If you spend 100 hours a month, then yes, 10 dollars really isn't that much.

The problem is for people like me, who only have an hour or two a week to play. I have a choice - I either pay a drastically higher per-hour rate than people who play more regularly, or I have a limited gaming experience. This is the same reason I don't play MMORPGs, of course; The value for money curve means that casual gamers get screwed.

I'm currently fighting a running battle with Steam support to reclaim a hacked Steam account. After about five messages back and forth, it has finally emerged that the person actually stole my account by "reclaiming" it from Steam, after providing my steam account number, and my credit card details.

I don't have any spyware on this machine - I checked with SpyBot and Ad-Aware. I surf using Opera, I read mail using Eudora, and internet security is part of my job. I am at a loss as to how anyone could have got both my Steam account number and my credit card details by hacking a third party, however, unless that third party was Steam. (Yes, I could be an idiot, riddled with spyware that I have no idea is there.)

This comment was edited on Apr 20, 02:11.

The problem with cars in Boiling Point is that the game can only track five "left" vehicles on the map. Normally when you leave a vehicle you can see it on the map (with an icon saying something like "Left Vehicle N1"). Sometimes, entering a vehicle will cause the counter to loop round, and make an existing vehicle on the map "disappear".

The main thing to do is to make sure you save before entering a new vehicle. There are a few potential solutions if you notice your favourite vehicle disappearing - basically reload, return to it, carjack something else within 200 metres so it drops off the map but doesn't disappear, then get back into it thereby "refreshing" it with the game in a new slot.

Having said that, once you can fly around in combat choppers and speedboats with machineguns, it's tempting to just use those all the time, and scuttle them when they run out of fuel / health (they can't be fuelled, rearmed or repaired) to get a new one. As long as you don't complete the missions that actually give you those vehicles, and as long as you scuttle them sufficiently far away from their spawn points (at least a few km) you'll just find a new one at the spawn each time.

It's interesting - at the end of this year, it'll be 10 YEARS since DN3D came out. I don't even think they're going to make that anniversary.

When it was announced, DNF was big news, but by the time it's finally released, I don't expect more than two or three percent of active gamers will have played anything else in the series. They've basically wasted one of the biggest brands in gaming.

Having said that, the gap between Doom 2 and Doom 3 was about ten years...

The game has spawned one of the most amusing flames for the development team I've seen in some time, though:

http://support.typhoongames.com/board/forum_posts.asp?TID=1511

One choice extract: If the designers were any more stupid, they'd live in a ceramic pot and get watered twice a day

This comment was edited on May 11, 02:16.

CS:CZ was actualyl reviewed in the previous issue of UK PC Gamer, which came out over a month ago - I had no idea it wasn't gold yet, I was just ignoring it as the review slated it rather badly.

Hmm, just went and grabbed the magazine. It was actually the issue before last, so over two months ago. They gave it 65%. A couple of choice quotes:

"Whacking terrorists doesn't gift you either ammo or weapons... you're being forced to sharpen your knife in desperation, though the shiny shotguns and sniper rifles of slain terrorists carpet the floor. Can you pick them up? Can you hell."

"CS:CZ lacks in almost every department. In many ways, it's a clumsy, backward game."

"Condition Zero has to be counted as a failure."

Hmm. We can only hope that they took this review on board and spent the last three months desperately polishing it up, as after that review (from the notoriously "rah rah rah" PC Gamer, who will normally hype up anything with a pulse, especially from the big names) I lost interest so fast I hadn't even realised the game hadn't been released...

This comment was edited on Oct 9, 02:13.

You don't have to run steam on startup.

Funny, when I installed the Steam beta, it not only set itself to run on startup, it also didn't bother telling me it was doing so (my security app notified me).

This won't stop piracy anyway, at least not for single player. HL2 is such a long awaited game that it'll be cracked and online probably before it hits the shops. Personally I want to buy it, but Steam makes me slightly uncomfortable - I hate software running on my machine that I'm not in control of, and something quietly deciding to download stuff in the background sounds like the kind of thing i detest.

If anyone hasn't already played it, it's well worth tracking down the Kung Fu mod for the original Max Payne - martial arts, stick fighting, guns and bullet time (together with combo powerups). It's incredibly well put together.

The surprising thing is how well the original game missions play in "martial arts" mode - you can almost always somersault in over the bullets and beat the bad guys to a pulp...

I don't see any ads (I run a filtering proxy) and Blues is about the only site I feel guilty about doing it on - if there was a Paypal donation option I'd throw money at it pretty much on reflex. I've subscribed to print magazines that aren't half as useful and interesting as this site.

Is there a historical reason Blues doesn't have a paypal option? If he doesn't feel comfortable taking cash directly (although he certainly shouldn't, he's offering a hell of a service) why not set up something like an Amazon wishlist so those of us who feel the need can buy him the odd present?

Hmm... just downloading Steam and installed it. At the end of the install process, it tried to set itself to run at every startup with a "-silent" option, which strikes me as a bit excessive - why does it need to run all the time? And perhaps more worryingly, why didn't it tell me it was going to do that? (I run StartupMonitor on this box, which is how I caught it)

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the cell shading "mods" available for the Quake engine games - they're not as cutting edge graphically as XIII is looking (I think they're available for Q1 and Q2) but it shows that cell shading isn't anything terribly new...

Xaber3D engine? Bizarre, I just played the demo and would have SWORN it was using the SS engine - the game is an exact clone, but with more bugs. I had some weirdness where the mouse sensitivity seemed to vary with frame rate, and some sounds kept "locking" and looping.

Sort of fun, but way too buggy. I quite liked Sam (and Sam SE) but I've already uninstalled the demo for this.

Good grief - you're right. Thanks for pointing it out, I'd never have found it otherwise. It's a pretty idiotic user interface decision (you have to select the map computer, then select "IGI HQ", then select "upload data to IGI headquarters") to do it this way, instead of having a menu option (or even a quicksave key) but at least it's there!

Having played through this a few times, I'm still amazed at how little has changed since the first one. The AI is still terrible (I've had a guy shooting at me, I run up beside him, and he's still looking at where I was and shooting...), there are still plenty of "locked rooms full of guards which pour out when the alarm goes off" (because in real life, guards always lock themselves in their baracks, right?)... this is really IGI 1.1, not IGI 2.0.

I might buy it anyway, though. The addition of a save game feature should drastically reduce the frustration of the original, and (whatever my gripes) the demo still feels "fun".

The IGI2 SP demo isn't officially available until the 16th, but it's on the cover disks of PC Gamer here in the UK, and my sub copy turned up this morning. I've just installed it and had a quick play - I'm guessing it'll be leaked to the usual download sites pretty quickly.

I played the original IGI and thought it pretty fun, although the inability to save (and the respawning enemies) irritated me immensely, especially later in the game - it's one of the few games I never actually finished.

Anyway, the demo is a fairly standard "sneak into a base, avoid the guards and cameras, get across a river" type of thing, very similar in style to the original.

And that's the problem. It's not just the style - from the Demo (which is labelled "90% complete", so I guess there's still hope) this game is almost identical to its predecessor. The graphics aren't noticeably improved. The architecture has a similar feel (and the level of detail isn't substantially better). The models and animations are, as has already been mentioned in this thread, pretty damned substandard, especially when compared to something like NOLF2.

Worst of all, there's *still* no save option. Once again, they've doomed us to having to restart from the beginning multiple times in order to complete a level. Last time everyone assumed this was to make the game seem longer, as Innerloop hadn't had sufficient time to make more levels... but if that's true this time, I've no idea what they've been spending their time on, as it certainly doesn't seem to have been the game itself.

I really wanted to like this game. I was hoping for something like the original, but with the irritating points removed. I can live with the dated graphics (after all, it's the gameplay that counts, right?) but the fact that they've ignored the repeated cries for a save function will probably put me off.