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? 

at work for about 3 minutes.

I went through the tutorial, or at least the first level, and then I got killed by a level 9 goat. 

pjw - Yeah that Nehrim thing looks interesting. I may have to check it out sometime.

Worth noting also, for all the fun I had with Oblivion, I really didn't like Fallout 3 much at all. I played it and completed the main quest (which took a shamefully short amount of time), and had absolutely no desire to play any more of it. I think it was mostly to do with the setting - I found the ubiquitous grey barren wasteland just boring visually, and I'm no fan of 1950's chic either. Also, I thought "VATS" took all the tension and excitement out of combat, and you soon learn that shooting manually isn't really an option either (way too ineffective). 

I really liked Fallout 3, and I probablgy prefer New Vegas over Oblivion. The writing is alot more interesting, and there's generally more stuff to do.
I very rarely used VATS, even while playing on the hardest difficulty.
Really looking forward to Skyrim. 

You're supposed to die on the goat.

I'm bored of it now, it lacks texture to be a great game. It's not bad though. 

Sooner or later. 

Bal is right. It's cool. But it hurts the fingers... 

Having just played through Quake 4, which was released six months after Area 51 in 2005, it'll be easy to draw comparisons in that both themes are modern base.

Quake 4 received it's share of undue criticism, with an aggregate score of 81% on gamerankings.com. Area 51, meanwhile, scored an aggregate of 78% so only marginally behind, but both IGN and Gamespot both rated Area 51 as better than Quake 4.

Nevertheless, it seems to be a fairly obscure title on the PC despite many positive reviews. I asy obscure, because it was eventually released for free (with advertising). But that version crashed on install for me, and I couldn't find a second-hand version to purchase. Even then it took two torrent versions before I finally got a working copy.

The PS2 version was thought to be the best FPS ever at the time, although that's not saying much. This led me to go in expecting a gem of a game. Unfortunately, my expectations were not met.

From the design perspective; both the power of the engine and the level design, Quake 4 eats Area 51 for breakfast. Some of the earlier Area 51 levels look quite bland. Since the entire game takes place in an under Area 51, I guess the designers were trying to maintain some realism in the design. With realism comes bland, futuristic walls and textures. Later in the game levels start to get more variety with the peak being the alien world and UFO ships. However, while the engine is capable of something great, the level design doesn't ever reach awe-inspiring. Good, but not great.

The mess of a story was a bit hard to understand. Near the end of the game I wasn't sure if I was still in Area 51, the alien world, or who the bad guy even was! David Duchovny's monotone mumbling didn't help at all. He really should stick to acting. And Marilyn Manson was a waste of money; I could have voiced the characters better. At the end of the day, you won't be playing Area 51 for it's story anyway. Your playing for the action...

Action which was fairly fun and fast all the way through. The dual-weilding of weapons is fantastic and doubles your fire-power. Having two shotguns go off in quick succession, blowing your enemies away, was a great feeling. However when your down to just one weapon at a time, they feel a bit weak. Unfortunately, it took me most of the game before I realised that the BBG, a powerful gun in it's own right, is self-regenerating.

Along with this, you get the half-man/half-mutant idea also done in Quake 4, where you can transform into mutant and use it's abilities. Every kill you make while in mutant-mode gives you health back. Area 51 definitely does this idea better than Quake 4 and makes it mean something with the gameplay. In Quake 4 you wouldn't know the difference.

Provided you don't overuse the BBG, Area 51 is still quite a challenging game.

Now to the cons: the biggest problem with Area 51 is, firstly, no quicksave. You're forced to use 1-3 checkpoints through each level. Fortunately they're usually in useful places so you don't have to do much replaying, but I still loathe the idea of no quicksave in a fast paced FPS. Perhaps developers think if your forced to replay much of the game then it'll extend the overall playtime. Even so, it's still only barely a 10 hour game.

And secondly, the game would come to a crashing halt at the end of almost every level for me (with a total of 18 levels). With no quicksave, i'd have to replay from the previous checkpoint only for it to crash again. I was forced to use someone elses saved games in order to load each level. However it wasn't such a big deal compared to most games, because your ammo and health in Area 51 are often 100% anyway.

So overall, Area 51 is definitely a decent game to play alongside the best of 2005. Just don't expect anything groundbreaking.