thanks, you are a good person, deep down. 

Just attempted to play Second Sight (2004). It's a third person game, although you have a first person view as well, but none of controls work from first person, which is retarded.

I got to the third level and decided it was too crap to continue with. First game I've ever quit so early. The level design was from the 90s, the gameplay was slow and annoying. Too much fucking around just to fire your gun. Let alone fucking around with all your stupid psychic abilities. Movement was butchered.

And what's worse is the constant alarms that go off as soon as a scientist sees you.

Pass. Area 51 next I think, if I can install it. 

http://www.humblebundle.com/ numero 2 

Now for the money to transfer from paypal... 

Even the free downloadable version of Area 51 (with advertising) failed to install. Guess i'll have to torrent it. In the meantime, I played Quake 4...


With Quake and Quake 2 being my two favourite games of all time, and will unlikely ever be beaten, it would be hard for me not to have high hopes for Quake 4. It didn't make much difference that id Software had dropped the job into the talented Raven Software's mits. Heretic, Hexen, Soldier of Fortune, Star Trek Voyager and all their sequels; these were all solid, professional and, most importantly, fun games. So Raven taking over the Quake duties is almost as good as id doing it themselves. And as it turned out, Quake 4 felt like a superior game to Doom 3.

While Doom 3 took place almost entirely inside tight futuristic bases, unfortunately Quake 4 didn't try to re-invent the wheel here and is almost exactly the same. The only difference is there are more outdoor areas and the level design is a little better. Everything is easier to see, there's much more variety in design, although it's still only the 'base' style, so expecting Painkiller level of variety will leave disappointed. While there aren't huge awe-inspiring set-pieces, it's all solidly good looking. Sadly, the id Tech 4 engine just doesn't seem capable of doing huge, sprawling areas. So Raven are stuck with a corridor crawl similar to Doom 3.

Having said that there are some big outdoors areas, but they are lacking in detail. The three biggest levels are the vehicle-based ones. And these copped a lot of flack from players suggesting they ruin the game. As it turned out, only 3 in 33 levels are vehicle based, and one of them is only several minutes long. In all, a maximum of 10% of the game would be vehicle based.

While the engine is restricted, the way it does lighting looks fantastic, especially when your team-mates have their flashlights on and they're cast all over the inner depths darkened base. So it's a shame there have been very few games using id Tech 4, just Prey, Quake Wars and Wolfenstein following.

Gameplay in Quake 4 was all solid. The enemies had plenty of variety and all looked fantastic. It's just disappointing that they weren't more closely related to Quake 2. The Berserker, Gunner and a few others were there, but not recognisable from Quake 2. Different attacks, speeds and difficulty means they're basically new enemies. Iron Maiden was a little more obvious, but again apart from being female, could be a completely different enemy. Arguably the more fearsome of Quake 2, the Gladiator, makes a return in Quake 4. But he's quite different; slower with a railgun that seems easier to avoid. So while there weren't many similarities, in some respects and homage aside, it's probably a good thing because the Quake 2 enemies were very basic in their attacks compared to Quake 4. This isn't 1998 anymore.

Most of the weapons make a return. The Machine Gun is much better, there's no Double Shotgun but the Single Shotgun packs enough of a punch to play almost the entire game through just with these two weapons. The Hyper Blaster, now your fourth weapons, is a good switch up as it packs a punch but also has plenty of ammo. Grenade Launcher, Railgun, Lightning Gun are all very similar to Quake 2. The Rocket Launcher is a little faster but requires reloading, meaning I didn't use it much. The new gun is the Nailgun, which is very fast paced but I didn't find it to be particularly effective compared to the Machine Gun/Shotgun combination.

I played on medium difficulty and it was fairly spot on. The first half of the game was fairly easy and it was a long time before I died, but the second half steadily got tougher with some great boss battles to finish the game off.

So overall I really liked Quake 4. It did feel like another Raven game; very similar in level design to their others, but that's a minor criticism because all their games look good. And with id Tech 4, great! While it doesn't live up to the groundbreaking prequels, it's great to have a solid, fun, return to Stroggos. With slightly better level design and much more fast-paced gameplay, I preferred it over Doom 3. 

BTW any good quake4 single players maps/mods out there? I've got:

cold_steel
q2base
q4spubilitus
Use_Destruction-1.2
strombine

None of them look too promising though. Certainly doesn't have the community Doom 3 got. 

don't know if that ever came about though. 

Ubilitus is pretty good, I recently played it.

q2base, is it that thing where you can play through q2's first map in q4? I recommend playing q2 instead.

doom3 has quite a few large caliber mods going, yeah... with q4, people seem to have focused on the multiplayer, which failed, ironically. 

just idle musing... but it always seems like SP/MP seems to divide the playerbase creating content with the result that you just get less of each. 

...for the extensive review, [Kona]--it was fun to read.

Q4 was the first game I worked on at Raven, and I'm glad you enjoyed it. 

It's probably the idtech4 game I enjoyed the most compared to the other two I've played (Doom3 & Prey) 

Sadly, the id Tech 4 engine just doesn't seem capable of doing huge, sprawling areas.

ETQW.

Corridor shooters aren't inherently bad. A well done corridor shooter can still be a nice game.

As it turned out, only 3 in 33 levels are vehicle based, and one of them is only several minutes long. In all, a maximum of 10% of the game would be vehicle based.

I think the main problem is that these disrupt the flow of the classic FPS parts of the game. It's like, "OK player, I want you to drive a hovertank now, and you will comply". That kills the flow.

Pretty sure it's more levels with vehicles as well, if you count the rail shooting vehicle levels (vehicle MG while you're being chauffeured around).

The Rocket Launcher is a little faster but requires reloading, meaning I didn't use it much.

True, although the game is overall slower than q2, and you get an upgrade that lets you shoot three rockets in a row, or something like that. Matter of taste I guess.

The new gun is the Nailgun, which is very fast paced but I didn't find it to be particularly effective compared to the Machine Gun/Shotgun combination.

I found the nailgun's alternate fire mode very useful against flying enemies, like Heavy Hovertanks. Also used it against normal tanks and maidens when I was low on health.

The game has grown on me since I first played it, especially for a lack of other 'solid' id-style FPS games to play. It seems that FPS which are merely 'solid' get sneered at for being not creative enough, but they turn out being hard to top.

Concerning the level design, yes it is super linear, which isn't the worst thing for a pure shooter, but upon closer inspection the levels try to impress with a large scale, but details cluster around the most likely route the player is going to take... and I would have liked a lot more items scattered around the many empty corners. Doom 3 does the latter thing very well. You're always rewarded for going off track in Doom 3, not so much in Q4.

I do like the enemies and weapons in Q4 for the most part, especially the tacticals with their variety of gear are nice.

My main objection is that the mandatory vehicle lessons, rail shooting and pointlessly running around on a spaceship kills the flow of the game. The best stretches are those where you're mostly alone and where the gameplay is classic corridor crawling, like the stretch from the medical labs across the dispersal and waste processing stuff.

I liked the walker mission, btw. A walker is somehow more FPS-like than a tank. I wish there were more walkers scattered around the game, but optional. As it is, it's a one trick pony that the player has to grudgingly use, instead of a cool addon that players can use whenever they feel like it. The walker could have featured in a boss battle, a la 'Alien'.

ok, enough text. 

but every time I saw an outdoor area with a vehicle I wanted to throw myself out my window, they were bad :(

The indoor shooty stuff was excellent though, and I will never forget being turned into a Strogg, that was really well done :) 

Vehicle sections and cooperative multiplayer are killing shooters. Every fucking modern game has to have them, no matter the cost.

The cost usually being gameplay.

I don't want to play with shitty AI that tries to be clever - the best they can do is stay the fuck out of the way and let me play the game. I don't want complex shit; there are plenty of RTS games where I can get that.

Who mandated that all shooters have to be like fucking Halo? 

So yeah, 200 A bugs, 300 B's and god knows how many C's. 

Mandatory vehicle section == le sigh.

Optional vehicle == cool bonus feature. 

I don't want to play with shitty AI that tries to be clever - the best they can do is stay the fuck out of the way and let me play the game. I don't want complex shit; there are plenty of RTS games where I can get that.

And this, too. 

It's because of tards like PC Gamer that give it a 70% just because it isn't different enough. They demand shitty Halo vehicles, and teammates (halflife might have been the cause of that thanks to Barney), and all sorts of other RTS or RPG crap when all I want is a fun shooter. Thank god it didn't have bullet time.

I actually quite like linear games. I don't get lost then and know i'm always on the correct path. I'm yet to play a real sandbox game... the thought of veering off course and ending up 10mins in the wrong direction scares me. But yeah Q4 was VERY linear. They could have had a little more exploration.

Actually some outdoor terrain levels would have been nice too, there were some nice ones in Q2 and the mission packs (beginning of The Reckoning was cool). 

http://www.qcfdesign.com/?cat=20 

From the "How the fuck did I miss this?" files: I just learned Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is coming out in november '11. Teaser trailer here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGMOMkACtn4

Now, I'm one of Oblivion's biggest fans, having sunk at least 500 hours into it (seriously), so you can imagine the amount of frosty white spooge clinging to my monitor and keyboard after I heard this news.

I'm aware of Oblivion's faults. The levelling system is illogical, counter-intuitive, and just plain shite. The melee combat is about as deep as a spilled drink. The character animation is some of the worst I've seen in a commercial title. None of that stopped me from coming back to the game time and time again like the abused little whore that I am. 

i'm replaying oblivion now too which meant i was very excited when i heard about skyrim. :o

i actually started by playing nehrim, but frankly, i prefer the completely unstructured gameplay of oblivion more.

so yeah, here's hoping skyrim will have decent animation and more fluid player movement. (movement in oblivion is like a preview camera in a 3d editor). 

You should try Nehrim (see my post 3805). It's really pretty amazing, and I'm actually enjoying it more than I did Oblivion...

Re: Skyrim, if they just fix the horrid world-levels-with-you horseshit from Oblivion, I'll be satisfied.

If they add back in some of the variation and downright weirdness in the world that was present in Morrowind, make the lockpicking and persuade mini-games a bit less braindead and more challenging, and add back in a few things that they removed (e.g. mark/recall, levitation, greater armor/weapon variety, etc.) then I'll actually be excited. 

looking back, i seem to remember i liked morrowind a lot more than oblivion. i'm sure some of that is because it was the first time i had ever played such an open ended game, but it's more than just that.

morrowind's world felt much more mysterious for some reason and the ruins you could explore (dwemer and daedric) seemed cooler and more distictive.
there was also the fact that for most of the game, you never have to travel east of the red mountain, so there was this feeling of awe that you hadn't even explored that area yet.

oblivion has ayleid, caves and forts and only the ayleid ruins are fun to explore for me. they usually have some small amount of button pushing and sometimes even puzzles. they also tend to loop back in clever ways. caves tend to feel like long slogs and forts just look very boring with a few exceptions. also, a lot of parts of the map seem to be unused (or nearly so). the mountainous area in the north east and southwestern forests are very sparsely populated with dungeons.

as for lock picking, i thought it was fairly well done, but i disliked how the game paused while you did it. it would be unreasonable for the gameworld to continue though, because the lockpicking minigame does take a while to do.
as a compromise, a lockpicking minigame that is shorter so it can work in realtime would be much appreciated. i didn't really like morrowind's RNG lockpicking. it was realtime, but as braindead as oblivion's persuasion system. 

Also interested in Skyrim here. I pretty much like all of the Elder Scrolls main titles so far, from Arena to Oblivion. They each have their own pros/cons but I like them for what they are. I only wish Daggerfall didn't seem so unfinished.

Skyrim is definitely up there in my waiting list. 

Yeah, the rating of any game is supposed to go from 0% to 100%, not 60 to 100.

At the same time its very frustrating when someone reviews your game who doesn't like gametype X in question - if you've made a golf game and the reviewer wants to play an RPG then you'll get a bad score.

Basically 99.9% of the gaming press is worthless as an informative tool, word of mouth being much better. Or word of forum etc.

I hear what you're saying with lineal games, but the best games always give the impression of nonlinearity, even if they're stuck on the rails - HL2 for example.

Nobody tried the roguelike?