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So, I genuinely wasn't expecting much from this game, what with it's troubled history. 17 hours later, and it's one of the best games of 2012. A lot of reviews claim "it's nearly as good as GTA!", which to be honest isn't far off the mark. The combat's a bit like Batman AA (one button to punch, another to counter), you can hit people with a fish or shove them face first into a fan blade. There's Collectables to find, though for once (a) they improve your stats instead of doing nothing, and ( once you complete specific side missions, they all appear on your map so you can collect them at your lesuire. Every open world game could do with "borrowing" that idea. So yeah, it's a brilliant game. And it's high sales are a big middle finger to Activision. Which is always a good thing.

I have very mixed feelings about this. I love the feeling of adventure, of not knowing what's down the road and if you'll be able survive. It's brilliant when you do overcome the odds and press on after a tough battle. The combat system is great with loads of customisation on offer, you're even encouraged to change class altogether. The Pawn system works really well, being able to hire and fire helpers and changing the composition of your group entirely as the situation demands. Despite all the good bits, the game so far has felt as though i'm playing the middle portion of an RPG where i'm clearing up fluff quests just to pad out the leveling process. There's been no gravitas or urgency to the quests so it's difficult to differentiate between the story and side quests. Things like not having fast travel I can understand why they left out even though it's annoying to have to walk to the same places over and over. I'm surprised more games don't use the MMO style flight paths to get around. You still get to where you're going quicker but you have to travel to a specific place, rather than just magically teleporting everywhere. It's a happy medium between the two. There's other things which are pretty minor and affect my enjoyment more than they probably should. For instance, why did they overlook mini-map markers for people who have something to say? It's incredibly frustrating having to run around looking for colored speech bubbles above NPCs heads. Likewise with the Pawns. As good as the system is it grates when in combat and you're unable to issue commands for something as simple as a weapon buff - the option just doesn't exist. Most of the time you just have to wait for them to apply the correct buff which is very frustrating against the larger enemies. For all it's issues, there are times when this incredible game shines through, and that's what makes it worth playing. I just wish it was more consistent.

I'm playing it. Early days, on chapter four, but it's bloody brilliant.

So I was really looking forward to this. All the vids pointed to awesome. But the end result is pretty hit and miss. The good: Realistic ballistics and holding your breath waiting for that perfect moment is excellent. Then the shots themselves are addictive and never a bore. Seeing exactly how well you did, bones shatter, lungs pop, balls burst. Realising you can shoot an enemies grenade hanging from their belt. The bad: Hate the AI in Far Cry 2? It's that times ten here. Setting up your first shot is always a pleasure but as soon as you've taken it all enemies on the map have a switch flipped on their head and know exactly where you are. But wait, it gets worse. Why be armed with a sniper if the AI (now knowing where you are) can hit you a mile away with a world war semi automatic? The cut scenes are mostly awful too. A mixture of in game graphics and cgi. The final kill in the game is massively comical too, mostly because of a squishy noise and cut to black/credits. Unfortunately a large part of my enjoyment of the first and reason for buying this was for online battles. Death match style multiplayer is not present on the console versions. Instead we are left with co-op only modes and I didn't find these enjoyable. The result: While not a complete failure it's hard to play this game as intended with the AI as it is. The first Sniper Elite was a perfect mix of stealth and mocking the enemy which would only have an idea of your location if they'd had a visual. I did have a lot of fun along the way to the unintentionally funny conclusion though (I played it in a weekend), it's a damn sight (rofl) beter than Ghost Warrior and it's well worth a punt at a budget price.

got a free copy of anomaly warzone earth on xbox the other week, never would have bought it, but turns out it's great, like a backwards tower defence game, you pick your path and tank types/formation, you get money to buy upgrades/new tanks, and you control a little dude who can pickup abilities from fallen enemies, it can get quite tactical picking your path/tank formation/power usage, and frantic when things kick off. there's some enemies that do stuff you wouldn't expect later on that keep it interesting. single player story is quite short but there's quite a few extra missions and 3 difficulties for everything. i found easy difficulty to be well judged for me. so yeah really enjoyed it.

It has been a bit of a breakout hit lately on the PC, or it has seemed like that to me. Games like this are sometimes teased for years but this one just turned up and is getting a lot of attention. This can go in the PC thread but I felt it deserved its own. It's deserved as it's a great return to the classic survival horror of old, mostly inspired by Silent Hill. Actually, it's better at being Silent Hill the recent Silent Hill games. Of course the game is in 2D and uses a very chunky pixel art style. Personally, I don't think it works that well. It's still atmospheric as it still uses quite an advanced lighting technique and the sound is top notch (in fact, the sound is amazing) but I think the chunky pixels do make everything look weirdly cute. But like I said before, the sound, lighting and subject matter does give a constant sense of uneasy-ness; it's just different art style would have added more, I think. I don't want to go into the the story and stuff because it's the mystery of it that is what's great. Apparently, Jasper Byrne, who made it, really went to town in researching mental illnesses and it's through trying to piece together why the game's nameless protagonist experiences these things. Is what's happening actually happening? if not, what's driving these apparitions? Or is it both? It's really rich in weirdness so it could go either or all ways. And it's definitely a survival horror, with emphasis on survival. Ammo for your handgun is rare, batteries need to be stocked up for your torch and you need to keep yourself nourished with food and sleep. I've only failed in keeping on top of a few of these things and it ends up with your man having a breakdown so keep things topped up. I'll give one bit of advice: for ammo, take a blue pill before you sleep. It's been pretty hard, too. You really don't have enough ammo to kill all the enemies so choose wisely if you are going to put one out of its misery. With it being in 2D it's also reminded me how much in common the classic survival horror has with adventure games. If it wasn't for all the scary stuff that's what it would be. Anyway, Lone Survivor is very good and you all should get it; it runs on anything. Go!

Surprised there was no thread for this already. A few people told me how good this was, so I was at a lose end tonight and decided to download it. It was a good decision. The Walking Dead is based on The Walking Dead comics and is a point and click adventure. However, it rips off a few things from other games and adds some new stuff on top. The stuff that's ripped off comes right out of Mass Effect and games of that ilk in where you have an either/or situation or conversation tree which effects what will happen further down the line. It's basically a branching story of which will evolve to your particular choices as you play. Replies to characters in game are mapped to a face button, and while some are timed in others where you are not in control of the situation, there are others that allow you to take your time and pick wisely what you want to say. The new thing that has been brought to the table is context sensitive combat. Now this sounds horrible, but they actually made it like an interactive qte, as in you actually have more control over what happens, but the effects of the qte are always the same, or at least I think they are. Outside of combat qtes, the left stick controls your character and the right stick controls the 4 points cursor, with each point signifying an action on the d-pad. These actions range from observing items, talking to people and interacting with stuff. It's a simple yet elegant set up. The whole shebang is wrapped up in some very nice celshaded graphics that harp back to the comic origins of the series. The way the story is acted out ranges from excellent to a bit choppy, but it's more of the excellent side than the crappy. The sound effects are quite good too, it looks as the whole package has had a lot of thought put into it. I particularly liked the attention to detail on one of the neon lights trying to hawk cola onto people, it's stuff like that that is prevalent here in the south of the USA. It's full of little design touches like this. Either they researched that sort of stuff or some people on the team have lived in the areas they have portrayed here in the game. Other than that, I can't really say much without spoiling the game or soiling the experience, as it's something you played maybe once or twice and then be done with. It's 400 points and is the first of five episodes that will be released. I have no idea when the new episodes will drop, but I'm looking forward to them The episode is quite short, I think I finished it in about 2 1/2 hours, although I think I missed a puzzle. I'm not sure though, it could have just been a dead end, I did look about to see if I could complete it but the game sort of pushed me right towards the end once I past a certain point. A nice touch is that right at the end it tells you what decisions other people made and how you aligned yourself within these decision. Maybe when/if the thread takes off we can talk about it all in spoilers, there's not much point me talking about it until a few other people have played and completed the game. Anyone else played it or interested in it? Click to get the demo Click to buy the game

Diablo 3 had an open beta last weekend, a stress test for the servers, but there's was a decent amount of game to play through It's Diablo, point where you want to walk to, click on enemies to attack them, hit your hot keys when your specials are charged, pick up loot. I'm not sure why these games work, and I'm not sure why Diablo and Torchlight work better than Dungeon Siege. I only played as the barbarian, with these kind of games I tend to find I get swamped, so playing as the character best suited to close combat suits me, but he does seem a lot less interesting than some of the other characters. I will say, and I know it's very early in the game to make any sort of judgement (you play the first act), that it hasn't grabbed me as much as Torchlight did, but it's still enjoyable and hugely compulsive. It's quite easy too, apparently that's just how Diablo plays, and I certainly wouldn't want it to be too hard, but it was only on the boss fight that I had to use a health potion. The problems though, the game has to be connected to the net at all times. It doesn't matter if you're playing single player with no intention of ever taking it online, it needs to be connected to the net. And not just connected in a casual way, checking in every now and then, it seems to be virtually running the game from a server. What this means is that if the server is busy you get lag. Click on an enemy to attack and either you wont perform the action or you will and the enemy wont react for a second or so. You also get put back a few steps from time to time, like you've unsynched with the server and lose the last couple of seconds of play. There's also the obvious issue of this meaning you cant play the game if your net, or Blizzard's servers, go down. I think this is due to the auction house for loot that allows real world money purchases. I get that being offline runs the risk of people hacking the game and selling created weapons when they get online, but I'd happily take the option of never being allowed to sell stuff in exchange for being able to play offline. All this could change as it was a beta, and the lag might never be a problem again. Although I suspect the launch weekend could be a nightmare. Shame because the game itself is very good

well i got it and played through the story mode, it looks amazing, controls well with the analogue stick (apparently not so well with digital input), it plays ok, story mode is too long but apparently arcade mode is shorter so that's good although arcade starts on hard mode and i can't get past the first boss on one life. there's some good ideas in there and some good bullet patterns, fun to be had. but also some odd stuff that doesn't work too well, the wobbly bullets, being hidden behind smoke, lots of instant death stuff. not sure i like it or not - need to play more. the time running out thing didn't seem to come into play in story mode much, except one bit in a sort of maze near the end, took loads of continues to get past that, not sure if i was dying or running out of time as they're sort of the same thing, most stuff if you get hit just takes off some time but some stuff takes off all of it - death. the 3d-ness of the obstacles makes it hard to navigate the maze too. did you get to play it illdog? my score was alone on the friends leaderboard.

I've just done a journey in Journey and it's... just what I expected. Flower surprised me. With Flower I got it maybe 6 months after it came out after listening to game critics swing a gladiola around, waxing lyrical about how emotional it was. I was unsure of that myself but I was surprised to find myself thinking it was a rather fun game. It had a sense of freedom which was really enjoyable. Journey is exactly how I imagined, which is weirdly disappointing. Now Journey, I think it's less game-y than Flower. Judging by the lack of trophies I picked up I guess there is more to the exploration than I saw but it still feels a little lacking. I'd of liked more to do. Though there are times where the pace picks up and some Flower style fun turns up. It's actually really well paced come to think of it: quiet, fast, tense, back to quiet and all that. I had the multiplayer turned on so I could be visited and it did add something to it.. I'll hide this stuff just in case. Thinking about it now, I suppose I like it more than I think I did while playing it. There's an issue with the price and if you want my tuppence I think it's only worth if you do really want to play it. I don't think I'd try and get anyone to get it if they were unsure. I didn't think about it a great deal. I saw it ages ago and liked the look of it, and then I just thought "fuck it" and got it. Best way I think, sometimes.

I'm not too sure what to say about Binary Domain, despite everything it's actually pretty standard stuff. Once the game gets going properly you spend most of your time with a team of 3 people from a choice of 5 (6 later on), and because of the trust mechanic it seems like it's always worth picking the same people. You start the game with Big Bo (big brash black guy, not to be confused with sarky english bloke and serious chinese girl) and through conversations and actions (like destroying lots and lots of robots) I've got really high trust with him, so it was then a case of picking 1 other person who seemed to have the attributes I wanted (I picked the english girl because she's got a shotgun) and developed the trust there. I've got to say though I've not found a massive amount of use for the trust yet. I've been downed a couple of times and they've revived me, that probably wouldn't have happened is they hated me, but in terms of the main voice commands (cover me, retreat, form up, fire) I've barely had to use them to need their trust. Apparently if you have a mic plugged in it'll respond to your mutterings, more so that just the default sayings, stuff like swearing will get them to respond. I might test it at some point but I've really not needed it so far. The trust thing can get a bit annoying, the A.I. aren't quite smart enough not to walk in to your line of fire, you if you've unloading with a machine gun and they decide the safest place for them is right in front of your muzzle then you're going to get moaned at and lose trust. Early on before you know the characters you'll get a lot of questions 'wrong', but eventually you learn to answer in a way they'll want to hear. The problem with that though is that both you and the characters you're talking to understand the subtlety of language, however the game doesn't cater for it. As an example a young girl asked me out at one point, I said yes because saying no seemed harsh, and I thought the game wouldn't let me anyway, but instead everyone disapproved. The other problem with it is that sometimes you miss what you've been asked and annoy everyone by not doing it, or their instructions aren't clear enough ("cover left" when there's no set way to be facing) This all sounds a bit negative so far but I've actually been quite enjoying things. It does mix things up but generally it's cover based shooting, and it works fine, better when you level up your gun a bit. I was a bit indifferent to it, but pretty much since I met the yakuza I've been really enjoying it. You also eventually meet a french cyborg who is easily the best character in the game, probably the best character in any game this year. What's killing me is the plot, I know I've seen an anime with the exact same story but I can't place it. There's cyborgs living amongst humans, only they dont know they aren't humans, you have to hunt down the guy who's probably responsible for making them. I know it shares a lot of similarities with Bladerunner, but beyond that all I can think is Appleseed, but I know there's some other late 80s/90s anime

More or less the same gameplay as the first but I only played the demo of that. Visually, though, it is pretty different as it's gone for a more cel-shaded look which really suits it, seeing as it's come from a comic book graphic novel. It's pretty grim and gory at times and Mike Patton is back on full, deranged extreme metal vocal style. Also, a brilliant way to open the game with a bang.

I had a quick go of the multiplayer. I was expecting it to be shitter that ITV2. SURPRISE! It's actually pretty damn good. Tacked on multi that I actually wouldn't mind playing. How about that. I'm not going to go into the single part of the game, mainly because spoilers and stuff. This is based on my impressions of the MP only. Multiplayer starts with you picking a class. From memory there are 6 classes. From what I can tell each class has 3 Biotic powers (could be more) which are mapped to Y, LB and RB. As you play you level up and are able to put points into the usual perks, similar to how it worked levelling up companions in ME1 & 2. Levelling up also allows you to start other characters, initially it looks like you are locked down to either human males and females in each class available. I'm not sure if biotic powers vary between sexes, but from what it looks like other races have to be unlocked by levelling up your character. The actual games that I played where the usual horde mode fare, except this time each class plays a designated part in the 4 man squad. Obviously at the start everyone has bare bones weapons and Biotics, so it basically turns into a case of fight for a few waves before the enemies get the better of you, and then level up some. When you do get some Biotic powers under your belt, you'll get further into the waves. However, it's not as simple as eliminating enemies, there are waves where you are times to eliminate certain VIP's, and it looks like there are set ups where you have to protect certain objectives and the usual fare of gametypes that happen in vs type games. You'll go from holding up against all odds in one wave to chasing down VIP's another. It mixes things up a bit similar to how the bonus objectives do in Gears 3 Horde, but in this case they are the key to passing the round, not just the objective. It sort of feels a bit like Section 8's mid-match missions that can really effect who wins, although this time instead of playing against other people you are playing against AI with some buddies in tow. I went engineer class, and Mika went soldier. If anyone wants to join in with us on this tomorrow night when we are on get the bloody thing downloaded, create a class and join us. I could imagine it being really good with a full lobby.

From what I've played so far Revelations is actually very good, it's a bit of a mix of old RE style and the new RE style. You can strafe, even without the circle pad, and provided you make good use of the scanner ammo is less than sparse. The flip side though is that you're very much dealing with monsters rather than villagers, it's rare they attack in groups, and the tone is creepy rather than high tension. Revelations is paced for the 3DS, you've had chapters in Resident Evil games for a while but here they feel a bit shorter, early on at least, and give you a nice little recap when you boot the game up again. The one thing I will say about this structure is that 3 hours in I'm still unsure if the game has really started properly. I began playing as Jill in the tutorial mission, then as Chris for a while, then I think Jill again with some more new features rolled out (it's a bit jumbled), then I played as Jill's partner in a flashback. In fact half of what I've played has been a flashback of something or other, each time to a different time. Hopefully now with a boss beaten, and a Chris level seemingly on the horizon the game will start to settle down. In terms of resident Evil tropes Revelations handles the limited inventory slightly differently. Now you aren't just dumping stuff in one big bag, instead you can carry a certain amount of health, a certain number of grenades, and annoyingly a limited amount of ammunition. This might be a design decision, you revisit areas so had you completely picked it clean on your first run through there's a chance you'll have left yourself short on a return visit, but the capacity (which can be upgraded) is pathetically small. On that note weapons can be upgraded at certain points, with the scanner being fairly useful at finding the bonuses you'll need. I'll admit that once I realised I was going to have to back track and revisit areas my enthusiasm for Revelations took a bit of a knock, but all in all I've really enjoyed it, certainly more than what I played of 5

seemingly the gaming press' favourite game ever, and it's actually not bad so far. As a highlight from the first 3 levels I've done, I jumped out of a plane and caught a girl, then as we were parachuting the plane tried to ram us, so I told her I was going to shoot the window, kill the pilot, kick the bad dude in the face, grab another parachute then jump back out of the plane and catch her again. Sure enough that's what happened and it was fucking awesome Beyond the set up things I'm less convinced. The gun play is fine, though it could do with more aim assist I think, and a melee attack button would be nice rather than having to switch out (which is admittedly just a button press). I've yet to do any real GTA stuff, a few minutes driving but that's about it, but I should be at that point now. One problem I have encountered, and I think this is down to A. Playing via OnLive and B. playing via OnLive wirelessly. The driving wasn't great. You aren't punished for killing people, or at least I haven't been, nor for accidents, but I found myself correcting a lot and having crashes caused by the AI drivers. But yeah, compared to the rest of the game it was very jerky (though it might also explain the feel of the shooting) I can see why people love it and I'll definitely be putting in a bit more time over the weekend

Couldn't see an existing first impressions thread for this, so thought I may as well copy across my post from NowLoading... I got the 360 version of this from LoveFilm yesterday, despite knowing pretty much zero about it, other than it's an id software FPS set in a post apocalyptic world and (going by the odd comment I'd picked up here & there) it supposedly looks fucking amazing... So after installing all three discs to the harddrive, I spent 2 or 3 hours with it, just to see what it is actually like. Yep, it does indeed look nice! Well the scenery / landscapey stuff does anyway (I'm not sure the same can be said about the NPC models. So far they haven't exactly been the most varied or imaginative NPCs.)... In glorious 1080p I swear you can pick out the individual grains of sand in some areas! However, despite installing the game there is still a bit of obvious delay with the textures, and really, there are only so many shades of post-apocalyptical brown that you can call pleasing to look at. The first hour or so of gameplay was not what I'd call "fun". Gifted with just a pistol and a bunch of "wingsticks" (bladed boomerangs), I was tasked with completing more than just a couple of annoying "fetch" quests before the game decided I was worthy of playing and spread its metaphorical legs wider. Since then, it's got a bit more interesting, but I'm still having trouble shaking that nagging feeling that this has all been done better elsewhere... I'm planning on giving it some more time before the weekend, so we'll see if things improve...

Played til 3am last night, found a dragon. Hardly done ANY story stuff but it's structured in a way where you can't really tell if it's story or not, I did one thing which I thought was pretty out of the way and then it ended up kind of tying in with the story. Managed to kill me some giants and some mammoths, the enemy scaling seems to be pretty nicely sorted, nothing has been particularly easy but it's obvious that there are different levels of challenge available to you. The example pre release was fallout, and taking on one of the giants reminded me of one of the super mutants from that game, they just roam around waiting to be found and if you keep plugging away and are smart then you can take one down, I used a combination of sneak and range, taking a few shots then running off where it couldn't get and then using sneak to hide and then wear them down. Then rushing in when the giant is low on health with my two swords. Levelling up feels better, like a mix of how it was before by doing stuff and it gets better, but also by you choosing skills along those branches you increase, effectively unlocking the ability to choose something on your skill trees. It's never felt like a grind in the way it did before, it's like it was sold to us, you play how you want and you level around that. I'm sort of aiming to be a snooty sneaky character but I also want to be good with two sorts and I think I might start putting more time into crafting stuff, items or weapons I'm not sure yet. As far as critique goes, there are small flaws to be found, examining a texture very very close up shows that it isn't perfect, I don't particularly like the controls( I'm playing on PC don't you know) but the things wrong with it are so minor that you either won't notice that much or won't care, there's so much that it does right. More impressions later on, but can't disagree with the review scores. Edit: for the records it does actually look amazing.

I'm playing through Shadow of the Colossus while I'm between games, note I'm not playing through Ico because I don't think it's very good. The shadows snatching Ico away (or whatever she's called) gets actively gets in the way of your goal, which is the point of them, but it doesn't make things any more fun. The HD'ed up graphics do look a lot better but they don't fix everything. You still clip through things, textures and landscape still loads in, but it's impressive how much detail was in the ps2 version that we just couldn't see. The chief thing the graphics have sorted out is the framerate which varied from an annoyance to a real problem, now it runs nice and solid. Going back what I hadn't really anticipated was having issues with the controls, but some of it has now become slightly counter-intuitive. For example, pulling yourself up to a ledge needs you to press the jump button, not up, same with correcting your position, less seems to be more. What it means is sometimes climbing goes really smoothly, sometimes it's an absolute ball ache. I struggled so much on the first colossus that I assumed I'd forgot the controls, but then all of a sudden I could just climb freely. I'm getting through it quicker than I expected, the game clock had me at less than 2 hours and I've beat 4 colossi, but I guess I've still got vague memories of how to beat them

I'm not saying a great deal at the moment 'cos I did a review that was over 2000 words and I'm sick of thinking about it. It's here anyway. Shameful plug over. Since it's a bit TL;DR basically the campaign = 4/10, co-op (kind of interesting but tacked on and not enough of it) = 6/10, and multiplayer (great, just maybe not as well crafted as Bad Company 2) = 9/10. It had a really rocky first week. Servers where an absolute mess but the last two days they've certainly stabilised. No more getting kicked out randomly and the lag that crippled particular maps looks to have completely disappeared. Still some trouble with the HUD not displaying flag captures correctly but other than that it seems okay. What you's think?

Its pretty tough. Same sort of progress as Demon Souls, so see that thread for the gist of this game. In case anybody plays this and is really stuck, i'll share what i know so far:

I tend not to read or watch too much about a game after its peaked my interest so i had no real expectations of this. I picked the big black dude who's speaciality is cracking heads like a mufucker with blunt weapons. Ive changed the fighting system from digital where you press R trigger to swing your weapon to analogue where you have to hold the L Trigger to initiate 'fight' and the flick the right stick from one direction to the opposite. This way you can target limbs, specifically heads, and im getting a few one or two hit kills now, as opposed to a flurry of four or five strikes before. The instruction booklet does a piss poor job of explaining analogue controls, i had to look it up online. You level up by gaining exp. Exp is gained by competing quests and killing zombies. Each time you level up you get skill points to spend. You can improve your characters Fury (like a beserk mode), weapon ability and health management. Im going to concentrate on Fury as the dominant stat, its super handy when your backs against the wall. Its like Doom, you go all hazy and basically rip through enemies with one hit. It feels like Farcry, whereas you move from place to place, talking to people, sneaking around, driving cars, just on an island full of zombies instead of Africa. Fights like Oblivion/Fallout, you can move in all directions whilst swinging your weapon so you can start the swing, move in to an enemy for it to strike and then move out for defence. You can also mod weapons at workbenches (seen that somewhere before) but they weapon construction so far feels more like Dead Rising, like mixing a baseball bat and nails. And last game comparison, but the collectibles are like Bioshock. They flash in the dark so you an see them and your collecting drinks, food and handy bits to make weapon mods. Also you collect audio diarys. You have your main quest line but im only a couple of hours in and i have about 10 sidequests on the go. I have had one problem so far, i picked up a necklace somebody wanted with the intention of returning it to them later when i finished some other quests in the area. Didnt really think about it again, but i naturally came across the hut where i picked the necklace up in the first place and the mini map indicated there was something for me to collect inside. Sure enough, the necklace was back on the shelf i first collected it from. Thinking back, the woman who requested the necklace was back at base where i had been ten minutes before and an icon would have appeared on the woman reminding me to hand in her lost goods. Hope that sort of shit doesn't happen too many times. Anyways, so far so good. Its suitably tense in places, scared the shit out of me a couple of times when zombies have come from seemingly nowhere and screamed in my ear before grabbing me. I also still approach fights with nervous caution. On i play.

So off the retro thread for a bit, distracted by this in the game sale, along with lots of other stupidly long JRPG's. Like I have the time to play these... Anyway, so apparently I'm in the dream world of Chopin surrounded by hippies and powder sellers, who are being repressed by the 'man' and his cheap powders. Probably influenced by Hair. It looks beautiful. Its really good to see some colour in games. Bright blue skys, green fields and trees, clean white clothes. The actually game mechanic is quite good, and a novel change from the line and get hit route of FFX, Dragon Quest etc. Not to difficult, and the use of button pressing to block, along with timed movement keeps you constantly involved. On the down side, the pacing is really slow, the cutscene's are Metal Gear Solid length and the enemies currently arn't very diverse. I'm currently on Chapter 2, and it appears that this isn't an acheivement whore game. I think a few other people on this forum have given it a go, so I'll keep you posted.

It's everything I'd hoped. More of the same but in co-op it's just so cool. Quite a few hours into co-op, not started single yet. The comedy is still present and the levels start lovely and begin to look run down and something is not quite right with GLaDOS again

I cant believe none of you guys are playing this!!! in fact, out of the people in my friends list, only one guy is playing it :'(. this series really doesnt deserve to have another instalment undersell! whinging aside http://www.mfgamers.com/public/style_emoticons/#EMO_DIR#/smile.gif, its awesome. It looks fantastic, and the sound is mind boggling, all the ambient noises and rolling orchestral flourishes are even better this time roun, and freaking scary. the whole thing is freaking scary!! been playing it with the lights out and headphones on, notifications turned off, and i actually feel wired and shaken after a couple hour session. so the technical stuff is just an improvement on the first games amazing effort, which is no mean feat in itself. but theyve really improved the gameplay and the story is shaping up to be better too. the new weapons are great, and using kinesis to pick up makeshift projectiles on the fly is a great addition. the more linear direction which sent shivers down my spine when i first heard about it actually does the game a service, makes you reaise how they couldve designed the first game in a similar way and it wouldve been better. no backtracking, just new enviroment after new enviroment as the game tries to show you all the different areas of the sprawl - its gruesome to see how different aspects of civilian life there have been buttraped by the necromorphs. they even hit the kiddy wing. --------------> its fecking awesome!!!!!

This must be the hardest game to give impressions to. It's a sort of open world, crime investigation, almost survival horror that was made on the same budget as my woodwork project at school. It's kind of good. This game is ugly, I'll get that out of the way, but the game knows it and often plays that to its strength, the puppet-like animation makes the comedy moments genuinely funny. The weird, uncanny smile Agent York (the lead character) gives when he's trying to be sincere is proper lol worthy, especially when it's combined with that whistling tune which I'm sure will end up being very iconic in videogame music. But it's not all laughing at the technical incompetence of the game, because somehow, it does manage to be successfully creepy, and the mystery itself isn't massively tacky, the characters perhaps, but plot itself is compelling. For some reason there are zombies (I'm sure there is a reason) and that's all I've been shooting so far, it plays a lot like Resident Evil 4 but not as good. And the open world driving stuff? That's the only thing I have a problem with, it's slow, handles both sluggishly and erratically at the same time and you have this 16bit drone as an engine noise. Only the banter York has with Zach makes the trips worthwhile. What's Yorks favourite Tremors film? Play it and find out.