why the fuck don't they market mice for consoles??
you could totally hold the controller in one hand and mouse with the other.
they have friggen guitars and drumkits but no mice. 

Hmm playing the demo again with a more critical eye, I think DNF is probably not all that good. That's based just off this demo, which admittedly is pretty bad and may not be indicative of the whole game.

The depth of field is very obnoxious in this game. It makes the majority of what's on screen look blurry. At first I thought I was just going more blind than I already am, but no, Duke apparently needs to get prescription sunglasses.

The AI is in fact pretty bad. I just didn't notice because I killed the enemies quickly, but they are very basic and don't show any signs of intelligence that I can tell. This might be okay, but at least pig cops in Duke3d would go prone every once in a while. These pig-men (they can't be called pigcops, because really they're just pig men in blue, ripped pants) just run at you guns blazing. Sometimes they're stationed at a chaingun, but that's more of a scripting thing than an AI thing I think.

The other enemies are some weird bug things, which are annoying to shoot and I think are meant to take the place of the ooze monsters. They are pretty shit. They are not fun, they are just 'filler' enemies as far as I can tell. They are accompanied by baby octabrains, which ... also suck, and are also there just for fodder. Very lame.

The last enemy is a gun ship, which drops off some pig cops on a ledge, then when you kill those it comes in a shoots you. This is the most telling part of the demo. You HAVE to hide from this thing behind cover, darting out to lock on with your RPG, then duck back into cover. You can't strafe to avoid rockets like a pro, you can't use anything else but the RPG. This fight is fucking SHIT BORING SHIT. If you run out of ammo you go back to the conveniently (?) placed ammo crate, stock up, then shoot some more. It's also very generic looking. If you don't hide behind cover, you will not win. This is not the Duke I knew. I think the Rock, Paper, Shotgun article got it right when they said Duke is a wimp, because he kind of is in this one.

OH yeah, when you kill it, the wing falls and makes a ramp up the small ledge, so you can now progress. Pretty ho-hum kind of stuff.

Sooooo yeah, I think I was hit by nostalgia early on when I first played the demo, hearing that sweet Duke theme song just brought back fond memories. I told Vondur it would probably be okay as a $50 purchase, but really based off the demo with a critical eye, it probably isn't. $20 maybe, but not $50. 

never thought of that but it would be fucking wonderful. I love shooters but hardly play any on consoles for that reason. 

Wonderful? I think instead of supplying mice for consoles so people could play FPS better, it would be a more logic step to stop making FPS games for consoles. Plus they wouldn't have to be so dumbed down then.

The DC actually had a mouse and a keyboard. I got the latter when I bought mine on ebay. Don't know what the big deal behind those. Quake 3 could be played with it and I guess that unbalanced many online matches. And there are some weird typing games ("Typing of the Dead", a zombie spelling/typing trainer or something similarly wtf). 

Far Cry 2 finally, took longer than expected because I had to take breaks due to the repetitive nature. Good fun but needed more variety.

Portal is next. 

I wish this thing had taken off :E

I could deal with playing with reduced keyboard space as long as you have a fecking mouse :( 

WTF were they playing with keyboard only via a cordless keyboard in a different fucking building??

Looks okay tho, exploding bodies are cool. 

I actually really like the idea of that. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead

"The word is stonger than the sword" taken too seriously... 

yeah, basically the sort of thing i was thinking about there.

just a portable pad you can sit on your lap or the coffee table or whatever.

they're porting most of these games to pc anyway, so mouse support is going to be in there from the start. for things like xbox, where (i think?) you can plug in any usb device, it should just be there as an option by default!
you should be able to use your regular mouse even, no need for anything special. 

In Steam, cost me �3.15, great fun. Reminds me of Command & Conquer old-school. 

Tried to play Shadowrun, some multiplayer based (but with single player bot matches) fps from 2007. Played 2 maps and decided i'd rather go take a shit then play it again.

Gameplay was crap, the game looked crap, don't know what the critics/reviewers are on about saying it looks good. It looks shit. Quake3 looked better. Next (which I believe is going to be Hellgate: London... my first attempt at an RPG). 

Was crap, btw. The company that started it was bought not too long ago and the new peeps are trying to fix it so it's not so much suck, though. 

hgl is fine. there's a memory leak bug that was never fixed, iirc. if you have a lot of ram it probably won't bother you though. i have only 3gb and i never had any problems when i played it again, although i did when i only had 1gb.
i do recommend you take a look at the aforementioned peeps's work on the SP mod. basically adds in some missing stuff from multiplayer and other improvements. 

Well ultimately it doesn't matter, because it appears to be yet another game where you can't remap the mouse buttons. I've never used WASD & i'm not going to start now. Don't know why these developers just assume everyone on earth uses WASD and is fine with the mouse buttons being set to whatever they think they should be (shoot in this case). 

you can change movement keys to whatever you want, and you can change the button to shoot to whatever you want.
just go in the controls menu.
you can also drag/drop any ability into the mouse 1/2 buttons to use, and remove shoot completely, if your class doesn't use it much. (evokers/summoners tend to rely mostly on their powers, and rarely need to shoot except to break crates or to finish off a mob). 

Are we both talking about Hellgate London here? There' no shoot in the controls menu, supposedly because it can't be changed, and when I click on any other function and try to rebind it, clicking mouse buttons 1 or 2 does nothing, it won't accept it. Only mouse button 3 and the scroller it accepts, and all keyboard keys.

Unless they fixed it in an update, but I doubt it... 

Portal.

Good game but design was a little too basic for my liking. And a bit short.

But good original game. 

well, you should always update your games, regardless. that's just good practice.

anyway, i was wrong about shoot though, sorry. you can't change mouse 1 and 2, those are always action buttons. you can bind jump to mouse 4 or 5 (if you have a mouse with the extra buttons on the side) if you want a mouse button for jump, otherwise, spacebar is a decent one (and what i use).

you can bind your active slots to whatever you want though. for example, my active slots 1-6 are bound to number 1 - 6, slot7 and slot8 are mouse4 and mouse 5, slot9 and 10 are q and e. etc...
and if you want to assign a skill/spell to your mouse1/2, just click and drag the icon (ingame) in your skill menu onto the icon on the left and right sides of the screen.
for example, my evoker has mouse1 as spectral lash and mouse2 as firestorm because they're both spells that need to be aimed while being held down.
other spells like arcane shield, which are one shots, i assign to keyboard keys. 

unless you are finding the game really hard, i recommend putting elite mode on. the game is too easy on normal mode. 

That smells like producer fear. 

i dunno, i just figured it was to stop newbies from getting destroyed, but it's not like elite mode is a huge leap in difficulty either.
there's more modes after you beat the game (nightmare i think?) where it is pretty nuts though.
isn't this par for these kinds of games? to get you to replay and all that. sort of the same as achievements 'oh, you beat the game, so now you can play it again, only harder. :D' 

I meant where the prototypes of games are usually much more hardcore than what gets released, and then things get simplified, a lot in the case of consoles.

It's not so much upping the difficulty level, but rather changing the basic game rules.

The one we're doing now is a top down shooter with some melee, and, indeed, unlocks a harder difficulty once you complete the game on hard.

This reminds me of the 'realsim' mode in L4D - where some features of the first concept survived, like the witch killing in a single hit.

Granted the zombie health is stupid in that mode though. 

ah ok. and yeah, that sounds like a possibility. the game is fairly tame on normal difficulty. you only encounter the more interesting monsters on elite. you also get better loot though, which makes it totally worth playing on the harder difficulty. 

how many people finished Portal in one sitting? Just curious, I did but only because I was fooled as to how long Test Chamber 19 was :)