Kak
March 17th, 2007, 06:37 AM
EDIT: ROFL, this post is hard as hell to read, it's not THAT late (2:00 AM) but I'm really tired and incoherent and didn't have the energy to make it look nice. But please read this post anyways :)
The game is called Boiling Point: Road to Hell, but is also known as Xenus. Here are some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_point:_road_to_hell
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/xenus/index.html?q=Boiling%20point:%20road%20to%20hell (you can check out some screen shots there, but it doesn't really give what the game is like enough justice)
I have no idea how I'm going to say all I want to say about this game, and this will be evident by reading this post and seeing me jump around between topics. Also I just started the game and only have a few hours into it, and have only done a few missions, so I don't know how these views might reflect the entire game.
It's like a mix of a lot of games. I don't know if anyone played the console game called "Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction", but it's in a lot of ways a first person version of that, also with gameplay elements from Deus Ex, Stalker and an Elder Scrolls game, and of course Grand Theft Auto. It's even a bit like the Jurassic Park game Trespasser in some aspects, if anyone remembers that game. And it's set in today's age.
Now when it first came out it was extremely buggy, to the point where it was unplayable so a lot of the reviewers said "wtf this sucks" and gave it a 1/10 or something. The most recent patch is 2.0, which makes the game more than playable, but it can still be pretty buggy, but it honestly doesn't take too much of the fun away. The bugs make some of the missions hard to complete. The game isn't supported anymore, and doesn't even have a website anymore, probably because nobody bought it, but a sequel is in the works called White Gold, which looks really sweet and i'm looking forward to it.
This is really weird in that it feels a LOT like one of those terrible low budget games, but it also feels like it was one that was made to be on a scale one thousand times greater in every aspect than it should have been. Some parts of it are so extensive that it's just really awkward because it doesn't really feel right compared to some of the mediocre parts of the game. It's like it does 10 thousand things but does each one mediocrely, but every one of them is still very enjoyable
The graphics are pretty decent, no ragdoll but a lot of the scenery looks pretty good and stuff. There are a few indoor places, but not that many, more than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas though, and that had a decent amount for this type of game. The map is about as big as that game's too, if not bigger, and there's no loading times anywhere for anything, except when you start the game and save and load and stuff. The visuals will remind you a lot of Stalker.
The game is packed with NPCs and lots of civilians walking around the huge cities and stuff, although the car activity is about at the level it is in North Korea in real life, not close to the level of GTA, but enough to get in car accidents or hit by a car when you're on foot. Unfortunately there aren't any good screen shots to give you a sense of scale of the main city, which is about 10 times as big as Balmora from Morrowind, but laid out like a conventional city. You can talk to every person (almost all of the time with full voice acting, except sometimes there aren't any voices but since it's so rare I think this might be a bug, and also the voices are quiet to the point where you need to pay attention to the subtitles to fully understand what they're saying) and most of the time you have several options to pick to say to people, like in Deus Ex. You can also take missions from civilians, with everything from helping an old woman across the street (which took me 10 minutes because of a bug) or helping a guy pulled over on the road with a flat tire by giving him a spare, to bigger stuff like tracking down some "Indians" (the hard core rain forest kind that still hunt with blowguns and only wear thongs and live in the jungle) for some herbal medicine because some Grandmother in a house you were trespassing in has a sick grandson who's lying on the bed sick and modern medicine can't help him. The Indian then in turn says he'll only give you the herbs if you kill some members of the "Bandit" faction hanging out at an old Indian ruin. You can also do a mission for the police chief where you take a picture of the Mayor at this Mafia buildings balcony after midnight.
One thing I wanted to say that I thought was cool was that some of the dialogue is actually quite funny, but then again I have an extremely "broad" sense of humor so I find a lot of things funny. As I said above, you often have options of what you can say to people, and some of the responses are things that made me laugh out loud despite them not being too crazy, it's pretty much that you can make your guy respond really rudely to a lot of things, and the stuff your guy says and how the actor says them can be pretty funny. I can't actually remember any right now, but I know if you guys "acquire" this game and play it, you'll notice them, and if you do please post some of them here. :)
Here's some random things about this game that I didn't want to have to make relate to each other and make nice paragraphs and stuff about, but still wanted to say.
Pretty much exactly like in Mercenaries, there are different factions that are at war with each other (that you can do missions for but it gets the other sides pissed at you), and they are often in random gun fights all over the place, so it's easy to get guns off of dead bodies (but the guns are often in really poor shape). There are different bases for the different factions, and some factions have checkpoints all over the place, some of them have SAM vehicles. This is cool because you often see choppers in the air in the game (and they are always deploying flares) belonging to different factions, and they often get shot down. I have never seen one get shot down yet (as in a missile firing and hitting one and then it come crashing down), but I have heard a lot of radio chatter about enemy helicopters being targeted, and then i'll see anti-air-artillery fire (but not a missile from a SAM yet, and I have no idea where the AAA is coming from, might just be from the assault rifles on the ground) but never see what it's shooting at, then i'll hear stuff and an explosion and then sometimes see an explosion, which I'll investigate and find the wreckage of a burning downed helicopter.
Enemies point guns at you and tell you to freeze and will eventually shoot you in a few seconds (assuming you are just meeting these specific bad guys, and you haven't just gone in there killing people), and you can try to talk them out of shooting you or bribe them. This might be possible if their faction hates you even more than the Bandits faction hates me now (which is due to killing them in that Indian mission).
Vehicles take damage (but it's not shown on the vehicle model, except when it catches fire and explodes) and require fuel. There are gas stations and car mechanics. You can store things in the trunk of the car. You can't carjack people, but if the car is unlocked and empty you can hop in and drive it. You have to purchase your own car from a car dealership.
You can't drive boats or helicopters or other specialty vehicles from the start of the game, when I try to the character just says "I'm not ready for that yet". I probably need to do a special mission.
Your character has location specific health like in Deus Ex. If his legs take damage, he will limp and move slow until you heal them.
Your inventory works like a mix between Morrowind and Deus Ex, you have a certain amount of slots and some items take up more than others, but they also have weight, which slows down your speed.
When wandering around in the jungle you have to worry about snakes, piranhas (which means when away from cities you can't swim to take shortcuts), jaguars, and BEES. That's right, bees. I don't even think you can kill bees, I've unloaded on them. If you've played Morrowind, they're like invincible and almost invisible cliff racers, thankfully they're much more rare, not as fast, and can't give you diseases.
There are different fruits and donuts in the game that you can find and street vendors that sell them.
There is medication addiction and alcohol tolerance in the game. There is also a drug called "adrenalin" which is like speed which is what the drug cartels are all about. The game models intoxication, and a lot of times you have to drink with people in the game so you get intoxicated, and it doesn't just blur your vision, but makes it REALLY hard to walk. It's hard to explain why, but you'll see when it happens.
You get tired and have to sleep in the game.
There is a day and night cycle in game and it doesn't go by all that fast, and you can't sleep through as much of it as you want if you aren't sleepy. And the only way to tell the time that I know of is to look at your non-digital watch on your hand.
The guns in the game have different ammunition types, and have "wear", meaning they break down with extended use. As they break down, they misfire. Most of the guns you find on dead bodies in the game have above a 50% wear, and when that's the case they only shoot a little over 60% of the time. You can get guns repaired and stuff. Despite that "realism", the gun fighting in the game is just like any other action game, if not less realistic, and the death animations are RIDICULOUSLY unrealistic and just plain stupid looking.
THERE ARE KIDS IN THE GAME. That's right, there are little boys roaming the streets. HOWEVER, I don't think you can kill them, because I try to light them up and they just run away (they are about as fast as the Jaguar in game so it's hard to chase them) and they don't seem to take damage. :(
This isn't exactly a "great game", but it's really sweet, and I really feel like if you're a free-roam game fan this is something you seriously have to play.
The game decent computer to run decently. I have a AMD 64 3400+ with 2 gigs of ram and a 256mb Radeon X800 pro, and I haven't had any problems running it on the default video settings, and the game still looks pretty good. You can buy it for 9 bucks at Atari's website, but I don't know if it's worth buying, but if you are a fan of free-roam games, it's definitely worth "acquiring" (2.43 gigs), which is what I did.
The game is called Boiling Point: Road to Hell, but is also known as Xenus. Here are some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_point:_road_to_hell
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/xenus/index.html?q=Boiling%20point:%20road%20to%20hell (you can check out some screen shots there, but it doesn't really give what the game is like enough justice)
I have no idea how I'm going to say all I want to say about this game, and this will be evident by reading this post and seeing me jump around between topics. Also I just started the game and only have a few hours into it, and have only done a few missions, so I don't know how these views might reflect the entire game.
It's like a mix of a lot of games. I don't know if anyone played the console game called "Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction", but it's in a lot of ways a first person version of that, also with gameplay elements from Deus Ex, Stalker and an Elder Scrolls game, and of course Grand Theft Auto. It's even a bit like the Jurassic Park game Trespasser in some aspects, if anyone remembers that game. And it's set in today's age.
Now when it first came out it was extremely buggy, to the point where it was unplayable so a lot of the reviewers said "wtf this sucks" and gave it a 1/10 or something. The most recent patch is 2.0, which makes the game more than playable, but it can still be pretty buggy, but it honestly doesn't take too much of the fun away. The bugs make some of the missions hard to complete. The game isn't supported anymore, and doesn't even have a website anymore, probably because nobody bought it, but a sequel is in the works called White Gold, which looks really sweet and i'm looking forward to it.
This is really weird in that it feels a LOT like one of those terrible low budget games, but it also feels like it was one that was made to be on a scale one thousand times greater in every aspect than it should have been. Some parts of it are so extensive that it's just really awkward because it doesn't really feel right compared to some of the mediocre parts of the game. It's like it does 10 thousand things but does each one mediocrely, but every one of them is still very enjoyable
The graphics are pretty decent, no ragdoll but a lot of the scenery looks pretty good and stuff. There are a few indoor places, but not that many, more than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas though, and that had a decent amount for this type of game. The map is about as big as that game's too, if not bigger, and there's no loading times anywhere for anything, except when you start the game and save and load and stuff. The visuals will remind you a lot of Stalker.
The game is packed with NPCs and lots of civilians walking around the huge cities and stuff, although the car activity is about at the level it is in North Korea in real life, not close to the level of GTA, but enough to get in car accidents or hit by a car when you're on foot. Unfortunately there aren't any good screen shots to give you a sense of scale of the main city, which is about 10 times as big as Balmora from Morrowind, but laid out like a conventional city. You can talk to every person (almost all of the time with full voice acting, except sometimes there aren't any voices but since it's so rare I think this might be a bug, and also the voices are quiet to the point where you need to pay attention to the subtitles to fully understand what they're saying) and most of the time you have several options to pick to say to people, like in Deus Ex. You can also take missions from civilians, with everything from helping an old woman across the street (which took me 10 minutes because of a bug) or helping a guy pulled over on the road with a flat tire by giving him a spare, to bigger stuff like tracking down some "Indians" (the hard core rain forest kind that still hunt with blowguns and only wear thongs and live in the jungle) for some herbal medicine because some Grandmother in a house you were trespassing in has a sick grandson who's lying on the bed sick and modern medicine can't help him. The Indian then in turn says he'll only give you the herbs if you kill some members of the "Bandit" faction hanging out at an old Indian ruin. You can also do a mission for the police chief where you take a picture of the Mayor at this Mafia buildings balcony after midnight.
One thing I wanted to say that I thought was cool was that some of the dialogue is actually quite funny, but then again I have an extremely "broad" sense of humor so I find a lot of things funny. As I said above, you often have options of what you can say to people, and some of the responses are things that made me laugh out loud despite them not being too crazy, it's pretty much that you can make your guy respond really rudely to a lot of things, and the stuff your guy says and how the actor says them can be pretty funny. I can't actually remember any right now, but I know if you guys "acquire" this game and play it, you'll notice them, and if you do please post some of them here. :)
Here's some random things about this game that I didn't want to have to make relate to each other and make nice paragraphs and stuff about, but still wanted to say.
Pretty much exactly like in Mercenaries, there are different factions that are at war with each other (that you can do missions for but it gets the other sides pissed at you), and they are often in random gun fights all over the place, so it's easy to get guns off of dead bodies (but the guns are often in really poor shape). There are different bases for the different factions, and some factions have checkpoints all over the place, some of them have SAM vehicles. This is cool because you often see choppers in the air in the game (and they are always deploying flares) belonging to different factions, and they often get shot down. I have never seen one get shot down yet (as in a missile firing and hitting one and then it come crashing down), but I have heard a lot of radio chatter about enemy helicopters being targeted, and then i'll see anti-air-artillery fire (but not a missile from a SAM yet, and I have no idea where the AAA is coming from, might just be from the assault rifles on the ground) but never see what it's shooting at, then i'll hear stuff and an explosion and then sometimes see an explosion, which I'll investigate and find the wreckage of a burning downed helicopter.
Enemies point guns at you and tell you to freeze and will eventually shoot you in a few seconds (assuming you are just meeting these specific bad guys, and you haven't just gone in there killing people), and you can try to talk them out of shooting you or bribe them. This might be possible if their faction hates you even more than the Bandits faction hates me now (which is due to killing them in that Indian mission).
Vehicles take damage (but it's not shown on the vehicle model, except when it catches fire and explodes) and require fuel. There are gas stations and car mechanics. You can store things in the trunk of the car. You can't carjack people, but if the car is unlocked and empty you can hop in and drive it. You have to purchase your own car from a car dealership.
You can't drive boats or helicopters or other specialty vehicles from the start of the game, when I try to the character just says "I'm not ready for that yet". I probably need to do a special mission.
Your character has location specific health like in Deus Ex. If his legs take damage, he will limp and move slow until you heal them.
Your inventory works like a mix between Morrowind and Deus Ex, you have a certain amount of slots and some items take up more than others, but they also have weight, which slows down your speed.
When wandering around in the jungle you have to worry about snakes, piranhas (which means when away from cities you can't swim to take shortcuts), jaguars, and BEES. That's right, bees. I don't even think you can kill bees, I've unloaded on them. If you've played Morrowind, they're like invincible and almost invisible cliff racers, thankfully they're much more rare, not as fast, and can't give you diseases.
There are different fruits and donuts in the game that you can find and street vendors that sell them.
There is medication addiction and alcohol tolerance in the game. There is also a drug called "adrenalin" which is like speed which is what the drug cartels are all about. The game models intoxication, and a lot of times you have to drink with people in the game so you get intoxicated, and it doesn't just blur your vision, but makes it REALLY hard to walk. It's hard to explain why, but you'll see when it happens.
You get tired and have to sleep in the game.
There is a day and night cycle in game and it doesn't go by all that fast, and you can't sleep through as much of it as you want if you aren't sleepy. And the only way to tell the time that I know of is to look at your non-digital watch on your hand.
The guns in the game have different ammunition types, and have "wear", meaning they break down with extended use. As they break down, they misfire. Most of the guns you find on dead bodies in the game have above a 50% wear, and when that's the case they only shoot a little over 60% of the time. You can get guns repaired and stuff. Despite that "realism", the gun fighting in the game is just like any other action game, if not less realistic, and the death animations are RIDICULOUSLY unrealistic and just plain stupid looking.
THERE ARE KIDS IN THE GAME. That's right, there are little boys roaming the streets. HOWEVER, I don't think you can kill them, because I try to light them up and they just run away (they are about as fast as the Jaguar in game so it's hard to chase them) and they don't seem to take damage. :(
This isn't exactly a "great game", but it's really sweet, and I really feel like if you're a free-roam game fan this is something you seriously have to play.
The game decent computer to run decently. I have a AMD 64 3400+ with 2 gigs of ram and a 256mb Radeon X800 pro, and I haven't had any problems running it on the default video settings, and the game still looks pretty good. You can buy it for 9 bucks at Atari's website, but I don't know if it's worth buying, but if you are a fan of free-roam games, it's definitely worth "acquiring" (2.43 gigs), which is what I did.