[TrashMan]

FEAR

Graphics is great and the engine runs smoothly even on my old can. Story is interesting and the elvels and events are done in a good way - level design is excellent.
AI is superb, one of the best I've seen, sadly that you're allways alone. All other commandos die at the begining of the missions and you never see them in action, even though it would be cool and they would preform good.
It's allso full of unexpected twists and suprprises.

Spoiler:

You don't get the save the girl - she dies.
the guy you chase trough the whole game just sits there at the end and waits for you to kill him with ONE bullet from a gun.
the child - well...the big bang at the end is not the end

CIVILIZATION 4

Excellent musical score and a highly time-consuming and addictive game. Some improvements from the old ones can be seen, but some of hte most irritating issues remain. (Like a musket armed cavary downing your gunship)
They have been somewhat reduced by some specific bonuses to units.
Colosseum is still a normal bulding insted of a wonder (strange since it's farmore complex than a piramid).

all in all a very nice game.

[Prophet]

Colosseum is still a normal bulding insted of a wonder (strange since it's farmore complex than a piramid).

Colosseum equals as a generic sports arena in civ. Thats why it's a normal building...

[aldo_14]

IIRC there were a fair number of Colosseum-esque ampitheatres (the actual name of the Colosseum, incidentally, comes from a 30-40foot statue - Colossus - of Nero sited nearby) in Roman times.

[Ransom]

I was very disappointed with FEAR. Too much of the game was samey action sequences, it was really more of an action game than a horror game. Story was pretty simplistic as well. It suffers from the same problem as many FPSes, which is have most of the story at the beginning and end and leave the middle filled with explosions. I enjoyed the horror bits, but after the first couple of hours I found that I was just playing through the action sequences to get to the next creepy part and not actually having any fun doing it.

[Janos]

My biggest gripes with Civilization IV.

- It's buggy. Buggy as hell. It's also somewhat of a memory hog. It can run perfectly well on a minimum specs, or maybe not - the problems do not seem to be really consistent and the game also has a nice memory leak, one of the biggest I've ever seen on this hi-end game. Epic/large endgames cause stutter, freezes and crashes even on most high-end configurations. Right now the game can really be unplayable and it's more a question of luck than of hardware - caveat emptor, basically. The updates, especially one fixing the memory leak and CG leader heads, are on their way but pretty much essential.

Aside from that..
Bombardment was much better in CivIII. Now you basically have to suicide rush a city with your catapults/cannons/artillery (yes, no more mobile dedicated artillery ) to wreak havoc. Destroying improvements and directly attacking enemy forces via bombardment requires aircrafts - battleship cannot bombard terrain tiles, or at least not so on first two levels unless I am completely ****ed up. Also it will by default cause more or less no collateral damage. The result? Three BBs floating on an enemy coast usually just manage to drop the city's defence modifier to 0% and not much else. To actually **** **** up you need an army of carriers (one carrier can also carry just 3 fighters/jet fighters).
For some ****ed up reason it's not possible to intercept enemy air units over their own city, so modern war against an enemy with even a minor airforce becomes unrealistic slaughter. Minor issue? Definately not so in modern times. Gandhi is still not a pacifist and Aztecs are the most damn annoying neighbours you can get. Gunships seem too fragile. Carriers are still too cheap (cheaper to produce than one battleship, actually). Cost of updating an unit is so high that it's easier to build completely new units than to update to newer configuration (it can be something like 300GPs for updating a knight to cavalry. Just one knight, mind you.)

 Defence/offence ratings for units are, however, much better - spearmen are no longer the invincible arm of God which can destroy modern tanks with ease. (Actually, even basic infantry has real problems beating modern armour with city raiding updates.)
The CivIII "health+combat bonus" is scrapped and replaced with dedicated updates, promotions. You can promote your cavalry as more mobile, just stronger, more efficient against infantry, medics and so on. With right civics - which are absolutely fantastic - you can make pretty dedicated units and stacks prior to rough combat.

Personally I still enjoy the game a lot and give it 90 points, but bugs, resource-hungriness and aforementioned minor issues (mostly making warwaging more difficult) drop the rating.

[Nix]

FEAR was pretty good, but even on my high end machine with a 9800 XT, I cant run the game higher than medium settings for computer/graphics in the menu.  I guess it's time to upgrade the ol' vidcard again.  A lot of the action takes place in tight, indoor spaces, and it drags on at times.  Sure, the game is about close quarters combat, but I would have loved to see more outside scenes where the first big group tries to take you down.  The story was pretty good though.  Audio, was superb, except for the gunshots.  They just had this.. bap bap bap feel to it.  Comparing the SFX used for Quake 4's weapons and FEAR's weapons, Q4 left me much more satisfied.  The levels are designed quite well, but I do have a gripe about what game developers do to put in thier games.  Listening in on the "audio commentary" vid that's on the Spec Ed DVD, one developer mentioned that they worked on this little piece of the map for 2-3 months, or something like that.  All the part of the map was something "cool" to "show off", I believe.  WTH?  Shouldnt the time be spent refining the levels or making sure that nothing gets cut out of the game due to time constraints?  Extra fancy eye-candy is cool, but I wish developers could make games that can take a lot longer than a week to finish.  I'd rather see larger levels with smaller things, even levels that backtrack to previous maps to get to the next objective in the game. (SS1/2 anyone?)

[Slasher]

Does Civ4 suffer as badly as Civ3 from that "Middle Age Knight vs. Modern Armor = Knight wins" syndrome?  Really, in Civ3, unmodded, my M1A2's seemed good for about 2 or 3 knights before they bit the dust.  And I won't get into the whole "spearmen vs. tank = OMGWTF" phenomena...

[Janos]

Does Civ4 suffer as badly as Civ3 from that "Middle Age Knight vs. Modern Armor = Knight wins" syndrome?  Really, in Civ3, unmodded, my M1A2's seemed good four about 2 or 3 knights before they bit the dust.  And I won't get into the whole "spearmen vs. tank = OMGWTF" phenomena...

Not really, or at least I haven't experienced that. Basically, it is possible for macemen to counter a cavalry charge, but only with enough defensive bonuses and promotions. I haven't seen a horse unit (be it a horse archer, knight or cavalry) beat any modern units. Riflemen frequently lose against infantry attacks. And it is theoretically possible for a spearman to defeat an armour, but I haven't seen stuff like that so it doesn't really matter. At least yet.

I am also kinda stuck on my current all-tech conquest scenario where I have to attack and defeat technologically equal army on a foreign continent facing pretty bad odds :V

[CP5670]

My brother got FEAR a few weeks ago and I started playing it, but the graphics engine is just pathetic. On an overclocked 6800 GT, I was basically limited to 800x600 with no AA, soft shadows off and medium texture detail to get even 50fps minimums and things looked like crap at that resolution. He didn't mind, although he doesn't seem to care about fps much at all.

I've decided to just wait on this game until I upgrade my card in a month or so. From the little that I played and saw my brother play, my impressions are that the story looks fairly interesting, the cheap scare tricks are silly, the level design looks average (better than HL2, but a far cry from SCCT), and there is lots of scope for creating glitches with the physics (a very good thing in my book ).

[TrashMan]

Colosseum is still a normal bulding insted of a wonder (strange since it's farmore complex than a piramid).

Colosseum equals as a generic sports arena in civ. Thats why it's a normal building...

A Colloseum is a arcitechtual wonder. I was doing a seminar on roman architechture and it's sheer complexity is stuning.
the Circus Maximus is a prime example of it - tens of thousands of tons of stones in a eliptical shape held on pillars and arches - each storage in a different style, each wth 80 outside arches and 80 statues.

A piramid is a simpla basic shape - there's nothing complex about it. The only issue was hauling the huge stone blocks.

If anything, a colloseum should have increased your chances at generating a great Engineer (I'll fix that). Come to think of that, the roman Praetorian unit is allso badly done..I just gave it the cover promotion as a starter and of course, upped it's price a bit.. And the battleships firpower and intercept chance

[TrashMan]

Allmost forgot - about FEAR.
The thing I really liked is melee combat.

There's nothing like bycicle kicking a guard trough the window, followed by high-kicking his companion to dream land and then sliding in the legs of of the third guard who comes to see what the fuss is about

[Janos]

Slightly off-topic, but if you have Half-Life 2 then do yourself a favour and download SMod. It's pretty goddamn cool.

Including:
- bullet-time
- Modified single-player campaign - a bit more difficult and more combat-oriented.
- Weapons. A lot of them. These include stuff like Alyx Gun - great, great handgun -, Strider Cannon, Laser Rifle, shovel, Gordon's Magic Wand which is my favourite closed quarters weapon, grease gun, Sniper Rifle, AK47, Stuff Launcher which lets you shoot, uhh, stuff (you can copy an exploding barrel or a corpse or a watermelon. The copied object them becomes your primary fire thingie, you can essentially create friendly gunships or Combine). Sticky bombs, physics gun, MP5.
- More gore, more blood, better sounds. Kicking, throwing away weapons..

With SMod, HL2 changes into happy epic shootout with heroic feats (dashing into a Combine stronghold in your enforced buggy, escorted by sandlions and sandlion warriors, using bullet-time to dodge combine fire, kicking some heads and hitting the knees with shovel, spawning barrels as mobile protection..) It's pretty damn great and gives great replay value. I use it for fun, not for challenge - although new weapons are scarce, some of them are also pretty damn powerful and Combine becomes little more than cannon fodder with laser gun, Alyx Gun and BT combination. But hey, what's wrong with a little destruction?

And it's japanese. http://forum.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=70774

[Grey Wolf]

Colosseum is still a normal bulding insted of a wonder (strange since it's farmore complex than a piramid).

Colosseum equals as a generic sports arena in civ. Thats why it's a normal building...

A Colloseum is a arcitechtual wonder. I was doing a seminar on roman architechture and it's sheer complexity is stuning.
the Circus Maximus is a prime example of it - tens of thousands of tons of stones in a eliptical shape held on pillars and arches - each storage in a different style, each wth 80 outside arches and 80 statues.

A piramid is a simpla basic shape - there's nothing complex about it. The only issue was hauling the huge stone blocks.

If anything, a colloseum should have increased your chances at generating a great Engineer (I'll fix that). Come to think of that, the roman Praetorian unit is allso badly done..I just gave it the cover promotion as a starter and of course, upped it's price a bit.. And the battleships firpower and intercept chance

You do realize that the Circus Maximus != the Colloseum, right?

[TrashMan]

Most people refer to it that way.

Amphitethre, Colloseum, Circus Maximus...whatever gets the point across...

[Fury]

Regarding FEAR, unless you've got one of those latest generation high-end video cards; use 800x600 resolution. You can then pump details up pretty nicely. In this game, 1024x768 and above requires significantly more video card power, it's not just about texture memory.

[TrashMan]

I have a GForce 4Ti 4200, 64mb (Athlon1900+, 1GB DDR) and I run it in 800x600.
It run smooth with no problems.

Civ 4 didn't give me any troubles either..and I played on the second largest map..only by the end of the game did the tuns take a tad longer, but it was ok.

[Grey Wolf]

Most people refer to it that way.

Amphitethre, Colloseum, Circus Maximus...whatever gets the point across...

None of those three have anything to do with each other with the exception of them all being built by Romans. An ampitheatre is just a type of theatre, the Colloseum was a large circular arena (it's the most famous of its kind, though many others were built), and the Circus Maximus was an elliptical stadium for chariot racing.  You don't really know your Roman history at all.

[TrashMan]

I do.. I did a seminar on Roman architecture. I know what is what.

But the average joe thinks all 3 are the same, so I'm not gonna lose time setting it apart. (and in game it IS the colosseum)

[pyro-manic]

Got FEAR today, and it's pretty good so far. It's a system hog, which is a pain, but it looks pretty good. The level design is kinda samey (I'm currently chasing that fat prick, whatever his name is, past all the sentry guns, and it's all looked pretty much the same so far), but it's got some great weapons - possibly the best shotgun ever, and the pistols are great fun as well. The scoped rifle (I forget it's name - ACP or something) is rather handy, too, though the bog-standard rifle kinda sucks. I just wish they'd gone for full iron sights rather than a slight zoom for the precision aiming mode, though - that would've been cool.

[StratComm]

I do.. I did a seminar on Roman architecture. I know what is what.

But the average joe thinks all 3 are the same, so I'm not gonna lose time setting it apart. (and in game it IS the colosseum)

You're completely missing the point.  There's no reason for it to be a wonder, primarily for game balance but also because it's called a Colosseum in name only.  If you look at it in the modern era, it's just a football stadium.