Other Half-Life fans: can you recommend me a new(er) PC game?

The Game Room
21

Okay you guys have sold me on Deus Ex. I’ll risk the ten bucks on the chance it’ll work in Vista! :slight_smile:

Wow, that’s an interesting link, Argent Towers. I’ll give that a try. So it appears that STALKER is based on a film?

I’ve started playing the game and, considering it’s my first modern FPS game outside of the HL universe, I’m noticing some interesting differences.

  • The very first thing I noticed was that intro movie, which looked phenomenal. However, it’s quite a switch from Valve’s “YOU are the character” philosophy. I’m so used to seeing everything in first person perspective that a third person view of my character jolted me a bit. (More on this below.)

  • Holy crap is this gorgeous or what? I often spent lots of time just ogling the beauty and realism of White Forest in HL2:E2, but the countryside here in STALKER makes White Forest look like 2D. It’s breathtaking. The rain, the blowing leaves, the decrepit buildings… Similarly, the music is wonderfully moody.

  • The NPCs are pretty darn impressive-looking too, especially after seeing the same nine characters in HL2. I sure wish my Gramma had taught me Russian, though!

  • I can see why so many find this world immersive and atmospheric. Feels like I could wander around and inhabit it for months. In fact it seems almost like an MMO instead of an FPS.

  • I’m playing on Novice (I told you I suck!) and these bastard bandits are still kicking my ass. I hate this lousy shotgun, which apparently has to be loaded after every shot. Is that really how shotguns work? Dayum! Probably more realistic than HL’s gun, but it’s getting me killed out here!

  • I don’t wanna kill the doggies! :frowning: Shades of Wolfenstein 3D. But y’know what? I ended up killing the doggies then, and I’ll end up killing 'em now. They appear to be mutants, so I’ll think of them as zombies rather than regular pups.

  • The heavy use of text dialogue makes this an interesting throwback to my love for Infocom text adventures, plus all those LucasArts games where you choose dialogue branches. Is this common in FPS games? Considering the accents maybe they felt it necessary. Also, it does mean I get to ask a bunch of different questions if I choose.

  • One thing I love about Valve is that they seem firmly in favor of keeping you “in the moment” – they generally don’t do anything to remind you that you’re not really experiencing this yourself. This means no cut scenes, no text dialogue, no abrupt level/location changes, no mapping, no speaking from Gordon and no view of Gordon’s face. I’ve gotten so used to this convention that some of STALKER feels less “real” to me for this reason, though of course it’s very early yet.

  • Another Valve convention I admire (but I suspect more experienced & skilled players don’t) is their ‘in-game’ tutorials and tacit guidance. Again, their games are ‘on rails’ and STALKER is clearly the complete opposite. I notice i"m spending a lot of time unsure exactly what to do next. I’m kinda used to Valve’s almost invisible spoonfeeding. The HL and Portal games are genius at gently nudging you in the right direction, or at least getting your attention when they want you to focus on something (like having a flock of crows fly in the air right when a bridge is about to collapse). Here in STALKER I feel very much on my own. Which is probably the point of the game! It’s very different and I’m not saying at all that I dislike it – it’s just taking me a while to get used to.

  • I must admit I’ve been spoiled by HL’s speedy reloads. Being a craptastic player who keeps getting my face blown into smithereens means I have to reload a lot, and STALKER is taking me right out of the game with its long loadtimes. Loading textures, synchronizing whatchamacalits … GET ON WITH IT.

Well, these are my thoughts for now. Maybe I should start a STALKER thread…

Thanks to everyone for the recs so far!

22

Oh god. The f**king doggies. I don’t know whether this was just me, but for every one death my character received at the hands of his human or bipedal mutant foes, he must’ve been ambushed and mauled to death by a pack of dogs 3-4 times.

Not that it wasn’t really cool, mind you. There’s something to be said for a game where a single bark sends you lunging into a crouch, shakily gripping your sawed-off and hoping that the mangy little fuckers haven’t seen you yet. ^^

23

I got SSII to run fine on Vista, although I had to do some tweaks. The most annoying one was that, because I have a dual-chip machine, every time I ran the game I had to alt-tab out of it, go into the program properties somewhere, and choose only one of my two chips to run the game on. If it ran on both chips, the game crashed. I don’t remember all the tweaks, but it took about an hour of online searching, downloading patches, etc. to get it to run properly.

Daniel

24

Would you kindly try Bioshock?

It’s got a great story that is somewhat dependent on your in-game choices. It’s not perfect (though the graphics come close), but a great semi-mindless FPS when you want it to be–with a plot. There are lots of video options to turn down that, while you don’t get the full wizz-bang experience of shiny ice and water reflections, still leave a breathtaking ocular experience.

The gameplay has its ups and downs (I liked the hacking at first, but it eventually became chore-ish YMMV), but through in-game choices you can lean heavily on certain skills or certain weapons to give some variety in replay. Nothing so far (to me) has touched HL1 for gamey-goodness, but this does come close.

Doom/Duke Nuk’em and HL are in the FPS pantheon. Others are great, but don’t quite make it. What’s next up there?

25

Well there may be too much emphasis on stealth and not enough on shooting, but pretty much any of the Splinter Cell games are great fun. They have a very 24 feel to them, only with a much cooler protagonist and significantly better dialog.

Oh, and not nearly as much torture.

Hmm, on the same topic you might enjoy the Thief series, particularly Thief II and Thief III. The graphics age very poorly, and the difficulty curve tends to swerve like a drunk dyslexic who suffers from severe synesthesia and doesn’t known how to drive on top of it all, but the story is exceptionally crafted and distributed in a really neat way.

Just make sure to play or, at the very least, read a summary of Thief I first: the games all tend to be guilty of forgoing early narrative backstory in favor of immediacy.

Something else to think about would be Hellgate: London. It isn’t an FPS at all, in fact it’s something of an MMORPG dressed in single-player clothes, and it has an unbelievably terrible singleplayer story, but the marksman and engineer classes both receive vast arrays of extremely versatile and (largely) creative firearms, which are extremely satisfying to fire.

26

If you are having trouble at the beginning of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., here is how to find a hidden set of Stalker armor at the beginning of the game. This makes the first few missions much easier.

Not a cheat, but spoilered for those who don’t want a hidden item revealed.

[spoiler]Go to the first mission giver you meet outside the traders cellar; the guy who is the leader of the local group and who gives you your first missions. Behind him there is a house with a ladder leaning up against it.

Go up the ladder but don’t go into the attic. Instead, make your way around the edge and up onto the roof. Go to the opposite end of the roof. You will see another house like the one you are on there.

Make a running jump and jump onto that next house. Now, make your way around the edge of the roof (right on the edge) to its far side. You will see a hole in the roof there. Crouch down and look inside. You should see a crate sitting just out of reach inside the hole.

Shoot the crate with your pistol to shatter it and a set of Stalker armor should drop. You should just be able to reach it. (Sometimes it falls just out of reach. If it does, just reload and try again. You may want to save right before breaking the crate but since you are at the very beginning of the game you won’t waste much time just restarting if you have to.)[/spoiler]

Hope this is useful.

27

Then let me be the lone voice of dissent in saying that you might get a bit frustrated with Deus Ex. It’s fun, but the controls take some mastery. I admit that, having grown up with the Doom/Quake/etc. keyboard interface I am a little reluctant to change to different key configurations. But Deus Ex makes you do a lot of stuff manually that was automatic (and assumed) in other games. Want that crowbar on the ground? First you have to change your angle of vision to look at it. Then change your position until it is highlighted. Then physically take it. Not real easy to pick up additional ammunition when you’re taking fire. I like the graphics and the story, but you are going to need more fingers. And you will be killing some people instead of usual monsters or Nazis (if that is why you avoid the war game genre).

Have you played Unreal? Fairly easy controls. There are a lot of levels, and the ones in the Nali Temple are gorgeous. And it has some fun weapons (Razorjack anyone? Sludge Gun? How about the Flak Cannon?)

28

Nobody seems to have mentioned Halo, and, since you have Vista, Halo 2. Both good FPS games. I like the old MOH and COD series also. Lots of good weapons and firefight situations, plus you get to shoot from vehicles, etc. The Tom Clancy games are too much pain in the butt for my liking. You have to move troops around and get all tactical with the damn things.

29

Don’t buy Deus Ex!

Go to www.gametap.com and download the GameTap client. For $9.95 a month you can play all their games - there’s a full list on the website. Deus Ex is one of them, and since it’s <5gig you can download it in less than half an hour.

The client does slow things down very slightly but my system (half as fast as yours) runs DE with everything maxxed out with nary a hitch.

That said, I personally like the Delta Force games (also on GT) - no story to speak of, but lots of fun combat, and you can play either as a “Banzai!” type or sneak around.

30

Coincidentally, I just started playing Deus Ex for the first time a few days ago. I’m only on the second mission, but I’ll confirm that it’s an awful lot of fun to play, and the storyline hints at being very interesting. I’m running on Vista right now and haven’t had any problems.

31

Although it probably won’t run on vista, I wanted to mention that because of pilot141’s suggestion above, I downloaded a demo of Tron 2 and I loved it!! Even better, my son has a copy of it he’s going to loan me – he says it’s too hard for him! This is a kid who finished Half Life unassisted, on the natch, whereas I only ever made it through the game through the good graces of “impulse 101”!

Maybe he’s too proud to start on the “easy” setting. :smiley: I on the other hand have no such obstacle. Heh, heh.

32

Thanks for the additional suggestions, all!

I’m still negotiating and getting used to STALKER and holy crap it’s a hard one. I’m playing on the easiest setting and I’m still getting my ass kicked. The main thing that’s killing me is radiation, since I’m just not getting the hang of how these silly artifact dealies work. That said, the ambiance is stunning and I’m reaaaaly enjoying the fights with mercenaries and army types. I’ve run into a couple of issues – the first time I went into the Arena to fight, somehow a regular NPC from the Duty faction ended up in the middle of the bout (don’t ask me how) and I shot him, thinking he was my scheduled opponent. Once I finished and left the arena, every Duty member was suddenly out for my blood. Luckily I had a save point from before I became Enemy Number One.

One thing I’m finding fascinating is the flexibility of the journey. For example, in one of the earliest assignments (fetching the documents from the military base):

[spoiler]I went down the secret pipe into the underground area, battled all the bandits as intended, but managed to avoid the Bloodsucker entirely by racing quickly into the military-laden basement area. Climbing up to find Strelek’s stash, I managed to succeed in that part of the task. All this seems to be perfectly normal, right? Well, the next portion of the task I saw on my PDA was “Find your way out of the underground.” Here’s where I think I went a circuitous route – or rather, a perilously direct route. Instead of continuing into the basement, which on retrospect was what I was supposed to do, I figured the logical thing was simply to return the way I came. So I just killed all the army dudes I found, still avoiding the Bloodsucker, and climbed back up through the secret drainpipe.

Only when I came back up did I realize that though I’d found Strelek’s stash, I still had to find the documents I was sent in there to find, which were in the building in front of me. Belatedly I realized there must’ve been some way through the basement directly into the building. But hell if I was gonna go back down there again! Instead I just ran into the building’s main entrance in broad daylight, in front of all the military folks shooting at my bold ass, and raced up a bunch of flights until I found the documents. I then leapt off the building’s roof and hobbled my way out into the wilderness.

Sadly all this means that I never ‘really’ completed the task, I guess because I never triggered the “Find your way out of the underground” achievement. Even so, the documents were returned to the barman so it doesn’t seem to have screwed up teh game too much. I guess I’ll find out later if this was a fatal mistake![/spoiler]

I also like that this game seems extremely replayable, since there are soo many optional side missions that you can take on. I haven’t done that many so far, except for the family rifle and cleaning out the bandits from a stalker camp. But I’ll certainly replay and see how I do next time.

Rhythmdvl I did try BioShock, at least the demo, and it really ran poorly (very choppy) on my system. But maybe once STALKER’s done I’ll give it a whirl!

Really Not All That Bright: I’ve been wondering what people think of GameTap. It seems too good to be true, in a way. Have there been discussions here about it? I’ll have to do a search and see what everyone thinks.

Chefguy: Halo is for PC too? I always thought it was console-only. It’s such a huge seller but I never even considered it because I could’ve sworn I’d heard it wasn’t released for PC. Cool.

brujaja, by the way, there’s a thread tailor-made for us – for sucky videogame players! :slight_smile:

33

As far as I know we haven’t had a GameTap thread, but it’s pretty simple. You pays your 10 bucks a month, and you download their client, which works a bit like Steam; you download (and load) games through their client.

You can download as many as you want- downloads are only limited by the size of your HD.

I was initially a bit disappointed because I originally signed up because I thought it would include old-school Nintendo games (this was before Virtual Console for the Wii was announced, after which it made sense) but it doesn’t, aside from a very few NES games.

It does include heaps of Sega Master System, Genesis, 32X, Sega CD and Saturn games, old-school arcade games, Intellivision, Coleco, old DOS games (Zork!) and lots and lots of modern Windows games.

The Windows titles are a mixed bag - there’s lots of crap ones (Hoyle Battling Ships!), but lots of outstanding ones (Planescape Torment!)

You can see all the titles here.

34

Another vote for Far Cry. There’s a sequel, Far Cry 2, due out later this year too.

35

I use GameTap and it works pretty much as advertised. Pay your money every month and get unlimited access to their games. There are free accounts too but obviously you are much more limited in what you can play on them. But even the pay account is cheaper than most MMOs.

A few caveats to keep in mind.

First, you must be on the Internet in order to play. The difference between GameTap and something like Steam is that GameTap is more like a rental service. The games are downloaded to your system but they are encrypted, which means that you must launch them through the GameTap launcher and it must be able to verify your account before it will do anything. This works fine if you are at home but may not if you are wanting to download something to your laptop to play on the bus or something.

This also means that if you ever cancel or lose your account all the games you have downloaded immediately stop working.

Second, since the games are encrypted and controlled by the launcher you can’t alter them much. You can’t use most mods, for example, and you can’t enter any cheat codes that require changing .ini files or command line settings. (Some games do have their cheats enabled, others don’t.)

Finally, since everything goes through their launcher things are sometimes a bit… quirky. I get the occasional random crash or control glitch and every now and then hit something that just won’t run on my system. I’m not sure how many of these are GameTap’s problem and how many are problems with the original game itself though.

36

Note that once you’re in the game, you can disconnect from the 'net if you want/need to. You just have to be connected when you open the client and game itself.

IME, most in-game issues are the game’s problem and most loading issues are GameTap’s problem. Regularly clearing your GameTap cache and resetting the installation (takes about 30 seconds) fixes most of the GT-related problems for me.

The one issue I can’t fix is that the client reports my processor speed as slower than it actually is, and makes it hard to guess whether I’ll meet the system reqs for a given game. 'Course, if your computer is less than 5 years old you should be able to run everything.

37

Yep. I bought it, played it, and sold it on ebay. Can’t play Halo 2 because the bastards tied it to the Vista OS and I won’t buy a new computer just to play a fookin’ game.

38

It’s prettier on the PC too, IMHO - and you can use classic FPS controls instead of the pad.

39

Thanks, Argent. I never started playing Stalker when it come out, somewhat disappointed by long waiting and changes in features. But now, with Oblivion Lost I decided to give it a chance. And - although I’m less than two days in game-time, I’m already very impressed. No other game made me to continue shooting after already killing enemy. Feeling of creepiness and realism of firefights is fantastic. Great game.

40

Bumping this thread (I hope that’s okay?) because tonight I finished S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Last time this post I’ll use the periods!) Well, when I say “finished” I mean “made it through to one of the apparently non-ideal endings.” So here’s my review.

First of all, I said in my first response to playing this game that it’s atmospheric as all get-out, and that opinion sure hasn’t changed. Man, this is a real stunner. The rain, the wind, the creepy wolf/dog howls in the distance, the sounds of NPCs clashing with one another somewhere in the vicinity paying no attention to me whatsoever. I know my experience is admittedly very very limited, but I’m astounded at the immersiveness of this world. Plus the otherworldly, garbled voices (I think they were voices?) evident whenever the Psi thingy was working – also in Chernobyl itself – gave me the shivers. Ultra creepy. And who was that super-loud Russian voice who suddenly started narrating something right towards the end when I entered the CNNP? And what was he saying? And why on earth didn’t the game translate it for me? That’s one of the few negatives, though it’s not really that negative: that I couldn’t understand half of what people were saying the whole time. There was really no consistency to what dialogue was translated and what wasn’t, which kinda bugged. But it did add to the atmosphere, so I was willing to just ignore the fact that my character apparently doesn’t speak Russian.

I was also really impressed with the cut scenes, BTW. I know they have a bad rep – and I’m personally not used to them, since HL doesn’t really have many – but these were effective and powerful. The human characters looked great! Like no CGI I’ve seen. Everyone looked wax-like, surreal. And the facial expressions on my character (and the guy who’s apparently my father?) were quite amazing.

As I predicted, I continue to suck mightily as a player, and I never did get the hang of those guns – aiming was a bitch, and even when I used my scope I just couldn’t simultaneously shoot and hold the weapons steadily enough to get a real bead on my enemies. So I had to resort to my usual embarrassing strategy of screaming CHAAARGE! (er, to myself) while running like a maniac at enemies, hoping to get close enough to land a shot or two.

One really amazes me about the game is how clearly replayable it is, especially what with the many many side missions (few of which I undertook mainly 'cause I didn’t know which were important or not) and the multiple endings. I know I mentioned above that I was intimidated by the ‘non-rails’ gameplay, in that I felt I was wandering around getting lost a lot, unsure what I was supposed to be doing. I ended up finding my way around, but I remained frustrated by how much the game expected me to figure things out almost by chance. Indeed, by the time I got to Priyat, I was utterly stumped trying to understand why I couldn’t get into a certain room. Only by biting the bullet and checking a walkthrough did I discover…

[spoiler]… that apparently I was supposed to find some doctor and a guy name Guide all the way back in the Agropam (sp) Institute section, which would lead me to Strelok’s stache, where presumably I was supposed to find a hotel key or some such thing. (I didn’t do too much reading about this section because I wanna replay it.) My point is: how in God’s name was I supposed to know I was supposed to accidentally find some doctor? The Bartender never mentioned it, nor did the “Hello? Hello?” scientist dude in the mobile lab.

Further, I know there’s some kind of sarcophagus, but I never saw hide nor hair of it. The only ending I got was finding the Wish Bringer and asking for the Zone to disappear. Seems like I do get my wish, 'cause suddenly everything looked gorgeous instead of like a wasteland. But naturally a price had to be paid, and I ended up blind. Just like Burgess Meredith![/spoiler]

So I guess it was a good ending – good for Ukrainians, anyway, and for my character even if I’m not exactly in a condition to appreciate it. Classic irony. But I never did find out why I was Marked, what happened to me, or who Strelok is…

Though I’m pretty sure I was actually Strelok. But don’t tell me!

So I guess all these unsolved mysteries will unfold in a reply if I make more of an effort to snoop around? I was so desperate because I was constantly dying of radiation poisoning that I didn’t feel safe enough just looking around the Zone. Maybe now that I have a better grasp on how things work I’ll do a proper job of understanding the storyline.

Well that’s pretty much my review after a single playthrough. Many many thanks to everyone who recommended STALKER – I’m definitely gonna be playing this one again!