Yes, this game is amazing. It is basically just owning me with awesomeness time after time, and has really recaptured the childhood magic that I remember Mario 64 delivering. 
My favourite part is how deeply embedded into past Mario memories it is. Everywhere you turn there's classic music, classic characters (Magikoopas!), and classic gameplay. Yet this is all alongside the most innovative platforming action since Mario 64.
I wrote more on my superb blog, of course.
It's not overrated. It deserves all the praise it gets.
Did you actually play HL2 D3?
Technologically this game is amazing, and I also love the gameplay, but there's no way I'd say it tops Half-Life 2. I can't let my excitement go that far. 
I think it's more a case of you underrating it than the game being overrated, D3.
Yeah, I have to confess I filled in one page and then fucked it off once I realised it was a many-page affair. I'm too ill to sit answering tonnes of questions. 
This is something I've always wanted to see implemented into Windows. It'd be so nice if after renaming three or so files of the same type in a particular pattern (eg: file_1.exe, file_2.exe, file_3.exe), it was smart to automatically detect this and ask you if you want to rename the remaining similar files in the same way.
That's the type of innovation Vista should have given us.
As it is, the best you can really do is highlight a bunch of files, rename the first one, hit return and then it'll name all the files exactly the same but add " (1)", " (2)", " (3)", etc. Rename the first one and you pretty much have a pattern, but the format might be no good.
There are quite a lot of programs out there that do mass file name changing. Do a Google search.
Yes, I think scores would be much better if they learnt from the film industry and just restricted it to four stars, which are relative. So if a game gets four stars that just means 'excellent', three means 'good', 'etc'.
The problem with the current shitty system that most sites/magazines use (percentages and stuff) is it introduces the element of one game being 2% better than another. How the hell do you justify a 2% difference in words? I bet even the reviewers themselves couldn't say why Crysis deserves 96% and BioShock only 95% (false examples).
Crazy.
Well to be fair, four times in five years isn't that often.
I do agree though. Visually, this new version seems a little outdated. The main content areas with the nice, clean white isn't so bad, but the general style seems more like a GameSpy site from 2003 and stands out a bit in this modern web 2.0 world. 
It also reminds me a lot of Destructoid.
I mean no serious criticism towards the designer as for what it is it's a good design, but just like an awesome 80s hairstyle looks like shit now, this doesn't fit into the current web too well.
Of course I could say the same about sites like GameSpot so it's not that bad.
Oh wow, finally happening?
It actually said in the original Max Payne manual that there'd be a movie, although it implied it'd be coming soon. I guess the original plans fell through or got delayed.
Max Payne is a game that'd lend itself to a movie quite well though, so I look forward to seeing if they can turn the game's excellent storytelling into something special for the masses.
Hahaha, that City 17 group shot is brilliant!!!!!
Yeah, I read about. In all honesty I didn't notice it at all while playing the demo.
But are they are on the same resolution, Slick? Because as I've just pointed out, the difference between 1280x1024 and 1920x1200 can be over 30 fps.
It could also be drivers. I use the latest Crysis-optimised ones from NVIDIA (169.04), but a number of people probably aren't.
Quote from jaboo224Yeah i better be able to run that type of settings with my 8800 gtx tbh or somethings wrong. But im glad i found the link as i was worried too about this topic.
Your resolution will be the biggest factor here.
I've got an 8800 GTX with an overclocked Q6600 (3GHz quad core) and 4GB of 800Hz RAM, and playing Crysis on 'Very High' at 1920x1200 will fuck me right down to about 13 fps.
If I lower it to 1680x1050 I get up to more like 20 fps, and going lower still continues the performance gains. A 'normal' resolution such as 1280x1024 is where the 8800 GTX shines, as it really can take pretty much anything at that point -- even Crysis.
The only feasible way I can see of getting it to run smoothly at high resolutions such as 1920x1200 and above is to go SLI, but that's a financial mine I'm not prepared to fall down. Especially not with new high-end NVIDIA cards due within half a year.
In a game that rests so heavily on the GPU like this, resolution is everything. And the sad reality is that every graphics card on the market today can't cope with Crysis at high resolutions.
I'd like to know what kind of hardware you need to run that fucker. I mean it brings my computer to its knees on 'Very High', and going any higher-spec than this ventures right into the land of financial infeasibility.
Think I'll save the final game until the next NVIDIA cards come out, possibly Q1/Q2 2008 according to Gorion. 
Quote from jaboo224ummmm i hope you guys know that you can push the demo to ultra high settings using the editor...http://www.gametrailers.com/player/user ... 27682.html
What did I say, guys? What did I say?
Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
lol
I love how Hammer is pretty much the most tacked-together piece of shit editor in the history of forever (from a quick glance it's almost indistinguishable from its ancient Quake father), yet produces some of the best games in history.
I like the notion that "every age believes their youths are the worst there've ever been". I guess that kind of applies to the world as a whole because there's no way our current world is as bad as it's been in the past, yet it's quite easy to look at it and think "How could it be worse than this?".
Of course, some brief history lessons teach you otherwise. This sure beats the days where you'd never know if your village might be sieged one night, with rapes and murders for all.
I'd almost be inclined to say the world is more civil and less hateful than ever. We've done nothing but progress from stuff like revolutions, genocides, nuclear attacks, and cold wars.
Not really, especially in London.
I meant 'relatively' as in to, say, Finland and America. In case you weren't aware both countries have more civilian gun owners than almost every other country in the world, which makes it significantly easier to get your hands on one than it is in the UK where we have pretty much the tightest gun law/control in the world.
It may be easy if you know the right people in London and a few other key parts of the UK, but by and large it's much less simple a task than it is in other countries. The gun used by the psycho this thread is about was probably stolen from a relative of the shooter rather than something he sought out and bought from an arms dealer.
I'm going to assume it's no coincidence that the majority of these school shootings by very young people tend to occur in countries with higher general gun availability to the population. Probably makes it easier for such thoughts to infect your mind if you know your dad/granddad/etc always has a gun lying around the house.
