Some of the arbitrary restrictions in the first game (only one character could move a body, only one knew how to drive!) were frustrating but it was still a memorable and, mostly, fun game.

I'd still rather see a good addition to the Jagged Alliance series.

I wondered why there were achievements for "slaughter mode", but no options to actually play "slaughter mode"! Had me wondering that I may have to unlock it somehow.

I picked it up for 2.49 over the holidays and it's impossible not to get value for money at that price. Steam says I played it for 3.7 hours, which is only a few hours less than I spent with Left 4 Dead.

Trying to shoehorn co-op into every FPS is as dumb as trying to shoehorn deathmatch into every FPS; or even just adding multiplayer to something that doesn't need it. It's usually a waste of development resources and is only added because they think it'll make the game exponentially more successful.

On the plus side, at least FEAR 3 won't be a fantasy themed MMO.

For those new to all this: here are the good old days with Dr Derek.

edit: 2 minutes too slow!

I briefly thought this was a new product but it's just season 2.

When a business is having trouble paying the bills, they have to either cut costs or find new ways to generate revenue. Having a tantrum and demanding your customers do things they don't want to is utter madness.

Players will be able to play as Alliance or Horde in a constant struggle to harvest enough bear, boar, and wolf parts for their guildmasters.

Much more accurate.

JA2 was one of my favorite games because it got so much right that most RPGs get wrong.

You actually could kill a merchant and take all their stuff, this was balanced by making merchants unique and relatively rare so that there wasn't a best choice. the game actually modeled damage properly (lost health meant lost action points) so a wounded enemy was less dangerous than a healthy one. NPC's were unique and often hilarious yet the actors were nobodies. Good writing is much better than using 'big names' for horribly cliched garbage like Bioware does.

Unfortunately, this just means that it's likely to die by death from a thousand cuts as all of this gets changed to make some generic real time pseudo-FPS.

Historical illiteracy is the reason. It doesn't get much attention in the American state run schools and is largely ignored by popular culture. That makes it uninteresting to the people who think the Indiana Jones movies were documentaries. A more interesting question would be why it went down the memory hole while the second one became the state religion.

It looks like Diablo, but all that will matter is if it plays like Diablo.

All the early areas were ghost towns when I tried it, so they had to change something. Getting players out of the dead areas as fast as possible is the least painful way to fix things, but every time they raise the level cap it just makes it worse.

Very nice timing. I always hold off on this until the 'final' patch after the transfer window, since it never works right out of the box. The game is such a time sink that I refuse to play it before it works properly.

I bought Spellforce 2 during the sale and have enjoyed some of the Battlefield games, but the rest of the list are from series I just haven't liked that much.

Splinter Cell: Conviction, Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic, Assassin's Creed 2, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and the new Ghost Recon

Thankfully I have no interest in playing any of those games, so I can continue ignoring ubisoft entirely.

hubricide wrote on Feb 27, 2010, 13:10:
I get bored of MMOs in general, though - grouping only makes a game so much more fun, and the core gameplay of every MMO I've ever tried involves killing endless hordes of apparently 'evil' creatures (do these endless hordes actually exist in reality? I don't think so).

I enjoy MMOGs for the exploration, what abilities my character can get, what items there are, the geography of the game universe.. the combat aspect can be viscerally exciting but ultimately it always ends up just annoying me.. and I always end up wondering just why my only choice is to kill kill kill kill kill kill kill

There used to be this thing called an "RPG", where we could explore a vast new world and watch our character improve over time but they've been pushed to extinction by the delusion that making every RPG into a wowclone (that is guaranteed to fail!) is somehow a great idea.

The reason they all involve killing hordes of 'evil creatures', is because that's what EQ did and 99% of MMO developers seem to be totally devoid of creativity or original ideas.

It's sad to see such good game material wasted like this. It's probably the best IP you could ever license: very well established game system with a fair amount of 'lore', yet without the canonical straitjacket that ruins Star Wars and Tolkien games.

The demo made me remember that I liked the "Movies" game that Lionhead did.

While I loved the beginning of Civ games, the endgame in the earlier ones was always horrible. Once the exploration and tough choices on the tech tree were done, there's nothing left but clicking next turn 200+ times waiting for culture/space/diplo or playing a very weak war game. It needs a MOO option for a quick victory when you've effectively won but the AI hasn't realized it yet.

Is there any solid information on gameplay or a release date? Funcom has had interesting concepts before (Anarchy Online) but the actual gameplay wasn't original and their launches tend to be disasters.

The biggest issue with Arcanum at release was the very dated graphics had surprisingly poor performance.

It came out only a few months before Morrowind, Dungeon Siege, and Neverwinter Nights, so the graphics looked incredibly bad by comparison and the game was still sluggish and crashed often. It needed to ship a year earlier to avoid the next generation of RPG's, yet it probably required another 6 months to make it run smoothly and fine tune content. No wonder it didn't do well.