Finished Rage. Absolutely nothing about it stands out with me. The ending in particular was ... to call it "anticlimactic" isn't accurate, as that at least suggests some sort of build up. This felt more like id reached the required amount of content and said, "okay, that's a game, let's ship it."

The fact is, id seems to have never progressed beyond Doom in terms of content. They can make engines (and this one was still poorly optimized for the PC), but that's about it.

True, I don't play shooters for the story, but I also feel that if they're going to bother having is story then they should at least pretend to put some effort in to it.

Even putting story aside, the game was anti-climactic just in terms of content. There were tougher and more epic battles at the beginning of the game than at the end. It truly feels like they just gave up and shipped.

I am still playing The Old Republic, and will be for the foreseeable future. The amount of content in this game is amazing, the graphics are great for an MMO, and the voice acting throughout is just unheard of in this type of game. I had grandiose plans of replaying the Mass Effect series before 3 comes out, but I can see now that it just isn't going to happen.

I was worried about not having enough games to play, what with Skyrim and Assassin's Creed: Revelations and Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Monkey Island 2 and the original American McGee's Alice and a few others all still unfinished. So when I saw that Batman: Arkham Asylum had been released on budget I couldn't resist buying it. (I bought War and Peace to re-read at the same time, as I still might not have enough to be getting on with).

Batman: Arkham Asylum is great fun. I like it when a game just turns out to be full of fun things to do. It wasn't quite such a random purchase, as I'd been wondering what to get next after finishing the current crop, and everybody had been recommending Arkham City, but I didn't want to jump straight into the second game in a series. When Arkham Asylum turned up in the cheap pile, it seemed a good idea, and so far, it has been.

Now playing MLB 2K 11. Just trying to figure out how to throw a strike. I keep throwing balls. Not sure how to line up the ball to thorow a strike. I'm playing on x box 360.

A little ot. Been off the boards for a while as we have been battling Bronchitis, the flu, sinus infections, and I think even the black plague made an appearance. So that's where I've been for almost the last two months. We're both finally back to good health.

Working on Mass Effect 2 now. Finally finished ME1, and found it really weird to go to a whole different upgrade system.

I’ve been fooling around with some alpha/beta builds of games lately. Notably, Towns, Xenonauts and Defender's Quest. All look like they’ve got a lot of upside as I’m having fun with them even in their roughed out versions.

Towns is basically like a slimmer version of Dwarf Fortress without the dwarves (*cough* dwarfs) and with a graphical UI that's easy to understand. There are some quirks that need to be cleaned up: equipping townies is a chore now and apparently I’ve been bollixing up the townie recruitment by queueing up a ton of tasks for the current villagers (“Oh, noes, we don’t want to move in here where the citizens work all the time!”). The tutorial is decent and is just enough to get you up and running if you’re willing to poke around a bit (for example, a masonry table has to be made with a hammer but the tutorial text does not explain where you have to look to make this needed hammer).

Xenonauts looks like an almost undiluted heir to X-COM with updated graphics and a better UI (don’t have to re-equip the squaddies after every single mission. Huzzah!). I’m a little uncertain about how to successfully work the interception mechanics (no in-game tutorial as yet, and very little in the way of tooltips). The worldview (with the X-COM like sweeping terminator line delineating the days) has small blurbs that appear at the bottom of the screen where tide anomalies/alien sightings are announced. They should increase the visibility of these since they’re easy to miss and so far all have been outside of my chopper’s flight range, so I can’t even explore them :(. The...sectoids?...might need some kind of re-skin so they don’t look like they’re wearing tight running suits. I loaded up one squaddie with a dead sectoid and immediately had his movement reduced from 35 paces to about 5 owing to schlepping a dead alien in his backpack. The game also CTDs quite a bit, once when I was on my way to killing the last alien and winning the mission. Aaarggh! Why do you hate me, aliens? Other than my firing rockets at you that is.

Defender's Quest is like Puzzle Quest except swapping in tower defense for match-3 gameplay. I love tower defense so this definitely FTW for me. The plot/dialogue is like a lot of stories in these types of games, IOW very corny. So far, I’m enjoying the game enough to rank it up with PQ and Clash of Heroes in the RPG/casual game mashup subgenre.

I'm trying to play Deus Ex (the original one), but I'm finding the PC controls very difficult. You have to do all this crouch-walking, which requires holding the x key while navigating with the fingers of the same hand using the WASD keys, plus an extra 2 keys for leaning out of cover. I keep having to go look at the controls screen to see how to do things, too, since there are separate controls for everything it seems.

Also, I'm never great at games that are real-time and unpausable and depend on fast reflexes, and I don't tend to go for sneaky-style gameplay. I'm wondering if it's worth it to try to play more aggressively, such as just shooting people, since even in the first mission I can't seem to be sneaky enough to get anywhere. Or does the game penalize that too much (or not provide enough ammo for it)? I also don't get the point of the tranq darts. I shot two guards with them multiple times, and they ran away and raised the alarm. What gives? Is it that my skill isn't high enough for them to be effective yet?

I like the story so far, and it seems like a game I could like if I could figure out how to make it work for me....

erwins, now that you mention it, I seem to remember that's why I never got very far in the original Deus Ex too. (I also played it on PC).

I'm playing with it on the easiest combat difficulty, and I've died like 6 times just trying to get through the first mission. I really want to figure it out, but so far the learning curve is feeling pretty steep.

I did figure out that you can toggle crouching on and off instead of holding the key down by changing a setting, but I still feel like I might not be coordinated enough for this game.

ETA: Is Human Revolution any easier?

I picked this up yesterday as a bargin game as well ($19.99) but was drawn to it by the big "3-D Compatible" logo on it. Seems you need special proprietary 3-D glasses that do not ship with the game though.
Still looks like a good game... my son was playing it all day yesterday an dfigured he was almost done when he found a setting whch indicates he is only 20% .. i like long games like that for him..

I played Human Rev on the normal difficulty setting and didn't find it terribly difficult if you play run-and-gun. I could see how going with a pure stealth/no-kill approach might be insanely hard because it seems so easy to get spotted. I always ran through stun ammo like it was candy and creeping up behind enemies for a takedown just wasn't feasible all the time. Eventually I just gave up the no-killing and went with a more lethal approach. No idea how forgiving the game's easiest setting is. For shooters, I class my ability as merely competent with occasional dips into stupid mistakes when I get disoriented in a firefight.

Heh, that sounds about right for me too, depending on the controls. Mass Effect was my first shooter of any kind, and I found the controls pretty easy to deal with, and rarely used pause to do anything except issue orders to squad mates. I played on the normal setting and very rarely died.

I gave up on Deus Ex for the moment, and have started a new game of Dragon Age Origins. (Luckily I like replaying my favorites). I may still come back and try Deus Ex again with a more shoot-y style. I wish GOG would put out Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. When I built my computer I installed a dual boot system just so I could run that game on an XP partition, because it won't run in Windows 7. I've since upgraded my video card and I doubt it will work anymore, even in XP. I'm guessing they can't get their hands on it because it has anything to do with Star Wars....

Everything I'm doing right now just feels like a place holder until Mass Effect 3 comes out.

I'm playing Human Revolution on XBox 360 so I can't really compare, but I've not had any significant control problems. I've put this one aside for a while just because I was finding it a bit dull, to be honest... it doesn't seem to have as much of the humour I remembered liking in the first one. (As far as I got with it).

(eta) Although I did decide to try for the "no killing" achievement on my first run through, and as Cure the Blues said, that does make it significantly harder and also more tedious. If you're starting a new game, I'd recommend not bothering. You more or less have to restart every time you get spotted, because you can't just stand up and shoot back, and if you try to run away you usually die unless you're right next to an airduct or something. I'm not even sure if I'm still on track for it, since the difference between killing somebody and knocking them out is just holding the button down slightly longer - at one point I noticed I'd accidentally stabbed somebody and went back to my previous save, but it's possible that's happened without my noticing too.

The first Deus Ex, the tranq darts are more effective if you hit people in the back or the head. Ideally you want to get them when they're at a distance from an alarm.
It also reduces their health as the tranq takes effect, I've barely managed to stop more than one guy by whacking him with the baton just as he was about to hit the alarm.

Also, tranq darts stack damage. Try shooting the person more than once.
You probably also want a Combat Strength aug for one hit takedowns with the baton.

I'm playing Human Revolution on the hardest level and I have no problem with stealth, you just have to be careful and be aware of cover. Haven't killed a person yet.

Why wouldn't you just stand up and shoot back? That's what the tranq rifle, PEPS, and tazer pistol is for.
"Hey, I saw someone- OPEN FI-"
Taser pistol to the face!
(Marksman)
(Man Down)
(Merciful Soul)

Problem solved! :D

I'm coming very late to all of these games because I figured FPS wasn't for me, but then Mass Effect had enough of that that I now think some of them might work. I downloaded a demo of Crysis, and it seems very playable for me. So I may be getting that.

Now I'm also wondering about Halo, which for a long time I think I mixed up with all of the realistic war type games, like Call of Duty or the like. It looks interesting, and they just came out with the updated anniversary edition....

Playing Jurassic Park: The Game.

It's Heavy Rain with Dinosaurs, so basically it's, to borrow a phrase from Yahtzee, less a game and more a movie you have to press buttons to watch.

It's got a really great story, operating as sort of a side story to the original Jurassic Park film, taking place during and directly after events of the first film. You follow (I can't really honestly say you "play as") a handful of character, jumping back and forth between a couple of intersecting subplots. There's Gerry Hardin, the park's chief Veterinarian who was a minor to mid level character in the first book and briefly seen in the first movie, and his daughter which is visiting the park for reasons which are never actually explained, but one of the few complains I've had with the Jurassic Park series is it's more and more contrived reasons to shoehorn the "children in peril" angle into the series. One character even lampshades this by asking "What is this? Feed your children to work day?" I'm not sure if Gerry Hardin is supposed to be Sara Hardin's father, as was hinted at in the second book. There's also a female mercenary hired by BioSyn to recover the embryos stolen by Denis Nedry in the first movie, and a group of mercenaries hired by InGen to rescue Dr. Hardin and his daughter from the island. A few new species of dinosaurs get introduced, including a new primary "villain" species, which is sort of an ass pull but again no worse then the Spinosaur somehow magically going unnoticed until the events of Jurassic Park 3.

The overall presentation of the game is excellent. The graphics are good, just a tad bit cartoonish at times but still very good. The game makes good use of the locations and overall look of the first movie, basically taking a lot of things that were briefly mentioned in the first movie and expanding upon them. At times the length this story goes to reference the events of the first movie all while making sure nothing that happens in this story directly interacts with the events of the first movie or strains disbelieve as to why they weren't referenced in the later movies gets a tad silly, but never to the point it's really a problem. John William's score, which I still defend as one of his better ones, gets well used here as well.

My only real complaint, and to be fair there really would be no way for the game to fix this, is with the dinosaurs themselves. The basic "look and feel" of the dinosaurs in the game is, by necessity, dictated by the first film and by extension the original novel. Jurassic Park was published in 1990 and Crichton had been writing the novel on and off for several years, so basically the science of the "Jurassic Park Universe" is based upon our knowledge of Dinosaurs in the mid to late 80s, which is somewhat dated at this point. It still works because unlike most media Jurassic Park treats its dinosaurs as living, breathing animals instead of stock Hollywood monsters, interchangable with Godzilla but it still is sorta jarring knowing the a Velociraptor would have come up to your knee, been covered in feathers, would have poised no threat to an adult human and probably wouldn't have looked all that out of place in a modern zoo's aviary. It's sorta sad that one of the greatest monsters of modern cinema was in reality practically the Roadrunner and wouldn't have been a threat to your average house cat.

Which I suppose brings me to the gameplay and the sticky wicket because there almost literally is none. The interaction has been boiled down to just token key presses or thumbstick wiggles whenever an onscreen prompt tells you to. You pretty much literally have no control over your character in the traditional sense. You never directly control your character in any real sense of the term, even to do anything as simple as make your character walk across the room or pick up an item. The game is one long cinematic broken up with "Press X to not die." There's a few parts which I guess technically qualify as puzzles, but there's no way to not get them correct because since the game's storyline is so linear there's no way to screw one up. Every encounter only has one possible outcome and only a handful of possible choices, so at worst you just trial and error it 3 or 4 times. There's no sense of accomplishment when you do anything and no sense of failure when you don't because your actions have no consequences beyond how long it takes you to advance to the next scene.

So it's an enjoyable experience, it's a good story well told and makes good use of it's license but there just no... game there. Someone watching you play the game would literally get the exact same experience as you playing it. You're no more control of the game then someone watching House is control of the show. It turns the controller into nothing more then a glorified remote. It's less Jurassic Park: The Game and more Jurassic Park: The Cartoon with an overly elaborate DVD menu.

This seems to be a phase that the video game industry goes through every couple of years, when the cinematic qualities of a game cause a little sub-genre of minimally interactive games to pop up. There were Laserdisk games like Dragon's Lair and the "Full Motion Video" games that popped up on early CD based consoles and PCs and I've never understood the appeal. Jurassic Park, along with Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy, seem to be the modern versions of this where you take a game and reduce the gameplay aspect down to the simplest possible level.

There was potential for a truly great game here had it taken a more traditional adventure game route. As it stands it's still not a bad... thing but it is a rather bad game. It literally would have lost nothing had it just been a damn DVD.

Dragon's Lair was sort of unique; when it came out there was nothing that even approached it graphically (not saying graphics are all that count, but it would be like if Modern Warfare (graphics) came out when we were all playing Wolfenstein).

Beyond that I imagine the appeal is like that of any other game, some people just like the 'interactive movie' genre (just like some people like shooters or JRPGs or whatever else).

Of course it's Science Marches On with a dash of Rule of Cool, but my go-to explanation for most Jurassic Park mistakes is frog DNA. As long as they're filling the dino DNA gaps with the DNA of other animals, it's hard to be certain how close these animals look and act to the original dinos. Heck, Dr. Grant even says something similar in the third movie; I don't remember the exact line but it was something about how Hammond's creations are not actual dinos, but genetically engineered sideshow attractions. So if Hammond's raptors don't have feathers, maybe it's because frogs don't have feathers.

Also, I wonder if some of these dinosaurs might have been misidentified. We probably haven't dug up a copy of every dino that existed, so it's possible that Hammond's mosquitoes contained blood from something whose bones we haven't found yet, some larger cousin of the raptors we know. Maybe they just called them raptors for lack of a documented name. I know that sounds flimsy, but keep in mind this whole project is run by a guy who's more showman than scientist.

And finally, it may not be the best source, but according to TVTropes:
Of course, TVTropes also mentions that amber doesn't preserve DNA, but you can't have everything. I've always felt that all movies exist in an alternate universe, one where bullets knock people backwards and cars explode after every wreck, so a little scientific innacuracy doesn't phase me much.

There was - cartoons. It wasn't computer graphics, it was a cartoon, stored on a "laser disk". The scenes were drawn by people, as any cartoon would be drawn.

The technical advance was the fact that the disk had enough storage space to include them, and load them in an arbitrary order without spooling back and forth like a videotape. The images were stored digitally rather than in analogue form. It was an advance in storage media, not an advance in gaming or graphics. As Joe said, the game itself might as well have been a cartoon, except that occasionally you needed to press an arbitrary button at the right moment to see the proper ending and move to the next scene. (It was a bit harder than its modern equivalent, in that in those days they didn't tell you which button you had to press, or exactly when).

This isn't a retrospective opinion, either. I thought this at the time. I'd have liked to have been amazed at the graphics, but it was so blatantly just a cartoon that was being played back in an unusual way that I couldn't be. I was far more impressed when wireframe simulators started to be coloured in, and to approach curved lines and show a bit of detail on the basic shapes, a few years later. (Before texture mapping, and very crude, but it was a more significant advance in graphics than Dragon's Lair, to me).

Still playing Skyrim. I've been doing a couple of Daedric quests lately, just recently finished the Break of Dawn. There are few things more irritating than being in a fight with a boss that can kill you in one hit.