What PC game(s) to buy?
 

Until recently, I pretty much had to forego computer gaming due to two factors:

1) Lack of time due to wedding planning, selling my old house, fixing the new house, etc.

2) Lack of money due to two mortgage payments, home improvement costs, and saving money for honeymoon.

Well, I'm now married, back from the honeymoon, and my old house is sold. The new house still needs some work, but most of the expensive stuff is done. So I find myself with a little extra time and money, and I thought I'd start gaming a little bit again. But a lot of PC games have come out in the past year or so, and I don't know which ones are worth playing.

I host LAN games occasionally, but most of my gaming will be single-player. I'm looking for first-person shooters and similar, particularly those with a strong storyline and involving gameplay. I got burned out on Real-time Strategy games.

Single-player games I've enjoyed:

Deus Ex
Rainbow Six (and all addons)
Rogue Spear (and all addons)
Hidden and Dangerous
Half-life
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
GTA3 and GTA:Vice City
Max Payne
Mafia
Soldier of Fortune and SOF2

Games I'm looking forward to in the near future (lots of sequels):

Deus Ex 2
Half-life 2
Hidden and Dangerous 2
Max Payne 2
Doom 3
Halo
Duke Nukem Forever (cough)

Games I was disappointed by:

Ghost Recon
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
SWAT 3

...any suggestions for games (or add-ons to my existing games) to try? I've been reading some game reviews, but damn there's a lot to sift through. The new Clancy-based games look like they might be fun... any impressions?

Thanks!

Congrats on the wedding, man.:)

Go old school
 

Try and dig up an old copy of System Shock 2, and download the recent graphics upgrade. Good storyline and good replayability, with three character classes and a good skill advancement system.

Re: Go old school
 

I actually have that game, found it pretty enjoyable back when I bought it. It may be fun to get the graphics update and play through it again.

I also just remembered that I have No One Live Forever 2, which I bought back when I had some spare time, and I didn't beat it yet. I'll have to intsall that one again... what I managed to play of it was good stuff. It's predecessor was entertaining.

Well there goes any chance I've had of hosting the Cellar GR server with official Cellar games etc. Now everybody thinks it'll suck! I still think it's a fun multiplayer. It plays like War when you were a kid, but with real guns.

I can understand being unhappy with the clunky command interface which doesn't really get it done in single player.

I didn't think it was an awful game, it just should have been way better. Thinking back, I can't remember all of the reasons we disliked it... me and my good friend kept playing it and really wanting to enjoy it, but no go. I think one of our big gripes was that AI enemies were sniper-accurate from long distances with all weapons, but I may be confusing it with another game. I also seem to remember that every AI teammate was dumber than a bucket of hair, but again, I may be confusing it with another.

I do remember trying to enjoy it for many hours though before turning back to other games.

Frogger. Pacman. Qix. Q*Bert.

Deus Ex. That was the best game that I have ever played. I remember thinking, after having spent days in New York, that I had nearly beaten the game -- I didn't think that anything more could fit on the CD!

I'm planning to postpone my next computer upgrade until either Deus Ex 2 or Thief 3 is released. Speaking of which, have you played the Thief games? They aren't up to the level of Deus Ex, but they're still very good and they're still by Warren Spector. The last level of Thief: The Dark Project was probably one of my favorite computer games levels ever.

Just out of curiosity, what did you find disappointing about RTCW? I found it extremely enjoyable once I was past the boring generic Zombies-in-dark-caves stuff...it still had some rather weak levels after the Zombie trash, but some of the stuff was pure genius.

Well, maybe I gave up on it too soon. I never got past the zombies. To me, a game is like a book... if they don't capture my interest about 5-10% of the way into it, I give up trrying to force myself to enjoy it. I may give it another chance eventually, when I am very bored.

The multiplayer in RTCW looks striong, though. But few of my friends have copies, so we've never been able to give it a go.

Quake Arena is still the best, no bullshit, gore-spattered, kill or be killed FPS around, IMHO. But them my opinions are *very* humble, indeed.

"Alice" was pretty cool. It's based on the Quake 3 engine, but it has a very immersive storyline.

Splinter Cell -- get it. First person shooter, where you can shoot, or knock out your opponents. Stealth is always preferred. I love it.

My wife played through Alice and enjoyed it quite a bit. It's also down to $10, as are the Serious Sam games, if you want substantial bang for your buck.

I played Thief for a while, hit the steep end of the learning curve two or three levels in, and moved on to other games. I definitely enjoyed it, but I'm waiting until I can devote enough time to it and Thief 2 to master it, and that may be a while. (Can't... stop... playing... Dynasty Warriors 3... on... my... PS2...)

I loved Morrowind, and hated its crash bugs. The latest upgrade (Bloodmoon) seemed interesting but crashed left and right -- or, to be precise, it's geared towards advanced characters, and it seems like the longer you play and build up a particular character, the more CTD-prone the game gets. Ah well.

Icewind Dale is on my to-do-after-six-other-games list.

Tried Mechwarrior 3, got nowhere, uninstalled it.

My most popular game lately has been eBay, where sniping is always in season. (I'm up to 27 hockey jerseys and counting.)

Just finished Postal 2, that was pretty fun. NPC's react to your actions, and don't just run around and shoot. Funny, and a little twisted.

Alice was creepy. It became even creepier once I realized that I had adjusted to it and wasn't creeped out by the screams in the background any more.

I'm seconding the suggestion of Splinter Cell. Thoroughly awesome game. I'm partway through it on Playstation2.

I don't get the opportunity to play a lot of the cooler PC games, as my decrepit old machine (PIIMMX, believe it or not) really isn't up to it, although I do still enjoy playing Duke Nukem 3-D and ShadowWarrior.

Toad, if you start hosting Ghost Recon multiplayer that may be the incentive to put me over the edge into buying a new 'puter.

I enjoy playing online multiplayer games, which I mostly do when I'm up in Slangsylvania. The game I got hooked on most for both single and multiplayer is Global Operations, however they don't seem to run any sort of punkbuster software on the gameservers, so you end up dead from too far away with the wrong kinds o' weapons (aka "Fuckin' Charging Pistol Guy nailed me again from 100 yds away after I shot his ass with a LAWS rocket".)

America's Army is a lot of fun, as is Wolfenstein multiplayer. I liked the single player version of that as well.

One game that I played recently that I liked, although it was tough as hell was Vietcong. VC kill you longtime! Has reasonably good story elements tying the jungle prowling together, lots of VERY funny stuff too (make sure you interact with all the characters in the firebase. some of the comments are damn funny).

Gun fans should enjoy the multiplayer, because it gives you the option of many different kinds of rifles. And it's the realism: you get shot, you are at least injured and you probably die, unlike just losing "health points".

A buddy of mine wants a game next week at night some time.

If you don't need a new monitor we can build you a new PC for ultra-cheap, ask Syc.

My current monitor is "good enough for now," besides I can always pick one of those up later ...

Cheap is good. We'll have to talk.

Even if it does mean that I will have to enter XP-land (yeah, yeah, I know — RedHat), but my primary objective is to be able to play games. The hottest newest games. The ones that need XP.

Ah, Duke Nukem 3D. Those were the days. Back then I used to do a lot of game tweaking and map building, and enjoyed the hell out of it at the time. You can still Google for "Alan Bellows" and find websites with my levels on them. Seems like a long time ago. I must be getting old.

Did you know that they were going to release a retail add-on to Shadow Warrior called Twin Dragon? They cancelled it when sales of Shadow Warrior didn't meet their expectations. Back in my Duke3d map-building days someone noticed some of my maps (NukeCity and NukeCity2, which also added Duke Bots to the game), so I was hired to work on the Shadow Warrior addon. I designed one of the levels. We got the project done, so it sucked when they cancelled it. Never got paid. Bastards.

But I think I still have the ZIP file for Twin Dragon on my hard drive if you want a copy of it. It has at least one good level in it. ;)

Just bought this the other night, haven't installed it yet though. Had to finish up NOLF2. It was funny, me and the new wife went to Media Play to get the game, I walked out with one game, she walked out with four. Heheh.

Later,

Well there's the rub; I had a spare XP lying around that I wasn't using and I was able to sell to Syc, but it's $93 from newegg otherwise, which bumps up the price of the whole system considerably... by like 25%.

Having witnessed Splinter Cell on 3 platforms, I must say, it's meant to be played on the Xbox. You're doing yourself a disservice by playing it on the PC or PlayStation 2.

You can get it free with an Xbox now, which are $180 now. Good deal.

Holy sh*t, Alan, you made Nuke City? Were you on the Duke-Edit mailing list back then? I was there under the nickname "sven", I was the crazy guy always experimenting with strange things to do with two-way trams :) Ah, the memories...those golden days before every site had a forum and mailing lists wre actually useful :)

Did you ever manage to get Shadow Warrior running unter Win2k? I could never get it to play sounds on my machine...now there's a game I 'd love to play again (but I'm not going to install a Soundblaster and go back to Win95 :) )

Yup, that was me. NukeCity was the one that most people saw, and the Dukebots made me kinda famous, but the better NukeCity2 was the one that got me the job on the Shadow Warrior addon. I was actually pretty pleased with myself once I completed the Shadow Warrior level, I think I did pretty well. And my ego got pretty inflated for a while when the guy from 3DRealms had some heavy critiques for all of the other levels in the addon, but he thought mine was perfect. :) It was nice feeling like I was really good at something, now I just feel like I'm sorta-good at a lot of things.

Yeah, I was on the Duke-edit mailing list for awhile, during the few months where I was doing a lot of level editing. I look back on that stuff as the good ol' days. Of course that doesn't make much sense, since I'm happier now than I've ever been... I just tend to be sentimental.

Never tried it on XP, I haven't had Shadow Warrior installed since I completed work on the addon. I got so burned out on it while testing levels and textures and stuff... playing it over, and over, and over, and over, and over... Did you try making a shortcut to the EXE and setting the compatibility for Windows 95? Might work, I dunno.

It's sad but I have yet to beat the game. I've had it for nearly a year now too. Maybe I'll sit down and beat it someday. I'd do it this weekend but it's my 21st birthday on Sunday so I'm sure I'll be doing other things.

Do you have to resort to XP, or will win2k suffice?

I can deal with the cost of XP ... what's going to kill me is actually having to pay for MSOffice. Damn Bill and his copy protection schemes ... which I still maintain are Bill's revenge for the antitrust suit.

What if there was something 99% compatible that ran on Windows and was free?

My roommate has an Xbox, so I acted as Lambert for him, then I went out and bought it myself for the PC. My wasted 20's playing Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 served me well. It looks and plays pretty much the same on the PC or Xbox. I'm so used to the mouse, arrow keys, and edit keys, it was no big deal.

Man, the Georgian presidential palace sucks!

Now that I know how to beat it, I could do it again with no trouble. But the hardest part for me was probably the fucking shootout in the abbatoir. Try doing that with little control sticks, you mouse-using cheater.

Anyone that plays it on the PC hasn't earned the right to complain about how hard it is, 'cause it's simply not nearly as difficult.

Ah, UT, always the dreamer :)

I know. OO.o sucks. 99% compatible if you mean exported documents. As far as functionality, it isn't even close.

Unfortunately, I have to do a lot of technical writing at me work and it requires all sorts of stupid things that <b>just aren't there</b> in OO.o (or anything else, for that matter).

If the game requires a poor input method to be difficult enough to be enjoyable, then it is a poor game. Maybe I should reconsider my purchase before I open it.

I think you'll still enjoy it, because you have to actually think, but I just get tired of all these PC whiners going "Oh, it's so hard!" <b>You don't know what hard is!</b>

The abbatoir was actually pretty easy once I shot the lights out, got the mine placement correct, and reactivated the correct gun platform.

I'm just playin' smarter! You and your small sticks!!!:p

I could live with that ...

Has anyone tried out SunOffice 7 or whatever? Apparently it cleans up a lot of the little problems with OO.o.

I wonder if MS will ever swallow their pride and include native PDF support in Office. Nah, prolly not...

Just as soon as they figure out a way to sue Adobe into submission and steal their technology before integrating it into the newest version of MS Office...

They don't need to steal it; it's an open standard. Otherwise OO.o wouldn't be able to support it.

All PDF is, is basically compressed postscript.