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.
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Something akin to an EA move a few years back. I'm protesting how they are going about the sequel not so much the value of the product. Essentially it's because Valve have never done something like this before, any other developer and I'm probably just shrug and move on.
Now that I can definitely understand.
Valve is amongst the few developers that keeps a close relationship with their fanbase, so it's understandable why people don't want that to change. I don't think it will, at least not to the point that they will become like EA, but I guess as they get bigger somethings will definitely change.
"ll play these on my convinience in future Very nice review Ben
@gagan21: yep both will sell well. I will be interested in seeing how the community developers for both games. I've heard the PC community for L4D isn't the best anymore and MW2 I suspect will probably have a small user base after a few weeks on PC.
@The_PC_Gamer: Well its from the Diablo crew, and if it's near that pedigree I'll be good.
Borderlands does look amazing, and I'll be getting my copy on the PC ASAP.
Infamous, the darkness, Flower
You've got to write about Borderlands and Torchlight as soon as you get to know. Those are some games I am really looking forward to. Be sure to mention the save mechanics in them. That's the most important aspect to me.
Are you going ahead with the purchase of MW2? I would wait for a while, if I were you. Just to see if the game is worth the money. No point in throwing away your money to the publishers, especially when they are making sure we get a consolized game. Think about it.
Don't know much about L4D. I never played it. I kept telling myself in India that I would play online once I got here, and in spite of having a 8MBps connection, I never seem to want to play online.
edit: I will be getting it, it's only $20 via digital download!
Lonelynight: It is fun, it's not the best game ever made though and it's not the second coming. @pvtdonut54: ahh titan quest, I enjoyed that mostly. But I got to the end boss and died like 80 times. That really really annoyed me. I think it was because my build was "jack of all trades" type and while normal mobs were ok I was just getting slaugthered by the main boss, I had like 3 low hp minons who would die in like one hit. I went back and leveled up a few times but couldn't beat him so I quit, never to return. Hopefully you don't suffer the same fate
@chandu83: its good, you'd like it. Uncharted 2 like most console games using checkpoint saves, but they are quite often very close together, I rarely had to repeat more than 30 seconds of action. I'll let you know about borderlands and torchlight probably this weekend in a blog if I get time. I already preordered modern warfare 2, putting some money down on it, I think I'll stick with it for now. 3 page reviews aren't too bad, resident evil 5 I had to cut back on. I could have just kept ranting on that game (a game you would not like
)@TJamesA: Nice I'm glad I am letting some people know about it. But I'll be feeling guilty if it sucks
It is only 20 dollars, and if its a shadow of Diablo then its probably worth it.
Ben, I will probably catch you on Xfire and will tell me how Borderlands is. I am very interested in that game.
@chandu83: Might not be able to tell you much about the game. It got delayed in Australia until the 30th on Steam, and they released the censored version incorrectly - meaning I will probably have to delete the download and start again so I probably won't be playing until sometime next week.
As an aside, I'm hearing that Borderlands sucks in single player and is really designed for Co-op. Not sure I like that much (RE5 was like that) so I'm probably going to be needing 1 or 3 good people to play through with on PC. I will try solo and let you know how it goes.
I should be able to try Torchlight on Sunday though.
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Man, I was just worrying that I'm missing a lot from that I don't have a PS3... Whew.
SYdoggXxX
About the boycott groups you're in, I gotta be honest, they're pointless. As vocal as you guys may be, you're a minority. 40,000 may seem like a lot of people, but considering L4D has sold millions of copies, it's just a tiny number.
While it's nice to see people standing up for what they believe in, I can't say I support this cause. So a game gets a sequel... is that really so bad? Ok, so you're not gonna get as many free updates as you were promised but it's not like the original L4D was a ripoff, was it?
In the case of MW2 I do understand your concerns. Well, to be honest since I never touch the multiplayer portion of games (GTA IV being the only exception), I don't know how big of a difference would a lack of dedicated servers make, but at least I do understand that this can't be a good thing.