What games are you playing now?

[JackGordon]

Originally Posted by Brackstone17

I if I had to recommend a COD game, I'd say Big Red One is my favourite. It does some nice things different from the rest of the series (Germany and Japan aren't the only enemies, there's also Italy and Vichy France). Also it has a full cast of characters, no switching fronts half way through. It might be a little tough to find though.

Actually, I already found a load of used copies on eBay But I actually like switching fronts, although it does have its disadvantages. Not spending enough time with a certain squad and suddenly seeing a teammate die in a cutscene didn't really leave a lasting impression...

Originally Posted by BeardedHoplite

I personally thought World at War was one of the better WWII FPS-s put to console. Mostly because it is the closest I'm going to get to a game version of Cross of Iron (and thus, a playable James Coburn). The over-the-top gore didn't and the fact that it focused on the Eastern Front, which is the less-used and in my opinion, cooler front of WWII, made it a keeper; even if it was a Call of Duty game.

I can understand that

[pnoozi]

Played some of the Diablo 3 beta last weekend. Pretty decent co-op.

[JackGordon]

Finished my very first playthrough of CoD3 on Hardened difficulty today. Overall, I think this is a very good WWII shooter and I'm glad I gave this one a priority because of its reputation as the black sheep of the series. I will be going into CoD2 with a different perspective. But first... I'm playing through CoD3 again, this time on Veteran

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I played the Dragon's Dogma demo yesterday. I don't know much about RPG's but this looks and plays great! Depending on how/if Scamcom decides to screw gamers over, I just might buy it on launch.

[Brackstone17]

Originally Posted by JackGordon

Finished my very first playthrough of CoD3 on Hardened difficulty today. Overall, I think this is a very good WWII shooter and I'm glad I gave this one a priority because of its reputation as the black sheep of the series. I will be going into CoD2 with a different perspective. But first... I'm playing through CoD3 again, this time on Veteran

---

I played the Dragon's Dogma demo yesterday. I don't know much about RPG's but this looks and plays great! Depending on how/if Scamcom decides to screw gamers over, I just might buy it on launch.

What's going on here, JackGordon likes a CoD game and is excited for a fantasy RPG? On a serious note, Dragon's Dogma looks pretty damn cool, but I haven't played the demo yet.

In other out of character news, I've been playing Asura's Wrath and I really like it despite the fact it's basically an interactive anime and I hate all anime.

[JackGordon]

Originally Posted by Brackstone17

What's going on here, JackGordon likes a CoD game and is excited for a fantasy RPG?

Desperate times call for desperate measures

[JackGordon]

Got through Call of Duty 3's Veteran difficulty on saturday. Together with RE5's Pro, both FEAR and Dog Days' Extreme modes, this was one of the toughest shooters I've had to play through. Science damn it, never again...
In related news, CoD3's soundtrack composer Joel Goldsmith, son of Jerry Goldsmith, passed away yesterday at the age of 54. So that's sad... Here are some brilliant audio tracks from the game: Main Theme, Call to Arms & The Corridor of Death.

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Birds of Steel is finally here. And boy is it good Loads of planes, two (rather short) single player campaigns: Japanese & American. Fully customizable single player missions, co-op, online multiplayer, hangar, fully customizable controls (might get me one of those Saitek Aviator Flight Sticks)...
Beautiful classical music, fairly lenghty cutscenes serve as a wonderful history lesson/documentary with tons of authentic footage.

Great but hard game!

[JackGordon]

Gentlemen, I think I may have done the deal of a lifetime. The Penumbra Collection, brand new for €5,72 (shipping incl.). Bricks will be shat.

EDIT: I know bugger all about pc hardware etc. But can someone please shed some light on the following: can my graphics card - a Geforce gt 320, I believe - run the Penumbra games properly? What about Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason?

[Brackstone17]

If I had to guess, they should work on the lowest settings, but you should just try it out since advice over the internet will only go so far. Play around with the settings as soon as the game starts, maybe look up console commands for what kind of fps you're getting and go from there.

Here's a link with your graphics card's performance with other games: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-...M.28701.0.html

[JackGordon]

Will do, and thank you for the link!

[BeardedHoplite]

I bought the console version of Minecraft the other day. Besides it being five or so updates behind ther PC version, I really like it. The multiplayer is real easy to set up, so I Shanghai-ed some of my friends to buy it and we're trying to build a mini-Rapture right now.

[JackGordon]

I enjoyed the trial but 1600MSP is just too much...

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The Killzone 3 multiplayer got me hooked again. Slowly ranking up, trying to get those final class abilities unlocked... I'm Colonel III now. Ugh...

[JackGordon]

Cryostasis. It's all kinds of awesome Surprisingly my computer can run it on Medium settings so hurray for that!
Best way to describe this game is that it's a mix of Carpenter's The Thing in terms of soundtrack and atmosphere, a dash of the original Condemned's melee & shooting mechanics and Bioshock's visual style. The horror elements are a bit underwhelming, although I'm only three chapters in so the best is hopefully yet to come.
Other than that, the story's a bit of blur for now but it definitely got me intrigued. A few noteworthy gameplay features are the following:
Instead of a regular health bar, you get a bodyheat meter. It depletes continuously and when that thing reaches zero, your character freezes to death. It really keeps you on edge and on the lookout for various heat sources to keep yer mits warm.
The other cool feature is called the 'Mental Echo'. Basically it gives you the ability to "tune" into a corpse's mind and relive his past to put the wrong things right. In other words: you can solve environmental puzzles through the eyes of the dead.

I'm loving it so far. Why this game didn't get a console release is beyond me... Here's some gameplay footage.

[Live2BRightous]

Originally Posted by JackGordon

Cryostasis. It's all kinds of awesome Surprisingly my computer can run it on Medium settings so hurray for that!
Best way to describe this game is that it's a mix of Carpenter's The Thing in terms of soundtrack and atmosphere, a dash of the original Condemned's melee & shooting mechanics and Bioshock's visual style. The horror elements are a bit underwhelming, although I'm only three chapters in so the best is hopefully yet to come.
Other than that, the story's a bit of blur for now but it definitely got me intrigued. A few noteworthy gameplay features are the following:
Instead of a regular health bar, you get a bodyheat meter. It depletes continuously and when that thing reaches zero, your character freezes to death. It really keeps you on edge and on the lookout for various heat sources to keep yer mits warm.
The other cool feature is called the 'Mental Echo'. Basically it gives you the ability to "tune" into a corpse's mind and relive his past to put the wrong things right. In other words: you can solve environmental puzzles through the eyes of the dead.

I'm loving it so far. Why this game didn't get a console release is beyond me... Here's some gameplay footage.

I have this game... but the 20 frames I get from it kind of put me off. From what I played, it was *** awesome. I loved the part where you were underwater in that huge suit while that thing tried to attack you. The guns felt quite satisfying to use too.

[BeardedHoplite]

I finished Max Payne 3 last night. This is how Dog Days should have been, man. The fact that

It ends at an airport

makes it even better.
Plus it's one of the most fluid shooter's I've played. Even the animations in multiplayer are smooth.
And the story is really good. Maybe a little predictable if you know about what a hell-hole Brazil is, but it’s very effective and noirish despite the sunny settings

[JackGordon]

Finished Cryostasis yesterday. Phenomenal horror experience! It isn't perfect by any means; so-so enemy design, lots of graphical glitches and I can see some people being put off by the way it plays (slow & clunky). But science damn it, this ranks right up there with my other favorite survival horror games.

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Just got my PC copy of Metro 2033. Apparently it's a used copy that was resealed by the seller to appear as new, so that's negative feedback for him.
Anyways, I immediately noticed the red "Internet connection required for activation" sticker. Inserting the game does give me a "Install Metro 2033" screen but it installs Steam instead. The activation keycode lets me download Metro 2033 from Steam. Estimated download completion is about an hour so I've got some time...

[phoenix630]

In between Halo: Reach and Call of Duty MW2 and 3, waiting for the newest Tomb Raider to come out.

[Live2BRightous]

So I bought the new RE:ORC PC port full price... and I have to admit, I haven't had this much fun playing a game since K&L2 and L4D1. Something about it is extremely addicting... and with the multiplayer being alive, the gamemodes are extremely fun.

The port does has its problems though, like the sound cuts on and off at random, the mouse controls can look left and right perfectly fine, but looking up and down is reaaaallly slow. A few multiplayer glitches too, but nothing a patch can't fix.

[Brackstone17]

I've played and beat Max Payne 3 and I really loved it. At first I wasn't too thrilled. The gameplay is amazing, but the story and the atmosphere just wasn't there (there's a few times it got close though). Overall the story wasn't amazing, I'd say it's better than the first game but not as good as the second. However, just before I reached disk 2 (I'm playing on the 360) everything just clicked and I began to have an absolute blast. I don't have a specific time to completion, but it definitely felt just right. Something I find quite good is that the normal mode is actually a decent challenge. Unlike some games where normal is for people who don't know what videogames are and easy is for coma patients, normal is just right for the average videogame players first run through. Also there's 2 or 3 difficulties higher than normal and 2 alternate types of game mode after that to play, so there's plenty of content.

I haven't touched the multiplayer yet, so I can't comment on that, but overall I'd say this is a great update to the series. One note though, this game is not for the faint of heart, it's easily one of the goriest games I can think of. And I don't mean in a cartoonish, Mortal Kombat way either.

[JackGordon]

Borrowed Gears of War 3 from a friend. Finished it on Hardcore in about two lazy afternoons. What a terrible single player campaign. Sure, it does some good things: nice and varied setpieces, I thought Act 2 & 3 were fantastic, a couple of boss fights were very good as well, the underwater level was nice but should've been so much more. But its story, characters and dialogues are embarassingly stupid. And turning all the female Gears into stereotypical butch airheads is just... ugh... Random grievances:

- Dom's martyr's death came out of nowhere and felt genuinely rushed and misplaced.

- Queen Myrrah's monologues were extremely cringeworthy.
- Lambent enemies are bloody annoying
- Unremarkable soundtrack
- When downed, friendly AI walked right past me and got itself killed (happened about eight times throughout the entire game)
- A walk in the park, even on Hardcore. Only experienced difficulties at the end when the game activates its "We ran out of ideas before we even started"-mode and throws yet even more waves of enemies at the player.

This is definitely the weakest campaign of the series. Glad I didn't pay money for this...

[JackGordon]

Aliens vs Predator multiplayer on 360. Trying to get the last three multiplayer achievements I need: Very Tough Hombre (10 kills without dying), Persecution Complex (become a persecutor twice) and The Uninfected (finish Infestation as the last remaining prey). Almost nobody plays this anymore but when I do land in a match, I get pwned. Yay, frustration.

[JackGordon]

Apart from those annoying AvP mp achievements there's not much new for me to play with. So I just do what I always do: go back to past-gen. Snuck a peak at my ps2 library in the hopes of finding something I haven't finished yet and the winner is: Ghosthunter!
Apart from the graphics (progressive scan support, beautiful lighting effects, nicely detailed and impressively animated characters), this game gives the worst of terrible first impressions. The kind that lasts two drawn-out chapters... Afterwards it's happy times guaranteed! Ghosthunter is essentially a shooter but with interesting gameplay mechanics and excellent boss battles. I'm honestly not paying too much attention to the story because it's very silly, though in a campy sort of way. Once you manage to get through those first two atrociously generic and bland chapters, the game kicks into action with very atmospheric levels, eerie music, creepy (though not scary) and varied enemy-design.

[BeardedHoplite]

Hmm, that's some purty lighting for a PS2 game.

I've been going through my old games and found Syphon Filter games, so I spent the whole day just going through the PS1 trilogy. They've aged, but my childhood was spent on them and I just can't stop playing.

[JackGordon]

Got through Gears of War 2's single player campaign on Hardcore difficulty the other day. I haven't played this game in over two years, I believe. Still very meh... It's enjoyable, yes, but instantly forgettable at the same time. Few things I really enjoyed were the riftworm level, the boss fight with the Leviathan and the prolonged battle with Skorge.

Other than that, it's bad games-day today! Thought I'd give FEAR3 another go. Nope, it's still utter . Check out my Gamespot user review by the way. However, I do want to point out one thing: the EL-10 CAS shotgun with its P90-like feeding system, is just plain badass!


I was looking for a 360 exclusive to kill some time and got a used copy of Bullet Witch. Science be damned, this is one terrible game... The story is retarded, graphics are fugly, gameplay is tedious, the shooting isn't satisfying at all and using spells is pointless.

[Bevacur]

Hey! Fear 3 was fun! True it was not scary at all but it was very fun, but short.

Always wanted to try Ghost Hunter. I was pretty young when i played it. In the school hallway (literally the first 5 seconds) and i got scared and turned it off.

[JackGordon]

FEAR3 can be fun but only when playing as Fettel. I'll admit it's a decent shooter as well but, seeing as the name of the game is "FEAR", I'd say this game is a complete failure in that regard and it should be criticized for it.

Did Ghost Hunter really scare you? Not accustomed to horror-themed video games?