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jumb

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ogmzergrush said:
Yeah, I'm having a hard time distinguishing it from medieval fantasy. It looks heaps like battle for middle-earth imo!

On a serious note though, I don't quite get the fuss over that. It certainly looks faithful to the original, and that seems more important to conforming to whatever expectations people have of a "scifi" feel. Did people (not just you) think that the original was not "scifi" looking enough, are there huge discrepancies that I'm missing, or what?

Regarding it looking blocky, perhaps a bit. But it's hard to gauge that kind of thing from screenshots. I remember thinking F.E.A.R. screenshots were ugly (and quite blocky), but in motion it all works and looks incredible. From the low-res gameplay clips kicking around, in motion it looks a-ok to me on the go, but it's hard to judge too much until there's video of a similar quality to what you'll be seeing when you play.
I thought FEAR was shit. Mainly because at the time I played it, I had outdated drivers so it locked up a lot, which made me rage-uninstall it.
 
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jumb said:
I thought FEAR was shit. Mainly because at the time I played it, I had outdated drivers so it locked up a lot, which made me rage-uninstall it.
lol, that sucks. I had the same problem with Max Payne 2, except swap outdated drivers for a computer which was in the process of dying. I struggled through it with bluescreens multiple times per hour, then a day or two after I finished it the CPU died completely. Forever tarnished :( I'd like to go back and play it again to see if it's more enjoyable with a decent machine though, so perhaps one day.
 

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I didn't even bother with Max Payne 2. I heard it was really short and assumed it was pretty much like max payne 1, which I finished.
 

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Stop detracting from the greatness of SC2 (and this thread) by discussing clearly inferior games..
 

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ogmzergrush said:
Get fucked.
Already have, next suggestion.

Where's your zerg rush now bitch?



Yeah thought so
 
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bshoc said:
Already have, next suggestion.
Try it again without having to pay.

Duck Hunt

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Review Written May, 2001

Like most people who bought an NES, I bought an Action Set. For the longest time I had only the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt game that was included in the set. I later got Castlevania 2, and again for the longest time I only had those games. You might guess that with only those games I might have become very bored with my NES. But, no, I enjoyed Super Mario Bros. and Castlevania 2 so much that I played them over and over, until I probably knew more about them than any normal person should. I certainly never got bored enough with either of those two games that I had to resort to playing Duck Hunt for entertainment.

Duck Hunt is played with the zapper, the light gun that came with the action set. It looks like a gun, and you point it at targets on screen and pull the trigger like a gun to shoot. The game has three modes: you can shoot one duck at a time, two at a time, or you can shoot clay pigeons which arc across the screen. At first you can miss a few ducks or clay pigeons and continue to the next round but eventually you are allowed fewer and fewer misses until, very quickly, you must hit every target. As the rounds go on, the ducks move faster until they reach their limit. Then the game continues endlessly as you try to get a high score. A second player can use a controller to have some minimal control over a duck in the first mode, but don't expect what that player does to have more of an effect on whether the duck gets hit than the shooting player's skill.

And that's it. I've described every detail of the gameplay. After the first few rounds, once the difficulty curve levels out, the game is just an endurance test. What will happen first: will you make a mistake, or turn off the game in boredom? There may be some pleasure in playing a game as simple as Duck Hunt. But I said Super Mario Bros. and Castlevania 2 could have kept me entertained for years. Even the possibility of having some simple pleasure with Duck Hunt is only enough to warrant taking the game out for a half hour of play, at most, every two or so years. Super Mario Bros. and Castlevana 2 got me hooked on games; if my only game then had been Duck Hunt I think I would have a different hobby now. I wish I could say more about this game, but what more is there to say about a game whose most memorable feature is a dog that laughs at you when you miss?

Perhaps I should give credit to the game for bringing a unique game experience home. There weren't many games to take advantage of the Zapper, nor have other systems had many light gun games, and Duck Hunt did offer a break from all the platform games on the NES. Also, the aim of the Zapper with the game seems accurate enough for the technology of the time. Consider this, however. Many people hate The Adventures of Bayou Billy. However, that game's light gun stages alone are vastly superior to all of Duck Hunt.

1.5 stars.

 
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Daikatana is not an unmitigated disaster - but unfortunately, that's not enough to endorse it.

After more than three years in production, Daikatana, the first game developed entirely in-house by Ion Storm, has been released. And it's pretty bad. Ironically, Daikatana's biggest failures are due in large part to both a lack of imagination and poor design choices - in short, the very principles on which Ion Storm was founded.

Daikatana is a cross between a first-person shooter and a stat-based, story-driven role-playing game. But you get the feeling the game isn't going to tread any new narrative ground early on. Daikatana's opening scene is five minutes of dense, tedious exposition delivered as a virtual monologue by a character who stands still while the camera makes swooping motions around him. At some point in his speech he apparently gets killed but then recovers just enough to deliver another minute of exposition in the classic dying-guy choked gasp. In a sense, the segment does set a mood: Since you realize that Daikatana is supposed to be story-driven, you'll find that the numbing lack of creativity displayed in both the structure and writing of this first scene acts as an ill omen of things to come.

The plot is advanced through periodic in-game cutscenes that are usually shorter than the opening cutscene but equally inane. It's as if whoever wrote the story wasn't aware of the game going on between the plot points. At one point your character Hiro is spooked by the appearance of a ghost after having just dispatched two hundred reanimated skeletons in the previous level. At a later point, characters debate walking through a graveyard. One of them says he has a bad feeling about it, while another chides him for being superstitious. Meanwhile, they've both forgotten that they were battling an entire army of zombies moments ago and that the time for healthy skepticism is over. This sort of disparity between the plot and the gameplay is frequent and gives the story a cheap, threadbare quality that works against any atmosphere the game attempts to build.

The role-playing elements are a wash as well. Hiro has attributes for speed, rate of fire, vitality, power, and jump height. You gain experience by killing monsters, and when enough points are accrued, you can raise one of the attributes a notch, up to a maximum of five per attribute. The problem is that the level raising has little noticeable effect on gameplay. In fact, the entire system could simply be removed from the game, and the experience of playing Daikatana would be virtually unchanged. The Daikatana itself can gain up to five levels if you use the weapon to kill enemies. By the fifth level, it's arguably the most powerful weapon in the game, but it's distracting to carry around because it bisects the screen and has animated blue energy lines flickering around it. It's probably the biggest weapon in shooter history. The sword has a little more effect on the game than Hiro's stats, but it's still ultimately a gimmick that seems more like an afterthought than a tightly integrated feature.

Even with its nonsensical story and irrelevant RPG trappings, Daikatana could still have emerged as a good shooter if the action parts had turned out well. Unfortunately, the action portions of Daikatana frustrate more often than they entertain due to a combination of inconsistent level design, a poorly realized sidekick feature, and an unforgiving save system.

The sidekicks are by far the biggest problem and effectively ruin the experience of playing Daikatana. For much of the game, you're accompanied by up to two computer-controlled companions. They fight alongside of you, give you bits of information, and arbitrarily do things like scream "wazzzzzup?!" more times than they probably should. If either of the sidekicks gets killed, the game is over. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to get lost, shoot you, walk into your line of fire, get crushed under doors, fall to their deaths, get stuck running toward walls, and generally cause you grief. The sidekicks are a burden, and managing them is a chore. Yet unlike the story and statistics, they are a nontrivial part of the game that cannot be ignored. You can give them the same basic commands you would a dog, such as come, stay, back off, and fetch, but they won't always listen to you. It's especially frustrating when your buddies refuse to grab much-needed health packs sitting atop even the gentlest incline.

Daikatana's save system complements the sidekick problem. Eschewing the save-anywhere feature used by virtually every modern shooter, the designers have implemented a system whereby you must find "save gems" in order to save your progress. You can carry as many as three gems at once, which can then be traded at any time for an opportunity to save your game. Progress is also saved at level transitions. In theory, it's not a bad system. It builds tension by creating an actual penalty for death. If death in Daikatana were only caused by your own lack of skill, there would be no problem with the save-gem concept. However, since death is often the result of a failure of the game logic controlling your sidekicks, a save system that could have built tension instead creates acute frustration. In addition, the placement of the gems is inconsistent. Since you have no idea what lies ahead of you or how long each level is, it would have been nice if the designers had placed the gems in such a way that you could infer some meaning from their position. Sometimes the gems are located in a perfect spot for saving, and sometimes they're placed five feet from a level transition. A few of the boss battles that occur in the middle of a level also could have used a gem right afterward.

The game takes place across four time periods: far-future Japan, ancient Greece, Dark Ages-era Norway, and San Francisco in the year 2030. The first of these, future Japan, features the straightforward action of the original Doom. The monsters in this episode set the tone for the rest of the game. Although the appearance of the monsters changes throughout the course of the game, they all exhibit the same simple artificial intelligence. Virtually every enemy runs straight toward you until you either kill it or it gets stuck on something, which happens a lot. The look of this first set of levels is uninspired. The world starts out monochromatic green and eventually becomes monochromatic blue. You must navigate a very long series of similar-looking twisty corridors to reach your final destination.

The second world, Ancient Greece, looks better than the Japan levels but actually represents the low point of Daikatana's level design. It starts off with wide-open spaces and bright colors that offer a respite from the dark cramped feeling of the previous episode. The open areas even allow for some pitched battles against hordes of oncoming skeletons. But it soon degenerates into a stuffy corridor crawl, this time in brown.

By being strictly linear, the first episode sets a precedent that the second episode proceeds to break, which can be confusing. In the first episode, level transitions are absolute. There's no need to backtrack. The second episode requires you to backtrack a lot. It's confusing because your goals are not clearly presented, and the play mechanic of the second episode directly contradicts the rules of the game universe you've learned by playing the first episode. At one point, instead of informing you up front that your goal is to collect a series of keystones, the game waits until you actually need them to give you that important fact. The sinking sensation that occurs when you realize you're going to have to go back and reexplore the giant level is profound.

Near the beginning of the third episode, one of your pals becomes sick, and the healthy one must carry the other through the entire world, making both of them essentially useless for fighting. You must simply protect them. These levels really put the babysitting skills you've learned up to this point to the test, and they lead to more frustration. The fourth episode is a return to modern times and features a recurring find-the-hidden-key theme.

The designers did make one commendable decision. They have included a cooperative multiplayer feature. Up to three people, one playing Hiro and two people controlling the sidekick characters, can play through a modified version of the single-player game. The experience is modified in the sense that both the story and the computer-controlled sidekicks are removed. The game benefits greatly from their absence, and in this mode the game is often more fun and less maddening.

Several other standard multiplayer modes are included, such as deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and deathtag, a variation on capture the flag in which two players must work together to retrieve the goal object. In a few online tests, it seemed as if the weapon balancing was off, as everyone would scramble for the superweapon available in each time period.

There are moments playing Daikatana in which everything comes together - the sidekicks act as they should or simply aren't around, and you're able to enjoy the game as a pure, unadulterated shooter. But these moments are rare and are separated by long stretches of frustration punctuated by tedium. It's true that the game has a lot of content. The levels are large, there are plenty of monsters and weapons, and it will take you some time to finish. Yet a shorter, less disjointed experience with a few memorable set pieces would have been preferable. After years of development and a vast body of negative press, Daikatana is not an unmitigated disaster. But unfortunately, that's not enough to endorse it.

 
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3D Lemmings



Developer: Clockwork Games
Publisher: Psygnosis
Year Released: 1995

Review by Rosemary Young (December, 1995)

3dl.jpgI played the demo of this game a good few months ago now and, I must admit, we didn't get along too well together. My patience was sorely tested. Hence I was sceptical, to say the least, about reviewing the full version. I put the game in one night at 8 and no one was more surprised than me when I next looked up at the clock and it was past midnight. Where had those hours disappeared -- I'd been lost utterly in a world of camera angles and swirling transporters and suicidal rodents.

The general background
Just how does one describe 'Lemmings' to anyone who hasn't met up with these cute and colourful specimens that have driven many of us to distraction. They're just Lemmings, and they do what Lemmings do -- make straight for that Lemming paradise in the sky. In single file they soldier on relentlessly, hurling themselves over every conceivable gaping abyss. And it is your job to stop them by allocating various skills such as floating (very useful for the occasional abyss); building or digging, so that they can avoid or negotiate obstacles and arrive safely home.

With this latest episode which comes from the Clockwork Games team, you are certainly in for a surprise. It has generally the same skills as its predecessors (adding the essential 'turn' skill which is peculiar to this game); with much the same dangerous terrain to negotiate, the difference is the 3D environment which allows the Lemmings to head off in every possible direction. If you have played Lemmings before it's a bit of a jolt to the system. Not being able to just sit back and survey the total picture and work out a strategy takes some getting used to. It's a tad more difficult than that. With this one you must carefully map out the different paths by changing your viewing perspective in order to gauge what is in store for your lemmings and keep them on the straight and narrow.

Truly crazy
It's so crazy it's a puzzle in itself just locating your lemmings' 'home' let alone leading them safely there. Forward planning is essential and to give you a helping hand (I think!) there are 4 cameras or camera angles. You need to set up your cameras carefully and toggle between them in order to keep an eye on things. Also there is a very useful 'replay' mode which automatically cuts in each time you repeat a level after making that fatal mistake. Just watch the re-run performance up until the time you want to change your strategy then at the click of your mouse button you can take over the action. To take an even closer look you can select 'virtual lemming' mode and see what's happening from a 'lemming's eye view', so to speak.

Apart from manipulating the cameras the general mechanics of the game will be familiar to anyone who has played a Lemmings title before. The various 'skills' can be selected from a bar across the bottom of the screen, and at the right hand side there is another bar which provides information such as number of lemmings (in and out); the rate of release, the time limit, etc. It is here where you alter camera angles and pause your game, which you will be doing regularly, I promise you. There are keyboard and/or mouse controls for all the functions so that these bars can switched off to give you the full screen playing area. It's worth at least having a look in full screen because the graphics are especially well done and there is lots of detail.

The reckoning
Sorry folks, but for this game the bad news is that it is just as addictive as its honoured ancestors. However, if you have played Lemmings before you may need to give yourself some time to get used to it. Be generous, it's worth it. Still, it may also be that this one is not for everyone. It probably best suits the most dedicated Lemmings fans. You really do need a good store of tenacity. On the other hand, if you have never played Lemmings before and are considering trying it, I would recommend a different approach. Indeed, I strongly suggest that you hunt around and find one of the earlier versions and get yourself up to speed on that before you take the plunge and tackle this one.

Quandary rating:
 
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Sir-Tech have taken great pains to research druidic lore, and that attention to detail is obvious throughout the game's nature-oriented play.

Hard-core role-playing fans probably won't find solace in Druid, since it's aimed at the novice player. The venerable masters of the CRPG realm, Sir-Tech, have deviated from their usual path with a title that is far from the statistic-heavy titles of the Wizardry series. Druid walks the line between RPG (character development, stats, combat, and magic) and adventure (story driven, simple point-and-click interface) admirably, offering benefits of each genre to the overall package. While this may turn off some veteran gamers, Druid, even with its little quirks, is a fun game, and more accessible to new players than many of its RPG competitors.

Sir-Tech have taken great pains to research druidic lore, and that attention to detail is obvious throughout the game's nature-oriented play. Interacting with the world around you is easy—you can mouse-click your way through almost everything—but unfortunate problems with the inventory system make the interface far from perfect.

The story unfolds nicely, against the game's backdrop of intricately rendered backgrounds. The hero in Druid is rendered in detail, and is viewed during play from a three-quarters view similar to that of Origin's Ultima VIII. The dedication to visuals pays off, and the game is almost as much fun to watch as it is to play. Druid is a rich experience, even with its failings, and perhaps more importantly, it's accessible to the veteran and the novice alike—a broad appeal the entire RPG genre lacks.
 
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bshoc said:
If you wanna play the most under-rated game of all time I would suggest:

http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/164/164060p1.html

It still looks brilliant, even today, and plays with the best of em.
More like

Hugo's House of Horrors is a computer game released in 1990. Gray Design Associates created a parser-based adventure game reminiscent of the Sierra Entertainment "Quest" games (such as King's Quest and Space Quest). The game is also a strange and unique adventure into the realm of tongue-in-cheek comedy.

In 1991 GDA released a sequel, Whodunit?, and in 1992 a third installment, Jungle of Doom. Nitemare 3-D, a game that came out in 1994, is arguably the fourth (and so far final) installment of the Hugo series, though Nitemare 3-D, instead of being an adventure game, is a Wolfenstein 3D clone, in which Hugo ventures into the haunted mansion to rescue Penelope by shooting enemies with several types of guns. The Hugo Trilogy can also be found on The Complete Encyclopedia of Games for DOS

 
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Alternatively:

Ernie's Big Splash

The goal was to create a series of connections, for Rubber Duckie to make his way to Ernie's bathtub. The game teaches basic logic, directions (North, South, East and West) and sequencing.

The video game was created by CBS Learning Systems, for ages four to six.

It was originally made for DOS,[1] but was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in March 1986. On NES, it was released on the cartridge Sesame Street ABC, supplementing Letter-Go-Round. At some point in time, the game was released for the Unisys ICON operating system, a platform commissioned by the Ontario education system. No copies of this format exist, as the last ICON computers and software were destroyed in the early-2000s.

There is limited evidence that a version was released for Atari at a cost of $14.95, at the same time as Grover's Animal Adventures.[2]

Game play

Ernie's Challenge level
The Rubber Duck will be shown in one square some where on the screen. Ernie will be in another square somewhere else of the screen. The object is to get the Rubber Duck over to Ernie. You do this by selecting which path you’d like to use, from a wide selection, to get there. Ex. Say that there are 3 squares all together, starting from the left and going right. The Rubber Duck is in square #1 and Ernie is in square #3. Now, you want to go to square #3, which is to the right. So, select a panel that will get you there. Each panel will have to arrows in it, one representing where you’re leaving from, one representing where you’re going. We want to go the right, so select the panel with two arrows pointing to the right. Hey, look! You made it to Ernie! This is actually a lot simpler than it looks, so don’t worry too much. Once you’ve made it to Ernie, a little song and dance will take place. After words, pressing the A button will repeat the little show, but in reverse. Pressing Start will start a new game.

Ernie's Fun Challenge
More path selections and more than one character on the screen.
Ernie's Super Challenge
More path selections and more than one character on the screen.

ROM hack of the game

An R-rated "rom hack" of this game was created, which was called "Ernie and the Muppets Take it all Off". I-Mockery.com reviewed the rom, and received a letter from Sesame Workshop in complaint.[3]

This game was absolutely fucking killer back in the day.
 

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ogmzergrush said:
More like

Hugo's House of Horrors is a computer game released in 1990. Gray Design Associates created a parser-based adventure game reminiscent of the Sierra Entertainment "Quest" games (such as King's Quest and Space Quest). The game is also a strange and unique adventure into the realm of tongue-in-cheek comedy.

In 1991 GDA released a sequel, Whodunit?, and in 1992 a third installment, Jungle of Doom. Nitemare 3-D, a game that came out in 1994, is arguably the fourth (and so far final) installment of the Hugo series, though Nitemare 3-D, instead of being an adventure game, is a Wolfenstein 3D clone, in which Hugo ventures into the haunted mansion to rescue Penelope by shooting enemies with several types of guns. The Hugo Trilogy can also be found on The Complete Encyclopedia of Games for DOS

man i remember playing that
 

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i just watched the game play video clip from blizzard

they introduced one or two new units on the protoss side, and old units have some new abilities..

protoss now have this unit call mothership..looks way too powerful... along with other new stuff, it makes protoss alot stronger than they were in SC1, i wonder how that "balances" the game out
 

jumb

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Yeah the protoss seem heaps OP, but its only if you assume the other races don't have any new abbilities.
 

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yeah...they havent said much with the other 2
im very interested in terms of what they are going to do with the zergs..

but physical layout of the game not a concern for some of the units, it totally changes the old SC tactics
 

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