2008 wasn't a bad year, on one hand PC gamers didn't get a lot of exclusives, Warhead, Clear sky, Sins to name a few. But we did still get good multiplatform games, Fallout 3, Dead Space, Mass Effect. GTA 4 is not a great running game sadly, I think most agree with me here, if you can get it playable I think you'll find a brilliant game, I enjoyed it more than San Andreas, very long main story.

I think 2007 was a little better than 2008, mainly because of the quality of games, but if 2008 was a "bad" year for PC gaming then I'll take about 3 more bad years thanks.

In 2008 I picked up the following PC games. (Red are 2008 games, Bold are games I finished the story line in)

Psychonauts, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, World In Conflict, Unreal Tournament 3
Tomb Raider: Legend, Trackmania United, Thief Deadly Shadows, Penumbra Black Plague
Unreal Tournament, SWAT 4, SWAT 4 Stetchkov, Rainbow Six Vegas
C&C 3: Kane's Wrath, Painkiller Overdose, Dark Messiah, Shadowgrounds Survivor
FEAR Extraction Point, GRID, Mass Effect, Call of Juarez
Assassin's Creed, Condemned, Lost Planet: Colonies, Bionic Commando Rearmed
Audiosurf, Penumbra Requiem, STALKER Clear Sky, Crysis Warhead
Far Cry 2 LE, Dead Space, Fallout 3, Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Call of Duty World at War, Overlord, Left 4 Dead
Titan Quest Gold, GTA 4, Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil
Tomb Raider Underworld, Indigo Prophecy

Still got a few games to finish, but they will be finished next year! Underworld and Indigo Prophecy were gifted to me by the great man himself The PC Gamer who's GOTY list is a vast improvement over mine and gamespot's list ;)

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Mini PC Awards for 2008

GOTY 2008:

Fallout 3: Fantastic world to explore, wonderful side quests, better combat than Oblivion, more interesting world (for me).

[2nd Place] GTA 4, not because gameplay is inferior to Fallout 3, it's not. Simply because despite my efforts I couldn't get it running well.

Best Game Character of 2008

Brucie (GTA 4): Well wrtten dialogue and some great voice work sets this character on top of the rest. He's a winner baby, are you?

[2nd Place] Elika (Prince of Persia 2008) getting a companion that follows you from start to finish right is hard, Elika remains helpful, friendly but overall freshens up the PoP experience.

Best non-sequel Game

Dead Space was a great effort by EA, what I liked most about this was the effort they went to creating a bit deeper than usual backstory, downfall, the animated comic. The game wasn't half bad either, great horror sections, good pacing, balance of weapons and enemies and terrific audio.

[2nd Place] Left 4 Dead is just a great product thats had the polish of valve. Great coop multiplayer action, zombies have been done before but who cares this is fun as hell.

Feel Good Story

Good Old Games. www.gog.com A site that offers old and some newish games with no DRM. The guys involved are closely related to CD Project Red (The Witcher) Great prices, no nonsense, works with XP and Vista.

[2nd Place]: Diablo 3 baby. It will be big, I just hope they don't decide to split it into 10 episodes like starcraft's 3 episodess, then they might charge for content. But hey it's Diablo.

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Some games I am looking forward to in 2009:

Aliens Colonial Marines

Alan Wake

Mirrors Edge

Half-Life 2: Episode 3

Battlefield 3 8)

Rage

FEAR 2

Hope you guys had a good 2008, and all have a great 2009!

Today marks the start of my 3 week break from work! Woot! This as you might imagine brings me much joy. What will I do, I am not fully certain. There shall be much gaming though and I dare say I will be spamming gamespot more and I'll be on xfire/steam more than usual!

I finished GTA 4, what a long, epic, amazing game that was. Story wise, character wise and gameplay wise I feel it was really a step up above previous GTA games. To me it felt almost as fresh as playing GTA 3 for the first time.

The big killer obviously was the performance, Although I found a fairly decent setting, I was still struggling with 20-30fps. I got it playable but hardly the smoothest. I'm still not sure how I'm going to rank this game, performance is really the only negative I had, perhaps the fact that some of the story segments in GTA 4 weren't really concluded as I would have liked - but that was really because the whole lot of side story parts were just too awesome for their own good. I greatly enjoyed the game, Niko is a great character. Brucie is one of the funniest NPCs in a game for a very long time.

Sweet NB Sweet.

Still playing some Left 4 Dead, I am surprised that the campaign is still pretty fun playing through 2nd and 3rd times. I helped my team pass Dead Air on Advanced last night. And by helped I mean I distracted the TANK, using my head. In memory of nutcrackr! I still think the game would benefit from getting another campaign out soon. Or more bosses/weapons. Just more content!

Merry Christmas to all!

*Title and associated naming rights belong to The_PC_Gamer © 2008

2 New games!

I picked up Left 4 Dead despite the horrid crashes I got in the demo. And thankfully I haven't had a single crash. Runs great, no problems there.

But! The server selection and lobby system is very poor, often it doesn't find a server, or I join a server with a bad ping. Really disappointing from Valve, needed to really improve the server/lobby system so you could select from a list, view pings, view countries. This is just basic PC gaming mp. I did hear they are working on a way to integrate it, hoping for something ASAP.

When I get a good server and some good players I had some great fun. Pacing is great, the teamwork is natural. The maps are good fun, the randomness keeps it fresh. Played through the first campaign and died on the chopper landing pad :( Second one myself and biggest_loser got pummelled at the end heading for the boat pier because well I thought the boat was coming to the house....

Yeah well I'm still having fun, the witch is crazy, so is the tank. Can't wait for more weapons/maps.

 

COD: World at War was half suprising to me. Aside from some sections that felt a bit dry the majority of the campaign seemed better and more natural to me than COD 4. I haven't liked WW2 for a long time, but it's been a while since I've played one, and the thing I notice is that these old weapons are pretty damn accurate ;)

The end levels for USA and REDS were pretty fun, I enjoyed the russian campaign much more though, the music in particular I thought was very good. I also can't believe Gary Oldman voiced the Russian Sgt. The flamethrower was fun, very powerful. And they let you use it in bunkers a lot. For me I seemed to spend less time just waiting for x number of enemies to be killed and more time advancing when I saw a gap in the battle. BONZAI charges are never tiring. The sniper mission was better than COD 4's too.

One thing bothered me a bit was the "in your head" audio from your commanding officers, so he'd be 50m away but it would sound like he was in your head, so if for example he says "follow me" and you are busy stopping a bonzai charge you have no idea where he actually is immediately. On the other hand the number of times you are away from the boss would make directional audio very hard to get right.

After you finish the campaign you get the ZOMBIED NAZIS bonus level to play, crazy stuff :P

Finished Fallout 3, what a fantastic game. I recommend you avoid most of the main quests until you are tired of exploration. As the main quests are very short link together one after the other with few breaks, can be quite tedious and aren't that amazing. Some of the side quests are awesome and are mini stories in themselves.

I completed a review for it, I did make a lot of comparisons to Oblivion, so it might not be completely helpful unless you've played oblivion :P

 

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/fallout3/player_review.html?id=626113

Not long until I can try out GTA 4 and see what the fuss is about, looking forrward to it and the movie creation feature looks like fun. Not sure if the PC will get the DLC, I'm thinking yes since MS are pushing hard with it on GFW Live.

Anyway thats me, lots of games to play! Still have far cry 2 unfinished, not appealing to me as much as I was hoping I guess. Not going to pick up NFS Blundercover, because The_PC_Gamer says it sucks worse than ho street. :lol:

I finished dead space on the weekend, what a delightfully cheery romp that was :D

Seriously though it was a great game, presentation, gameplay, backstory lots of gore and great horror sections. Ended quite nicely, last levels were a bit shorter than the first, game lasted me about 10 hours and it maintained quality throughout. Some of the end sections had quite a few enemies requiring some quick reloading or weapon switching.

After you finished you can play through the game again with all your weapons etc on Impossible mode, with a level 6 suit to buy. Pretty neat unlock to try later! I also received the Art Book, which was very interesting, unlike the Far Cry 2 art book they made comments are talked about various designs.

Dead Space PC review

Fallout 3 I also picked up a few weeks back. So far I'm really enjoying it and it's halted my Far Cry 2 progress. It's oblivion with guns for me, and I put in a lot of hours into Oblivion. I like the quests more too, they seem more interesting story wise, the setting is more appealling too. I'm roaming about finding places, got a few quests on the way. Not pushing the main quest because you can't play on after I heard.

The downtown area is broken into discrete sections, seems you have to go through the underground tunnels to get to key places that are not far away on your map. The Super Mutants are getting a bit tiresome though. There are already a few mods out for it, mostly UI improvements that I might try later as they look quite good.

I'm playing on GFW Live, got a few achievements, namely the good karma ones. Heh, a settler keeps coming up to me in megaton and giving me useless items in appreciation. Last time I got a Squirrel on a Stick, so much for being good huh?

I was going to pick up Red Alert 3, but I've got plenty of other games to play atm and no time to fit Red Alert 3 in. I'll pick it up eventually.

Played some of the public Left4Dead demo with my good friend The_PC_Gamer, I thought it was fairly fun aside from the team damage and a couple of crashes :lol:.

I played the same part of the campaign about 20 times with no success really, (although we got close once) I was fairly excited for it, but I'm not sure and might play some more later, I'm guessing if I have a few good successes it would be more fun. 

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Here are some games that interest me coming soon!

 

Two more games!

Far Cry 2 Collectors Edition and Dead Space! :D

I'll be getting an Art Book with dead space included with the game, but not available due to order problems, probably really should be called a Gore book anyway. That FC2 CE is wood, and the flap opens up. T-Shirt at the back which fits along with map, poster, art book etc.

Far Cry 2 seems pretty fun so far, open gameplay, decent combat and pretty good looking graphics, no load times is a bonus really. I'm a bit perplexed as to why they have save boxes around the place when you can save anytime you want, probably because the save anywhere was a last minute feature added after some QA with PC gamers.

Dead Space was an outsider, wasn't planning to get it, but days before release I ordered it. The sci-fi monsters got the best of me. And really I have to say I probably enjoy it more than Far Cry 2. It's hard to break it down, because the game takes so much from other games and includes some tweaks on things. Think Doom 3 mixed with The Thing, add Bioshock elements and a touch of Gears of War and you are on the way.

Many people have trouble with the controls, but with vsync off they are fine for me. The presentation, audio logs, music, atmosphere, scares and design of the ship are first rate EA did a great job on this game, and I'm sure the same is true for the ps3 and 360 versions. It uses the UE3 engine and it uses it incredibly well, I thought only Epic could use this engine properly. I'm not sure how long it is, but so far it's one hell of a ride.

Next week looks like I might have to pick up two more games:

Curse publishers and their Q4 madness!! (not sparta either) :D

Edit: Scratch that, RA 3 comes November 6th here :(

I just saw the Max Payne movie, overall I say it was a decent adaption. Firstly don't expect the exact same events to occur. Main characters are there and most of them are based strongly on the game. Locals in the game are also present if some sadly briefly :(. There are a few bullet time segments, one in particular I thought was awesome and they didn't overdo it. Actually I thought it was light on the action, could have done more, probably a lot more and I would have been liking it.

The movie doesn't follow the story from the game precisely (I just played it - it's still awesome btw) so don't expect it too. Also if you go see it at the cinemas, stay after the credits, tiny scene at the end (not crucial but if you enjoyed it stay).

Anyway, I'd like to see a sequel hopefully with Vlad and Gognitti and more mafia present. Gamers cut I heard about, hopefully it would feature more action. I give Max Payne movie 7.5/10

btw mona is hot.

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Stalker Clear Sky Review

Finished clear sky a few weeks back, did a review which I changed and reworked a few times, it's a hard game to review, in the end I think it just missed the mark (the ending kinda made up my mind for me). Thanks to the 7 guys who recommended it, your payment is on the way!

Next week shalt be also knowneth as Far Cry 2 week, as I shall be recieving my copy. Dead space doesn't look too bad, either does Red Alert 3, Fallout 3, GTA 4, NFS: U, Tomb Raider Underworld, Left 4 Dead and COD 27. My wallet is already crying.

I bought Crysis Warhead from Steam a little while back (it and clear sky are #1 and #2 best sellers on Steam atm). Started downloading on Friday took me 12 hours at about 6gigs worth :P I didn't get retail because it's not out here until around the 25th, and it would have been about $10 more, so Steam wins.

The gameplay is obviously very much like Crysis, which means I enjoyed it, first few levels were great. The game took me about 5 hours to finish, compared to 9 for Crysis. Runs about the same, although I think I squeezed better settings out of Warhead. AI was a bit quirky, only one crash (ironically 20 seconds after I started). it has some good music too ;) I haven't tried Crysis Wars yet, it's has team deathmatch and a few more maps, another 5 hours download for me probably :P

Screenies!

More at my xfire profile

I jotted down my thoughts in a review (8.5)

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If you read my previous blog you know the woes I faced with Clear Sky. Because I was a big fan of SHOC. I decided to patch her up and then start again. Thankfully I got through most of the bit I did before fairly quickly because I knew exactly what to do. Amazingly (luckily?) the game is completely crashless up to this point, AI still has bugs. Just finished the first underground section. I'm really liking it, but I hear there is a new patch due out soon, which will fix more crashes.

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Our good buddy Geralt got a bit of a facelift, rather his game world did. In the form of the Enhanced Edition, they re-released The Witcher with a few updates, namely more dialog, more npc clothes, animations, color models for monsters, a few new quests and some optimizations with the load times. Those with the original game can get the patch for FREE!

Download the EE Patch (you need to register your game)

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I preordered this bad boy yesterday.

Far Cry 2 CE, wooden box, t-shirt, map, art book. It recently got 94% in PC Gamer.

I'm thinking of doing a new banner and avatar for gamespot, just to freshen things up, any suggestions?

Oh how is saddens me to actually write this blog. For you see I'm a big stalker fan. Well to begin with we Australians got the game early. I picked up the game last week, installed it and played some over the weekend. I played aboiut 5-6 hours, experienced 2 crashes, this I wasn't too upset with. After all the quicksave is there to use, and it gave me a break :P

So fast forward to this week, I start playing some more. Getting my ass kicked thoroughly by stalkers who are accurate, and pinpoint accurate with their grenades. But I'm enjoying it, you take it slow, get rewarded for fewer kills because you work harder for them. The detector/artifacts is fun, found 3 artifacts already, the inventory/pda is better. Repair weapons etc

One really weird thing happened. I angered some bandits in the Garbage area, but was outnumber so withdraw to my neutral stalker base at the start of garbage. Hoping they'd help me. I waited, the bandits came up and just shot these stalkers, who did not even fire back. They just walked around in a daze, getting shot and killed, luckily I survived, but that was really upsetting for me towards the AI dynamics.

But what's that? Crash, oh no big deal, load up my quicksave. Crash on load? What, Try again, Crash. Ok I'll try my auto save instead of quicksave, works, only lost about 10 minutes. Continue on my quest, head off to any area, walk up to a guy and press F, Crash. Oh damn, another 10 minutes lost. Quickload. Walk to a different guy, "How can I help you" Crash, Oh now this is getting insane. Walk to get a quest from the same guy, Crash.

Now there is a point where you have too many crashes in a game, Clear Sky just hit that point for me, literally 5 crashes in 20 minutes. I'm running the 1.01 patch btw, and quite frankly they have clearly not QA'd this worth a damn. Which is sad because there is great potential underneath. NA friends will probably have the 1.02 patch out when it hits retail, which may or may not reduce crashes. What SUCKS for me is that I'll lose my progress if I update to it.

STALKER for me didn't crash much (lucky?), sure it had some bugs, but I can live with some minor bugs. Crashes piss me off. I rated this as 8.5, which in 6 hours is what I genuinely felt it deserved. Then I hit Crash Sky, and will more than likely reset/ or lower this score. :(

Currently debating

a)persisting with the current situation

b)waiting for a patch and restarting or

c)giving up entirely.

Although I doubt I'll do c, if Crysis Warhead and the others hit before I can actually play 30 minutes without being shown the clear sky bug submit form, it will have to wait untl probably next year before I can put some serious time into it. :cry:

2-3 months extra, that's probably all it would have taken GSC to iron out 90% of these bugs, now they do patches and reap the bad scores in the press and backlash from early adopters.

In a few months we have some big PC games coming. To give you an idea here are some box shots of most of those top tier games from sept onwards. :)

Not a bad list of upcoming games I must say :D COD World at War could be there, but I'm not sure it will make 08?

Tomb Raider underworld looks good. They announced a new Lara Croft model, Allision Caroll, gymnast :) She fits the role very well, esp her moves. The Red Alert 3 cast trailer rocked, nice to see some great cheesy FMVs are back, some big actors. And I am thankful that they seem to be making cutscenes for the Rising Sun faction.

Which games are you guys excited about? Buying, Preordering even?

As for me I finished Lost Planet, it was ok, not fantastic, had some good boss fights and nice dx10 graphics. I got online and tried some of the GFW Live gold for free. Coming from a PC server background the setup is a bit different, you first join a lobby, then wait (AND WAIT) till 16 players join or the host starts. Then you play, this is not too bad. But what was stupid was as soon as you finish a round, you basically get booted all the way back to the menu, and have to search for servers again. Same goes if connection is lost or server is full. You must refresh them again.

Now the actual MP isn't bad, it has a few game modes, lots of nade spam. But for me it was completely unplayable, Really the best I could get was a Japanese (probably 360 hosted) server, and there was sersiously a few seconds delay when I pick up a weapon. I could really only get kills by spamming grenades. So that ends that escapade. The game did a great job masking lots of the lag, like you could move freely and shoot easily. But I could tell there was a very high latency.

Bionic Commando Rearmed, got it from Direct2Drive, but you can also get it on gamersgate. It's a sidescroller with 3d graphics (good too) and it's a bit of fun, you use a grapple to swing about, good for the price ($15). nice music + sound.

Have fun guys :)

By the way if anybody wants a guest pass to TF2, I have one available :)

Today in Australia, on the East coast they let everybody get the full Spore Creature Creator for $2 with a newspaper, EA pushed it quite big here and I think it will be huge. I got my copy, but may give it away to somebody.

Giantbomb was launched a few weeks back, I was pretty crazy on the editing thing for a week or so then got quite sick of having to wait so long just to do minor updates that were replaced by other peoples edits because of the delay. Once you get to 1000 points you can do as you wish though. It's obviously going to be a bit more detailed than wiki is. The forums are not pleasant to navigate.

--Gaming--

Bought Condemned in THQ's gamers choice range, finished it in about 5 hours. Game had a few disturbing sections and some good shock scares. I was quite disappointed with the ending, basically you have a "boss fight" only the fight is repeated about 6 times where you kill the boss.

[spoiler] You get to kill this demon type guy with these fast pole things, he's pretty tough but you can usually just time your blocks and attack him.

First you kill him in the field, he lies dead, then you continue on, a few big fat flame guys block your path

Then you kill him after the glasshouse, he lays dead.you continue going, more lackys

Then you kill him in the barn (the fast poles do well here), rip out his shoulder. Lots of mobs in the barn.

Then he jumps above you and you kill him again and rip out his spine.

Then you go into this nightmare world and you rip out his jaw and that's the end.

Ridiculous honestly, nearly ruined the game for me. The whole end sequence felt overly long, not only that but it totally killed the tension.
[/spoiler]

I also finished Assasin's Creed, the last assasination battle was hard, but the boss was pretty weak. The game as you may know features this sci-fi experience out of these animus generated memories, it actually helped it from getting too repetitive. In fact in small doses of 1 hour I thought it held up nicely, the combat improves as you progress and unlock more weapons and items, I think they did a pretty good job with the game really, the game doesn't really end though, outside the memories the game is not resolved at all.

I picked up Lost Planet Colonies, played a little bit and actually I don't mind it, It looks good, plays pretty well, some of the voice acting is questionable at times, but it was basically half price of a full new game so it's doing well for me. It has 360/PC play and live too. I don't really know what tweaks they made to this edition, the demo levels were fairly similar to what I remember.

Quakecon brought some cool news, Doom 4 (which we knew about) is going to be more like doom 2. Rage is mutants with vehicles. Sounds a bit like Stalker/Oblivion/Doom 3 mix, sad about the T rating - lucky PC gets mods for blood :D

Saw The X-Files movie, was alright - felt like a run of the mill extended x-files episode, which honestly can't be bad as a fan of the series.