Last time I played this must've been like 2004 with my brother. It was his game, and sometimes he wanted a real opponent, so we played hot-seat. I was terrible, I could never really get into racing games, especially simulators.

Thought I've grown since, but nope. It was too hardcore for me then, and it's too hardcore for me now. This is a game for true carheads, I can't understand half the shit it throws at me, and I lose every race.

The physics are amazing though. One of the best collision models I've seen. Different amounts of damage are dealt depending on the speed and the angle. I had some fun crashing into other cars to take them out and get ahead.

LITERALLY the exact same game as the first one.

The only differences are:
1) new tracks (with less visual variety)
2) reskinned menu
3) now motocross and regular racing are split into separate championships.

That is it. Even the soundtrack is the same.

I don't even know how to rate this game because on one hand this means it's as good as the first one (almost, I still prefer the visual variety of the original), on the other hand, if I bought it back in the day, I would've felt robbed. This is like a DLC sold as a full game. If something like this came out today, it would've probably caused an outrage.

Painkiller is a game that I've attempted to beat many times, and I can confidently say I've played through at least 80% of this game, but could never push myself to complete it. I think I've always wanted to like it because there are many reasons to, but at its core it's just an extremely basic and poorly thought-out shooter.

I remember when Serious Sam came out, most people called it a Doom-clone, which couldn't be further from the truth. Then Painkiller came out and people were comparing it to Serious Sam. I suppose because both games feature big crowds of enemies. But there's a major difference here.

Serious Sam often places you in big and open environments that sometimes have buildings or other obstacles laid out in a manner that lets you maneuver and strategize. It also gives you diverse rosters of enemies and weapons, each of which perform different functions. Certain weapons are more effective against certain enemies, which incentivizes you to constantly switch between weapons to target enemies that might be more dangerous or closer to you at that point in time. There is a lot of complexity to Serious Sam, which I feel often flies over people's heads (maybe even the developers' heads sometimes).

Painkiller has none of that. Most enemies function the same, the roster of weapons is very small and, aside from range, there's no significant difference between most of them. You have your shotgun, your rifle equivalent (nailgun) and your machinegun/grenade launcher. The rest are just variations. Each room functions as a tiny arena that you're locked in with respawning enemies. In most cases enemies spawn from 1-3 same places and you can easily just stand there and shoot at the same spot. Or find a place they have trouble getting to, let them congregate there and do the same. The entire gameplay is dead simple.

That being said, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun. Mainly due to the physics. But of course after a while you get tired of doing the same crap over and over again. The devs tried to spice things up with atrocious boss battles, which only make it worse.

I have to give this game props for how it came across in 2004 though. It was one of the best-looking games of the year, and ragdoll physics at the time were still a new and exciting thing. In addition, it has a pretty cool art-design, especially with some very creatively-designed (from a visual standpoint) enemies.

But in the end it's more of an artifact of the era. It was getting rave reviews at the time, and you can kinda see why, but in retrospect it's clear that the graphics were one of the major contributing factors to this. Whereas, when it comes to the gameplay, you can do much better within the same genre.

P.S. Forgot to point out: this Black Edition includes the first expansion, Battle Out of Hell, and it's terrible. It has some creative locations and designs, but gameplay-wise it's noticeably worse than the original game.

I remember when I came across the original GunZ, it was kinda unique for the time. An online third-person shooter/hack-n-slash game with MMO elements and Matrix-style acrobatics. I know everybody loved that game for the broken and exploitable mechanics in PvP, but I really enjoyed the PvE missions as well. I could never really get the hang of the broken mechanics, but I tried! I remember one girl teaching me to do those, asking me "how many buttons do you have on your mice?" and me going "What do you mean? 3 of course" and her going "hm, that's bad". I didn't even know mice could have more at the time.

For the sequel, it seems, the devs were trying to accommodate people like me by getting rid of the broken mechanics. I mean, I never really wanted them gone, but okay. I remember playing this for 20 minutes on release lol. I still had that logged in Steam with the "last played" date being 2014.

But the truth is by 2014 nobody was amazed by an MMO-esque online shooter or by the combination of melee and range combat. Practically every game's multiplayer became MMO-esque by then. Call of Duty and Battlefield were dominating that space.

It's kinda incredible that you can still play the PvE missions in this game, but not sure why you'd want to! As a single-player game this is just horrendous. In fact by the 2014 standards I think the gameplay here is VERY outdated. They just send hordes of dumb enemies at you that are easy to mow down. This was okay for a mid-2000s hybrid MMO-ish game, but by 2014 it's kinda unacceptable. And the art-design, which I really liked in the original, is very unpleasant to me here. It's very anime with lots of oversaturated toxic colors.

For fun though, try turning off the anti-aliasing. This is probably the only game where anti-aliasing means "all the visual effects invented post 2002". Because it makes the game look like those videos that make Doom 3 run on Windows 98.

Very generic linear story-driven TPS with a bad story and a stupid voice gimmick.

It keeps pestering you with dialogue options that don't matter. You can reply to most questions with "Damn", "God Damn" or "Shit", which I don't even know what these responses are supposed to mean in yes-or-no questions, but it's pretty funny. I wish the protagonist was voiced though.

Every character is unlikeable or cliched. You can give out tactical commands, but they don't matter because the game is so linear and simple. You're basically just blasting through tunnels of enemies with occasional cutscenes, scripted sequences and boss fights (which are atrocious). The art design is very plain, the music is forgettable. There's a tacked-on upgrade system which is needlessly complicated (who wants to play tetris when choosing upgrades?), so I simply ignored it.

The AI companions are so stupid and annoying, they constantly get in your line of fire or push you out of your cover, or die and need rescuing. On this one boss fight, one of them died and the other one was like "do you wanna help him?" and I was like "No", and she was like "well, I can't!", only to change her opinion a few seconds later, when I already exposed myself to try and save that idiot, and go "do you want me to help him?", and I was like "yeah!", and she was like "ugh, alright". As a result we all got murdered. Brilliant.

The lowest form of horror in my opinion is one that relies on the sense of self-preservation, startlement and shock value. And that's precisely the type of horror presented in Condemned. Some of it was true for F.E.A.R. too, but due to the outstanding gameplay you kinda wanted to forgive that. At first I thought Condemned has a F.E.A.R. complex of "great combat, bad horror", but within 70 minutes I realized that this wasn't the case.

The combat starts off very impressive. It's difficult to pull-off a good melee combat in first-person, and Condemned is probably one of the better examples of it. And the enemy AI seems very advanced at first, almost like it's playing mind-games with you. But soon you realize that the combat doesn't really have any more tricks up its sleeve, and gets boring very quickly. Plus some issues with it become apparent. For example, it's clear that head-shots deal more damage, but it's almost impossible to have any precision in a fight. You aim at the head and end up hitting air above it. It's almost a happy coincidence when they do happen.

As for the AI, it becomes obvious that the perceived "mind-games" are all scripted, while the real AI is extremely dumb. They like hiding behind corners, and that's basically their only tactic. Which is very annoying because sometimes you KNOW the enemy is hiding there, but there's pretty much no way to avoid being hit. One time an enemy ambushed me, and after I took a couple of steps back, he decided to hide behind that same corner again like I didn't see him.

Furthermore the level design reveals itself to be extremely linear. Sometimes there's like two paths to the same room, but they usually only differ in what pointless items they're gonna have, and it's usually conduits. And these diversions are so brief that you end up exploring both paths anyway. Then there are these special doors that require a special weapon to open, and it's always somewhere around the corner. So there's basically no consequence for picking one weapon over the other, because you're always gonna find the one weapon you need when the situation arises.

Needless to say, guns are almost useless here. Most times you find them with about 3 bullets inside, which isn't worth trading an axe or a sledgehammer for them. I don't really mind having less ammo in a game like this, but what really bugs me is the in-game reason (or lack thereof) for why you can't carry extra clips. Because you carry an entire forensics lab worth of tools on you, but there's no place for an extra clip?

Speaking of the forensics, they're just busywork here. They're not some fun gameplay mechanic. They're usually just "pull out a tool, point it at something and left-click". Most games that feature forensics have this problem, but here there's so much emphasis on it that it becomes really annoying really fast.

And the final nail in the coffin for me is the movement speed. It's very slow, and you wanna hold down the sprint button the entire time, but then you keep running out of stamina. I dunno why they decided this was a good idea. Being slow does not add to horror or suspense. It just makes you feel handicapped. If the goal of the game was to make you feel handicapped, I'd understand, but you're supposed to beat the shit out of hundreds of junkies, so I don't really get it.

All that being said, the core combat is really well-done. I think, if they made it a bit more complex and let you move faster, this could really develop into a fun first-person brawler. The potential is definitely there.

Gameplay-wise this is behind even the first Colin McRae Rally. For a simulator it's just lacking any depth, and the handling is tolerable at best. For some reason it lets you choose real drivers like that makes any difference, but won't let you tune the cars.

The menus are very poorly designed, there's hardly any settings there, you can't even look up controls. When you select "Single Rally", you need to select a location first to see an image of it (if you wanna at least get an idea of the weather, cause the game won't tell you), but then if you don't like it and press circle, it drops you all the way back to the main menu.

Graphically, although it's pretty decent from the technical standpoint, it's drenched in brown and grey colors, making it just unpleasant to look at. And the soundtrack came off more annoying to me than anything else, although I suppose some people will enjoy it.

That being said, it's a tolerable racer. Like, if you have nothing else to play, this is good enough to fuck around and kill some time.

In the conversations about great arcade racers I've never heard Moto Racer's name come up. In fact I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about this game ever. The only reason I know about it is my vague memories of playing it as a kid. I feel like the gaming community is biased towards certain titles due to their reputation. Because this here is the original Sega Rally, except with motorbikes.

And it really makes this distinction tangible with higher speeds, fragile vehicles and more verticality in the tracks. There are two types of races here: your regular speed racing and motocross, and there is a different emphasis in each. The first is a suspenseful, adrenaline-pumping experience that requires hyper attention and reaction. But, when you're able to pull off some of the rather snaky series' of turns at 200+ km/h it feels extremely rewarding.

The motocross tracks give you more time to assess the upcoming turns, but add the challenge of calculating the trajectory of your air time that's gonna result from driving up the hills at high speeds. It's all much simpler and more intuitive than it sounds though. One kinda stand-out feature is the ability to speed up by doing a pop-a-wheelie, which is something that's not explained to you in the game, even the control scheme doesn't tell you about it. It's handy after crashes, but normally you don't need to speed up, as you're already going so fast, it'll only make your bike harder to control.

The graphics and music are gorgeous on some tracks and kinda vary in quality on others. Some songs with vocals sound pretty corny. The game does let you select which song is gonna play mid-race, which is pretty cool, but it's just extra busywork that nobody needs. Perhaps, if the game let you pick a selection of songs like EA BlackBox's NFS titles do, I might've even rated it higher. Because, although this game doesn't really do anything exceptional, everything it does do is extremely well-done. Certain tracks provide such a stellar audio-visual experience that, if the game managed to keep this up for its entirety, it would've really been a perfect experience.

I guess, if I really had to nitpick, I'd complain about the pop-in, which, from the footage I've seen, is as bad on PC as it is on PS1. But it's not THAT bad, and is actually better than most old racing games I've played.

On one hand the combat here is a huge improvement to the formula. In addition to this being in three dimensions, the way your character slides forward a bit when kicking and you having a back-punch move that lets you completely reverse in the middle of a combo and smoothly transition into an offensive makes this so much more complex than the old school side-scrolling beat-em-ups. The fighting here is about distance-management and strategy. You want to avoid being surrounded, which is a thing that can happen only in 3D (or top-down/isometric). And it surprisingly works very well for a while.

On the other hand you're unable to block or break through the enemy blocks, you rarely have an opportunity to grab an enemy, and sometimes you get stuck in that loop of being unable to pick up a weapon because you're being punched and unable to punch back because you're standing over an item and that's when your punch button turns into a "pick up" button.

All these issues kinda come to the forefront on the first boss[1] where the difficulty suddenly spikes and his every hit knocks you down. I still don't know whether I beat him correctly or cheesed him because the only way I was able to do it is get close to him, let him electrocute me, get up and try to hit him immediately before he electrocutes me again. Rinse and repeat till you go insane.

After that boss it seems to me that the issues were starting to become more exacerbated. Enemies became more agile and made you feel like your animations are slow and clunky. New types of enemies started to feel cheaty, as some could incapacitate you like that boss and some would have replenishable health.

All these issues really made the game start to feel stale after that point. A shame because I feel like this had the potential for a masterpiece. But I've definitely played better 3D beat-em-ups and this ain't it.

[1] it was that robotic boss that hits you with electricity. Might've not been the first, I don't remember.

Couldn't find the Linux version. Does it really exist?

For a game that spent about 8 years in development, it feels like it was made in under a year. I imagine, as with many things in Russia, somebody must've pocketed most of the budget. Between 2002 and 2012 SCS Software was putting out a truck-driving simulator each year, sometimes two a year, and they were all better and more complete games than this.

This game is just broken in almost every aspect. Starting with the graphics that look atrocious on max settings. The lighting effects and bloom are insane, some of the shadows look like they came from the 90s, and it's so poorly optimized that it can't output a smooth framerate on my computer that was manufactured 7 years later and was one of the top-tier laptops of its time. I immediately turned off all the effects and shadows, but there's still really bad aliasing, and the maximum anti-aliasing available is 4x, which makes the game look okay, but still doesn't fully solve the problem.

There's now this terrible story mode, which you can thankfully disable. The cutscenes have horrendous animations and voice-acting. In addition to disabling the story, there's a toggle to disable cutscenes, and yet even with both disabled there's still a ton of unskippable cutscenes in the game that play every time you enter a warehouse, gas station, repair shop or any other enter-able building. And they're all long as hell.

The previous two games (Hard Truck 1 and 2) had this old school rock/metal soundtrack, which was alright, but this game has a radio with several stations that play different genres. I mostly listen to hip-hop and some electronic genres (grime, old school dubstep, garage, jungle, etc.), so I can't really speak on the quality of other genres in this game, but the hip-hop music here is just abominable. They must've found royalty-free music or some really desperate broke rappers because this shit is garbage.

The one area where the game doesn't totally suck is the gameplay. It's not as arcady as its predecessor and clearly takes cues from the SCS Software games. It's a totally serviceable truck-driving gameplay. You pick up cargo, drive it to the destination, make money. I didn't really notice any obvious ways to hire drivers, but there were menus that allow you to manage your little trucking company, which I assume is probably the biggest feature of this game, but I never got far enough to really check it out.

However, even in the gameplay I found noticeable downgrades from Hard Truck 2. In particular, you can no longer communicate with other drivers, police or mafia, which makes the open-world feel less like an inhabited place. The collision physics are somehow worse than in the older games, and are frankly embarrassing for 2009. Although the destruction model is pretty decent, the actual collisions feel worse than in the original Ridge Racer. And the cops are completely useless here. Unless you stop your truck, they can't do nothing. I drove half the map with cops chasing me and eventually I just lost them.

Speaking of the map, this game takes place in California instead of a made-up vaguely-Russian map of the last game. The devs boasted in dev diaries that they actually went to California and photographed a lot of it to accurately recreate it in the game. That's cool, but it doesn't really make much of a difference, when you can only drive on the highways. Every city is represented with like 3-4 buildings, the rest is just inaccessible decorations of pretty low quality and with no life in them. In general, the graphics here are pretty bland and technologically way behind the 2009 standards.

In conclusion, this isn't the worst game of all time. There's definitely some joy to be derived from it, but I can hardly understand why anyone would ever wanna play it, considering how SCS Software practically perfected the genre. By 2009 they had made 7 games in the 18 Wheels of Steel series and the original Euro Truck Simulator. I haven't played all of them, but even the first game from 2002 is better than this.

Full disclosure: couldn't play through the game because of constant crashes. Will probably give it another try sometime in the future. Still, I felt justified in rating it based on my limited experience.

I quickly realized I didn't like the story and began skipping the cutscenes, so I figured I might as well download a save file and jump through most of the missions to avoid the crashes.

Shortly before the game's release I played the demo of it and was so impressed that I couldn't wait for the full game to come out. But I remember when I finally gave it a try, the early sections of the game got me so bored that I just kinda moved onto other games.

And it is true that the beginning of the game is kinda slow. You start off with a quick jetpack tutorial and a dogfight, which is pretty fun, but then it kinda drags you into this very slow and mediocre cover-based shooter with a lot of cutscenes, dialogues and walking sections.

Once they give you the jetpack again, there's strangely another dogfight tutorial that is exactly the same. But you also get to do some cover-based shooting with the jetpack, and I gotta say, this is kinda where the game's potential lies, and what impressed me so much with the demo. Imagine a cover-based shooter where you can fly over enemies and ambush them from behind or attack from the air. In addition there is vertical cover that totally shifts the plane of combat. The possibilities here were insane: fully three-dimensional combat and fully three-dimensional exploration of open levels. That's what it could've been.

In reality though, I feel like the systems don't really interact with each other, and often undermine each other. The levels are pretty linear and often wouldn't let you switch between hovering and boosting because you'd immediately start hitting walls and lose control. The floors and ceilings are also quite noticeable. In more open locations you'd see mountains and wanna climb on top of them, but the game just wouldn't let you. But when the game does give you some open-space combat arenas, you quickly realize that you kinda have to get close to your enemies in order to deal any decent damage, and once you do get close, you kinda have to take cover because you're extremely fragile. Not to mention there are very few locations that give you vertical cover.

In fact, I feel like this game is too short and spends way too much time locking you in linear sections and depriving you of the jetpack, the main attraction of the game. Without it, this is just a poor man's Gears of War.

But the dogfights are really the star of the show here. It's very fun to do maneuvers and outsmart enemies. On top of that, the coolest feature is how you can hijack an enemy aircraft and fully utilize it throughout the battle. Like it's not just a gimmick, they don't break in 5 seconds or limit your movement, they're a decent combat option.

Honestly, instead of crafting a story-driven campaign, they should've just given us procedurally-generated open levels with both ground and air combat happening simultaneously like in Battlefront and Battlefield games, except give us better weapons, higher accuracy, more melee options and maybe some special powers to make us feel like a superhero. Let us dive from the air to the ground with an AOE attack or pluck enemies from the ground like an eagle. Let us kamikaze-attack airships or use a hook to zip towards them. Now that would've been a really fun game. But instead this kinda makes you feel like a dog on a leash in a park. There seems to be so much fun to be had here, but they just don't let you do any of it.

After playing the previous 4 entries and seeing continuous improvement, I was hoping this would be the best game in the series. The cover art is certainly the prettiest. But it's like the devs went insane and decided that the handling in R4 was starting to get too normal, and this just isn't the Ridge Racer way. So naturally this game controls like ass. As long as you're holding down the acceleration button, the steering is too tight, but as soon as you release it, it sends the car spinning. If you don't try to fight it, the slightest attempt at steering without acceleration will literally turn your car 180 degrees around. This must be one of the worst-controlling racing games I've ever played.

This is NASCAR in name only. Basically it's a Super Mario Kart game. And if you're into that type of game, you'll enjoy it.

Personally, I've never really been into these games. For some reason they just don't feel like real racing to me, and it's not because they're unrealistic, however it might have something to do with the physics. It feels like you're driving bumper cars. And the power-ups can sometimes feel unfair, when there's no way to dodge or protect yourself. I suppose the retort to this is that you should learn the track and know where each power-up is, like you'd do in an arena shooter, but in an arena shooter you can move to any point of the map any time you want, whereas here you might be half the track away from a protective power-up.

Still, not that I have a huge issue with these games. I can still have some fun with them, but I get bored very quickly. Here, the game actually lets you turn the power-ups off, which I did after a few races. But then it became even more boring, lol. The thing I enjoyed the most was how crazy some of the sortcuts were. Also the commentator reminded me of Weird Al Yankovic for some reason. I kinda ended up playing only to discover all the shortcuts, and I wish they instead did the whole game like that and added traffic to make driving at fast speeds even more risky and suspenseful.

But after spending a couple of hours in this game, I felt like I've had enough. This is the kinda game I think I would've liked way more if I played it as a kid.

If you've never played a rally game, this is fine.

It's a clone of Sega Rally 2, but obviously the graphics are not as good because this is PS1, and the music is pretty generic. In fact, everything here is generic. I don't think this game has a single original idea. There's 3 modes, which are essentially the same thing. There's no tuning or customization, you just drive through simple tracks with time trials and checkpoints. Exactly like in Sega Rally 2, except that game had some tuning in one of the modes, so there's even less complexity here.

A totally skippable, but technically okay experience.