This game is awesome. The demo is amazingly good fun - but you MUST try *multiplayer* on *expert* difficulty with *voice* to fully appreciate it. I think alot of people try SP on normal which is pretty dull - then start slagging the game off. MP is where it's at.

In the UK the game is $30 from amazon but frankly I'd be happy to pay $50.

opps - excuse the junk post - Opera went crazy on me.

Just wanted to say I thought Butcher Bay was rather better than Doom3. The graphical style and quality were very similar - but all the many characters in Butcher Bay had unique and detailed faces and bodies - compared to Doom3 where the same three heads were used for every character - which sucked.

Just finished playing thru the second time with commentary on. I thoroughly enjoyed it both times. Will prolly play again on hard. Yes it was more of the same - but the gameplay, design, pacing and attention to detail were all excellent. Yes it was expensive for the short duration of the game - but I'm happy to pay a bit more for episodic content if the quality is this high and they can turn them round every 6 months.

I'd highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Halflife2.
This comment was edited on Jun 5, 06:15.

Buggy as hell: Crashed on me 3 times in different places - and this is on a stable PC which very rarely crashes.

After equiping the binoculars indoors I couldn't unequip them - or even quit - had to ctrl alt delete.

Also - could they dumb the game down anymore? (I know it's a training level but come on!!). All the climbing and jumping actions are automatic - plus you get big white text telling you what to do next - even which button to press. Where's the fun in that? - where's the exploration and discovery - where's the fun?

And could they make the keys any more complex - sometimes action is G, sometimes E, other times it's spacebar WTF? Maybe it's just as well they tell you what to press.

This game sucks - I'm Audi!!

This comment was edited on May 23, 19:04.

Nice clip - hate to be critical but when the big alien goes down the gibs don't bounce very convincingly. They kinda just hit the ground and stop. Must have bouncey gibs a la Quake.

Anyone else disappointed about all the alien sh*t. I much prefered fighting the human opponents in FarCry - compared to all those rubbish mutants.

This comment was edited on May 22, 15:53.

Yes the grav gun was great. But if I remember correctly Far Cry had some fun physics too: pushing barrels onto guards, making boats out of pontoons, and general Fun With Dead Bodies (TM) - ranging from kicking them off ledges and down stairs to watching them bob up and down in the water, leaking out their guts

The slick way you could switch from first to third person perspective for the vehicles worked so well in FarCry - and the rush you got first time in the hang-glider, and the variety of vehicles. Sorry - they had HL2 beat in that department.

Granted, FarCry had some rubbish levels and didn't have the consistant story or dramatic sweep of HL2. But it did have those huge open-ended levels and great sense of freedom and exploration missing from HL2.

I'd say they were both great games - but I still say FarCry stole alot of HL2's thunder by being first.

Some good points in the HL vs HL2 article.

For me the great thing about HL was the number of FPS technological firsts: In particular; in-game cut scenes, NPC interaction and lip-syncing. (I'm amazed to see games today where the characters are still block heads who speak without moving their lips! eg. TR Legend. You just can't get away with that anymore - not after Halflife).

HL2 was great - but by the time it came out it had no new features: Vehicles and physics were done by FarCry 9 months earlier (and done substantially better).

So HL2 was a great game - but not such a leap forward as it's predecessor.