didn't seem to fit. Also felt like they straddled the fence on the actual shooting - felt too light that they probably shouldn't have included it imo, just added more running away/disarming type stuff. Faith doesn't seem the shooty type.

Visuals were great - awesome 'impression' of a city instead of it being an actual city. I don't care what dictator is running things, a city is not going to be all bright color-coded sterile hallways and rooftops. Still though, fucking amazing style that I'm sure would've been great to play with had there been a level editor (is there one?) Also some of the layouts were top notch and very Quakey imo. Having a sterile metropolis means you can do all kinds of weird spirey things and twisty layouts and still be believable to a degree. Top notch for the most part.

Good length too - I felt it was a bit short but only by about maybe half an hour. The story progression kind of went limp after a while (you rescue your sister, watch a cut scene, then whoa she's kidnapped again (WHAT THE EFF?) so a longer length maybe would've meant another impotent rescue plot and ANOTHER kidnapping plot afterward, sooooooo I'll let it slide.

Cool game, worth the $6 I paid for it during the Steam sale. 

Actually looking into it you can hack the UT3 editor to work with Mirror's Edge, but I'm unsure what's all involved. Might give it a spin. 

Yeah I think it's still one of the best looking games around.
I really don't understand why they had those shitty 2D cartoons spread throughout the game, the 3D is so gorgeous, they should have just stuck to that. 

the 2d is seriously balls, the 3d is beautiful. 

Valve has changed the ending to Portal, mega spoiler ahead :
http://www.xfire.com/video/2393cf/

Woo! 

Not that great an ending imo. 

it's disappointing they resorted to ret-conning the ending. 

I don't really see the trouble, it's not like they changed anything, they just added a bit on.
They could have as easily just added it to the start of whatever comes next and it wouldn't have bothered anyone, but this works nicely as a teaser. I think it's smart. 

Oh well, it's quite an okay game (SP) - I enjoyed it. Needless to say, it suffers from the obvious flaws most modern FPS have: MSD. Visually great, even though I could 'only' play it on DirectX 9. Cool finishing moves.
A game like this would benefit from at least some nonlinearity in its map design. After all, what's more scary than seemingly being lost in a dark base while chased by aliens? There are six maps in total which you play through in different ways and directions, and with slight changes, depending on the species. While it was done well, they could have done more here. I wished the campaigns were longer, especially the Alien campaign which was very cool. Considering this fact and the overall playtime, I wonder why it has such a huge filesize.
Good controls, although the melee combat takes some practice. I thought the Predator weapons are a bit of a let-down: I hardly every used the proximity mines; the spear feels silly because it doesn't have to be picked up again after a throw.
Story-wise it was nothing special and the way it was told, the audio diary collectables in particular, was kind of lame for the most part. I'm tired of being guided through a game over a radio. Also, ffs why Tenenbaum again..?
The marine AI is stupid and poorly done. You can kill one unnoticed while others stand right next to him. They don't even become alerted when they discover fallen buddies.

I haven't tried MP yet. Have to mentally prepare for being smashed by Bal. 

The thing about mapping for Mirror's Edge is that the lighting utility used on the maps to give them the distinctive HDR look is not shipped with the game, so you CAN map for it, but you will have real trouble matching the style of the original game.

Apparently though, some people have managed to cook up some custom shaders that make custom maps look very close to how they are supposed to look when processed by the proprietary lighting tool.

Another gotcha is actually playing custom content in Mirror's Edge. There is no actual menu to select and play any custom usermade content, so what actually has to be done is this:

1) Backup a timetrial map of your chosing
2) Save your map under the same name as the timetrial map, essentially replacing it
3) Launch the game and load the timetrial map via the menu, which now will obviously launch your map instead. 

it's like doom mapping all over again :) 

Cool game, worth the $6 I paid for it during the Steam sale.
you're awesome, thank you. 

OK, I was looking forwards to this game since pretty much when it was announced (although I actually got very worried for a while because I figured it meant that they had scrapped Colonial Marines).

I agree with all of Negkes observations pretty much. I have only played through the Marine episode, and I did that in two sittings (!).

I must admit though that the marine episode was great fun, mainly because of the quality of the maps and overall immersion, and the A.I. of the aliens, which was very good indeed, you could tell it was the sme crew that made the original AvP PC game about 10 years ago (fuck has it really been that long!?). Aliens use the darkness to there advantage, even when it is the AI, they will scirt across dark patches on the cieling and then come up behind you. They dont make much noise, only deep growling, the weird elephant-pig sound they make when they get shot in Aliens, the other sounds being very subtle. So yeah - make sure you have a clean pair of trousers handy! There are also parts when you get attacked by many aliens at once which is very retro-doom style gameplay, you really get a cool sense of awesomeness as they are closing in on you from all angles........

Scripted sequences worked well for me, and although the voice acting could possibly have been better (I read someone complaining about that somewhere) I felt that it was very engaging nonetheless. The weapons felt good - just like the movie Aliens.
I also like the hive environment because of the way the aliens would hide in the walls and you wouldnt see them until they began to move - some walls had so much detail on that you wouldnt spot them until they had spotted you. Also there are some parts in the walls which look like an alien is sitting there, and when you get closer you see it is just a part of the hive. Very gigeresque :)

But yeah - im a bit of an aliens fanboi..... 

sort of rig do oyu need for this game?

I've been hanging out for a new aliens game. 

http://www.bluesnews.com/screenshots/games/crysis2/20100304/

Definitely time so start saving for that pc upgrade =) 

Maybe not, as they are aiming for a console release this time. The PC version will probably still be quite scalable, but it should run on most modern machines. 

nitin: Min specs: 3.4 ghz, 1 gb ram, 256mb DX9 card.

Ricky: I thought the Aliens were too slow. Unlike in the other games, they didn't really dash towards you, but rather circle you, attack, then retreat a few steps. Much like a cat toying with a mouse (in this sense, the remark by the scientist in the Alien tutorial fits). A clear concession to the console players. Another one is the facehugger grab if you have more than 1/3 health. In the game's predecessors, once a facehugger jumped at you, you were done for; here, they aren't much of a threat.
This doesn't mean there were no difficult situations, though. 

if thats min specs. Although I have a 9800GTX, might cover for lack of cpu power somewhat. 

==========================
Intel Processor - Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz
AMD Processor - Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+
Nvidia Graphics Card - Geforce 8800 GTS
ATI Graphics Card - Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
RAM Memory - 2 GB
Hard Disk Space - 10 GB
Direct X - 9
==========================

Blindly staring at a CPU clockrate doesn't work these days, as a modern 2,66 Ghz i5 CPU or similar will be more than twice as fast as an old 3 Ghz Pentium 4. 

Its on steam.

It does suffer from some consolitis in the control scheme, but really that is the only downer I can think of right now. This game is *FUN*

Its been a very long time since I laughed with glee as I caused absolutely ridiculous amounts of destruction in a game... I guess this is kinda like gta3 on steroids mixed with far cry & Indiana Jones (!?), if that makes any sense.

You are basicly a vigilante guy with lots of guns, a parachute and a high tech long range lasso that can grapple onto just about anything, helicopters, cars, buildings, people, anything. You can also use this grapple to stick objects and enemies to other objects, with hilarious results. For instance you can tether an enemy to a gas canister, then shoot the canister making it fly away with the guy still attached =)

The demo gives you a complete sandbox area of the game a few miles wide and has a 30 minute time limit before you have to start from the beginning again, but what a fun 30 minutes it is!

The demo, and the game, require directx 10 so its Vista/Windows 7 only, no XP support. It looks gorgeous but requires a fairly decent pc to run it with everything on.

Give it a try! 

Some student game, apparently a few of the guys were picked up by Valve to work on Portal2, not so surprising considering the gameplay they have. Fun little FPS puzzle game.
https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&download=1506 

Human Revolution runs on a proprietary engine and is played from a first-person perspective, though it pops into third-person for certain attacks and taking cover. 

I am so hyped for Brink

http://kotaku.com/5491753/new-brink-trailer-plays-peekaboo-with-big-guns