Pick up some post-apocalyptic shooters for cheap

[Wooz]

Wow, nice deals. Has anyone played the Warhammer games?

Yeppo, the first is a pretty good RTS, the second DoW puts you in command of a squad of space marines instead of an army. It's also fun.

The game isn't too interesting, engine isn't the best

Please. F3 runs on (a heavily customized) gamebryo.

In any case, people seem to be confusing 'the engine' with shaders, geometry detail, texture resolution and worst of all, skill with which assets've been done (you know, 'the engine' doesn't magically create in-game objects, 99% of those are sculpted, textured and animated by people) when trying to determine the technical visual quality of a game. It's annoying.

To be honest, even the newest installment in the series, Stalker: Call of Pripyat, isn't exactly a flabbergasting achievement in terms of VG visuals' technical quality. But to say it looks worse than F3's lo-res textured, clunkily animated hunk 'o brown shit is a gross misunderstanding.

I still think it sucks though, because Fallout 3 is so much better and I can't help but compare it to F3 and be disappointed.

They're two very different games, both in terms of gameplay, target audience and technical approach. It's as if you compared apples and oranges. A better comparison would be with Metro 2033, which is a bit in the same vein, but wildly different technically.

I had a lot of fun with it. it's a bit too linear for my taste, and more so than I expected it to be

One of the reasons it's so linear is the fact that the levels in that game are insanely full of details. You need segmented areas in order to load all the visual info. An open world a la Stalker with that amount of lighting/object detail would require excellent geometry/texture-streaming/scaling capabilities on your game engine, a bunch of occluders and a computer faster than HAL 9000.

Take notice that the most detailed areas in games are always closed-off, separate levels

I have always wanted to try SR 2 but after seeing all the problems people having with it I never dared to buy it.

I've seen worse, though it's hardly the most stable game out there. At this price I'd take the risk, it's a fun game.

"Worse" as in "The only game I've ever played that was actually buggier than SR2 is Gothic 3"

The game is a lot of fun and allows a ton of customizing, definitely go for it. Maybe there's patches. I was able to run it without much problems, except when I wanted to play multi.

 

[aenemic]

One of the reasons it's so linear is the fact that the levels in that game are insanely full of details. You need segmented areas in order to load all the visual info. An open world a la Stalker with that amount of lighting/object detail would require excellent geometry/texture-streaming/scaling capabilities on your game engine, a bunch of occluders and a computer faster than HAL 9000.

Take notice that the most detailed areas in games are always closed-off, separate levels

true, and for this I'm glad. I forgot to mention that it's one of the smoothest gaming experiences I've had in recent years. loading times are non-existant and when you die, you're good to go pretty much right away. not once was the narrator finished with his lines (and his lines are always short) before the level was loaded.

 

[Starwars]

I'm not really crazy about some of the design approaches to Metro 2033 (the uber linearity for example) but for what it is, it's an *extremely* well-made game. The one thing I was disappointed with were the mutants which I didn't find particularly initimidating. But the atmosphere is just... dead-on.

 

[PaladinHeart]

Funny. I happen to have a collection of... probably a thousand (give or take a few hundred) miniatures. Although I tend to prefer metal minis, rather than plastic, and fantasy, rather than sci-fi.

I've probably painted around, oh, say, less than 20 minis. I wish I was better at it.

Also wish I was better at taking pictures.. it actually looks better in person. xP