I've got that. It looks fantastic!! Never finished it though caus emy memory card keeps messing up and deleteing everything. The memory card is the Dreamcasts only weak point.

I found it quite insulting when it made me go out and find a job.

I preordered World of Warcraft today. I'm pretty stoked about that one. I've been playing Morrowind for the past month and a half (third time I've started a new game). I wonder if I'll EVER finish that blasted game.

Haha, yeah, drive the forklift, move the box, do it again! And then in Shenmue 2, box goes left, box goes right, box goes left, box goes left! Doh! I went right!!! I long did I listen to Migi-da, Shadi-da, blah-blah-blah. Great game though!

Half Life 2 has stolen my life. Quite possibly more realistic and detailed than the real world. Only with monsters and cool guns.

I'm currently playing through Shenmue II again now and enjoying it thoroughly. Both games have huge flaws (let's spend the morning airing books out of a library!), but are truly compelling.

In actual fact, I'm playing through them for reasearch as I am currently (read: slowly) creating my own sequel, Shenmue 3: The Journey Continues, using the RPG Maker 2000 program. Its in very early stages, I'm still getting a hang of the program and there are so many sprites and graphics I need to create from scratch, but as a semi-piss-take sequel, I'm quite chuffed with it so far. And with Yu Suzuki distracted with Shenmue Online instead of continuing the series, the road is clear for my unofficial follow-up! Groovy!

I am finding The Minish Cap impossibly beautiful and better and better with each passing minute of play. Recommended. heartily.

I played Tetris yesterday . . .

Has anyone listened to The Tetris Song on the superb Adam and Joe DVD? Its sung to the tune of the 'High Score' song on the original GameBoy version.

LAST VERSE:

"My friend Joe's a Tetris-sceptic,
Says it makes you epileptic,
But he doesn't understand,
It builds the muscles in your hand,
And it improves coordination,
Puts you in a situation,
Where you use imagination,
To stack loads of ODD SHAPED BLOCKS."

Class.

Yeah, that's such a great dvd
If only they'd released the entire 4 series. I'm hoping Adam and Joe Go Tokyo will see the light of day too.

I got that with my shiny new gameboy. 22 and I finally get one! Woohoo! I'm actually stuck though. Can't find any Lonlon milk.....

There's a great version of Tetris called 'Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine'. You should download it.

YES YES YES YES! (and No no no no! - It's not a version of tetris, it's a 'western rebranding' of a game known as 'Puyo Puyo').
The mega drive version was excellent, because it had a 4 player mode - something that the latest versions of puyo pop / puyo puyo / whatever (GBA/PS2/etc) don't seem to have!

it'll cost you 100 rupees.

Oh, and Puyo Pop on the GBA does have four player mode. You only need one copy of the game but you'd need four Game Boys.

You get a cut down version of the game if you only have one cart However, I hope they do something good with the nintendo DS!

I knew that. I did. I was just testing you.

Playing through Half Life 2 for the second time (this time on hard, previously on medium). Absolutely brilliant game. It's totally linear, but it's that good I didn't really care.

Steam on the other hand is the worst piece of software I have ever used in my life. It is abysmal. It makes me want to drown things. I haven't seen one benefit to the user from it, all it does is sit on your PC as an obstacle to prevent you playing your games. It invents a different reason every time you play Half Life 2 to either delay you or just stop you using it altogether. From installing Half Life 2 to actually getting to play it was 3 hours. First there's the setting up a steam account, then there's authenticating your CD Key (which took a whole day, so basically it wouldn't let me play the game unless i was connected to the internet), there's decrypting your game files, 4.5 GB worth of it, then it patched itself (On the day of release). Occasionally it randomly decides offline mode is unavailable, so you have to go on the internet yet again. What happened to the "you'll need to connect to the internet once when you install it, but that's all" which Doug Lombardi claimed? Grrr.

Also had a quick go on Halo 2, the single player seems slightly better than the original, which isn't really saying much, it still seems somewhere between poor and average. The multiplayer was more or less the same as when we played it months ago in the internal Microsoft beta we had, i.e. crap. What a totally overrated game.

San Andreas is still ruling my life - though I did spend most of last week completing the crash courses in Burnout 3...

Heathen!

Different strokes I suppose, I've been playing Halo 2 solidly for a couple of weeks, have completed single player on Heroic - am waiting for Legendery, its apparently a VERY different game to legendary on original Halo - and have been playing the online games too much really. Spending lots of time on Big Team Battle through Matchmaking. My GamerTag is Doijest if anyone wants to play too.

I love it!

Sorry, but I can't see anything that Halo 2 does better than any other run of the mill first person shooter. The level design is bland and boring, and repetitive (although not to the same degree as Halo 1 where you just played through endless amounts of the same identical room over and over), the enemies are annoying (those little aliens that run around shrieking waving their arms in the air are terrible. Any sense of immersion is destroyed by their stupid comedy voices/appearance/behaviour). The weapons are boring. The multiplayer has a slow, plodding pace, and seems to require little skill. Graphically, the detail (normal maps and some objects) pop into existence a few frames late during cut scenes so you get a really horrible effect. Anyone fancy pointing out some good things about this game?

Yeah, I never got what the big deal was about Halo. It's a good solid FPS and was fun for the most part but not the be all and end all. I think it just achieved legendary status by default after spending a few years as the only good exclusive on Xbox

Yeah i didn't see what all the fuss was about when i played HALO. Give me Deus Ex any day. If only they hadn't fucked up the sequel.

You're not the first person I've spoken to [metaphorically] who thinks this about Halo 2. I'm just glad I didn't go for an xbox over a ps2 purely for that. Without a broadband internet connection, Halo 2 is meant to be merely an upgrade of the first and more superior game.

well Halo 2 is a fun game thats all that matters to me. And better then the first game that to be honest bored me...Strange.


The multiplayer however is very good. Never any lag and some good gameplay.

Recently....I've played and completed Fable. I was disappointed with it to tell the truth, far too short a game.

Lord of the Rings:The Third Age was pretty good, I'll swear it's using the game engine of Final Fantasy X though.

Ditto.

Ditto again... I'm not saying everyone should love Halo, but I do. And as for Halo 2 being merely an upgrade, its an upgrade in as much as Back to the Future 2 is an upgrade of Back to the Future, same actors, same set, whole new adventure...

And while Halo may not be revolutionary, its a VERY TIDY package in my opinion. I think they do lots of things well, for example:

Level design: you may find the level design boring but I think it works perfectly. There are very few levels in games that are memorable to me. Maybe level 1 of Doom 1 and the 'difficulty lobby' from quake, but from Halo I love replaying The Silent Cartographer, Assault on the Control Room or Halo time and again in co-op or alone. And my friends have their favourites.

Sound: they've taken the time to give it proper cinematic sound. Lots of orchestral pieces at key moments to give the proper sense of gravity. And the "stupid comedy voices/appearance/behaviour" all add to give your enemy character, instead of some grunting zombies that all make the same noise when you shoot them. Having the Marines and the Covenant heckling each other adds to the game in my book.

Character design: Bungie have managed to build on the characters throughout the two games. OK, Master Chief is hardly the most emotional game character, but then the Terminator was never particularly expressive either, its what fits. And the Master Chiefs relationship with Cortana, Johnson, the Keysesesses etc is something you don't often find. Normally its lone gunmen go kill!!!

Dificulty: Yes Halo is easy, if you play it on Normal. Whack it on Legendary and it becomes a whole lot more challenging, requiring a combination of stealth and brutality. And its not a game where if you get caught sneaking around its over... you just have to change tack and start spraying bullets instead of hit 'Retry'. And the difficulty curve on Halo 2 is made greater still, so it suits all players. Not everyone is an expert.

Online: The system Bungie has used for Halo 2 online means that on the whole, players of equal skill will be matched with each other. This means that you don't get constantly dumped into games with people above your ability and end up playing dull games. As for it being plodding, I've never noticed any lag, and would say the action is just as intense on 'Zanzibar' as it is on 'Beach Assault' from Wolfenstein, which I also loved.

Sorry. Too far. My final point: I like Halo, for the above reasons and more. I'm not saying you should. I feel Halo is a victim of Hype, and perhaps some small degree of Xbox/PS2 rivalry.

On another note: I heard Doom 3 got Game of the Year or some such at the Golden Joysticks awards or something. What? If you think Halos bad...?????

I never liked Halo on the Xbox. I thought it was far too slow for a FPS. So when it came out on the PC I gave it a bash, just to find it was still pretty slow compared to most other FPS.

Medal of Honnor is where it's at, but I wished they'd release the rest of the series on the PC, and not on the bloody consoles, as I can't play those kind of game on a control pad!


ANYway, I've been play Tekken 4 on the PS2, as well as GTA: Vice City. Will be playing Mario Kart 64 tonight, as my house mate has just bought it.

I played Halo on the PC, it sucked big time. And I played Medal of Honour on the Xbox, it also sucked big time. I did however play wolfenstein, which is almost the same game, on both Xbox and PC, it sucked on Xbox and ruled on PC. Moral: games don't do well when they cross over. Make it for one or the other and BE HAPPY!

I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong to like Halo, I just like a good debate about what makes a game good or bad. I can't see anything in the game whatsoever that makes it come even close to deserving the critical acclaim that it gets. Of all the points that I made about why it's bad, even the Halo fans I know just end up shrugging their shoulders and saying "yeah, you're probably right about that bit...".

I'm baffled how you can possibly defend the level design in Halo 1. It wasn't just bad, it was absolutely appalling. They'd literally just made a handful of rooms and pasted identical clones of them around to make a level. There were numerous times that I got lost, or found myself going backwards because the rooms ahead looked totally identical to those behind. Even the level designers must have spotted this because there are often arrows on the floor pointing the way to go. You should not have to do this. If you find you need to do this when designing your level it means that your level is fundamentally flawed anyway. Reusing level geometry in multiple places isn't a bad thing, as long as it's done at a fine grain detail, like the Unreal Engine does with static meshes, where one wall panel can be instanced many times, or a light fixture, or a doorway. It's not OK to instance entire rooms where you feel like you're playing the same part of the game over and over again. The most obvious example of this is a level called the library. Where they seem to have made a whole floor and copied and pasted the entire thing lots of times. That level is possibly the worst, most boring level I have ever played in my life. Yet they went and repeated it in the sequel....

Well, yes, some levels are a bit repetitive, you'll notice I didn't include the library in my favourite levels - although one of my housemates LOVES it for the hour of non-stop shotgun zombie based murderlising it offers - as I do find it a bit boring. I think they did fail on some of the interior levels but the outdoor battle grounds are so vast and - in my opinion - beautiful that they can't be beat. I actually think the outdoor stuff was done better in Halo one than in Halo 2, although it does have some gem moments. Like the first time you realise you've walked outside into a vacuum, and when you're wandering around the workings of a MAC gun! I've never said Halo doesn't have failings, and the sections of Assault on the Control Room that repeat, or the library, are prime examples.

That said, if it were indeed a massive library, I imagine it would be fairly repetitive, as would buildings sharing the same architecture. How many hospitals have you been in which don't have arrows and colour codes every-which-way you look? And the library in Halo 2 is not the same level at all.

EDIT: as we're still talking level design, I would add the beach assault on Medal of Honour: Allied Assault as another memorable level of all time. After that, what a dissapointment!

Was anyone else here disappointed in some ways with Fable?

Another game I'm playing online right now is Joint Operations:Typhoon Rising. Released by Novalogic, of the Delta Force and Black Hawk Down game series fame, it's basically a Battlefield 1942 style game.

Server code seems fairly stable, and up to 150 players can play.

Pros-

Lush environments, a good choice of weapons
Varied vehicles, from Zodiac boats up to Chinooks and Mil-26 Halo helicopters.
Nice variance on character models


Cons

Some maps are too dark, even Night vision doesn't seem to help.

I think this game is one of the best FPS to come out on the PC. It had a much better one player game than most FPS, and was totally rock hard on the hardest skill setting, specially the snipper level!

As I said above in another post, I wish they'd release the rest of the series on the PC.

Oh God, I played a Nintendo DS today. It's beautiful. Metroid Prime demo looks great and plays very well, and ditto for Mario 64 DS. I've fallen in love with it and I want one. Where's my chequebook...

If it were indeed a massive library, wouldn't it actually have something in it? There was nothing but boring slabs of angular geometry. Everything feels so empty and hollow, there just didn't seem to be any detail in it. In games such as Half Life 2 (this isn't supposed to be a HL2 vs Halo argument, this is just an example), all the environments seemed to serve a purpose in the game's own world, and you just happened to be passing through them, as opposed to Halo's level design, where each environment seemed to be a few random rooms stuck together. There doesn't seem any thought gone into Halo's levels at all, it's like they were just making it up as they went along, room by room.

I agree that the outdoor levels were MUCH better than the indoors ones. Had the majority of the levels been outdoors it would have been a significantly better game. Unfortunately you only seemed to ever spend a bit of time out there before having to go back to the dull interior levels again. The indoors levels weren't "a bit repetitive", they were infuriatingly so.

Well, I can see we are at a bit of a stalemate. I do not entirely diagree with you, but I don't find it as big a problem, obviously. I do see what you mean about lack of the small details in the library (of course we don't know what it is a library for... perhaps flood specimens, hence the plethera of them about, in which case I imagine it might resemble a featureless prison) but the grand detail is there. Enormous cavernous rooms, that have been devoid of life for millenia since the last time the Halos were activated. Enormous vistas, linked by giant underground tunnels. Vast bridges of light and installations buried into the sides of cliffs! I think the scale of things in the game draws the focus away from smaller details.

The 'detail' that I always find the most satisfying is when outdoors, you see the Halo stretching off into the distance, arcing upwards. They seem to have made it less obvious in the new game though.

And I don't for a minute think that this is a HL/Halo argument. I have nothing against Half Life. I played the original, but I came to it late so it had... rivals. I can't stand Counter Strike though! Don't get me started on that! Its a shame that these two games are both so respected (or not ) because they inevetibaly get compared. At the end of the day, they are two different games!

Anyway, enough computer game ranting. People will think I'm crazy soon!

You lucky bleedah! I want the dogs program! aww they're so cute!

Tere are so many yetisport games now, www.yetisports.org theres 7!!!!! Wow

Recently picked up a copy of 'Beyond Good & Evil' (£4.99 in Toys'R'us !!!) which I've been after for quite a while. Pretty good stuff, plays well, looks nice I have however read a few reviews saying that it isn't that long a game, so it may finish just as I'm getting into it. Anyone else played through it ??

yup. gaming of the highest quality. I thought the length was perfect but then I like short games. less of a waste of my life.

Neverwinter Nights seems to be devouring a large chunk of my free time recently...

I have been living on a diet of Metroid Prime 2, San Andreas and guns......lots of guns....
This nutrition is enough to ensure that I can kill......plants. Another few days and I may just move up to killing a shoe so good luck to me.....I'm so lonely:P

"You lucky people!"~Tyres

I need a DS more than I need oxygen! Well, maybe more than I need school....anyway, I really want Mario 64 DS as I had the origional and I loved it more than I loved....school. The point is, how did you get to play one?

We've got a few at work actually, they look quite nice, but I've no intention of spending a lot of money on one.

There's a branch of Chips near me that has a display one. They let me play on it.

Controlling stuff with the stylus is quite good and bad at the same time. It seems ok for controlling the view of a first person shooter, given the lack of a mouse and keyboard, but at the same time, it means you have to hold the thing with one hand, which is a bit awkward. Apparently there's a thing you can get to put on your thumb so you get the precision of the stylus but you can hold the device with two hands. Unfortunately I didn't get to try this as the one we had in the office didn't have it.

After a little play with it, my overall impressions of the DS were that I'd be pretty happy with one if I was given one, or paid about £50 for it, but I couldn't imagine myself paying a lot for one.

Had a go at Far Cry, which seems pretty damn good, except that I'm already halfway through it after a few hours yesterday and today. It's not as good as Half Life 2, but it's certainly a hell of a lot better than Doom 3.

I am over the gaming moon(probably the one from Majora's Mask) because I went to my local import game shop and got a NINTENDO DS! I love it. Sheer awesomeness. It is GREAT! Unfortunately I have to wait 'till next week to get a game, 'cos that's when they get the American games in. Darn it.

I got Sims 2 for Christmas. Would it be too sad to create Shaun, Liz and Ed Sims?

I think it's pretty much obligatory.