IMHO it's not that great. It's worth playing, there's some fun to be had, but it's not a "great" game. It's a mediocre Grand Theft Auto clone. Half driving missions, half shooting missions. It's not nearly as wide open as the GTA games and it doesn't have the mini games. The cars (in the interest of some kind of historical accuracy) are not as fun to drive as GTA cars. Later in the game the cars get much more powerful and handle much better, but they're never close to GTA cars (again intentionally, historical accuracy-ish-ness).
Good things about the game: it's a good period piece and it's got a better than average story. And if your into historical accuracy (or what passes for that in a video game) more than horsepower, control, and firepower: you get that to.
If you've played the GTA's and want more driving/action I'd go for Simpsons Hit & Run first, Mafia second.
I was a long time CRT loyalist, finally broke down and bought a ViewSonic VP930b. I'm limited to a max resolution of 1280x1024 and a refresh rate of 60 Hz. It definately has some pixel lag that CRTs never had.
But, one thing I never thought about til I got this monitor is blacks. On a CRT you never get a true black basis for your screens. You can try to balance it for when you first turn your computer/monitor on or for when you monitor warms up but you will never have an across the board good contrast balance. With an LCD blacks are blacks and colors are sweeter and richer. I'll trade that any day for higher resolution and faster pixel refresh.
I love the game. The simplified squad command interface is brilliant. Two down sides: once you build your squad to a certain size it becomes a joke (too easy) so the last 1/4 of the game is kinda dull. After my last pc upgrade I tried to install and run it and it crashed to desktop. Didn't monkey with it much and I find the value packages often are more compatible than the original versions.
Night Life. The date mechanism in this expansion is huge for advancing sim relationships and fufilling aspirations.
One thing that sucks though is that the expansions after University disable the University bonus career paths. No idea what the logic is there. You can download hacks to re-unlock them, but it's a bother.
Half Life 2: Episode 2, probably more for Portal and Team Fortress than for the main game. Crysis, cause I just rebuilt my machine and want to see what it can do. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., cause at one time it was spec'd to be an incredible game, I hope it hasn't been X-Boxed to much. (And not technically a new game) City of Heroes: Issue 9, cause: crafting.
I'm always skeptical of statements like that, but FarCry lends them some credibility. At the time that game was the graphical bleeding edge, but you could still run it on modest hardware, and as they patched it performance got even better.
I love this game, despite the bugginess. With patches installed I didn't have any bugs that prevented me finishing the game, but I continue to have occasional crashes to desktop.
I love playing a vampire and the powers are very cool and fun to use. The writing and voice acting is really good in this game: Jenette/Therese and Alistar Grout (recordings) are great examples.
The different clans offer significant replay value. Malkavians were the most fun for me, but I think you needed to play through once as a different clan to truly appreciate them.
While trying different clans creates replay value, the rest of the game doesn't really. You'll get every item every time through. The main story line is very linear and side quests are fairly minor. The game world feels small and under populated.
Someone mentioned the funny walking. The actual in game animation is fine (to me) but the cut scene animations are really sloppy (to the point of making your vampire look like a dweeb). My guess is that they roughed out the cutscene animation with the intention to go back and do it right later, but time and money constraints made them release the game half baked.
The community patches are great, but a warning to the hardcore gamer: They make an already fairly easy game easier by tweaking combat rules and adding back items that were removed from the game by the developer.
I feel your pain brother. I've been burnt and swore off downloaded games (except Steam).
One side note: the first fix file you downloaded (*.7z) is archived with an open source program 7-Zip. It's a great high performance archiving program that reads most compressed file formats (including .zip, .bz, .rar, .gz) including its own. Search 7-Zip on Google for the free download if you want it.
...Apparently, in the EULA for Vista it says you don't "own" it when you buy it rather you are basically "renting" it...1Lonehawk
That's whateveryEULA says for all OSs, all software, all games. When you buy any software you are buying the right to use it, you are not buying the software. If you owned the software you would be within your rights to copy it, resell it, etc. EULA's create a model where software companies can make money on their intellectual property.
Microsoft does plenty of nasty, predatory things. But EULA's are standard operating procedure.
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