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Agreed. People who bitch about Doom3 not having a plot should be flung into a waste processor. iD don't do "plots". They do, urr, nice engines, umm, brown levels, umm, darkness and zombies and rockets. These are all good things. Although I believe my Riddick review featured a mini-rant against the evils of crates/barrels/corridors etc.. Damn I'm so perceptive and like, ahead of the times. Although Old Man Murray probably said it best with his Crate-Based Review System

disc-golf?

Oh yeah, and I vote cannabis. I love that stuff. I mean, you can cook with it, how nice and homey is that? What other drugs can you cook with? Hard day at work hon? Here, I made you spaghetti alla crack..

Why isn't alcohol on that list!? Or nicotine, or caffeine? (or aspirin?) These are the truly indispensable drugs that make everyday life bearable, so we can cope with waiting until the weekend when we can do the other drugs on that list. Preferably all at once. With a balloon or two of nitrous oxide as a chaser. Except the hallucinogens (I like vaguely remaining in this reality) and ketamine, I mean, it was created as a general anaesthetic for horses and cows for fucks sake.. I also hereby BAN anyone from daring to post something along the lines of "You know, you can have a much better time without drugs than you can with them!". You haven't been getting the good stuff. Trust me.

Sort of reminds me of Interstate '76 - I loved just caning it across the desert, drifting some cannoned-up muscle car back and forth across a thin strip of tarmac while scenery whipped past at 150mph.. I'm all for games that give you a sense of scale..

They're clearly working up to some kind of GTA MMO type thingy. This is good. I also find it hard to envisage a future in which San Andreas does not in fact kick all the ass..

I'd be overjoyed that my game kicked enough ass to get gamers all over the world playing and enjoying it? Oh no.. sorry.. I'd be outraged that these amoral theiving scumbuckets had DARED to get my game without paying, because instead of going into the industry because I loved playing games, and wanted to create great games that as many people as possible would enjoy, I want CASH and FAME and POWER and don't really give a shit about whether people play my game and have fun. Clearly only those people rich enough to afford my game should be able to play it as.. as... that's the RIGHT and MORAL thing to happen!

I'm not entirely clear what you mean - but basically : I don't expect good developers to survive. The current model of game financing and distribution is horrible. I can't see it leading anywhere other than p41n. Small devs are subsumed, and forced into sequel-slavery. Game budgets get bigger and bigger, publishers become monolithic and all other game consoles will be crushed under the heel of Sony, until the only entertainment options available to us are PlayStation, and EA games. And probably Grand Theft Auto too.. but EA will end up buying them too more than likely. God.. it's depressing... Like pop, the games industry will eat itself. Probably. Although I'm serious about Sony being the only console hardware manufacturer, it's only a matter of time before Microsoft and Nintendo give up, and go the software-only route that SEGA have already been forced into.

Let's see. We have the vast unwashed uninformed hordes that will blindly purchase crap because of a licence tie-in, or some cleavage on the gamebox, or some such other reason. There's nothing we can do about this. Obviously, no-one savvy enough to be on this forum is going to fit into this category. These people are doomed, and we can't reach them. It's a shame. Then we have the savvy forum dwellers. We don't buy crap, because we will hear from any number of sources if a game is a dog. Anyone here go out and buy Driv3r? No.. Trouble is, if all the savvy gamers rush out and buy a game because it's genuinely good (like BG&E for example) then that's still VASTLY fewer people than will be spending their money on Tomb Raider 7. Hence BG&E dies, and hence Tomb Raider 8. There's nothing we can do about this. We aren't powerful enough, either politically or financially to change this. And by continuing to pay overinflated prices we prop up the publishers that are perpetuating this situation. Umm, also, I'm getting tired of people saying things like "oh, you download gams, you have no morals, do you beat old ladies over the head for their pension money too?". I download games because I want to play them, because I can (yes, whoever said people get stuff for free because they can might have had a point) and because I hate publishers more than I hate people who throw rocks at kittens. The whole moral thing is amusing. Piracy is stealing, absolutely definitely. It's criminal and bad. But it's not THAT bad. I don't think you can equate it to embezzling from an employer, or mugging someone for their wallet. Most normal human beings have a sliding scale of morals, from phoning in sick when you're not that ill, to murder and rape. Where (honestly) do you think downloading a video game without paying for it fits on that scale? mm? OK - game is not worth buying (Max Payne 2 - 40 quid for 5 hours gameplay? when you can't even select a higher difficulty level initially, FORCING you to replay?) but IS worth downloading. For Free. I'll download it, and enjoy it, as opposed to paying too much for it, and being thoroughly pissed off. How many times do I have to repeat : I want to play and enjoy games. EVERYTHING else, including the law of the land, is a secondary concern. I have morals, Mr Farbror, it's just that they are loose enough to allow me to break the law in a number of interesting and enjoyable ways, downloading video games being probably the least of my sins. I am curious as to why you seem to rate game piracy as such a vile crime? People downloading good games doesn't kill off good games. The Horde buying shit games, publishers hyping shit games, and refusing to take chances on original IP kills off good games. There's nothing we can do about this. So why not grab everything you can, and play, and enjoy? Life is too short. Although of course, I am clearly going to hell for my sins.

Good. Unfortunately loads of idiots will. Hence Bad Game 2 : Worse Game, and Bad Game 3 : Even More Shit. Ok. Don't buy it. Why not download it anway? You weren't going to buy it, so there's no loss of revenue there. The only issue is the moral one about getting something without paying for it. By playing the game anyway, you get the chance to appreciate it, which you wouldn't have if you let your moral qualms dictate your actions. If enough people downloaded enough games, the publishers would be forced to drop prices, and (I believe) change their distribution model. Instead (perhaps) of paying forty five quid for a static dvd, you could download a core engine, and pay per-level, with new content updated and added each month. Once the distribution model changes, I think publishers will find their creative stranglehold on the market lessened. Fingers crossed this is happening anyway. As for removing the bad games, I don't really have an answer for that one, I don't recall saying exactly that either, I think my tirade was more against the idiocy of people buying shit sight unseen. It just baffles me that the vast majority of games are bought by people who don't know games, and aren't knowledgeable. Some of the few of us who know and love games then proceed to get all sniffy about warez because we feel like we're betraying the developers. Publishers want you to buy games. Money is the most important thing. Devs want you to play games. Enjoying a well-written game is the most important thing.

Oh yeah - and remember how games used to come with loads of Cool Free Shit, like the legendary Infocom "Hitchikers Guide" which had peril-sensitive sunglasses, and scratch 'n' sniff things? Games cost a fortune today, and generally you get a DVD case, a DVD (or two! ooh!) and a tiny manual. The rest of the manual is usually in a PDF, or online someplace. See what I mean about greed?

Hmmmmm. Publishers care about royalties and cash. Devs care about people playing and loving their games. Or should do. This reminds me of a comment Bruno Bonnell (CEO of Atari) made when Warner Bros. told everyone they were going to chop publisher royalties for licensed titles if aforementioned titles didn't get more than 70% average review scores. I.e. "If you take our licences and make crap, we pay you less!" Bonnell was furious. His reaction was (and I paraphrase) "But Enter ze Matrix sold ze millions of copies! it made lots of ze money for everyone involved! how dare zey! oo cares if ze game is ze 'uge pile of merde!?!" Publishers do not care about you. They don't care if you have fun playing their games. As long as you buy them, and keep buying them. They want your cash. They will foist overhyped unfinished shit on you, and laugh when you are stupid enough to pony up. Screw 'em. Publishers are everything that's wrong with this industry. Console or PC, regardless of the medium, games prices are set artificially high and kept high by cartels of publishers and hardware manufacturers. The music industry is currently seeing a change in the way they distribute and price their product, because that the ease with which their IP could be ripped off is forcing change in the way that IP is bought and sold. The same needs to happen to the games industry. (on that line of reasoning the "what would happen if we ALL just downloaded everything" argument dies - the industry would be forced to change the way they did business. You might have noticed that they won't bother unless they have to - look at the music industry behemoths, clinging on with all ten fingernails to an outdated method of content distribution because they're scared and greedy.) It's also impossible to get any kind of sane figures on sales lost to piracy as well, the utterly ridiculous idea that every single pirate copy in existence represents a lost sale is.. well.. utterly ridiculous. But still entertained. I believe that people who make games should do so because they want them to be played and enjoyed. People who make shit do not deserve my money. People who hype, cheat and lie to get me to buy their shit do not deserve my money. Every so often I play a game that I absolutely adore, and I buy it. The rest of the time, screw 'em. The sad truth is that for every excellent title that doesn't sell too well and dies, there are a million million idiots (and idiots mums etc..) who keep buying crap, and keep bolstering the publishers current business model. Savvy gamers should know this. Piracy is so so so NOT the reason good games fail. Idiots who buy crap and wouldn't appreciate a quality title if it attached itself to them with crocodile clips are the reason good games fail. And the publishers are making games for these people. not for us. You want to support the industry? Buy a programmer a pint. He needs one. You want mediocre, generic, unfinished, overpriced crap to be rammed down everyones throats forever?

FPS have moved on alot? It doesn't have a story because iD are now, and afaik have always been utterly terrible at anything other than writing very good engines, and playing lots of multiplayer so that's usually balanced reasonably well (apart from Quake 2, ok..) iD games have always suffered from bog standard crate/barrel/corridor crappy level design, imagination-less monsters "ooh zombies! with shotguns! wow!" and a complete lack of anything approaching a story. DOOM3 will be good because it's a pretty proof-of-concept for the nextgen of gaming. It looks better than anything else out there, and they're going to try and scare you lots. these are good things. I predict my own personal ph34r level will diminish considerably once asked to get a red keycard however. The FPS hasn't really changed much since half life. The in-game scripted events and sense of immersion the player felt were revolutionary. Nothing since then has had the same impact imho.

The whole "beaten by a girl" thing isn't the blow it once was - if I got all depressed each time I got my ass kicked by a chick I would be on Prozac by now.. I have been royally schooled by girls at Tekken, Smash Bros. Melee, Counterstrike and (to my extreme disbelief because I reckoned I'd be well good at it) Rogue Leader versus.. You should be grateful there are girls getting into the games with sufficient fervour to kick your ass in the first place

We can't seriously have two pages of stuff on classic games without anyone mentioning Elite, now can we? I'm probably just tired. Someone must have mentioned it earlier. Yeah. Although I bet they didn't have a link to the "Dark Wheel" novella that was included in the box with it though heh

Bugbomber. Only ever had a demo disk of it for the Amiga - but it was utterly stunning. In fourplayer mode, with your mates crowded round your Amiga - sheer gaming bliss. Basically it was Bomberman with various tweaks, your character had the ability to place blocks, fire laser bolt things that would attack creatures they could see, lay mines etc.. levels were populated with purple eggs that would hatch nasty beasties, UNLESS you laid you OWN eggs which could contain painting creatures that would go round changing the allegiance of unhatched eggs to your team... 4 player games on harder difficulty levels would kick off with each player frantically walling himself into a little layer, and then dealing with the deluge of purple eggs that would materialise (they had to be blown up with bombs, or painted to your colour before hatching). Once the purple eggs ceased appearing, each surviving player was then free to unleash their own individually coloured army onto the playing area (which by this point would be covered with mines, enemy robots and various pickups). ISTR a PC version too.. Other games I spent too much time playing : F-19 Stealth Fighter (Amiga) : sort of like Tornado in the sense that avoiding conflict was the main idea, creeping along at about 30ft above ground level, flying as slowly as possible with the nose of the F19 tilted up to stop you from stalling while patrolling MiGs fly past directly overhead, oblivious... oh.. joy.. MGS in a plane Birds of Prey (Amiga) : another sick flight sim, with about a billion different planes, and missions ranging from the usual CAP, to cargo drops in a C-130 and edge-of-the-atmosphere test piloting in a X-5 rocket plane.. fun! Cruise for A Corpse (Amiga) : someone mentioned this earlier, absolutely beautiful point and clicker, by Delphine (chaps who did Another World, bow down!) bloody difficult in places, but generally splendid - with the most gorgeous intro I'd ever /seen/ at the time. Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 (Amiga) : 2 player split screen racing action. Get down. Supercars 2 (Amiga) : Utterly glorious 1-2 player action top down racing with weaponry, CPU opponents, stunt tracks, upgradeable cars, and bizarre between-race "comm screen" quiz sections where depending on the answers given you could either win or lose lots of cash. Carrier Command (Amiga) : Ahh, blend strategic resource mangement with laser blasting twitch game skills in a quest to take over an island chain, and destroy your identical twin carrier that went EVIL. Masterpiece. There are more I could put here, but it'll turn into a solid page of dewy-eyed Amiga nostalgia (cannon fodder/chaos engine/speedball 2/Alien Breed) Greatest game console /ever/.

Aaaaaaaah. Stunt Island. Possibly the first game I managed to get running on my PC of my own accord - after literally several days spent messing with EMM386, DOS mouse drivers, low memory, high memory, expanded memory, extended memory et. al. It worked, and I was completely lost to the world until I managed to wade through the majority of the stunt challenges (flying a MiG across the bay, before pulling a high-G turn straight down main street between two banks of skyscrapers was a highlight..) and set up my own stunt Magnum Opus, alas never completed : a massively overambitious mission where the player chases a military convoy, dodging SAM missiles launched at them, chasing tanks/trucks etc.. I spent weeks on that, and never got all the scripting sorted (having no manual didn't make it any easier..) An amazing title though, with (istr) Gouraud shaded polys which were something of a novelty at the time? Clearly one of the all time kinds of emergent gameplay though, a virtual sandbox to seriously rival GTA etc..

Astonishingly, it is a really good game. Played through a chunk of it last night, the melee combat works really well, the stealth sections are sensible, the graphics are solid and (especially the character models) rather pleasing to the eye. The much touted intro-tutorial sequence works good, and well, I've put a few hours in and I'm not even nearly bored yet. yay! Go Starbreeze!

Flashback was rather like too little butter spread over too large a slice of cinnamon raisin toast. Whereas AW constantly confronted the player with differing challenges, FB largely consisted of just shooting things. Sure the game was longer, because there are nice big sections that aren't really that interesting. Plus there are some pixel-perfect nause jumps in there that make the cavern section of AW look about as taxing as watching an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. I hate that little sponge fuck. Anyway. Another World 4 life j00 :cens0r:in' flashback lovin' :cens0r:s...

Rerelease? ReMAKE? omg folks. My cup runneth over.

Stop it I reviewed the Xbox version for jolt.co.uk, and quite frankly, I was distinctly underwhelmed. It was a better story than a game, with lacklustre combat and occasionally-satisfying driving. That race car level was straight out of Spirit of Speed : 1937 though, which is to say that it was utterly shit. Didn't anyone who played that game before release bother to tell the devs? As for Mafia 2, I heard they were considering a more Sopranos-esque contemporary setting, which with better cars, and tweaked combat, could actually be quite good. Fingers crossed

You are being shallow Besides, Syberia was kind of fun.. what with its fiendish clockwork creatures, and generally weird ambiance..

mmm. Alien Resurrection on the PS scared the living crap out of me.. Waking up in a cell as an unarmed and completely vulnerable Ripley, and swaying through dark corridors listening to an computer voicing portents of doom.. that was creepy. Alone in the dark also, Silent Hill obligatorily (if that's a real word).. Resident Evil, w00! The bit right at the start when the zombie dog mutant crashes through the window and leaps, snarling, for your throat.. aaaah. Anyway, those games scared me, lots.. Surely I will not survive the new Call of Cthulu title.. Maybe I should play it, die, and become the first person to posthumously sue a games company..

That's a cool interview, I think between my school-level French, and the Babelfish trx I got most of it. I did read this though : This makes me weep. Does he genuinely believe there's no "heart" in the games industry today? Or is he just using some kind of prissy Frenchness to justify not bothering to try and produce something good? I think he's living in the shadow of Heart of Darkness, which considering it supposedly shifted 1.5 million copies, is an odd thing to do. Maybe he hated it. Maybe it completely disillusioned him. I don't know. Sad though.

oh well.. that kind of sucks.. Guess I won't bother trying to track down a copy then At any rate, I refuse to believe it could possibly contend with Fade To Black in the "worst game vaguely related to AW" stakes. Boy, now boy, ah say, that there's a terrible game