[Swamp_Thing]

I´m playing it now. Gotta say i was a bit disapointed. Gamespot gave it a 6.5 score,  and now i know why. Some of the textures and effects used are arcaic, like from a 1998 game.
It features the voice of David Duchovny, and Marylin Manson too.
It has a great story and all, good models, great CG movies,  but the level design is just appalling. They used textures that even i could do better! And they placed the enemy spawn locations all wrong, enemies appear out of nowhere. And in huge numbers, too! I wonder where all those bodies come from...
Still, i guess it´s as good a game as any to pass the time. But not to replay.
At least it´s not bug ridden like some other titles out there. If only they gave the level design a bit more effort...


http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/area51pc/screenindex.html

[Turnsky]

Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
I´m playing it now. Gotta say i was a bit disapointed. Gamespot gave it a 6.5 score,  and now i know why. Some of the textures and effects used are arcaic, like from a 1998 game.
It features the voice of David Duchovny, and Marylin Manson too.
It has a great story and all, good models, great CG movies,  but the level design is just appalling. They used textures that even i could do better! And they placed the enemy spawn locations all wrong, enemies appear out of nowhere. And in huge numbers, too! I wonder where all those bodies come from...
Still, i guess it´s as good a game as any to pass the time. But not to replay.
At least it´s not bug ridden like some other titles out there. If only they gave the level design a bit more effort...


http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/area51pc/screenindex.html

it's a pretty straight-forward FPS, but at least it outdid pariah in the story department.   great for a quick blast now and again, tho

[Swamp_Thing]

Yes, but Pariah had great graphics. If Area51 had the graphics of Pariah, and Pariah had the story of Area51, we would have 2 great games to play.
But i guess that´s the problem with every game this day in age. They excell in one area, but fail miserably in another...

[Ford Prefect]

Not every game. In my opinion, Half-Life 2 is as close to perfect as a first-person shooter has ever gotten.

[redsniper]

except the story isn't really explained and it stutters like a mofo.
Although I do give kudos for an excellent engine. I'm sure we'll be seeing some awesome mods for it.

[Annorax]

old area51 > new game.

[redsniper]

you mean the arcade shooter?

[Annorax]

Originally posted by redsniper
you mean the arcade shooter?

Yep.

[Unknown Target]

The shooter was great fun.

And Half Life 2 sucked. It has no reply value. Why? Because unless you have two gigs of RAM, load times take over five to ten minutes for one minute of gameplay.

[Ford Prefect]

That doesn't mean it sucks; it means it has high requirements. Besides, my computer doesn't have that much RAM and my loading times are quite reasonable.

[Turnsky]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
The shooter was great fun.

And Half Life 2 sucked. It has no reply value. Why? Because unless you have two gigs of RAM, load times take over five to ten minutes for one minute of gameplay.

hey!. i /liked/ the loading times... i sketched and ink comics during them!

[Unknown Target]

Originally posted by Ford Prefect
That doesn't mean it sucks; it means it has high requirements. Besides, my computer doesn't have that much RAM and my loading times are quite reasonable.

Doom 3 had high requirements, and it still ran well on my rig when I had even LESS RAM. Half Life 2 was bloatware, and everyone was so hyped up about playing the next Half Life installment that they didn't care.


Anyway, I'm downloading the Area 51 demo right now, to see how it turns out.

[Swamp_Thing]

I always thought Half Life II had a very poor sound. There was no ambient music, and every so often an ugly music would pop up with the volume too high. Not to mention that they used the same sounds from HL1, wich is 6 years old...

[pyro-manic]

Heh, HL2 may not have been quite what everyone was expecting, but it was a damn sight better than Doom 3, which was frankly shockingly bad.

UT: How the hell did you have 5-minute loading times?? Are you running a 486 or something? I mean, I know my 'puter is pretty powerful (A64 3500, X800, etc), but I my loading times were never more than about 5-10 seconds with full detail on, so unless you were running it on way-too-high settings, you should get something comparable...

As for Area 51, I've seen mixed reviews for it. I'm probably not going to get it, just because I don't have enough time to play games much at the moment. Maybe over the summer....

A fun little shooter you should try out is Painkiller. It's about a year old now, but it's great fun. Similar to Serious Sam, in a sidestep-shoot-sidestep kind of way, with hordes of baddies and HUGE bosses to kill. Some spectacular levels as well (the Monastery level towards the end is very cool), and some groovy weapons like a stake gun and a shuriken launcher...

[Unknown Target]

Doom 3 looked incredible, especially with it's dynamic lighting engine. Also, my system (P4 2.2 Ghz, 512 MB of RAM, Geforce 4 Ti4600) ran it just perfectly with only 215 MB of RAM! But I had to get ANOTHER stick when I got Half Life 2. Previously the mission load time was TEN minutes. All of this was with detail set to the lowest to reduce that awful sound stuttering and that annoying load times.

As for something comparable - Counter Strike: Source loads in under one minute, and Doom 3 loads within seconds.

Anyway, on topic: Area 51 isn't that bad. I played the demo and it seemed like a fun little on rails shooter. I was glad that at last I wasn't always supposed to be scared to play the damn thing, it was just a run and gun thing, which is a nice change of pace from all the horror games coming out. Storyline seems good, but the AI is, of course, pretty dumb. It does have it's moments though, and I couldn't help but smirk at the fake moon landing set

[Flipside]

Doom 3 had awesome atmosphere/lighting etc, but I miss the simple things, like being able to stand in an empty room in the original Doom, and use your ears to figure out what creatures were around you and where they were.
I hate this 'teleport in' technique that seems to be developing for bad guys in games these days, the whole trick of Doom 1+2 was learning where things were before zooming round the corner, that often doesn't work in Doom 3, since theres usually nothing round the corner until 2 seconds after you turn it.

Haven't played A51, but it sounds like a pretty routine FPS, I'm getting more than a little bored with them now, same stuff, different background, over and over again.

[pyro-manic]

I hated the graphics in Doom 3 - the lighting was incredibly irritating. Everything was too shiny, and the shadows were awful - some were dynamic, but others were static. It was a mess. Then there was the dreadful level design, the crappy weapons, and the predictable monsters. It was a case of "oh, look - a dark corner/corridor - a beastie will pop up in a second", and they invariably did. Boring...

And UT: Weird. Everyone seems to complain about sound stuttering, but I never experienced that even once. And with that machine, you should be able to run it at fairly decent specs. I don't know what to say...

[Flipside]

Oh yes, another thing that was better in Doom 2 was the fact that there were enough monsters about for you to be able to open a door, nip across a room full of monsters, leave, wait until the in-fighting had stopped from all the missed fireballs/bullets etc, and then go in and mop up what was left. That little feature added a level of strategy to the game that was completely missing in 3 alas

[Unknown Target]

I'm not saying Doom 3 was perfect, far from it. But Half Life 2 wasn't perfect either. In fact, to compromise I'd say it's on the same level as Doom 3. Personally, I think it's worse, but w/e.
You're wrong about the lighting though: the thing about Doom 3 was that EVERY light was dynamic. Half Life 2 had a mix of static and dynamics

[pyro-manic]

If you say so. In that case, it was merely rather badly implemented. In any case, neither are as good as the originals...