Have you tried Call Of Duty 4?  Supposedly brilliant.

It’s an RTS of some sort, rather than a squad based shooter a la GRAW2, but Tom Clancy’s End War will be phenomenal if it works.  Guaranteed to be weeks of game play in that one.

So keen to back to Australia next year and start playing all the games I’m missing out on now.  Assassin’s Creed topping the list.

Not squad based tactical but game related:  Jim are you planning to check out Assasin’s Creed?  It sounds to me like really interesting game and it comes out for the 360 and PS3 sometime this month.  I’m planning to get it in 2008 when its out for pc.

is CoD4 out yet?

i been playing orange box HL2 eps 2 and Portal.. WOW AWESOME GAMES
finished both games in about 4 days… LOL LOVED it.
anyone play Armed assault yet?
Back in the day when Operation: flashpoint came out, that was one hell of a game.. 100 Square Km of playable map…
kicked ass.

Orange Box doesn’t bother me, but a friend of mine had the same problems with HL-2 on the PC.

and CoD4 has a pretty damn cool story.  It’s damn near impossible in several spots at the Veteran setting.  Played all the way through on the regular setting in about 8 hours though.

I’m still psyched for Rock Band myself. :) pre-ordered and hoping to have some serious fun with the family over Thanksgiving.

Oh, and I think Portal was wicked fun.. and has a lot of potential.

Jim CoD4 is fucking great!  I highly recommend it, I mean what’s not to love about killing Russian/Muslim extremists!  Graphics are spectacular, story is cool as shit, and some parts are eeriely realistic playing as a U.S. marine fighting in arab streets. I haven’t touched Halo3 since I got it.

Seems like Ubisoft has the sole rights to produce team-based tactical shooters.  Tom Clancy must have a patent or something :(

Crysis, is coming soon,..  All your bases belong to us!

boobthedog…

Maybe it’s just me, but my overall feelings, after playing completely through single player on Halo 3 can be summed up as: meh.  I just don’t get the hype at all.  I mean, sure it was fun, but I didn’t think it was groundbreaking or any of the other claims made continually at all.  I’m thinking MS bought themselves a crapload of hype.

I thought the graphics were good, but really, any new game that doesn’t look damn good is just weak.  Sound.. whatever.  Nothing to write home about.  I thought the coolest sounding bit was the opening gregorian chant.  The way some of the aliens ran screaming was funny, but that got recycled big time.  The story isn’t bad, but still, nothing super new.  Gameplay: Mostly fun, but the constant battles against aliens that require multiple full clips emptied into them, coupled with lack of ammo quite often, was just annoying. 

The last bit I found extremely annoying.  Here you’re supposed to be using these uber cool, alien weapons, and yet there were still tons of aliens that you’d have to empty 2 or 3 clips into (and yes, I mean hitting them the whole time) to kill them.  Some would take 2 or 3 full-on rocket hits to die.  I’m not talking “boss battles” either.

To me, Bioshock was a groundbreaking game.  Great graphics, cool story (that you lived instead of just watched cut screen after cut screen, except for once), cool system with the genetic mods, etc.  I liked System Shack back in the day too.

Biggest gripes with CoD4 thus far:
- WAY too hard on veteran.  Wouldn’t care but a chunk of the achievements require doing stuff on veteran.  I’ll likely just not bother, but some parts are just insanely hard.
- Typical CoD spots where enemies basically spawn from nowhere infinitely until you reach a trigger point.  I find that you sometimes have to play some areas a couple times to realize when it’s time to avoid fighting and just get past the enemies to trip the event that stops the spawning.  I can understand being up against a lot of guys, but there should be limits.

CoD bits that rocked (without giving away major plot points):
- Entire sniper mission
- AC-130 mission (damn that was realistic, and obviously inspired by that video that was sent around the net a couple years ago.. even used quotes from it).
- Overall story… could’ve been ripped from the newspapers damn near.
- Nuke and aftermath being so realistic (nobody complain about spoiler… it’s in the damn commercials after all, sans aftermath).

miguelito..

I felt the same ‘meh’ about Halo3 as well. Not even close to same experience I had with Halo1. It’s funny you mention the lack of ammo I’m fed up after a scene where I crossed the checkpoint with little ammo and it’s damn near impossible to take all of the Brutes out with what I have. So I’ll probably have to restart the whole damn level. Very frustrating.

I haven’t played CoD4 on veteran yet (I’ll save that for when I’m done with Medal of Honor Airborne) but so far my biggest gripe is you don’t get to drive an Abrahms tank. The AC-130 mission was awesome but way too short I thought. Yeah the sniper mission rocked, wearing the guillie suits in the grass as the tanks/soldiers roll over you was intense!… Also I could watch the opening credits driving in the car thru the streets all day.

Personally, I thought Halo 1 was kind of average, while Halo 3 has been a decent shooter so far.

I think “decent” probably sums up Halo 3 pretty well too.  But it was nowhere near the “groundbreaking” type hype it was getting constantly from reviewers and such.  People touted it as the new standard and all.

Hell, I had way more fun playing Orange Box, which included my 3rd run through HL-2 (2 times on PC before) and 2nd of Ep 1 (once on PC before).. then Ep 2.  Not to mention how cool (and funny) I thought portal was.  I haven’t even touched TF2 yet, but I’m really not that much of a multi player.

Got here from the great Rock of Love posts, finally registered to answer your Orange Box questions.  I get motion sickness from the games until I use the console to change the field of view, it widens it a bit so you get far less motion sickness. 

For PC, you can change it manually by going into the console and typing:
fov_90

If it says you need cheats enabled then:
sv_cheats 1

Good luck, and I will be here for RoL2.

Crom

So thus far, single player on Rock Band is freaking awesome.  The drums are fun, I really like the feel of the new guitar (some hate it, but YMMV).  I bought a 2nd kit so I could leave one at my parents for holiday fun.. will be trying out multi with the family in a couple hours, and I’m sure it’ll get played a ton over the weekend as we tend to get together at least 3 of the 4 days over the TG weekend.