Are most games released now "trash"?

[Souless]

I Dunno.. I'm waiting though.

[Canadian*Sniper]

I bought the Orange Box last night and played some Portal. Then I took a break. Instead of going to bed I played more Portal and I ended up beating it a few hours after. It was 3:30 when I turned off the game. Damn. Portal was REALLLY REALLLY REaLLY fun. There's more to do on it as well like puzzles.

I also tried out tf2. I <3 the Sniper class I listened tot he developer commentary about the decisions they took to make the game and I'm convinced those were good decisions. I strongly recommend you check these games out.

I haven't tried out hl2ep2 yet. I'm in no hurry.

Yeah the games are garbage. I'm waiting for Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2!

Has Diablo3 been announced? I forget.

[Souless]

Yeah the games are garbage. I'm waiting for Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2!

[golden_boy]

One trend in Linux gaming seems to be emulators. SNES games, Lucasarts games, PSX games... all years old. Windows games... BG 2, Broodwar, Half-Life, Diablo 2, and WOW... several DOS emulators...

Native games, well there's widely-played FPS, years old, like UT 2004... plus newer ones like Prey, Doom3, Quake 4, and ETQW just got a Linux client so it will stay around for some time. Open source FPS are also really big, like Nexuiz, Warsow, Alien Arena, Cube/Sauerbraten...

There's also Neverwinter Nights which is the only Black Isle related RPG with a Linux client.

For newer games, there's puzzle games, turn-based strategy games... small/obscure things that aren't too time intensive... except for a handful of bigger ones like Freeciv and Wesnoth, which also are years old because of how the open source development works. Constant development keeps them alive, so to speak.

In general I'd say that since the number of native Linux games is small, there is much more of a willingness to use emulators of any sort, not just Wine, plus more knowledge about them. So you see lots of people running those age-old games like Monkey Island etc.

The fact that the overall influx of games into Linux isn't as big as with Windows means there is already some sort of preselection and people are willing to play older games, only to find they aren't bad at all.

=)

[Solecord]

Final Fantasy XI is a really cool game. It's a bit more involved than WOW which I liked about it. However you really can't solo in FFXI as many of the quests require a team. Plus it takes a LONG time to level up... it really required dedication to play that game and I just didn't have the time to continue to play it so I gave it up. If I had more time I'd definately stick to that game though.

[Hendar23]

WoW is way too expensive

I hear ya. I played it for two weeks and started thinking why am I paying for this when I can play Diablo 2 at no extra charge? And the raids are too long for me. The shortest takes one hour and with wife/kid I just can't sit down that long at a computer without being interrupted. And the world is static, all the PvP in the world doesn't alter the world at all. It's been a year since I played it and I know that if I go back right now nothing will have changed in the world. The players actions should shape an MMO world. But thats just my opinion....

[Canadian*Sniper]

The video game review by the angry aussiegamer about Darkness

[Hendar23]

@Hendar23: Invisible walls suck!

Fo' sure. Instant immersion killer. What game you talking about?

[rudl]

I don't want to say anything against Starcraft2, but startctaft and worcraft3 (and other blizzard games too but I've only played these two a bit) have very similar gameplay.
It's time for something NEW why should I buy starcraft2 ?, starcraft is still fun. After some time I don't care too much about new graphics.

About WoW:
1)I know too much people that are addicted to it.
2)WoW is not a new game it was released in 2004 I think (please correct me if I'm wrong)
3)WoW is too colorfull for my taste
4)WoW seems to be based on addiction. it is part of the concept: First you want to reach level 60 than there is anew add-on->you start playing wow again. You can't win this game it never comes to an end.
5)WoW is way too expensive

[Canadian*Sniper]

I made an edit :x

[Rampage]

yea..
damn that was a long read, but enjoyable nonetheless since I can relate.

About starcraft2 .. that is exactly right, there is no need to a re-invent such a successful game, just add on top of the original to the successor.

It definitely looks really good, in terms of graphics I was expecting a bit more. The environmental graphics and the way units react to the environment is beautiful. The units themselves are extremely unique and look REALLY good, from the immortal, all the way to the titan. I dislike the cartoonish look of some of the units. I was expecting marines to look a bit more hardcore, not like knights from the medieval days.

I dont like the warcraftish look of the game, I would enjoy a bit more of an upgrade from the original starcraft.

In terms of balance I'm sure there are gonna be no flaws, Blizzard is probably the only company I know that nearly produces a bug-free game every time.
Thats why all their games are best sellers.

I will surely play it, I played Starcraft/Brood wars for 6 years, it's still the greatest strategy game in my mind.

[Canadian*Sniper]

@rudl: Of course Starcraft2 is going to be a similar to its predecessor. If they took out the marines, scvs, dark templars, zealots, zerglins, and overlords then it's a completely different game. Look at warcraft and diablo for example. Warcraft2 had humans vs the orcs. Warcraft3 built off of this and added a few new races. Bloodlust still exists in the game. Diablo used the same end badguy and classes in the sequal where the Warrior became the Barbarian, the Rogue became the Amazon, and the Sorcerer became the Sorceress.

@Hendar23: Invisible walls suck!

@Rampage: World of Warcraft is fun. Why is it fun? I find it fun because you can do whatever you want and whatever you do always benefits your character in some way. There are also games inside the game like CTF and TDM for example (among other objectives). But the main idea is that the entire world is again acting like the original Warcraft Games where it's still the Orcs fighting the Humans except throughout the history of the game the Humans have become more evil and greedy like in Lord of the Rings and the Orcs have become more like William Shakespeare.

The huge plus I find about World of Warcraft is that there is absolutely no way you can fuck your character design up. Let's use Diablo2 for example. In Diablo2, you would earn 5 stat points and 1 skill point every time you gain a higher level. Once you used those points up there would be no way to reverse the transaction. So if you spent your skill points on one ability which helped you out mid game but is now completely useless to you in hell and nightmare mode then you just gave your character a handicap since he or she will never get those bloody points back.

In World of Warcraft it seems they understood the anger and frustration from gamers and improved the concept. In WOW after you reach level 10 you gain Talent Points which pretty much resemble the skill points in Diablo2 where you gain one point every time you level up except this time you had to wait until level 10 to get them since you were to bloody stupid to figure everything in the game at once. With these talent points you can customize your character's strengths only now you can pay your class trainer some gold to remove all your spent talent points so you can then use them in a different order if you so wish. Same with professions. You are only allowed 2 major professions in the game but you are allowed to forget everything that you learned in that profession with a simple bonk on the head so you can learn another one.

The only parts in the game that you can't undo are your character names, your race, your class, your gender, and what you look like. But if you aren't happy with this then you sir have problems which is why you're playing a game that a little kid could play.

Why do I play WOW (not during school)? Because it's a big fucking Team Deathmatch between two teams on a fucking huge map. That's the whole fun in it. You can never be too careful when questing because you never know when there's a raid gang of opposing factions ready to jump you. In which case they will set a campfire at your corpse and wait for you to respawn instead of looking for more victims which is really fun when you're the ones doing the killing but really fucking poop shit gay when you're the one being camped.

edit:

My first impression of the game was that it was complete donkey shit because of how addicted the players were. I was in school a few years ago and I called for a team meeting so we could organize everything for our upcoming client meeting. Only to my non-surprise that when everyone showed up about half of them had their laptops open playing as a little hobbit which in WOW terms is a little gnome which resemble those little troll toys with the funky hair you could stylize giving gamers another good reason not to play as the fucking kiddy Alliance faction. So why is the game so addicting one might ask. My answer is that the game never ends. Usually when we play a game such as a board game like scrabble or monopoly we play until the game ends. But WOW functions a different way. Say you're playing monopoly with your friends and you happen to land on the 'play scrabble' box. You now have to play scrabble and monopoly at the same time. And if you continue thinking this way by adding in more games every time you land on a box in monopoly then you pretty much got the drift of World of Warcraft.

When you're doing a quest in WOW there will usually be a man in the middle of nowhere with an exclamation mark on top of him. If I was loyal to my cause then I would complete my primary quest before giving two shits about this guy but because this game is so fucking large and I am bound to forget about this guy's whereabouts, I talk to him and he asks me to do a quest for him adding 2 quests in my todo list. Now once you get to higher levels in the game you will run into a lot of these fuck tards asking for favours and before you know it you will hit your max quest limit because there's just too many fucking things to do in this game and I will not have a sense of accomplishment if I don't complete them all. But every time I attempt to complete them I'm given two more quests for every quest I complete. So I'm never going to finish this game but at the same time of me knowing this I still want to play it as if I'm lieing to myself.

[Hendar23]

Had it, finished it. Loved it. Multiplayer blows, but that's just me.

Demo was great fun, I just heard it gets boring after a few levels. The combat seemed a bit unbalanced. As a warrior class it seemed so much easier to kill enemies using environmental weapons that the kick was more powerful than any sword. Not that kicking people into fire/spikes/off cliffs/down stairs got boring quickly

[Grim]

I saw the trailers for Dark Messiah. I was stoked to try the demo. I tried the demo last night. I want to buy this game. It's not easy in Hardcore mode

Had it, finished it. Loved it. Multiplayer blows, but that's just me.

[Hendar23]

It's the same problem seen in the movies. As it now takes hundreds of people and millions of dollars to produce a game with 'next-gen' graphics devs are not willing to take risks. I mean if you were spending tens of millions of dollars making a game, would you risk a flop? I love our art form and I love new ideas, but I wouldn't. I'd just go for a generic RTS or FPS with gee-wizz graphics too. It's no wonder we are seeing the same games just with better looks. It's what Joe Public gets his wallet out for.

But it's early days. Like cinema, we have discovered this new type of media tool and we are still fumbling about seeing what works and what doesn't . Video games are only about 30 years old. When cinema was 30 years old, they were making good films, but the standard techniques for telling great stories still had to be fleshed out. I look forward to what the next 30 years will bring. Though classics live forever, we'll look back at games today and think how awkward and crude they seem, not just in terms of the technology, but it form, substance and game mechanics.