What single player FPS campaign are you playing?

[dsheinem]

Necrogiant is fairly straight forward; just kill him dead before he kills you. When his health gets low he'll bust out his ultimate attack that you have to race down; that's when you want to use your Tarot cards.

I never used a Tarot card ever in the game. Of course, I also didn't earn very many

Play through it on the hardest difficulty. Trust me, you'll start using them.

It wasn't available at the start, and I don't intend to do another playthrough.

[Ack]

No worries. I gave it a shot because I liked the game but found it quite easy to get through and wanted more of a challenge. So after I beat it, I went back and gave the highest difficulty a shot, and oh man, it was worth it. I still managed to breeze through the first half of the game, but the second half got brutal.

[TSTR]

Damn, I must just suck at this game then. I did manage to just beat the Necrogiant though. Fuck that tornado, man.

[Ack]

Damn, I must just suck at this game then. I did manage to just beat the Necrogiant though. Fuck that tornado, man.

Nah, when I was doing that, I was near the end of my prime in playing FPS, having spent years in college playing with and against guys who were world class. I probably couldn't do it now so easily.

[MrPopo]

Damn, I must just suck at this game then. I did manage to just beat the Necrogiant though. Fuck that tornado, man.

Yeah, the tornado sucks because you don't know it's coming and if you weren't prepared to damage race you're just screwed. But I did like how they weren't afraid to put the giant in Necrogiant.

[MrPopo]

I've been playing Unreal. I doubt I'll finish it tonight so I'll throw some thoughts in this thread.

This game came out 6 months after Quake 2 and massively improves on what Quake was doing. The graphics are prettier than Quake 2's and the big thing they do is having huge outdoor areas. These kind of large open spaces don't really get seen again until Serious Sam comes out. It's definitely a technical achievement.

The game involves you being trapped on an alien planet and you need to find a way off. Lots of things die along the way. The game involves a lot of optional reading to tell its story; there's dead people logs and inscriptions on ruins. It's the sort of storytelling that gets done amazingly in Metroid Prime and is just sorta meh here. Granted, I haven't read a lot of it. The text window doesn't scale with your resolution so at high res it's very hard to read. Additionally, you need to pull up an item to actually read and it really breaks from the flow. To contrast with Metroid Prime, MP is a much more deliberate game so taking time to read stuff around the environment fits in, while Unreal still has a lot of the Quake-style action. The game is definitely slowed down, though, and I'd say it's slower than Quake 2, but not by much. And then the game's storytelling gets completely blown out of the water by a game that comes out 6 months later; Half-Life. The voice acting from allied scientists and enemy soldiers really helps with the immersion and getting story points across. Similarly, the CD version of System Shock has all the audio logs voiced, which lets you quickly turn them on and then proceed while listening (plus it's another very deliberate game with the survival horror aspects).

The weapons are the most disappointing part. In terms of damage there's only one that really stands out; the flak cannon. Everything else seems to take about the same amount of time to kill anything (unless you can master the buggy headshots of the rifle and razorjack). This ends up splitting weapons into which ones trigger dodges and which ones don't, with the latter being all around better. And this dodge mechanic is the one thing that makes the enemies harder than Quake, which again gets overshadowed by the marine AI in Half-Life.

[Xeogred]

I think I like Unreal more than HL1 myself. It's definitely got more roots in the older stuff as you kind of said and the Metroid Prime comparisons are pretty spot on. I really dug the large outdoor environments, the music, atmosphere, and its stronger emphasis on puzzles/platforming. It gets really cool near the end and felt pretty epic. Good times.

I'll agree some of the guns left a little to be desired. If I remember right there wasn't really a true shotgun in it which just felt weird.

[Ack]

The game involves a lot of optional reading to tell its story; there's dead people logs and inscriptions on ruins. It's the sort of storytelling that gets done amazingly in Metroid Prime and is just sorta meh here. Granted, I haven't read a lot of it. The text window doesn't scale with your resolution so at high res it's very hard to read. Additionally, you need to pull up an item to actually read and it really breaks from the flow.

Hexen II has a similar problem, where it tries to convey the story and include directions for what to do next via text boxes that don't scale properly and are red text on a brown background, which muddies them up and makes them hurt my eyes.

I enjoyed Unreal when I first played through it, but having done so in both single player and multiplayer, I have no desire to ever go back to it. And the Return to Na Pali expansion contains a lot of tight corridors and really didn't do the game justice in my opinion. That said, the flak cannon is THE greatest weapon in the game. Heh, or at least it is my personal favorite.

[MrPopo]

Unreal's level design is solid enough that the fact that I've ignored basically all of the messages hasn't hurt my ability to progress; a lot of use of go to area A and flick switch and open area B, go to area B and flick switch to open area C. The text would give me a more explicit "you need to go somewhere to remove this barrier" but you're likely to stumble upon where you need to go anyway.

[J T]

I've been playing the first Red Faction lately. It is surprisingly good. The premise of an evil mining corporation is rather silly, but the pacing is so good that it makes up for that by never being boring.