agreed

1.1 has rejuvenated the game for me. My frame rate is suddenly amazing, smooth and fluid. I remember it being this way in 3.1, but it had been so long since I had played 3.1 that I forgot my game was ever like this. It's like I've found a lost friend. I have no idea what they changed...

Besides that, it's pretty much the same game. The new marker system is great, although no one else seems to be using it. DOD seems to possess all sorts of fantastic ideas, top-of-the-line stuff for FPS war games, while being combined with an ancient graphics engine. D'oh!

Now all we need is for all the custom map servers to move over to Steam. Once that happens I may finally be able to enjoy my game the way I did 5 months ago. Then we have to pray to God that all the fantastic custom mappers from 9 months ago...... come back.

Guess that won't be happening. Heh

...they, as movies, served no purpose, excelled in no area, and offered minimal visual excitement.

As stories, they were OK, but if you're not going to bother putting the "movie" (yes MOVING PICTURES) along with a story, then what's the point of making the story into film? The Matrix sequels should've never been committed to film, instead they should've been made into books, comic books, or at best, anime.

Seriously, for those of you who liked the sequels.. what exactly did the sequels accomplish as movies? I found NONE of the action sequences memorable. The first Matrix was fantastic, each and every action sequence still remains the kings of all action sequences in history. The sequels were easily bested by the generic fluff of Kill Bill and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Even Clone Wars provided more interesting battles.

I thought the Matrix sequels totally dismissed the Matrix itself. So I'm still hoping for the Matrix universe to be fleshed out some more. And if anyone's played the HL mod "The Specialists", a game concept like that is just waiting for high-budget high-production value treatment. (Max Payne 2 doesn't look as good)

As for the film critic basher... keep in mind that all of the nations' critics LOVED the first Matrix. Just visit www.rottentomatoes.com and see how all the various action movies fared. Kill Bill did very well too. So it has nothing to do with "pretentious critics" and a lot more to do with how the Matrix sequels wasted most people's time.

This comment was edited on Nov 14, 15:25.

I think I heard 1.1 will have better sounds, and most importantly, an altered bullet damage system that will make the semi-automatic rifles more potent. But besides that, it's probably not going to be too big a change..... bummer

This patch blows, JA needed serious balance changes to the Siege mode. For one, the guns are a total joke... you can have 5 people shooting at a guy in the open, 10 ft away, and there's a good chance not one of them will hit them. Not a jedi person, btw. Only explosive weapons are useful at all. Ugh.

(spoilers) I'm with you too, Pyro. The Matrix sequels abandoned the Matrix itself, and left us with the feeling that nothing that occurred in the Matrix could have any importance. Now that i think about it, the heroes and villians of the movies pretty much did NOTHING of importance while they were jacked in. Nothing they did, conflict-wise, helped end the war. Everything was just a means to communicate. Neo rescued Morpheus in the first film, but why rescue him? Did Morpheus really accomplish anything in the sequels? Neo rescued Morpheus to merely discover himself, by presenting challenges. Morpheus saved the Keymaker, yes, who only needed to be saved because Neo wasn't fast enough to keep a friggin door open.. too busy fighting worthless goons. WITH the keymaker, they merely led Neo to a conversation with the Architect.. who coulda just e-mailed Neo what he wanted to know, in the form of a Flash movie or something. Heh! Then in Revolutions, the entire Trainmaker/Merovingian Hell Club scenes were just a total waste of time. And Neo's final battle with Smith was pointless, as Neo could do nothing but be absorbed anyway. (nevermind that ALL of the Matrix fights of the sequels were of very low quality, while Matrix 1's fights were all well choreographed, fast-paced, and generally the king of action scenes of all time.)

Meanwhile, only what happened outside of the Matrix is what counted. Neo had to go to the Machine City 01 so that Deus Ex Machina (big head) could help him defeat Smith. I think we're all like Cypher from the first movie. We prefer the Matrix over reality.

1942 PAW was an amazing game, it opened me up to the world of flight sims. (unfortunately no sim since then has entertained me like PAW did). I remember an old Walmart guy recommending me the game. Then when I had trouble getting PAW to work, I went back and the guy showed me.. PAW Gold! Which was sooooo much nicer. The multimedia features blew me away too. I really liked the tinny voiceovers. Didn't i play that on a 66mhz computer? My God that was so long ago.

The carrier battle mode was great. Setting up CAPs, figuring out how many of your planes you wanted protecting your ships... or escorting the bombers on a risky strike. Sending B-17s from airfields to patrol the seas. Above all, i loved torpedo run attacks from the gunner chair. Seeing the flak tear through planes in the formation.... the hit planes would flip into another plane... both planes would crumple into the sea just 100 ft below. Then the Zeros would come. Aiyee!\

Years later, I managed to become a Japanese naval airman on the set of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, and got to sit in the back of one of the strike planes as a gunner. What a dream come true. Plus I apparently got to stomp on the wing of the very last remaining Zero from the war. (everything else is apparently a remake)

This comment was edited on Nov 5, 03:43.

hmm it'd be cool if the US govt got involved in computer game making (besides America's army). Maybe then we could get game companies to release a damn game that had replay value! (instead of bein greedy buggers who release small lifespan games)... that way we'd have extra cash to sink into massive military budgets and deceitful wars. *grin* hehehe

Reloaded and Enter the Matrix both raked in tons of moola, but were both panned by fans and critics alike. Anyway, the sequel to the game should be better. Shiny realises they screwed up, probably, and since Revolutions comes out in just 3 days... it means Shiny has no reason to rush the release of this game. Unless they demand the game come out when the Revolutions DVD comes out or some weird thing like that.

Acquire Ion Storm and you've got the best of the FPS industry under one publishing house. yowza.

There had a free public beta test for quite some time. The game seemed really popular, and the players act very mature, civil, and take the game very seriously. There was even an anti-war group that staged a demonstration march. I think they managed to create anti-war t-shirts and wore them as they marched.

There's definately a large appeal for women. My girlfriend saw the game for just a few minutes, but she seemed to really like it. The fashion aspect of the game goes a long way I guess. Plus the player models are very fun to look at. I don't think there's going to be a problem with crazed young boys overrunning the game, there seems to be a lot of safeguards towards that.

The biggest problem, I thought, was that this game really is just a chatroom with great looking avatars. But it's an inconvienient chatroom. The system specs are pretty high, but more importantly, the game drains such a large amount of system resources that multi-tasking slows down immensely. And so you're stuck focusing your entire attention to a graphical chatroom. Then there's the problem of chat logging. Stuff that people say wasn't backlogged, i think. Only in certain areas could you scroll back to see what people said. Otherwise you had to focus entirely on reading your friend's messages as it came out of their head, or you'd miss it.

But I guess "There"'s point is to recreate reality in some way. In this way, i think it succeeds. Nothing comes closer to virtual reality than There. I believe their payment model is to be very cheap to play, but it will cost you a little extra money to buy stuff in the game. Otherwise you'll just be Joe Schmo, with a pitiful wardrobe, and no home to live in.

instead of a full out SDK, there should at least be a mission designer for Deus Ex. Like a flight sim's mission designer, here you wouldn't be able to modify the content or levels directly, instead you would only be able to change the objectives, enemies, storyline, etc. So basically you'd be playing the same maps over and over, but since Deus Ex's world is so large, with hundreds of rooms, drawers, and computers to access.. the replay value would still be huge. Custom mission designers could create new experiences in the original environments.

I wish all FPS games would attempt to do this. So far not a single FPS game has. Instead they release a really complicated set of editor tools that less than 1% of its fanbase ever figure out how to use. With dedication and countless hours of work, a die-hard fan can create a brilliant new map. But they are few and far between. Some day, I hope, mission designers will be catered to the casual gamer... and let people just enjoy the preset maps in new and simple ways. (Think Warcraft/Starcraft map editors)

Oh, and adding multiplayer co-op would be cool too.

A DX Online game would be spiffy. That's all i can say.

naw, I mean more like a mix of Serious Sam w/ Diablo-style XP level progression and skill set gain. Kinda like Deus Ex but an extreme slant towards action and shooting. So it'd be about guns and bazookas, not just FPS perspective but truly first person SHOOTER.

if their next game is anything like Diablo, i hope they add a lot of custom mission/map/modification abilities like Star/Warcraft have. Not only that, but a way to make it to where the custom maps are still viable on the standard ladder play, realm play, etc.

Personally i'd prefer an FPS hybrid w/ Diablo hack-n-slash. That would be wicked.

i hope the FPS portion of the game will be exciting. Ground Control 1's third-person-unit control feature was kinda lame because of the uninteresting terrain and so forth that you'd expect from an RTS game.

Friends don't let friends play Firearms. No matter how bored the friends might be.

Your Huey idea would be a great game! Especially if each Huey could field 2-3 players (pilot and 2 gunners, for example). To be a success though, it'd need to lean heavily towards an action-sim concept, with huge explosions, massive amounts of enemies to shoot at, forgiving physics, aerial battles galore (against other helicopters, even though the NVA didn't have many choppers..), attacks on tanks, APCs, etc (all destroyable by mere machine gun fire!). But I can picture a Blackhawk Down movie-esque game where you're flying just a few feet above the jungle top, with RPGs and Zsu-54 fire flying everywhere. And the ground combat would be extremely well detailed so that you feel like you're watching an FPS game unfold below you, that's how good it would be.

Put all that together and the game would rock. Otherwise a realism-heavy Huey game would be not be interesting to a wide enough market. Anyway, I agree that WW2 sims have been beaten to death. I've been playing them since 1942: Pacific Air War and honestly, none of the WW2 sims since then have really been that much better when it comes right down to it. I think WW2 sims are a dead breed (and sims in general) because of what the games are about: realism. Well, once you get to a certain level, all that's left to make more sims about is the little nitpicky details that the vast majority of people don't care about. Sims self-destructed by simply doing their job.

the Sim genre needs to approach entirely new time periods and points of view.

i'm downloading the game now. I always wanted to get a hold of this, but didn't like the game enough to shell out cash for it. Close though! Now that it's free, I'd like to play co-op with some peeps. My AIM is jerryku7, yahoo ninjaboy_21. IM me if you're interested in some tcp/ip play (assuming HD doesn't have a server browser program built in)

For some reason Forgotten Battles takes forever to load for me, and death can occur quite rapidly. So, not being able to hotjump into another friendly plane that's flying around really blows. I pretty much load game/fly to target for 80% of the game, only to get shot down in the remaining 20%. This is especially lame when i'm just a bomber gunner and have no control over where flak hits! D'oh!

I miss the hotjump feature from other sims, such as 1942: PAW. I think i'll go look if Rowan's Battle of Britain has it...