Skip to main content

"But I have nothing to play": NOLF 2 to the rescue.

Despite having picked up a half dozen titles in the recent Steam sale I curiously found I had nothing I was interested in playing last night. After a game free fortnight on holidays I felt the need for that quick shot of gaming adrenaline that only a first person shooter can provide but none of my new games fit the bill.

Despite (because of?) the billion selling success of Call of Duty games good shooters are thin on the ground these days and I have already exhausted the replay potential of the few that made it into my collection.

Turning to my increasingly dust covered shelf of olde games I pulled out a classic I haven't played on almost a decade : "No One Lives Forever 2".

Good news: this humourous tale of 1960s sexy super spy Cate Archer installs and runs without a hitch on Windows 7-64. Better news: despite its age the cartoonish style has held up very well and the game still looks gorgeous. Best news: this game is still brilliant. It is funny, clever, challenging and great fun to play. It is one of the first shooters I remember that had an rpg lite element with the opportunity to upgrade selected abilities such as stealth or accuracy as you progress through the game.

NOLF2 comes from a golden age of First person shooters. A time when creativity had not yet been exhausted by endless repetition and when technology was just good enough to make games that had depth and challenge and graphics adequate not to give you a headache. Highly recommended if you can get your hands on a copy.

Labels:

Comments

Ashen said…
Fully agreed. Despite some minor flaws, NOLF 2 remains one of my favorite shooters of all time.

Monolith used to be one of my favorite developers around. Until they descended to an endless spiral of FEAR sequels that is.
4:36 pm
Anonymous said…
You echo a startlingly common sentiment in the blogosphere following the Steam super-sale.

"I just bought a gigantic pile of games that I'm not sure when I'll actually play..."

And just in time for the most insane MMO release season in history :D Goodbye free time!
5:18 am
mbp said…
Hi @Ashen. I liked the first FEAR but the sequels haven't been able to keep up the standard. Time for them to start over with a new series I think.

@1000damage: Too many games, to little time. Mind you single player games have become noticeably shorter over the years with many having a campaign length of 10 hours or less. I wonder if mmorpgs could get away with something similar? In fact maybe they could make a virue out of limited content: "Our mmorpg will only take five hours per week of your time".
7:21 am
Jayedub said…
NOLF 2 is a great game, back when Monolith made awesome shooters!
7:25 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...
52 comments
Read more

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...
1 comment
Read more

If there is a God I think they are a God of fractals

Life is infinitely complex. In the language of mathematics it is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable. This is the definition of a fractal.  The thing about fractals is that you can zoom in as far as you like and it never gets any less complex. I think life is like that. At one level you see kings and emperors and their epoch defining movements. Zoom in and you see common people arguing over the price of corn. Zoom in further and it is just one person trying to decide what clothes to wear. I think that God, if there is a God inhabits all of these levels and all of the complexity that each entails. 
1 comment
Read more