I've just completed it on normal in 1:40. It was very enjoyable and very nicely polished. As was said before, I also wondered why you have to toggle autofire seperately. After all, I used it pretty much all the time and only used the actual fire buttons to change direction. It wasn't a problem, gameplay was very smooth, but it seemed strange.
Apart from that, normal was just too easy for me. I'm not a "hardcore" gamer, but I hardly ever felt challenged. On the other hand, though, I think it's great that for a change a retro game like this is not as hard as the usually very tough classic games it's inspired by. I suppose hard mode will challenge me a lot, and then there are still the other unlockables, the only "problem" is that after playing through normal mode already, my motivation to go on playing isn't very high. Then again, it's great that I have a whole new map to fight through and have a greater challenge.

In any case a very nice game through and through

Yes, the mektek page is unavailable again.
The torrent file was already posted on the last page: http://steamreview.org/external/mw/mechwarrior4mercenaries.all.to.51.03.01.0017.mtx.torrent

I've also heard that you can simply rename the downloaded file to .zip and extract it. Supposedly you can then just play the extracted game, you don't even need to install it. But, the most recent version is 51.03.01.0020 (instead of ..0017), I don't know how you can get that without MTX.

In any case, downloading it with a different torrent client should be a lot faster. At least I still try downloading it via MTX, and though unlike the previous days it works again, it crawls around at a maximum of 150kb/s, while there are actually 4500 seeds available. (edit: For the record, it still wasn't any faster for a long time since I was using the original BitTorrent client. Oh well.)
I guess MTX really isn't a shining example of good programming.

[edit]
I was told that once you've downloaded the mtx-file with a different torrent client, you can put it into the folder "mektek.net/MTX/temp/games". Then just start MTX and click to install MechWarrior 4. MTX will recognize that the file is already downloaded and install it.

The same applies to the patches, which can be separately downloaded via these torrents:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/196751/mechwarrior4mercenaries.51.03.01.0017.to.51.03.01.0018.mtx.torrent
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/196751/mechwarrior4mercenaries.51.03.01.0018.to.51.03.01.0020.mtx.torrent

Got a gamepad plugged in?

The news seems to have spread by now, so I guess their server couldn't take it. But, I suppose you're better off direclty using the torrent file Cavalcadeofcats linked to, anyway.

Mechwarrior 2 was so good... never got into 4.  Wasn't someone working on a new MW game?

Yup.

Also, there's this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGGmmI4QGDA (Some great gameplay footage here)

From what I've heard they really just had to get the "OK" from Microsoft, which they only got a short time ago. Then they still had to patch the game to work without an original disc.

I guess their "MTX" client is mainly used to connect the players a bit better, give them a lobby for multiplayer games and such. It looks fine on my Win7 system, though download speed is indeed pretty low. But, it's only been released today, so I guess it won't take too long for mirrors to pop up.


I saw that another game called "Assault Tech1: BattleTech" is also available there. It's said to be kind of a "MechWarrior best-of" game. Has anyone played that and knows if it's good?

It was announced quite a while ago, but now it's finally there, the Free Release of MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, including Mektek's MekPak. All info here: http://www.mektek.net/projects/mw4/

I've never played any MechWarrior games, but I guess this is a good time to try one.

Coming (probably not any time) soon: Scout Man!
Fighting such memorable bosses as Heavy Man! Engineer Man! Even Demo Man!

He did say, though, that for a change he doesn't want to pay much attention to graphics and atmosphere in FiNCK, but instead just focus on the gameplay.

I guess I'm becoming the medium here:

Yeah, it's heavily inspired by smb2, and also by Lyle in Cube Sector. However, some things are currently slightly too similar to Lyle, so I'm going to replace a little of the graphics at some point before the release on May 12.

[...]
Btw is he really going to sell this ?

Yep:

At the moment I'm making my best shot at living off game development. It won't be free, but as it is developed rapidly in just a few months the price tag will be low.

The key inspirations are indeed Mario 2 and Lyle, there's no dishonesty about that:

To explain the game itself, it's a platform game very inspired by Super Mario Bros 2 and Lyle in Cube Sector.

Alright, the script now works flawlessly. As explained before, I disliked that the Desktop Dungeons window is so small, but just maximizing it somehwat messes up the scaling. So, this little script automatically runs Desktop Dungeons and then doubles the window size, so it runs with a "clean" doubled resolution.
Just download this, put it in the Desktop Dungeons folder and run it:
http://www.mediafire.com/?lzzmyztnmqm
It's an exe-file, but it's just the compiled script. It doesn't change anything about the game.

If you have AutoHotkey installed and want to alter it in any way, here's the original script file: http://www.mediafire.com/?jiz22onygt2

Here's a ZX Spectrummy style set for anyone wanting a nostalgia trip.
- thank gawd for tooltips as without them the glyphs would be a tad cryptic ...
[...]
http://tikipod.com/temp/ZX.zip

That looks really cool

I think this will be a nice point in the "How much may indie games cost?" discussion. It looks fun, but certainly like a typical freeware game, something most players won't expect to be asked to pay for, similar to VVVVVV.
I am also of the opinion that freeware games are a pure luxury for gamers, as common as they are or were, and that it's absolutely justified to sell such a game, as big or little as it may be. But, I guess I'm not in the minority when I say that I'm still just not interested enough in it to buy it, as cheap as it may be.

I also think Lyle in Cube Sector is a very great game, and FiNCK looks much more puzzle-oriented, but Nifflas does indeed seem to borrow heavily from it. Is that really the case, or are there other earlier games in which picking up and throwing items this way is such a big part of the gameplay as in Lyle, apart from Mario?

To the guy who re-downloaded and lost all his unlocks: they're the .af and .bin files in the program folder.  Hope you didn't delete your old one.

Oh, that's why. Those are the files which I had to delete to even get it running again, due to the error described earlier.
It's not really that bad, if that bug is fixed some time, I might just give it another try. After I had played through it a few times, every playthrough was actually pretty quick But, considering how much trouble I had with the final boss in BAMF mode, I'm not sure if I'll do it again.

So, Outcast is now available for $6 via GOG.com and has been enhanced to run less troublesome on modern machines: http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/outcast
I wonder what it's like playing it for the first time now. I'll find out soon enough

Master of Orion 1 and 2, too, by the way!

I've only watched Nausicaä and Mononoke now, they are indeed very nice. Both their endings left me somewhat disappointed, but I also liked the generally rather serious tone at least prior to those.

Grave of the Fireflies also interested me, as judging from what I've heard it's one of the few such movies going all the way in being very serious and realistically upsetting. Unfortunately, I could only bear watching it about halfway through. Not because of depression, but because of the terrible english dubbing. I guess Japanese with subtitles is the way to go there.

Concerning RPGs, Gothic 1 and 2 do it the best in my opinion, at least making you believe that there is an ecosystem. All NPCs, even enemies, have a (simple) day and night routine. Each citizen in a town has a bed of his or her own where they sleep at night, they work at their specified place during the day, maybe go to the tavern around noon, and then it's repeated. If certain types of animals meet others, say wolves meet the bird-like Scavenger, they attack each other. Those Scavengers sleep during the night, whereas at the same time wolves become more active and make the woods a very deadly place to wander around in during nighttime.

Of course, there isn't a real dynamic market for example, the townspeople don't actually produce anything, but their shops are just restocked every 3 days or so. But, when you play the game, everything is nicely made to fit this world and make it very believable. Quests don't feel tacked on, but seem very understandable in the context of the world. Also there are hardly any loading times, so people don't just disappear when they enter their houses and you would have to enter a new "level" to follow them, it's seamless. They aren't perfect games, it takes a while to get into them, but they are really special in making their virtual worlds feel believably realistic.

As it's free today I just gave it a try, and it's really good! Actually I'm quite surprised by a few things.
I expected the gameplay to be rather basic and shallow, but I was at least partly wrong, considering that there is a number of spells and items to be found, which kept it interesting for me.
Secondly, I thought it would be a shorter game, similar to POWDER, which you play for maybe 10-15 minutes and then at some point foolishly run into a much stronger monster or fall victim to some hidden trap, die, and play again. This doesn't seem to be the case, as I've played Fargoal for maybe half an hour now, and the difficulty was never high, so it seemed like much more of a "crawler" like Diablo, without an emphasis on unlucky deaths, and more on rather comfortable exploration that steadily gets more challenging.
Lastly, I was really surprised by how atmospheric it is. Not a very fast pace, very nice and calm music, and often somewhat eerie synthie sound effects. The graphics also look good and contrary to my expectation I didn't mind the static sprites.

I'm still not convinced that it's totally "my" kind of game, because I think I might still find it a bit repetitive on the long run. But, it has been a pretty nice surprise so far and plays very well with the great controls and just highly polished design all around.

Can someone please tell me what finishing the game in BAMF Mode unlocks? Apparently, some higher force or so wants to prevent me from seeing it myself. Finished it on Kitty difficulty first, then twice on Normal, then once on Hero with the cool third character, and even unexpectedly had a good time with BAMF Mode up until the end. The final boss, though.. I suppose I took as much time trying to beat him as it took me to play through all the rest of the game. I actually got the strategy all planned out and even nearly beat him a few times. But, then all of a sudden the game started lagging like hell, restarting it didn't help, then I extracted the exe file again from the zip, which brought the crash-at-startup-error back but fixed the slowdown. And, when I thought that I could go on playing like this, I noticed that doing all of it reset the unlocks.
Creepy.

Anyway, I doubt I'll bother with all of it again, so I'd at least like to know if the last difficulty and fourth character are as cool as the third one

It sure looks pretty nice and seems to handle well. Two things put me off, though: I've read that the "impact" you have on a group of zombies doesn't change at all depending on which vehicle you choose and at least not enough depending on your speed. So, no matter if you're driving a truck, racing in a sports car or just taking the cab, it probably doesn't feel much different.
But, I can't judge that, because the other thing that put me off is that the demo always crashed about 10 seconds after the first mission started. I tried quite a few troubleshooting tips given on the official forums, but nothing worked.


Anyway, it still looks like it's very good fun for the few bucks, and I'm quite excited to see how their great HL2 car-combat mod D.I.P.R.I.P. (Die In Pain, Rest In Peace) is going to benefit from Zombie Driver's sales