Ben X

Yeah, it's actually quite fun because you get a little shooting gallery. There's only been one instance when I've opted for quick-load instead, which was where I thought I had to do some precision platforming and kept falling to my death, so I just wanted to retry as quickly as possible (turned out it was a spirit-walk puzzle for which I needed some spirit ammo, so ironically I actually did need to kill myself and go through the mini-game).

I'm about halfway through and still very much enjoying it. It looks great and there's loads of attention to detail (enemies turning off anti-grav walkways while you're on them in a firefight, the idle animation on your weapon where a little eye stalk protudes and stares at you, using a severed alien hand to open doors, the broadcasts coming from Earth as people call in to a talk radio station with reports of weird stuff happening, your spirit animal attacking enemies so you can shoot them while they try to swipe it away) and some sweet environmental story-telling, like suddenly hearing "Barracuda" by Heart in the middle of this spaceship and then realising they've abducted the entirety of your bar, before grav-flipping into it for a fire-fight, or seeing an entire airliner get abducted (which the abandoned Prey 2 was planning to use as its protagonist's back-story). It's still currently throwing new stuff at me (ghost children! One-man shuttles you can fly about the place and tractor-beam massive objects around with! Using forcefields in a new way to chop a boss' gun-hand off and use it against it!), so currently I'm happy. It may be that it runs dry around here and the second half is utterly repetitive, we'll see.

Prey is really cool so far. The start is scary and exciting - you start off in a shitty bar, getting in a fight with the locals, then suddenly the power goes off, Blue Oyster Cult starts playing on the jukebox and everyone and everything is getting hoisted into a massive spaceship where fellow abductees quickly get gored by massive machinery. It's doing very well at creating an alien atmosphere - anti-grav paths, portals (which can lead to weird scale differences), massive, toxic-poo-spewing bumholes, weird weapons, not to mention the Cherokee spirit-walking layered on top - without overwhelming the player. Having said that, I do seem to have come afoul of some gravity-flipping and hit a dead end, so I'll have to reload an autosave and see if that's the case. EDIT: a couple of Prey threads from 11 years ago! And I just realised that as this is in DooM3's engine, I may be able to fiddle about with the graphics settings like I did with that game...

@SecretAsianMan are you going to replay it?

I've finished ii! It's actually pretty short, which is definitely a good thing without a lot more variety being introduced. Overall, once I switched to easy, I very much enjoyed this. Great atmosphere and attention to detail (your visor's wiper cleaning away bug splatter, wire-frames of targeted enemies showing through walls), and satisfying squad mechanics. It's actually made me want to re-watch the prequel trilogy, which is pretty damn impressive. I wish this had done better so we could have got the planned sequel, Imperial Commando. That would have been great, starting the game as a Republic commando on Kashyyyk to retrieve your fallen crewman when Order 66 is given and suddenly turning sides and taking down a load of wookies and jedi. Retrospectives here: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007/10/01/retrospective-republic-commando/ http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/retrospective-star-wars-republic-commando-article and part 2 of a dev commentary (parts 3 and 4 are also available, but part one got taken down because of the John Williams score, which I'm gutted about): NEXT: Prey

Yeah, I noticed the shields on my tactical display, but I hadn't quite figured out how they worked. I guess the deal is that you only lose health if your shields are at zero, so as long as you duck under cover before your shields go down, you're fine? The revive mechanic is also cool and has gotten me out of some jams, but to be honest I'd rather they just alleviated the difficulty a little instead because, along with bacta stations, reviving team-mates or waiting to get revived myself is where I spend a lot of game time. And yeah, now I'm used to just running in and immediately setting my guys up, it's a lot better. Although sometimes there aren't any POI for them, or there's a ceiling turret, which they just cannot handle. Those fucking Star Wars ceiling turrets have been the bane of this FPS play-through. Also the flying droids with lightning attack were stupidly overpowered on Normal setting, especially when I was on my own. I just cannot believe that they play-tested this and decided the difficulty levels were spot on. Basically, there's lots of cool stuff going on here but also a load of bullshit enemies, bad ammo balancing etc getting in the way of it.

I had to put this down to easy just to make it possible, and it's actually not too bad now, although I do spend a lot of time healing my squad mates and using health-recharging bacta stations which can make it feel like a slog. I'll be interested to hear how your replay goes if you pick it up, @SecretAsianMan

Yeah, it's better once you figure out how they want you to use it, can be pretty satisfying. It's still insanely difficult, though. Anything but the lowest of enemies can kill you from full health in a couple of shots. There's a siege section now and I just don't see how it's possible. EDIT: okay, a walkthrough advised me to use the sniper positions which I hadn't spotted. You kind of have to charge into deadly situations just to get your team set in the only positions that will allow you to win...

The presentation for Republic Commando is great, especially if you enjoyed at least the design of Episode II. There's a cool little intro where you're a clone, growing from baby in a tube, to young Kiwi kid doing computer tests, to full-on Temuera Morrison meeting your squad and seeing armies of clones and transports gathering. Then you're thrown into the Geonosis battle from the end of the movie and having great fun blasting all those droids and bugs. The HUD is nice and helpful, with objectives and possible team-member orders highlighted (focus fire on this droid, snipe here, blow this up). The only problems I've hit so far are: it's surprisingly difficult already, with laser-shooting bugs that take up to 3 clips of ammo. I'm actually tempted to go back and put it on easy, unless there's a tactic I'm missing. as with Pacific Assault, there's a team system where you can tell your team to pull back, defend an area etc. I always find these way too difficult to think about in the heat of battle, as there's never an easy way to remember which key does what. It's an RTS element that doesn't really mix well with FPS.

@elvaq did some streams. Their Twitch channel is here: https://www.twitch.tv/elvaq (I don't know if they want to share any specific video links)

Oh yeah, it's 75% off at the mo. In case you missed my edit, I'm having a bit of a blast through HL2 first. I probably won't go through any vehicle sections, though, so shouldn't be long before I get into SWRC.

I got to a bit where you have to take down two fighter planes with a shitty gun and you die 19 times out of 20 no matter how good you are. I fluked past it once only to get to a turret section where I only had 7 health left. My paramedic doesn't want to help me because he's in a raft. Fuuuuck this, uninstalled. Star Wars: Republic Commando next! (I don't have any Half-Life 2 + episodes posts to paste here, but they're brilliant, obviously EDIT: in fact, fuck it, I'm going to play a bit of HL2 just to remind myself how amazing it was in 2004)

So far, MOH:PA is like a very clumsy Far Cry. After a long sequence of levels which were nicely presented but where I didn't have to do much (boot camp and Pearl Harbor mainly), I'm now in the jungle. It's very difficult to figure out where I'm supposed to go or where the enemy are. I keep on coming up against leaf-painted walls and having to sit back and watch my squad until I can tell what the hell's going on. The shooting's not very satisfying so far either - crappy WWII weapons plus enemies that don't always react to getting shot. The atmosphere is as you'd expect - a mix of gung-ho and glumness, with an R Lee Ermey clone chucked in for good measure.

Ehhh fuck it, I can't be bothered to muck about with mods (especially as I have to work out how to avoid shitty fan textures) just to play this game for ten more minutes before remembering that it's just not my sort of thing. Also, that lock-picking mini-game. I'll paste here what I posted on the Size Forums when I played DooM3 over a couple of months a few years ago: And now I'm moving onto Medal Of Honor: Pacific Assault. I'll have a bit of a play, and if anyone wants to try co-op, let me know!

Once you've watched it, check out our (languishing) Pixar re-watch thread!

I'm not a huge fan of the first Matrix either, and I think the reason is that there's no real story to go with the high-concept setting. It's just "Is Neo the one? Yes." I also find the 'real world' sections to feel a lot more fake than the matrix sections, which is really the wrong way round.

Good call - what a dreary, bloated, franchise-builder of a film. And they've announced they're now making FOUR more! There were two good moments in the whole film: where Newt Scamander takes the muggle into his suitcase which contains a huge animal sanctuary with loads of different climates and weird creatures interacting with each other. (I sat there thinking "this would be an amazing VR experience", which I guess is the new version of watching an action sequence and thinking "this would be an amazing video game level") when the muggle who has seen all this amazing stuff and been a good ally is told at the end of the film he has to be obliviated because rules. It's a clever rearrangement of a standard Potter trope that garners a lot of pathos.

Phew! 1828 is duty bound by forum honour to stay at number one.

Have we all been knocked off the high score table yet?

I asked this on Slack. I was told that if you extract the first zip folder it will automatically do the second one at the same time. Worked for me!

Well, hopefully you've fixed it so I won't need fullscreen!

Another free FPS! I just got Killing Floor for free from Humble Bundle, but when I registered it I was given two free passes to the full game as well, so I'm not sure what I've actually got in my library... So if I've got a playable version of the game, and if someone wants to play co-op with me, I'll give it a go once I hit that point of my playthrough!

I'm already getting bad deja vu to the first Thief game! It's fun sneaking around putting out candles and what have you, but I just get frustrated by not knowing what the consequences of any of my actions are going to be. I'll definitely need to look into a fan mod I read about that links all the levels together and eliminates the DXIW- scale loading times before I go any further with this, I think.

I got past that boss and luckily glitched my way through another one that would probably have led me to give up on the game, as it has some stupidly harsh and unavoidable fall damage. I actually got right up to the end of game boss, but I couldn't figure out the trick, so I watched a video of it instead (you have to shoot the meteors into Lucifer). The final level setting was really cool - lots of different battles from different eras frozen in time. It's a shame the rest of the game wasn't so inventive. It had its moments, like the Ghost Rider guys who grab nearby enemies and use them as shields, but the essentially real-world locations and general grimdark feel mean this game isn't as memorable as Serious Sam. Oh, and the inter-level cut-scenes are as dreadful as people were saying! Pointless, interminable, and ugly, with so many misread lines, plus they feature Eve (yes, that one) looking like a default Unity naked female model but with a hair bra (which, bizarrely, you can see right through anyway). I think another reason this felt like a bit of a slog was that the weapons, as per usual with these games that have a big wacky selection, weren't very satisfying or well-balanced on the whole. If they'd reduced the stake-gun reload time and given it the secondary freeze mode, they could have got rid of every other weapon except the chain-gun (with its rocket launcher secondary mode). Here's a much more favourable retrospective from The Will Porter: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/painkiller-retrospective And now I'm onto Thi3f!

Holy cow @One8Two8, pleeeease stream this game or at least record some high-scoring play!