MasteromaN,
InsaneFury
Ughmmm, sorry. I guess I just couldn't make out any suggestions from his posts here. One was even moved eventually. My bad. Will be more extrapolative next time.
Narfous, no *war*, that's so stupid. Just please don't be so frenzied when you post in my respect.
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Regarding the subject:
I do not know much about "Gore: Ultimate Soldier" (2002) release and won't comment on it at the moment.
As for "Gore: Special Edition" (2008) I would like to elaborate on what I consider a premiumware scam(*).
This supposedly free game has several vital gameplay features available
only to premium players:
radar for seeing locations of your teammates and
flags in CTF, ability to see health and armor of teammates, etc.
"Gore" site wrote:... various great, select features in the future will be available exclusively to users who have a Premium Key.
... "premium keys" which players can purchase to unlock extra features not available to free players.
Premium Key costs *only* $19.99.
If one player paid real money for opportunity to buy virtual weapon in MMORPG for the price ten times lower than others have to pay in that virtual world, that's one thing. But if others (non-premium members), even if spent ten times more time in the game, are forbidden to buy that weapon at any price, they are clearly treated as inferior.
Free humiliation by paying members - quite probably, but never a free full experience.
So what you get is a notion of the gameplay, etc., but you can't consider yourself
playing on par until you paid for locked features.
There is multitude of online titles exploiting similar "free" scheme/scam. I tried some (e.g. BiteFight) and shortly realised that as a free player I suffered severe discrimination.
All of such games promote exclusivity for premium subscribers. And when free players are deprived in some areas of gameplay this is
not a free game. When playing a game feels like being crippled, something is really wrong with the whole "free" idea.
The general concept is that sooner or later you will find yourself systematically abused by premiums with those unavailable elite features, simply because you are an easy target. And as you play further it gets worse, since on higher levels you meet more premiums and more disbalance. The whole pain caused by this was carefully planned beforehand with a view to indirectly force free players to give up and become premiums (and get their revenge harassing yesterday's fellow sufferers).
The marker for this type of trickery are exclusive features and limitations that substantially influence gameplay
for non-paying members and go beyond time-saving, unique look and other adjuvant additions.
So, for my money, this game is
free as in scam, not free as in freeware.
They push "
fun" word everywhere on the site, but I believe you'll end up with frustration until you
pay for
premium fun.
The only part that is really free is singleplayer. But since it was not the designer's goal, there's little chance singleplayer mode may be entertaining (and several reviews prove that). So that's not a great deal to receive it for free.
All in all I hate such online scams of a game - not because they require payment, but because they are advertised as free. And as such waste time and bring dissatisfaction to millions of ordinary players, who, when they started, never knew that to escape innate disadvantages they would eventially have either to pay or to quit playing.
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*
Premiumware is a type of shareware that, while posing as free fully-capable product, deliberately misses some of important features available only to "premium" (i.e. paying) users.