Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is one of the few FPS games that really impressed me. First, it didn’t feature the same overused WWII theme but a refreshing present day scenario, second, it has a very professional feel to it. The graphics are awesome, the gameplay is perfect and characters and dialog are believable. And third, the story plot is thrilling, there are so many twists and turns to it that make you glee at the screen. CoDMW is full of these jaw-dropping moments. This Moments in Gaming episode shows one of these unexpected moments.
Later in the game the SAS unit around Captain Price is moving forward to the missile base deeply hidden in the Altay Mountains in Russia when suddenly two ICBMs are being launched in close vicinity. This is one of those “I cant believe this just happened!!”-moments in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
No One Lives Forever and it’s sequel are two games that I particularly enjoyed playing. Set in a mid-century spy movie theme you are playing Cate Archer, a top secret agent for an English secret service called U.N.I.T.Y. who has to take down the terrorist organization aptly named H.A.R.M.
The two games are very atmospheric and full of 60ties flair, concealed spy gadgets, exotic locations, fast-paced action, insanely dangerous situations and spiked with a good dose of humor. Gladly they don’t take themselves too serious unlike some other games of the genre.
In this video Cate Archer and a ninja named Isako (who is - rather unwillingly – one of the villains henchmen) are fighting it out in ‘No One Lives Forever 2‘ in an impossible showdown taking place in a trailer home which is being hurled away by an approaching tornado and somehow both are getting out of it alive.
I’m a southpaw! I do all kinds of things that require a certain degree of eye to hand-coordinated skill with my left hand. This includes using the computer mouse too. So I have the mouse on the left side next to my keyboard with my left hand using the mouse and left part of the keyboard and the right hand using the right side, incl. cursor keys and numeric keyblock.
With a standard keyboard we lefties actually have a slight advantage over right-handers when it comes to playing First-Person-Shooters or third-person-view games since we have a nicely separated block of keys that we can use for controls with the right hand where right-handers would need to use some obnoxious key layouts in the depths of the left side of their keyboard, in particular the notorious WASD keys.
After their last RPG masterpiece release, the Might & Magic 6-Pack, gog.com have now released Realms of Arkania 1+2 and 3. RoA is the English version of what I only knew as Das Schwarze Auge in German back in the 16-bit days of Amiga. If my memory serves me right only the first part of RoA made it to the Amiga while the two followers were only available for DOS.
Realms of Arkania is classic hardcore role-playing, flip3D style intermezzed with isometric combat screens and you can get this for a ridiculous cheap price now.
So far gog.com is only releasing DOS or Windows based games. For some games I wish they’d add Amiga games to their line-up simply because many Amiga games were better than their DOS conversions, just take a look at highly regarded Hired Guns. in case of Hired Guns you feel that the developers were a team of Amiga enthusiasts. The DOS version feels bland and rushed compared to the shiny and atmosphere-oozing Amiga version.
Either way, for DOS games Good Old Games are packing their releases up with a copy of DOSBox pre-configured and ready to install and run. For Amiga versions they would probably have to pack up a copy of WinUAE to assure a hassle-free experience. Not sure how that would work out.
The other day I was playing the Point Lookout Add-on for Fallout 3 and there is this one main quest where you go to inspect an area named Calvert Mansion just to run into a ghoul named Desmond. He seemed very busy trying to defend the mansion against Tribal intruders and without asking me directly he made me help defend the house. At first I thought Desmond seemed to be a cool guy, after all he wears a suit and appeared like some sort of gentleman (as far as a ghoul can appear as a gentleman anyway).
But after we finished bouncing off the intruders and I’ve started a dialogue with him it turned out that he’s not such a gentleman after all. In nearly every second sentence in his dialogue he makes use of the notorious ‘F word’! No exaggeration! After a short while listening to his insults (calling me a moron several times) I got fed up of his overuse of nasty language and started to loathe this guy. Note that it turns out that he’s supposed to be an unlikable character but this could have also been very well transported without the overuse of bad language. … *Spoilers ahead*!
While Jagged Alliance is without discussion one of the finest squat squad-based strategy games ever made that has seen the daylight, I especially enjoy the ‘personal’ characteristics that the mercenaries bring with them and the frivolous Butt Groping demonstrated in this clip shows this side of JADG nicely. The map seen in this video is one of the scenarios that can be found [intlink id="37" type="post"]here[/intlink].
Check out The Great Game Experiment, a community site especially for gamers and game developers. Members can introduce their favorite games, add new games, meet other gamers/developers etc. The site also focuses on Independent Game Developers, after all it was Jeff Tunnel of Garage Games who breathed life into it (The same Jeff Tunnel of Dynamix fame btw! Games like Project Firestart and Rise of the Dragon come to my mind).
Developers can introduce their creations and find other developers – both professional and hobbyist – to get working together on a project. Games made in Flash are welcome and there’s even a category for it.
[ad#gog_arcanum_box]So after about six months of absence I’ve decided to subscribe for a month back into SWG to see if things changed for the better (and to see if my stuff still exists). I spawned inside my house where I left the game last November and decided to bring my char to level 90 so I did many of the quests that I still had open. After all quests are almost the only way currently to gain XP quickly.
The game is basically still the same since I left it! Many of the same old bugs and a gameplay that has only distantly something to do with RPG. Examples: Tried to continue the ‘Secret of the Syrens’ quest but the Black Sun Bunker at the waypoint never spawns,I want to call my mount pet inside the Kashyyk Hunting Grounds but it doesn’t spawn, I want to attack that imperial trooper that permanently shoots at me but I can’t because he’s stuck inside a wall … the list could go on for a while.
Thy Dungeonman 3: Behold Thy Graphics, a text/graphics adventure from Homestarrunner in the style of the very early days of computing. Complete with fake floppy load delay and amber screen display! You find yourself in a dungeon cell with doom lurking all around you. The texts are intentionally exaggerated old ‘english’ and once you got out of the first area you’ll notice that this game plays quite smooth. It’s a short but funny and while you’re there, you find several other oldschool imitations on Homestarrunner and videlectrix.com.
… I’m not talking about fun with playing the NGE mind you … when the NGE came live there was a lot of derision and mockery on the official forums. Among all this down pour of anger, hate and dismay about the NGE there were a handful cynical postings of how scenes in the Star Wars movies would look if the NGE had affected them. Because they were so utterly hilarious I decided to save them for later and what better opportunity do I have than to post them here for people who have missed them. In this sense read on and enjoy!
Recent Comments