Still stumbling upon good games.

[Intangir]

So I enter a gaming slump, and the pendulum swings back to watching DVDs and getting caught up on movies. I get around to watching Johnny Rambo work his way through the entire Burmese army and I'm thinking, "Hmm, this movie isn't that great." Or at least that's what I probably would've been thinking except my mind was wandering, trying to reconcile what type of game I wanted to play to end this slump. And as I was watching the part of the movie where Rambo and Co. infiltrate a jungle base to rescue the hostages, all of a sudden I wanted to do that myself--in a game!

Unfortunately, military tactical shooters and I have never gotten along and I realize this within a few minutes of Hidden and Dangerous 2. I also have never managed to get into the Hitman series and besides that's a lone wolf thing anyway. Turned-based tactical games just seem to put me to sleep... so I guess I'm screwed.

A few days later, however, I see an announcement for that $99 "Everything Pack" of Eidos games on Steam and I'm looking through the list and I see Commandos... Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever played a Commandos game. A trip to wikipedia, a few screenshots, a gameplay trailer, and a quick skim of a few reviews later, I'm eventually playing a Commandos game.

I settled with Commandos 2: Men of Courage as my starting point in the series because apparently the first and third are brutally hard. In retrospect I consider that a pretty good choice since I thought the training missions in Commandos 2 were pretty hard. I could probably sweep through them now that I've worked my way up the learning curve, but they really just throw you into the deep water in those opening missions and leave you to figure it out. I couldn't even figure out which guys were mine until I pressed the "4" key when randomly pushing buttons on the keyboard. You should've seen me when I hit one of the function keys and my screen split up into little windows--"OH SH--WTF HAPPENED... Oh, whoa! How cool!"

That's pretty much been the theme with Commandos for me every time I learn a new trick. I'm usually pleasantly surprised and then wonder how I ever managed without it (like the cameras, or when I first found out you can also assign a FOV marker on the ground to see if it appears on any nearby guards' FOV sweeps). With the camera only being able to rotate in 90 degree intervals and the pre-rendered backdrops, I had the game pegged as a fully-2D isometric until I went to peek in through a window and found out I could see in a sort of limited-first person view and pan the camera to my liking. It was both strange and cool to me at the same time.

Above all though, I'm just having a ton of fun with the game. I mostly like how I can pan around the camera like an RTS to see everything and work out my game plan and plan B's right off the bat. I find myself enjoying the squad tactics, too. I remember having my Diver scale the walls of a big concrete facility to infiltrate a prison while my Spy distracted enemy snipers on the rooftops, the Green Beret tied up the patrolmen, and the Sapper hopped about placing remote bombs on their fuel tanks and anti-aircraft guns.

Anywho, it just seems like every time I'm in a slump and clicking through gaming forums and top-ten lists I come to the poor conclusion that I've played through all the good games already and all that's left to do is replay them or await the Next Big Thing. But occasionally you just stumble on a good game (or franchise in this case) that you've somehow missed earlier on. So what's the last good game you've unearthed or stumbled upon?

[ceevee]

you gotta try out Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. had a lukewarm reception when it first came out. didn't sell too well and reviewers didn't like the super-steep learning curve. but a legion of avid fans like myself bayed for more and got Beyond the Call of Duty.

if you thought C2 was tough going then you ain't seen nothing yet. without gloating, i think i'm the only one on this forum to complete level 1 haha!! i went onto level 6 when repititon set in (reached the position of Brigadier too :cornut: )

glad you came across the Commandos treasure chest.. you won't be disappointed..

aside: i remember many moons ago we had a debate about what genre Commandos (and Desperados) fitted into. many went on about its RTS merits, others like myself tried to prove the point it was a sophisicated puzzle game. sigh.. the deep uninterrupted debates of yesteryear

[Aku]

I have Hidden and Dangerous 2, and I couldn't get into it like the original. Most of the missions don't even give you much command over your squadmates, telling them where to go and what to do and so on. That really detracted from the game for me.

If there is any Hitman that could change your mind, it's Hitman: Blood Money. That game doesn't just have one classic mission, or a couple classic missions, but numerous classic missions. It should be a must-play for everyone into stealth shooters.

I remember Commandos and came so close to playing it years ago. Maybe one day I'll pick it up and try it. Or just wait for Jagged Alliance 3.

[Mochan]

Commandos isn't *that* hard but you have to be used to this kind of game. It helps if you played Lost Vikings earlier on. ;)

I somehow never got to playing Commandos 2 and all the succeeding game even though I thoroughly enjoyed the original. I basically would say that Commandos is a puzzle game but with an RTS interface. It's certainly not the same kind of game as Jagged Alliance. I never really got into Hidden and Dangerous.

I'm just waiting for Jagged Alliance 3. In the meantime I reinstalled Silent Storm and am getting headshots galore hehehehe.

[Intangir]

you gotta try out Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. had a lukewarm reception when it first came out. didn't sell too well and reviewers didn't like the super-steep learning curve. but a legion of avid fans like myself bayed for more and got Beyond the Call of Duty.Maybe if I graduate from Commandos 2 I'll move on to the first and third games; hopefully the first game isn't too different in terms of gameplay--or isn't lacking too many of the features I'm getting accustomed to in C2. Did you play and/or like any of the other games in the series?

Still liking the game and taking my time. I can see it getting a bit repetitive later on, but they keep giving me new characters and combinations to mess around with so I haven't gotten there yet. Fortunately there doesn't seem to be any overarching storyline so I can always put the game down for a week or two and be able to jump back into it when I'm ready. As far as the genre is concerned, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commandos_%28computer_game_series%29) puts it in a sub-genre of RTS called RTT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_tactics) (real-time tactics) alongside Desperados, Total War, World in Conflict, etc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_real-time_tactics_video_games).

Another game I've been playing around with that I forgot to mention originally was TrackMania Nations Forever--a game released free to download (http://files.filefront.com/TrackMania+Nations+Forever+Free+Full+Game/;10013754;/fileinfo.html) about a month ago. I kept hearing Jeff Green pimp the game on GFW Radio so I downloaded it and eventually got around to it after a week or two. I was skeptical, but the more I played it the more addicted I became with the game. Another reason I like it is that you don't have to really think too critically when playing it so I can turn the music off and audio down and listen to podcasts while trying to get those gold medals. Those games are always handy, and it's the first worthy replacement in that regard since I finished Puzzle Quest.

edit: Damn Lakers...

[Intangir]

Some pics I snapped from another game that I've found and been playing through recently:

http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/4985/psiopswp3ka0.th.jpg (http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/4985/psiopswp3ka0.jpg) http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/3485/psiops2008061723430578ir4.th.jpg (http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/3485/psiops2008061723430578ir4.jpg) http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/417/psiops2008061723172221wv3.th.jpg (http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/417/psiops2008061723172221wv3.jpg)

That would be Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PsiOps) (2004). I'd avoided it thus far due to its Starforce protection and consoley nature but a freely downloadable, ad-enabled version was recently released on FilePlanet (http://www.fileplanet.com/187537/180000/fileinfo/Psi-Ops:-The-Mindgate-Conspiracy-(Free-Game)) so I figured it was finally time to give it a spin. I played it over the course of the last few days and just finished it a few hours ago.

If you haven't tried it already, give it a shot. It's basically a standard 3rd person shooter but has a nice blend of psychic powers (Telekinesis, Pyrokinesis, Remote Projection, Mind Control, Energy Drain, Aura View) poured over the top for you to experiment with throughout the course of the game. Messing around with telekinesis kinda feels like a fun mixture of the HL2 gravity gun and the Jedi force push, and like in HL2 you'll occasionally have to manipulate the environment and its physics to progress throughout the game.

The controls were a little kludgy for me--especially when trying to move around objects with telekinesis--and I had to lower DirectSound Acceleration a couple of notches to keep the sound from popping. The game starts out a little slow until you start remembering some of your Psi powers, the story is blah, and it's also fairly short (which I liked but YMMV) but, hey, the price is right. I defy you to get tired of exploding people's noggins with your mind, or tossing bodies around and off ledges or into acid or off a cliff or into fire or tossing them towards you and catching them with Mind Drain before their body hits the floor or...

Note: As with the other ad-enabled free games, I believe you have to be in the USA/Europe (or at least pretend that you are) to play the game. Alternatively I believe there's a DVD (European?) version + crack out there that solves the DRM issue.

[Mochan]

The best part of Psy Ops was the telekenetic powers. The game was pretty average but the psychic powers gave it a little vanilla twist. I played this game on the PS2.

[Intangir]

Yay, another installment! Actually I should've posted one before this but I forgot to... I'll have to come back to that some other day. In the meantime I just beat Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim (2000). What a fun little game! I figured since Hinterland hadn't come out yet and after seeing that Majesty 2 was in the works for next year, I'd go ahead and give it a whirl. And then a few quests later it was 3AM.

Seems like a few friends of mine that are into RTS games didn't like the lack of control--as sovereign you can only entice heroes to do your bidding by setting bounties and rewards but can't control your units directly. As someone who was never very good at RTS games and was becoming increasingly disinterested in some of the genre's conventions, I found I enjoyed the genre-twists of Majesty quite well. I was actually relieved that I didn't have to go around micromanaging several different bases, dozens of units, and collect all sorts of different resources.

Of course, after a few sessions and advancing through the difficulties, you tend to know the game mechanics well enough that you do tend to go out and micromanage some adventuring heroes--you'll genuinely want to keep your expensive Paladin alive or resurrect your high-level wizard because he actually managed to survive long enough to learn the good spells. Towards the end there I was even addicted to the economic/RPG elements; I'd give new recruits big bounties for killing weak stuff like rats just so they'd have spending money to purchase new weapons, armor, potions, etc. I was having fun just thinking about how that benefits both of us--them for being more able in combat, and me knowing I'd get to see a nice portion of that spent money back due to taxes. Kind of a weird thing to be enamored with (for me anyway) and a first for me from a game. :thumbsup:

I will say this though: the Northern Expansion is damn brutal. In the original game I went from struggling in the beginning few levels while learning the ropes, to beating expert missions (including the last one) in one go. So I was feeling pretty confident going into a level with a designated "beginner" difficulty in the expansion... :cryin: Ten tries later I finally beat it--just BARELY. And I had to slow down the speed practically to slow-motion just to stay in the game. Even with that, I still felt that I mostly beat that mission due to luck. So, yeah, I'm probably not even gonna attempt any more of the expansion, especially since that was the only "Beginner" level mission in there. I think I'll just anticipate Hinterland and Majesty 2 instead. :blush2:

[Mochan]

Hey what's the update on Hinterlands or Majesty 2? I've been waiting for a sequel to Majesty for like forever. There are only two games in existence I know of that are like Majesty: Majesty and its expansion, and an ancient game called Stronghold. I wish there were more like them.

[Intangir]

The website for Hinterland still says Summer 2008. If Tilted Mill is based in the northern hemisphere, and I have my dates right, that would mean they have until the autumnal equinox on September 22nd to get it out. Right now, AFAIK, the game is still in closed beta. I really doubt they'll make it by their current release date, but I guess we'll find out in the next ~6 days.

Majesty 2 is a bit harder to tell, and a little more worrisome. For starters, the people who did the original Majesty, Cyberlore, didn't make it (even though they'd tried to make a sequel for years after Majesty was released but couldn't get a publisher to take a chance). It's actually being made by a company called 1C:Ino-Co which seems to be based in Russia so it's hard to be anything more than cautiously optimistic about the sequel. But from the few videos I've seen of it, it didn't look too bad. Right now the only release date target for the game is Q1 2009.

In the meantime The Witcher Enhanced Edition just came out and the downloadable patch with the content (for the original game) is supposed to hit the internets this Friday. :D

Short and somewhat recent preview of Hinterland (http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/hinterland/preview/hinterland/a-20080829135345244089/g-20080829133822288013).

[BaneNWN]

I agree about hitman bloodmoney i even said i felt it was goty when it came out.like aku said many great missions and i like the fact that you can play stealth or go rambo depends on your mood.

[Intangir]

For some reason every time I play a Hitman game I start thinking of one of those contrived assassin movies where the killer is some flawless ghost-assassin that never misses a beat and doesn't raise an alarm. And then when I play the game I inevitably screw up or get caught and keep quickloading or restarting a mission trying to get it just right until I get burnt out on playing the game. I tend to do the same thing in Thief, but for some reason I don't screw up so often at it. Oh well. Not sure if I've tried Blood Money yet, so I may have to give it a go--and see if I can't break my habits.

Anywho as I mentioned before, I forgot to post about another good game I played through a few months back. And I don't think it's been discussed on here before.

I remember having just played through the Space Siege demo and being disappointed. And I was trying to describe it to a friend as being a action-RPG with scaled back RPG elements. Or like it was really supposed to be an action-RPG but then they decided to ditch that and started dumbing it down rather than just making a pure action shooter from the ground up. I didn't know if that explanation made any sense or even if it was entirely applicable, but after that I had the urge to go out to try to find one such pure action shooter game to succeed where Space Siege had failed.

Not long after searching I came across Shadowgrounds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowgrounds) which was in the same vein as the game I was looking for. And it was a fun ride while it lasted, but it was a little too simplistic and wasn't quite right. However, when I was searching for similar games that had come out more recently, I found it: Alien Shooter: Vengeance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Shooter:_Vengeance).

The title doesn't traipse about dropping subtle clues to describe its gameplay. It's a shooter. You shoot aliens. With a vengeance. The nice twist here is that there's also some RPG elements to it that give the game some flair and experimentation. Your character has stats like a regular RPG. If you want to be beefier to take more hits you can pump up your vitality, or if you plan to carry around an arsenal in your inventory you better plug some STR. Likewise you also have proficiency points to allocate to your weapons of choice--but only enough points to really effectively go with two or three of them. Do I want to go pistols and shotguns? Or assault rifles with a rocket launcher? Maybe I can get away with three...

Top that customization off with thousands of aliens clogging up the screen as you back yourself into a corner, guns blazing. Once the gibs settle you stroll out of the room knee deep in a carpet of alien blood and guts, take a scroll back to base and buy some better gear, spend any points you've earned from leveling, and go on to the next mission. That about sums up Alien Shooter: Vengeance and if that sounds good to you then you ought to go pick it up off Steam or something for <$10 or whatever it's at. It's worth it.

Here's a video of some gameplay if you're interested (a bit low-quality, but oh well):

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[Mochan]

Alien Shooter kicks ass!!! Vengeance is the "upgraded" version of the original mindless blastfest and it actually... tries to be more cerebral so that really tells you a lot about the original.

[Intangir]

I guess this thread's theme has mostly been towards find those older games that have fallen through the cracks (for me, anyway). But I'll mix it up and talk about a new game that's come out because nobody else seems to be playing it on here. That game is King's Bounty: The Legend.

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On the surface this game seems to be passed off as a HoMM clone although I guess the history is that HoMM was mostly a clone of the original King's Bounty--whatever. What matters is that the game's good and entirely too addicting. I don't think I've ever played through an entire hex-based turned based RPG before so it's saying something that I've just beaten it a second time. Fortunately I think my addiction has finally run its course, and now maybe I can finally get some real work done before Far Cry 2 and Dead Space come ou--checks calendar--dammit!

Anyway, it's pretty rare that a game grabs me almost instantly but that seems to have been the case with King's Bounty. Being as polished as it is certainly helps. The graphical palette is rich with vibrant colors and surprisingly detailed when you're zoomed in all the way. Matching that is the performance--load times are just a handful of seconds on my machine, and the framerate hasn't skipped a beat. Even the animations are nice with some flourishes and when you're running around through a forest and see a squirrel climb up a tree and jump across to another one it just feels like there are such nice little touches to everything.

Gameplay is mostly divided up into three main classes: Warrior, Paladin, and Mage. The Warrior mostly specializes in bigger armies by getting more leadership bonuses, and they also have more skills to help accumulate Rage which allows you to summon one of four Rage spirits to use one of their 4 availiable spells (note--The Reaper is awesome). Paladins are the in-between class; they'll strike a balance with Rage and Magic, and they also get a nice attack bonus to undead and demons which helps a lot in the late game. And then Mage, the class I didn't play, which emphasizes the magic skill tree--having more spells availiable to them, more mana, more punch to their offensive spells, etc.

Each class plays notably different than the others; you'll probably even choose to have different armies to better play to their particular strengths or bonuses. And gameplay is the main attraction for the game; the story isn't too particularly involving or interesting so much as being a capable vehicle for the combat scenarios that gives you a nice tour around and throughout the world of Endoria. Items seem to be randomized each playthrough so even if you do play through as a warrior a second time you might end up with an entirely different army. For instance, if you found items that grant leadership or morale boosts to humans the first time but come up with stuff geared for undead the second time around, you might be swayed into foregoing the forces of light on that playthrough in order to cash in on those bonuses.

Perhaps one complaint I did have was that the difficulty kind of jumps around when moving to new areas. You might be kicking ass in Darion only to move on to the pirate-dwelling Freedom Islands and get your ass kicked by the first enemy you come across on the main island. Unless you're awesome at these games or don't mind taking heavy casualties, the only way around these large jumps in difficulty is to make sure you've done almost everything you can do on the previous area. So if you go in somewhere and get your ass kicked, explore around, try to collect some extra leadership flags strewn about, and see if there are easier mobs to go up against first. And a tip if you do start the game: while the game is very much open for you to explore off the bat, I recommend doing the King's quests as exclusively as possible until you get the Spirits of Rage (I think it's his third quest). The game really opens up once you get those guys and you can start calling forth and leveling up the first two spirits almost instantly (my second playthrough I had the first two unlocked at level 3).

PS -- Also almost finished with World of Goo and it's been a nice little game, too. YouTube can probably show you how the game plays better than I could explain it, but if the sound of Gish + Lemmings has any appeal to you then you ought to be playing this.