The games you never played

[friznit]

I've been pretty immersed in MMO's for some years now. First it was Eve, then it was WoW. In between times I play the odd strategy title such as one of the Total War series or venture into the 'military sim' stuff such as Armed Assault. I even secretly played X3: Terran Conflict for a while, but that was mostly when no one was looking and I had no internets.

Looking back over some of the more popular games that have cropped up, I realise that there's many that I've missed along the way. Farcry, COD, FEAR, even LotRO and Warhammer to name but a few. I was browsing through some of the 5punky reviews that were written soon after some of these titles were released and as is often the case, they are quite often raved about only to disappear into obscurity mere weeks later.

Two things come of this. First, I think there's a few things that we could add to develop the richness of our collective gaming history. Revisiting some of the older reviews and adding a second opinion after the initial buzz has worn off, bug fixes have been applied, and perhaps some game enhancing mods have been released. Classic examples of this might be STALKER, which I understand was improved considerably after the modding community had a few months to fiddle with it.

Secondly, we could have a 5punk hall of fame, where we post an exclusive list of games that we think everyone really should have experienced at least once, since regardless of which genre you prefer, they're actually highly entertaining to play.

[Dog Pants]

I was sort of hoping for a 5punky hall of fame with the 10 5punkiest games list I made. I can see what you mean with games being raved about then disappearing - I think it follows the patterns set by the most actively playing 5punkers, they play a game to death and once they get bored there's not enough people to support it here. I feel like I missed a few good games these last few years - TEEF and L4D immediately spring to mind, and I'm getting that feeling with Killing Floor now.

I do like the idea of returns to old MMOs we didn't like, at least in theory, since they're the ones which change the most in their lives. However, I find myself already pretty much knowing the results.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I think it follows the patterns set by the most actively playing 5punkers, they play a game to death and once they get bored there's not enough people to support it here.

I think this is as much a problem with the games as with 5punkers.

Take BF2 (a slow burner, admittedly) and CoD4, both of which got played to fuckery in their day, but remained popular for a long time.

I also find it interesting that the 2 games you mention are both valve games, I'm starting to think that they're more liable to overplaying due to the glacial dev cycle and slow release of new content, along with the excessive hype.

I can see killing floor lasting better, as it's simple gameplay and already has a solid foundation as a mod, so people already have maps made that need porting.

Also, on the subject of valve, I think they ruin games by making them too player friendly. L4D, on expert mode will occasionally overwhelm you with a tank, but basically, walk through map, same way every time, stuff runs at you, mostly easy to deal with, no thought, no tactics.

I personally found myself getting bored of L4D coop reasonably quickly after release. Survival mode is an improvement, but to be honest, Keith does it better, it's not got all the player friendly stuff going on, so it matters more if you die, you're actually inconvenienced.

[Dog Pants]

Well L4D and Teef weren't necessarily examples of short life, just that I missed them, although with L4D's limited content I'm not surprised it doesn't get played so much now.

[friznit]

Speaking of coop, any news on the STALKER coop mod?

[Gunslinger42]

I personally found myself getting bored of L4D coop reasonably quickly after release.

So did I, but playing versus kept L4D alive for quite a while for me, and it's exactly for the reason you said co-op got boring - it being basically the same simple thing each time, and the only real threat was the immense damage tanks could do - however playing with humans made it more of a challenge than an AI, even the bastard director, could ever hope to achieve (maybe the next AI/director type deal made will BECOME AVAHRE and offer more of a challenge)

The thing that eventually caused l4d to lose my interest was the limited maps. While I think its great and had tonnes of fun, it does need more campaigns.

Teef on the other hand is alive and well as far as I'm concerned (and is for bali as well, I believe). A large number of maps/modes, plenty of updates (granted, first few updates were slow to come out, but they seem to be picking up the pace now)

[HereComesPete]

The thing that eventually caused l4d to lose my interest was the limited maps. While I think its great and had tonnes of fun, it does need more campaigns.

Teef ... seem to be picking up the pace now)

Both these things. L4D needs more maps, I know they put a lot of effort into each one with it being a mini-story etc, but it needs more ground to cover.

I think that to recycle them and add new bits would work. So each map features in another two or so runs that mix new and old, it would save time and as long as they didn't take the piss too much I think it could work. New mode is all well and good but it just goes horribly wrong on some bits because it was rushed out as people got bored quickly.


As for Teef I totally burned out on that, having a few weeks off when it came out I went a bit admin crazy over the 4+ servers for very long amounts of time as the early exploits were discovered and people shouted fix!/ban!/lul f4g! etc etc. On top of that me and Berk put a lot of actual play time into it very quickly, so it was something like 40 hours in the first 5 days I was on our servers.

I'm slowly getting back into it, but I can't face it for any serious amount of time through something that was my own fault really. I reckon it'll be the arse end of this year before I can stand a lot again.

[HereComesPete]

Speaking of coop, any news on the STALKER coop mod?

Old one won't work properly because the coop spazzes the A-Life, but there's various degrees of success in getting runny roundy screamy bits to work okay.

Call of Pripyat apparently has some sort of free-play thing that might allow for coop, I guess we'll know when they release more concrete details about it.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Both these things. L4D needs more maps, I know they put a lot of effort into each one with it being a mini-story etc, but it needs more ground to cover.

I think that to recycle them and add new bits would work. So each map features in another two or so runs that mix new and old, it would save time and as long as they didn't take the piss too much I think it could work.

This, I honestly always expected it in the game, there's no reason they couldn't have had more random paths through each map.

As for Teef I totally burned out on that, having a few weeks off when it came out I went a bit admin crazy over the 4+ servers for very long amounts of time as the early exploits were discovered and people shouted fix!/ban!/lul f4g! etc etc. On top of that me and Berk put a lot of actual play time into it very quickly, so it was something like 40 hours in the first 5 days I was on our servers.

I'm slowly getting back into it, but I can't face it for any serious amount of time through something that was my own fault really. I reckon it'll be the arse end of this year before I can stand a lot again.

also, the class updates didn't help their cause much, I'd rather they'd released lots of new maps, then the classes, rather than dragging both out over more than a year.