I have a couple of coupons for Best Buy so I could concievablely get both, but I was wondering what my fellow Dopers think?
I don’t know anything about the games themselves, but Universal Pictures is watching sales of the Thing game partly to see whether there’s enough fan interest out there to warrant giving money to John Carpenter to make a sequel to his movie.
JK2 only because it’s a sure thing. It would be pretty hard to top and I’ve heard The Thing is ok, but no JK2
I’ve played both, and recommend DK2. The Thing aint bad, but DK2 is very, very good. Force powers, whoo hoo!
I read that the more interesting features of The Thing are pointless and don’t come into play very often or provide any challenge. For instance, the other characters in the game have a ‘Trust Meter’ which will cause them to disobey you or even attack you if it gets too low. The review I read said that the problem with it is that it never gets that low, all the things that raise the trust meter, such as killing monsters or healing your teammates, are things you are going to do anyway, and if you start screwing up seriously and cause the trust meter to drop, you are probably going to want to reload from a past save long before it gets to the point where they will attack. As to the thing about your teammates turning into monsters every now and then, this doesn’t really hurt you much because the monsters they turn into are easily dispatched, and you can pick up new team members on a regular basis. Sounds like a game with a good idea but poorly thought out implementation. Of course, that’s just based on a review I read, I haven’t played it.
I DID buy Jedi Knight 2, and I wasn’t terribly impressed. I hated the level design on most levels, the whole theme of ‘Gigantic Room with Doors Hidden 50 Feet Up’ got old really quick, I can understand WHY they had to do it that way - when your character can jump 50 feet in the air it’s hard to follow the typical FPS level design and maintain the required linearity, but it doesn’t make me like it any better. A great deal of the Force Powers are hardly ever used, the same thing with the weapons - you will find yourself using the same few tricks over and over again just because they are so effective. The first few levels are ridiculously hard, too, they require way too much ‘I know not to walk around this corner because I got killed last time I did it’ past-save memory.
Do you have Deus Ex already? That’s a truly great game, and it’s pretty cheap these days too.