I just finished the campaign for MW2 on PC, it took roughly 5 hours to complete on mostly regular. I did some hardened to start with but felt I died too much for it to be fun. Even on regular I died quite a lot but that's mostly because I'm impatient and run out and attack everybody. This 5 hours also includes repeating the opening tutorial mission about 6 times and one mission about 3 times because crashes sent me to the start of missions. For some reason SP would just crash for me, reinstall + compatibility mode seems to have fixed it so I got most of the second half done fairly quickly
Overall I'd say the sp campaign improved over COD 4 which I wasn't a huge fan of, main reason is the spawning of enemies. It seemed more natural compared to clown houses in COD 4, more rooftops, doors, alleys etc. The campaign jumped around a LOT. I think this was done to keep the interest up and it mostly worked. Without spoiling things there were a few things I didn't quite understand with the story. There were a couple of cool segments even if they were really short, again making sure there is enough variety.
I have played some multiplayer on PC and I will say that the peer 2 peer system isn't anywhere near as bad as I was expecting, the netcode is ok. The problem with p2p is that it can be very inconsistent, hosts drop, gets laggy sometimes. But perhaps the major thing that bugs me is that you can't vote for maps, vote kick players, no team autobalance, no team swapping, no text chat in the lobby. I do like that I can get in a game very quickly, 5-10 seconds and usually it works well.
I've played some spec ops, mostly short missions. They weren't bad but I not sure I'll be replaying them. I'll try them all once and play some more multiplayer.
Some screens:
Bigger Collection of Screenshots
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Torchlight gets my seal of approval (click here for my review), Diablo fans can rejoice here is one of the better action rpg games in a long while. It doesn't quite have the same atmosphere as diablo but the combat is much more fun and the loot is great. $20 price tag is very appropriate, lots of replay value or over 10 hours for one playthrough on normal and I didn't do many side quests. In any case it's a good timesink and you can play for short or long sessions and still get rewarded.
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It's getting close to the end of the year now, not many releases left even on the consoles. I guess it's time to start thinking about a GOTY. Have you guys decided on one yet? It might be a little early but most of the big releases are out if you picked them up that is. I haven't played Dragon Age but have heard good things.
Start of next year looks pretty damn cramped for game releases because some games got pushed back into 2010. I guess it's better that way than to have them all crammed into the holiday season but a few more for 09 would have been nice.
I picked up two games this week, both on Steam. Torchlight and Borderlands. Would you believe that my Steam Account has 85 games on it? How about believing that my Steam folder is currently 192GB in size and has over 140,000 files? I've had to delete a few games to make some room.
I've played about 3 hours of Torchlight and about 2 hours of Borderlands so far so I can't really conclusively define either game. My initial impressions are quite different for both. I'm enjoying one and not really enjoying the other, I'm sure you can work out which based on my long impressions below! Keep in mind these are very early impressions, I'm curious about how either game changes after you put some serious hours into it.
Borderlands:
The Good:
Shooting works pretty well, lots of random guns but they managed to make the mechanics work well for rifles, machine guns, shotguns and pistols. If you manage to get connected online the netcode seems pretty good. The art st-yle graphics are good, it is very similar to Prince of Persia 2008 but with perhaps more paper cartoon look.
The Bad:
I'm not enjoying it; the vehicle controls aren't very good. There are spawn nodes where the same type of enemy will spawn 5 minutes after you just killed the same group from that exact same location. There is no atmosphere at all in the world, the game relies on being generic and somehow trying to exploit how silly it is (this may be a turn on for some people). With some over the top characters / enemy types. I tried about 40 severs to get a coop game going and connected to just two. Apparently you need to forward ports which is ridiculous, needs a patch asap.
Once connected I was with high level players and I gained 2 levels far away from the action just for being in the world for about 2 minutes. The second match I did lots of random quests at my level with higher level players who were nice enough to help out with good weapons. The quests were standard bore fest run here, get this, and kill this guy. I had to deal with many groups of dog like enemies over and over. The game relies on you to have fun by just killing generic baddies over and over doing so far nonsense quests in a bland world.
There is no "save" the game saves when it wants, which is usually at quest turn in I think. But say you made a trek across the level you can't save there, you must restart from a node in town, this is obviously done to make it coop friendly you just hop in or out of games. Lots of ammo and money scattered around from enemies or in storage containers but you have to press "E" to pick it all up, for ammo and money this is annoyingly unnecessary.
Screens:
Torchlight
The Good:
Diablo st-yle music, it constantly saves so you can instantly leave the game and come back where you were exactly (preserving the entire world), dungeon crawling action, great loot system with constant upgrades and steady increase of items, pretty good art design great set of powers and skills, automatically pick up gold when you are near it, pet can sell your stuff while you bash monsters, good range of monsters. Treasure rooms, more action orientated with skill types. Some differences in weapons but allow you to play your own sty-le(dual weild, ranged, shield). Four spells to hold, might be things like summon skeleton or fireball.
The Bad:
Inventory is one item per slot no matter size, gems look tiny. Less character than Diablo games, npcs only have like "hello" then wall of text. Some samey looking levels even though they are meant to be random. Loot on ground has overlapping tags. Narrator can be annoying "you have triggered a trap" as flames come out of a barrel – thanks captain obvious.
Screens:
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So I'm really enjoying Torchlight on the whole, its simple fun and gets most of the action RPG basics right. I think there will be a patch soon to fix the loot on the ground where picking up rare stuff is sometimes very difficult.
Borderlands is not doing much for me so far (I'm level 10), I think it's design motto was "hey let's just shoot stuff together" which honestly doesn't do it for me. I do not think it's a great example of combining the FPS and RPG genres. The most interesting story aspect is the Angel Lady that talks to you from time to time.
While initially you might look at both games and say Torchlight is a casual, Borderlands is less so. I would disagree with that from what I've seen. Torchlight has far more depth in your equipment, skills, pet, attack combinations than Borderlands has had so far. Borderlands seems to be entirely casual, lets join coop and kill things with our guns+2. There are similarities between the two games, they both rely on a loot system to keep the player going I guess and both are doing a decent job with loot. Torchlight has a better story than Borderlands – and Torchlight hasn't got a great story believe me.
Of course these are initial impressions; I've only played a few hours of both. Things could change and please don't take offense if you are really enjoying Borderlands 
, it's just an opinion. I'm hoping things get better and they patch the co-op so people don't need to forward ports.
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I finished Uncharted 2 again on hard, solidifying the game being among the best. The experience was actually better the 2nd time and difficulty wise it was fine because I knew what was coming. I don't think I will try on Crushing, no need to ruin my experience.
I've tried online but it hasn't been a great experience, matchmaking keeps putting me in with American players and there is some noticeable lag doing things like punching (eg I press punch, I see myself die, then I see I punched some guy to death) I'm not really sure if this is how matchmaking functions on consoles (i.e. very poorly) or is just a quirk with Uncharted 2.
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Has anybody used Xfire game store, or heard any good or bad news about it? I'm tempted to give it a try and see how it compares with others. It's always better to have lots of competition out there, gives consumers more options, lowers prices.
I finished Uncharted 2 a few days back and will say its an amazing single player game, better than the first game. The characters, dialogue and action are really amazing. It's very close in terms of pacing to what Valve has produced with the Half-Life series. I'm replaying the game on Hard and it's a great game with some minor flaws (camera glitches mainly).
I've played some multiplayer and it's not quite as consistent as the single player game., sometimes i'll get a bad server and some freezing, sometimes I get a server with near as I could tell spainish people talking. Other times it takes 5 minutes to find a group then a few people leave and the teams get unbalanced. I guess it's probably more telling of multiplayer on consoles than anything else but maybe I'm wrong there as well. I have played some two player co-op and that was very good, its just single player like action spread over a few levels, more enjoyable than the stock mp in my opinion.
You can read my review of it on NGN
So far the PS3 "experiement" is going ok. I'm using it less than before because I've gone through quite a few demos to see what it has to offer me. I hate to use the cliche but uncharted 2 almost makes buying it worth it, there are some nifty games I plan to pick up for it on the holidays - Little Big Planet, Killzone 2 for example. Any other recommendations are welcome, preferrably older titles I can pick up for cheap.
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My PC however is not forgotten. I still consider this to be the best gaming platform in the market 
Torchlight is out in literally a few days, super excited for it and will be waiting for Steam to unlock it. Not been so excited for a game for quite some time actually (last was Crysis I guess) hopefully it brings back that Diablo feel and maybe spark a cyclic turn around for the industry
Borderlands is out the same day! 28th of October. And I did actually preorder it, call me a sucker for FPS / RPG hybrids. The game is actually preloading on Steam which is unusual because 95% of third party games don't seem to get preloads.I love preloads because my internet speed here in Australia is quite poor (150kb/s down) which means 8gb can take a while.
Although I don't really think the box art is very attractive I'm hoping the game isn't just constantly trying to be silly in order to be fun. We will see!
THQ got themselves another European, post apocalyptic shooter in Metro 2033. I've been tracking this for a little while now but there hasn't been much news about it until now they release a pretty nifty trailer. It looks similar to STALKER, and there is a good reason for that - the guys that worked on the engine for STALKER are working on the game engine for Metro 2033. I'd say thats a good thing because I liked how the engine looks inside. Hopefully it doesn't have as many bug problems as the STALKER series.
It's coming to 360 as well, so maybe that will mean a bit more in terms of QA testing. Are you guys getting tired of post-apocalyptic shooters / rpg games? I'm certainly not as I feel the actual genre has not even come close to reaching potential yet.
Modern Warfare 2 hit Steam, with plenty of advertising. It's basically going to be using steam works, I think that means steam is required for Boxed versions even. Nothing wrong with that as I have many games that require steam, but some people don't like it.
MW2 is sitting on 3rd best steam seller right now behind borderlands and L4D2. Which tells me that the boycotts for L4D2 and MW2 aren't really making a huge impact on your average consumer who just sees game, pulls out credit card, buys game. I'm going to pick the game up, reluctantly, and I will see just how the lack of dedicated servers ruins the community (that is being optimistic btw).
For the record I'm still in the L4D2 boycott group - actually the leaders of the original group (40,000 members) decided to close it because they thought it achieved what it set out to achieve. WRONG. By the way those "leaders" were flown to Valve and given the royal tour of their offices for no cost, not a bad deal huh. Another couple of guys set up a new Boycott group which has 750 members so far.
