Video & PC Game Discussion

I just switch to MASS EFFECT which looks like it's going to be great.... Advice: don't get Assassin's Creed... for the first hour you'll think it's marvelous, second hour it's OK, third hour it sucks as it's the most repetitive game ever... man did they waste fantastic graphics and a good idea!

Portal was definitely the biggest surprise of 2007, it was obvious that games like Bioshock, Crysis, STALKER, the rest of The Orange Box, World in Conflict etc would all be great but Portal initially to me at least was a strange little game which I really couldn't form ,much of an opinion on, in fact I thought it was going to be a free tech demo similar to Half Life 2: Lost Coast rather than the excellent game it turned out to be.

In my opinion the truly stunning thing about Portal is the quality of the storyline and game play, since playing it I've not been able to look at first person shooters or puzzles games in the same way, just like the gravity gun in Half life 2, Valve have revolutionised and reinvigorated the game mechanics of the first person shooter with the portal gun. Add to that the excellent characters and you've got an astonishing game.

I can definitely see a Portal 2 appearing around the same time as Half Life 2 Episode 3.

Still keeping with the Half Life/Portal theme the latest version of Garry's Mod has been released and it includes all the Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 items, maps and ragdolls to play with. For those who don't know what Gmod is, it's basically a physics sandbox based on the Source engine (the same engine powers Half life 2, Portal, TF2 etc) in which you can make anything you want using various tools like a welder, thruster or wheel creator, up to more advanced stuff like ball sockets or prop spawners.

Some of the things I've made have been cars, aircraft, boats, melon cannons, G man catapults. Basically it's just lots of fun to muck around with, one particularly entertaining thing to try is crashing the engine by getting it to process too much stuff at once, the melon cannon is particularly good at doing this if you use enough melons and explosives.

N Ellingworth wrote: In my opinion the truly stunning thing about Portal is the quality of the storyline and game play, since playing it I've not been able to look at first person shooters or puzzles games in the same way, just like the gravity gun in Half life 2, Valve have revolutionised and reinvigorated the game mechanics of the first person shooter with the portal gun. Add to that the excellent characters and you've got an astonishing game.

For me the most amazing thing about Portal is the simplicity of the portal gun. Many truly remarkable games are simplistic at the core (Tetris, Lemmings etc) ...

The T wrote: I just switch to MASS EFFECT which looks like it's going to be great.... Advice: don't get Assassin's Creed... for the first hour you'll think it's marvelous, second hour it's OK, third hour it sucks as it's the most repetitive game ever... man did they waste fantastic graphics and a good idea!

Assassin's Creed was not that bad. You really had to play it the right way to enjoy it, though. Playing to win in the easiest way makes it really dull because it's so easy -- you get a mob of guards on you, you kill them all, no problem. But if you play it like getting hit once is game over (which it really should have been), it's quite a bit better. It allows you to play it in an enjoyable way or an easy way, and the latter should never be attempted. Low-profile assassinations and blending into the fleeing crowd? That's fun. The easy way to do it, though, is just to kill him and every guard that comes along. Certainly easy, but not very fun, especially when combat is so automated.

N Ellingworth wrote: Portal was definitely the biggest surprise of 2007, it was obvious that games like Bioshock, Crysis, STALKER, the rest of The Orange Box, World in Conflict etc would all be great but Portal initially to me at least was a strange little game which I really couldn't form ,much of an opinion on, in fact I thought it was going to be a free tech demo similar to Half Life 2: Lost Coast rather than the excellent game it turned out to be. In my opinion the truly stunning thing about Portal is the quality of the storyline and game play, since playing it I've not been able to look at first person shooters or puzzles games in the same way, just like the gravity gun in Half life 2, Valve have revolutionised and reinvigorated the game mechanics of the first person shooter with the portal gun. Add to that the excellent characters and you've got an astonishing game.

The Gravity Gun didn't really revolutionize anything. Last time I checked, it's not in any game in any form aside from HL2. It was a clever gimmick. You won't see other games borrowing the Portal gun, either, but what Valve has done is created a potential puzzle series. Not revolutionary, but certainly a very fun gimmick. Portal was too short, though. Portal 2 needs to be 10x as long and I'd be a happy man.

Crysis wasn't really all that remarkable aside from the graphics. The suit was cool, but cool doesn't make a game great: it's a good shooter and a lot of fun, but it won't be influential to future games. Bioshock was incredible, though.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: For me the most amazing thing about Portal is the simplicity of the portal gun. Many truly remarkable games are simplistic at the core (Tetris, Lemmings etc) ...

Simplicity is sometimes overlooked. One of the things that made Total Annihilation so great was its automation. I almost don't want to hold out hope for Starcraft 2 because Warcraft 3 got it all SO wrong, making it a game of managing buildings and clicking on the minimap to send them to places to fight automatically. Bloody backwards, if you ask me.

I've not even heard of that but then I'm not really up to date with console releases since my console interests are limited to the retro scene.

Recently I've mostly been playing Sonic Jam (the first 4 Sonic games on one disc) on my Saturn and various Half Life games on my PC but now I've finally got an Xbox 360 game pad I can play Sega Rally properly (the keyboard controls are rubbish).

NaturalScience wrote: My wife and I bought a Wii last night.  What a blast!

This evening I downloaded Sins of a Solar Empire which is a interesting game which tries to mix turnbased '4x' depth and complexity with realtime gameplay, and I'm happy to report that the developers have done a really good job.


Edited by N Ellingworth - February 07 2008 at 16:54

Pokemon Blue. Yeah. what.

replaying it, it really isn't that hard a game  still fun though
lvl 34 Venusaur heading through rock tunnel and a lvl 21 Gyarados

the thing that sucks is that there's no way to trade so I can't get beasts like Alakazam or Gengar anymore