toblix

It was a Wild West Commandos clone game, and it was great. It had fantastic graphics and awesome gameplay. The characters and levels were even varieder than in the Commandos games, and there was a system for setting up several of your characters to perform some command simultaneously, which was actually useful and fun, and there were lots of stereotypical Wild West stuff and I loved it. Anyway, there came another game from Spellbound (the developers) called Robin Hood (and something about Sherwood), which used the same engine, but sucked because it was action oriented. Aaaanyway, right out of the blue comes the demo for Desperados 2, which i'm downloading right now. The blurb for the demo doesn't sound to promising, with talk of zooming into firefights and real time 3d and stuff. Anyway, hopefully it'll be as great as the previous one. Oh, and if you never played Desperados, but liked Commandos or Commandos 2, try it. It's probably dirt cheap now.

Commitment, eh? Explain, please.

The game seems so choppy... Even the mouse cursor in the menu jumps around like crazy. And everything is so slow, even with the speed boost on. I don't remember it being like this when I last played it, and that was only about a year ago. Is everything smoothed out in my memory, or doesn't it handle high-res scaling well?

I think I might just have to give it another chance, then.

Definitely. If you give me your address I'll send you a copy.

No, both Desperados and Commandos 2 (as I remember them) both have that slowly rising difficulty curve that never goes too high and always let you work out the levels at your own pace. There's never a time limit or the need to quickly manage a lot of stuff at once. Commandos 2 has a bonus system I enjoyed, which consists of gathering pieces of a photograph in each level (they're spread around in lockers all over the level), which leads to some kind of bonus level, which can be defending a little fort from oncoming Germans (which means placing soldiers at strategic locations and waiting for the enemy) or a boat race. Also, the levels in Commandos 2 are amazingly detailed and beautiful, and since there's no hurry, the ability to rotate the camera (in 90 degrees increments, since it's prerendered) doesn't detract, but add to the scale and beauty of the environments. Also, Commandos 2 has indoor segments, which mesh wonderfully with the outside ones. Man, I'm going to play Commandos 2 again. And Desperados.

If the pace of the game is like the original, I'll give it another shot. Also, even though I think Desperados is better than Commandos, my absolute favorite of all of these kinds of games is Commandos 2. Everything about that game was perfect. The graphics are absolutely fabulous, with really detailed graphics everywhere, making all the levels really interesting to play in. The fact that you can rotate and watch the level from four angles also rocks when the graphics is so great. The gameplay, too, is much better than the predecessor. No impossible tasks, just a huge level full of guards, and you begin with one guard, and then you can take the next. And then, if you go around there and distract that guy, you can use the other character to quickly grab the guy patrolling the bridge, and so on. The more I think about it, the more I realise that the fact that you control the pace of the game yourself is one of the most important qualities in these games. There's no countdown, and no sequence where lots of guards come running from everywhere. If you play it right, you can leave the game running for hours without anyone noticing you've knocked out half the army. That's why I didn't like Commandos 3.

Just for the record, I also thought the Desperados giveaway was the full version. I remember thinking it was the demo at first, then looking at the box and finding no mention of it being a demo, so I thought it might be the full version, since the game was a couple of years old then, and I didn't get the impression it was very popular. Anyone remember all the talk about expansion packs with new levels for Desperados? I was at the Spellbound/Desperados forums, and people were getting pretty bitter as they slowly realised there was no new contents coming. Oh, and I didn't bother playing the demo for long, since it seemed pretty clear it was going to be an action game. Was I wrong?

Seems they chose the action route for this one too. Oh, well.

I've found that the secret to watching tv series is to download them. Then you don't have to sit in front of the tv all day, switching channels, waiting for the shows you watch to come on.

So, you know her bra size yet?

I think I'd probably try to talk them out of it first, and then kill them. The double-barreled shotgun double shot to the face is fabulous! WHAM!

Definitely. The pacing of the game is what makes it so wonderful. It's not like the enemies are just spread out randomly, but they're hanging around places where it's not jarring for them to be, like the houses they've occupied, and the roadblocks they've set up. But it's like, when it's just an old house, completely silent (only the wooshing of the ocean), and you can go into the kitchen and see all the stuff there, and upstairs there's the former inhabitant that got taken by a headcrab, and he wakes up when you arrive and starts wailing and shambling towards you. And this is so great, because it's not like the enemy is there as a challenge, but just as some sort of, I dunno, story element. It's pretty unusual for a game, but it works fantastically. Even though it's just another zombie model, you're thinking "hey, this is the guy who lived here," or whatever. And you can just cheese it, and leave him there. Run out of the house, jump into the car and continue along the coast. It's like the game world is so real that me leaving the guy alive there, or me doing whatever, throwing stuff off a cliff or stacking cans of paint, has some meaning or effect that's not a product of some explicit game mechanic, but just a byproduct of all the aspects of the game's design. At least, that's what I think.

Just finished this game for the second time. I was expecting to start playing it and then stop because of being disappointed by the nineties graphics and gameplay that wasn't as great as I remembered, but the game is actually still fun! Also, although the character models are really ass compared to the lady with the big breasts in the spaceship in Unreal II, the 2d tiles that are used are wonderfully beautiful and pretty and colorful and fantastic. The gameplay is pretty good too, by which I mean that it's not extremely hard or unforgiving but challenging, and there's a feeling of progress as you get better balls. Also, there's this great effect of playing this cartoony, childish-looking game that's really about oppression and totalitarianism (in a way), with comically fat soldiers that shoot colored spheres at you but still feel a bit like nazis. There's a bit of having to run back and forth through the same place, which sucks a bit, but the fat nazis explode when they die, with a pop, and then a coin or a heart comes. And there's a jetpack and little elves with keycards, and the best part of it is that once you've played this game, you can continue by playing LBA2 (or Twinsen's Odyssey), which is a truly great masterpiece, so it's a shame I just found out my LBA2 CD is broken and I can't download it from anywhere. Anyway, if you liked BG&E, or didn't, you should play it. I'd post screenshots, but: I'm too lazy I hear that linking to screenshots from MobyGames makes closeups of penises appear instead. Here's a link, though. And the music is really cool (in the game, not the link)!

So I read they're uppificating the production of the DSL in order to make more of them so the Japanese are happy. Is Japan the only country it's available in, though? Isn't it being sold anywhere in the US or Europe or Middle East or Africa? Just Japan?

Whoa!

Yeah, I guess a lot of people find the fights difficult, because if you get into one, you're pretty much screwed. Almost all the enemies attack faster than you, so that if you're hit, you're caught in a short cycle of stunning hits and then you die. The secret, of course, is not to engage in close combat, but to attack from a distance with the ball. Sometimes it's hard, when they're coming for you, but usually they don't take a lot of hits before they explode into some sort of reward. Also, you should just avoid most of the enemies. Run past them.

LbaWin is the Gentleman of Relentless in Windows. It even lets you turn off that annoying running-into-walls stunning effect. Oh, and I wouldn't say there's a lot of platforming, but that might be a lie. It's a while since I played the second one. Let's just say you shouldn't be afraid of jumping from platform to plaform over an open pool of lava. But mostly it's, I dunno, arcade adventure, sort of. With balls (magic balls!).

So anyway, now we'll get a state sponsored LBA 3, right? God dammit, the world needs another LBA game. It's been, what, nine years?

http://www.mininova.org/tor/244075 I may be breaking some sort of rule, or law, but this is a BitTorrent link to all (but one) of the Jon Stewart segments, plus some more stuff.

I was walking around town early one day looking for something to eat (I was in town because I was attending a LAN party), and for some reason I saw this bin of games at a photography store (or whatever it's called). They were all crumpled and worn out at the corners, and they were all dirt cheap. Also, one of the games was Sanitarium, which is a super great game (one of the super greatest, in fact). So that's my find.

Just wanted to express my feelings about the Fallouts (1 and 2, not the rest): They're absolutely supar fun! Arcanum has some of the same feeling, and Planescape is also great, but the Fallouts has the supar trophy in my RPG book.

Are you serious? If you got a game that was 100% realistic, would you just do the stuff you usually do? Me, I would kick someone's ass. Why? Can't a game be complex and deep, like a European garden? You still don't understand what I'm trying to say. I'm not saying that I want all games to be unlimited in scope. I'm just saying that if a game is supposed to have even a hint of story, the player won't be satisfied until he's reached one of the predefined endings, and the nature of games dictates that you have to win ("beat the game") in order to do this. A movie can end with the main character dying a meaningless death or something, but when that's the case it's supposed to be that way. In a game, such an event would constitute a failure, and if that failure is supposed to be a point of closure or whatever, for the story, the entire game would be this free-form mess that shouldn't attempt to have a story in the first place. Gaaah! I don't know how to express myself!

Well, technically, it wasn't a question, but yeah, maybe.

Yeah, but this isn't what I mean. The "losing" here is just really figuring out some gameplay mechanic that you need to understand in order to win. My view is this: What if Guybrush got sworded in the gut and died right there, on the road? No player would just go "Oh, so that's the end of the story, right here. Good game!". My point is that even if a game system/world is free and unlimited, if you're going to tell a good story, you can't rely on the freedom. Eventually, you'll either have to make it so that every possible outcome of the gameplay gets some form of closure (which is impossible), or ever so gently nudge the player towards the limited set of endings which will satisfy him/her. This sort of fits with why I don't spend much time on games that start with "Sim". They never have goals, and never a "story arc", so they're just toys or simulations, which start to get boring the minute I get a sense of the "gears" and mechanics behind the game. If The Sims was really unlimited in possibilities, I'd do nothing but play it, but when I've spent a couple of hours on it, and realise that I can't really build the house of my dreams, since I'm limited to the tilesets and dimensions that the game supports, and the people can't turn into completely unique characters, just pre-animated models with combinations of some limited number of stats, it feels so empty. SO EMPTY!!!