Well it seems it is almost a PC game. If they would put back in the high res textures and eliminate the one ammo for all, and possibly (very debatable of course) put back the skill system, we might have a passable game. Until then it is an Xbox only title as far a I am concerned.

Looks like another case of the sequel being horrid following a fantastic original. I'm thinking of a word - It starts with M and is 6 letters long

More games should follow behind the No One Lives Forever series example. It had a great original game and an even better sequel.

I am disappointed in Ion Storm. There is absolutely no reason this game has to be so bad. They just had to make it almost exactly like the original, with a better graphics engine, new weapons, augmentations, plot, storyline, characters etc. and it would have had just as much success as the last one. Instead they have to revamp the entire game and make it horrible because it was almost nothing like the original.

While you are correct, I felt that the original idea ( before MS and XBOX decided to join the show) and graphics that were displayed, as a working engine no less, were ten times better the the final product. No high Res graphics, the controls were dumbed down to console level, and therefore gameplay followed. It seems that it is less to do with the game being a sequel, as much as they tried to satisfy the console people first and we were but a brief afterthought. The demo displays this with its horrid text(perfect if you are 10 to 20 feet from the monitor) and tepid mouse feel ( in the future we are all weightless ) Typically we only see this type of awfulness on console ports. i am worried that more companies may decide to go this same route and our systems will be dumbed out of existance. heres hoping the halflife 2, doom3 and stalker are all they seem to be.

BTW I downloaded the trailer for painkiller- looks better than I had hope:grinthumb

That's horrible! Damn Microsoft and their &#%^@%* XBOX. Money money money, I bet MS offered Ion Storm a big chunk of money to shift development to the XBOX, and we get shafted by it.

It should have been built for the PC, then ported over for the console. Not the other way around as you said.

I am signing that petition.

I've been keeping my eye on Painkiller for awhile now. The graphics are really nice, high res, and just as DirectX 9.0b compatible as half life 2 and Doom 3 are. Uses th Max Payne 2 Havoc Physics engine, and has some brutal gore and action.

Mark my words. Sleeper hit.

anyone who wants more info start here, at http://www.painkillergame.com/

Machine gun AND Rocket launcher on the same gun??!!? Genius!

As to the patch, I installed it, but still kept all performance settings the same as before. The game ran fine before, now I get several crashes to the desktop every session. Go figure.