@Masa - yeah I remember playing these too. It was kind of fun making holes with rocket launchers. But I am pretty sure I put the game down mid way. After playing the demo, I am excited about the new Red Faction.

I played Killzone 2 to completion again yesterday. As a single player game, there are a few things that I just don't like. It's good, the graphics and sound are awesome (as a tour de force demo for the PS3 it serves admirably), but SP gameplay wise it's got way too damn much cheap shot development and you are constantly dumped in at close range in crossfires. Your team mates are completely annoying and always rushing you. They die all the time forcing you to play medic more than anything and when they are standing they aren't nearly as effective as AI team members in something like Battlefield: Bad Company. The cover based mechanic isn't crisp and refined as a shooter of this production value should be sporting. The AI knows exactly where you are aiming at all times, even when it is engaged against another target, moving just at the right times to provide unrealistic frustration. The game also seems to "have" to kill you right away after a level load, then it eases up some. Discovering the simplicity and ease of knifing everything also kind of made it less of a shooter. I dunno, some flawed issues to me and I am probably being picky, but I wasn't having as much fun as opposed to just getting through it. It's still really good, just a lot of annoying parts.

Multiplayer however is pretty damn cool. I love the game where you get random objectives and the game changes every few minutes. Most all modes are classic and newer mod multiplayer are in there. One minute you are playing for frags, then you are trying to assassinate 1 specific person, then you are capturing and defending, then collecting and transporting a package, even trying to secure and destroy a target with explosives. Your side has to react and form up depending on what random objective is announced. Really good stuff. Bots are pretty good too for SP skirmish. At first I wasn't even considering getting more maps, but now I am leaning towards grabbing them when they are budget priced.

This comment was edited on May 24, 2009, 05:41.

I enjoyed the first one a lot. Looking forward to BC2.

I played the Red Faction single player demo for almost a whole day. That game is going to be soo much fun. Last night

I got the inFAMOUS playable demo. For those curious let me lay it out:

Setting: Modern times. Huge accident causes catastrophe. Outbreak of social decay and a plague causes the government to completely quarantine the city. Your character was near ground zero. Like a meteor freak from Smallville, he gets special powers that are constantly growing and he is struggling to control them and learn more as they grow. The city is over ran with rape gangs, thugs, cultists, and the police are virtually non existent. You make moral decisions with every mission you take. Do you help people and go up the good side helping people and the city, or do you take an evil route gaining a completely different set of powers destroying anything in your path to reach your goals. The story part of the game utilizes dialog (good voice acting) between significant people in your characters life using cut out art which is arranged in a shifting parallax manner. It is actually pretty good.

Graphics: The city is a dark and dangerous place. The graphics portray this by choosing a dark palette which wonderfully contrasts the electrical fireworks your character is able to unleash. Neon signs, and the enemies stand out as well. Giving it a new look and feel compared to other city type sand box games. The city is alive with activity. Cars drive roads, people wander and mutter whats afflicting them. Think Sin City in color.

Gameplay: Take the vertical movement abilities of Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia and triple that. You can climb just about anything. You feel like an urban climber as you use every surface imaginable to vault your way higher and higher. There is no stopping to figure out tricky ways to ascend, it just flows in a very intuitive way. The controls are so tight, virtually all you need to do is think it, and it happens. Cables stretch from roof top to roof top in some places. You can leap on and slide, even reversing direction and sliding back. Or you could drop down and hand over hand traverse them. The freedom of movement is a pleasure by itself.

As you are traversing the city, you run across various enemies. You can deal with them in a FPS shooter manner with a multitude of different powers. The demo had maxed out half the powers, leaving a mystery as to what the other half actually were. You can use these powers in the air or on the ground. Everything works no matter what you are doing. You can direct fire by hurling bolts of energy. You can indirect fire and bombard anything with timed explosive bursts of energy. You can leap down on targets and do a devastating shock-wave attack. You can even simply walk up to something and beat the hell out of it with various melee attacks that the interface combos together. The end result is total freedom to move, climb, leap, and most importantly destroy in a fast paced real time firefight. Think Crackdown with a totally maxed out agent who has even more firepower.

There are RPG elements. Your character gains experience points. He can use these points to customize the 20 or so powers and abilities, most of which have 3 levels of power. How you kill things does matter. If you just kill something flat out, direct energy, or walking up and pummeling it, you get 5 points of experience. If you get a head shot there is a bonus. If you pummel someone and toss them off a roof top, that earns a bonus. Doing a wide range of stunts, multi-kills, environmental kills, or combos of these yield even more bonuses. Pulling off stunts also yield experience and bonuses. Killing with style pays well. It makes you start thinking of clever ways to do things adding a new wrinkle to free form sand box games.

When you are low on power, or hit points, all you need to do is find any source of electrical energy and drain it. These include any fixture like traffic lights, air conditioners, telephone booths, wall utilities, power lines, and even people with the right attack. Despite this the AI is relentless in making sure you don't succeed in anything you try to do. So while being able to drain power and heal may seem like a great help, things happen so fast that you need to really keep an idea of a nearby electrical source for emergencies. These are easily located by using a pulse power that highlights electrical sources in the area.

The demo only gave us 3 small islands to work with and you are tethered on a tight time leash (stray too far or take too long to get to a mission and the demo will force you to do it), I am assuming there is a much bigger portion of the city as I could see bridges extending to other places.

The demo demonstrated the moral choices by giving you 3 missions. The first good karma mission, you are tasked with moving a train containing hostages through the city to a specific safe area. To accomplish this, you have to kill enemies that are constantly trying to stop you. You have to clear debris and blockades on the tracks. You have to jump down under the tracks and energize certain points and switches. Then drive the train by standing on top of the engine and fighting off enemies who even try and launch rockets at you and the train.

During your mission innocent bystanders may be injured, you can walk over to them and heal individual people (because that's what good guys do). Your abilities also are very different when you are good. Instead of killing things you have an option to subdue them. You powers are blue in color. You are actually verbally supported by the mutterings of city bystanders much as a superhero is lauded when crowds see them.

The evil karma mission has you waging war over a water supply. I won't go in to details of any more missions. But the evil powers are red in color. They tend to be more destructive and do not differentiate who or what gets caught in their wake. There is enough difference between good and evil to matter and you can feel it when you play. The city dwellers also treat you different as you walk by you hear the fear in their voices, and they talk about you as the criminal you are.

As you complete missions you take over and secure territory. Other than cleaning the streets up, I did not get any understanding what else territory may affect from the demo. During game play I also saw vehicles being utilized by enemies. These were scripted parts of missions. It's hard to tell on a demo if these will also be employed in random chance encounters.

Enemies varied from basic grunts, rocket wielding harassers, special units with powers similar to your own, flaming suicide bombers, and various other configurations to keep things interesting. Enemies can be anywhere, roof tops, street level, on balconies, and they react, move and continue attacking no matter what happens to them if they are still alive and able to continue. I got the feeling there are different factions of enemies in the full game so I imagine there are many different types of enemies I have not encountered in the demo. We have all been able to see one particular boss type encounter via video, that wasn't in this demo so I can't comment more on it.

I find myself replaying this demo a lot and eagerly await the full release. It will be hard to decide what to play. Red Faction or inFAMOUS since they come out at the same time.

I remember playing this the first time and those Aliens crawling from floor to wall, then to the ceiling. That was really creepy stuff playing alone in the dark lol. All the different vision filters the predator had was cool. I would very much re-up for this one.

They should sell those Battlestations T-shirts. Very cool.

Very interested in this game.

As far as I noticed, the PS3 doesnt sell much because:

1. It's the most expensive console atm

Not really. You spend 120ish a year retail to play online and pay for wireless. Plus good PS3 bundles have 2 great games as well.

2. Most console gamers just prefer to play their games on the 360, most games are available to both consoles but the 360 has lot more exclusivities than the PS3

With this years line up I don't think Xbox has more exclusives, well at least not high quality ones. I would also venture to say that many of the PS3 exclusives don't have any other game on any platform that can match the idea or gameplay (unique). Xbox came out a year ahead of PS3. It got the early adopters and many having already invested in the system, stuck with it. But that is changing now, how much and how fast is the question. Having multiple Xbox system fails is driving many to PS3, at least I see it on their forums a lot.

3. Graphics and framerate are most of the time always better on the 360

This I know for a fact is false in most cases. Don't believe all the doctored up comparisons. Many have been proven frauds, and when they are the right media, they use lighting and other tricks to make things look worse on PS3 (look up IGNs Fallout 3 comparison for one example PC,XBOX have sun behind camera, PS3 it's setting to the east of the photo). Some games on 360 do look better in some ways, for the following reason. The PS3 has been held back by 360 ports to the PS3. Meaning PS3 owners up until the last year have been having to suffer with modified Xbox game code. Now PS3 is getting written for directly, and games like Killzone 2 show just how utterly amazing PS3 dedicated games are going to be.

4. Even tho PSN is free to play online, there is just a lot more people and a lot more games to play on Xbox Live.

This is true for now. Again, Xbox came out a year earlier.

5. While having a Blueray reader is interesting, gamers want to play games first and with all the advantages the 360 has, the Blueray option is not enough of a feature to get more sells.

Blu-ray is more than interesting, it's phenomenal. For games it allows boatloads of bonus features, media, and advanced textures that don't need a lot of compression. Not to mention Blu-ray eliminates the need to swap DVDs like you have to do in many RPGs on Xbox. The Blu-ray feature is a huge selling point, maybe it's lost on those who don't own one yet. Buying a new Blu-ray component alone is in the $450 range. As more people move up to the nice HDTVs that have been out and are coming out, Blu-ray is going to become essential. As for gaming, as you said it's about the games. If I were buying a system for the first time, and looking at both with an educated comparison of the two, I would be buying a PS3, no doubt, but I would wait until after E3 to see what is announced to make a final decision.

PS3 isn't a dead zone, I can't keep up with the inflow from now till xmas. Sacred 2 alone will be filler in between games.

Just got Sacred 2 a week or so ago. Thinking about UFC 2009 (it's been compared as a Fight Night for UFC with amazing reviews).

Between now and 6/9 (next 16 days):

Damnation (bargain bin)
UP (mmm pass)
InFamous (Day 1)
Cross Edge (Day 1)
Virtua Tennis 2009 (bargain bin)
Red Faction (Day 1)
Fuel (Day 1)
Tiger Woods 2010 (bargain bin)
Prototype (Day 1)

There's on average a game a week till xmas from then on. People who have used an Xbox for multiplayer from 2005 have spent in the range of 500 for the console and 480 for online service. PS3 was 600 range and 0 for online, with free Blu-ray and built in wireless (add another 100 for xbox is that's your preferred connection) So price is not an issue. Xbox is reaming people over time compared to PS3.

I am not banking on that picture of the slim being real yet.

This comment was edited on May 21, 2009, 15:50.

This looks really good. Just imported the PSP version from UK (PSP has no region lock afaik).

@Keith - That's right! I remember that now!

What someone needs to create is a reader for Google Earth that takes the images from multiple angles, calculates building dimensions and actually builds photo realistic maps. Then you retouch the unique stuff. Get a nice engine for it that can support just about any game...

Rack up another good PS3 exclusive this fall in Demon's Souls. Almost ordered this one from Play Asia, but glad I waited. They can't keep the game in stock.

Edit: Saints Row 2 needs PS3 trophies... The last DLC was 10 bucks for 3 little missions. Kind of pricey, especially without trophy support. I passed although this is a worthy game to get extra content for.

This comment was edited on May 20, 2009, 22:16.

Ahh please say it aint so. I played the demo of this the last 24 hours and really looking forward to it!

I think I still have a letter from the Producer of "Wargames" and the gold CD they burned for me after they chose to recall the entire release due to shipping it with a pretty nasty virus. It was a sad development indeed, as the game was not bad for that time period.

Wasn't there a Sir Tech title that when you uninstalled the game it destroyed your windows build?

I wasn't all that satisfied with the latest PGR. This all sounds like they are now trying to do what Burnout Paradise has done. Hopefully they will do what the old Burnout titles did (since that is wide open now imho). Crash mode, traffic attack and just the general feel is something I miss.

There are so many good TNG ones. It's my favorite series too. Was a mature, evolved look at what a Star Trek Universe should strive for. The message of hope, even though very politically correct. Picard brought that stiff british stage acting to the role of captain. Added a whole new level of charm while very much demanding respect.

I always chuckle when I think about the current "Are games drugs?" debate, and think about the episode where everyone had these glasses that were video games, and they would be rewarded with narcotic doses the more they played. Swept the whole ship. Seemed like it kind of was making that statement even though the device was introducing a substance.

I caught the Nasa stuff the last 2 days. Am very glad everything worked out so far. A friend of mine did a lot of shuttle code for Nasa (probably some ISS stuff along the way too). He's now working for a German company. It's sad we have lost most of out edge in space exploration.

Can you still accidentally sell your horse while you are riding it, zone and suddenly wonder wtf happened to your horse? How's the gold spammers? People still grief and exploit? What did they do for level 80s as a place to farm other than that god forsaken desert zone with only a few good camps that everyone fights over? Did they ever fix siege battles to enjoyable and functional? Did they ever flesh out player owned cities to be what they had envisioned versus what little got implemented at release? I have more questions, and did like the game, but it had some whopper problems that would require an expansion of large proportions to resolve. The healing system was pretty meh and raiding was pretty confusing and laggy. Raid areas and dungeons always felt confined and clausterphobic with the amount of people involved. Itemization seriously needed help. It had some pretty cool classes and the combat was good. I will probably revisit it when they release a good expansion.

Time travel I think was introduced in Episode 4 of the original series (just watched it on BD). The alternate universe was also introduced in the original serries. Can't forget the good Kirk bad Kirk episode. DS9 did 3 or 4 episodes dealing with this same alternate universe style too (as in more faithful to the original).

Waiting for PS3 GotY edition with all these included.

Looking forward to DW: Empires 6. Those who like Risk/Total War type games with real time battle resolution should check it out. Out of all the iterations of DW, I played DW5: Empires probably 1000 hours and could easily pick it back up and play it some more as one of the other generals (there were like 70+ with unique fighting styles). Hopefully they will let us direct the battlefield leaders like we could in 5. DW6 actually had decent dialog and voice acting.