Boiling Point review on Moby games
 

A good user review of the game which highlights the not-so-obvious hits… while being realistic about the misses.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/window…viewerId,6226/

I still haven't gotten around to trying Boiling Point yet, despite owning a boxed copy for over a year now. Is it really still as buggy as they say?

If you've played White Gold already than you might have to get used to the more simple graphics but also being impressed by way better features and of course fully voice translation, it is way worth to play it but consider even more time than with WG, a deeper story and better fights, of course ensure that your boxed one is patched up already, bugs arent that nasty like in WG, which game fills the forum of having so many bugs- clealy WG.

Yeah I think quirky is more the word for it. I don't remember anything game breaking.

It sounds like a lot of people consider Boiling Point to be superior to its sequel. Is this the case?

I'm going to install it this week. I just need the 2.0 patch, right?

Yes it's much more complete as a game - White Gold has a prettier engine and is a lot of fun, but feels like a tech demo sometimes IMO. Plus the translation sucks.

2.0 patch (~200mb) is all you need. I found the mouse acceleration to be a little off in Win7, but it's fine in XP with the same hardware.

I just installed Boiling Point, but I'm having a hard time locating the v2.0 patch for the US version. All I can seem to find is the patch for the European version.

I had the game on my to-play list for a few weeks and finally installed it partly due to this thread and the linked review, but I was pretty disappointed.

It's very addictive, yes, but I don't have any fun driving around the bland country-side and shooting up dudes in various camps. The actual gameplay is just bad. The worst thing about the game is its structure. So far progress in the main quest is only possible if you have x amount of money. And the necessary amounts become very huge very soon, which makes for very tiresome gameplay.

It can provide short bursts of fun and satisfaction when completing the varied side missions, the factions are a fun element and the main quest offers different methods to accomplish your goals at times, but the game is bogged down by the mediocrity of it all.

I don't know the details (I have the UK version) but I don't think a 2.0 US patch was released for whatever reason. There's a 1.1 patch out there. Val, do you remember why that is?

Have you tried using the UK 2.0 patch?

I saw the US 1.1 patch, but it was a lot smaller and didn't fix nearly as many bugs.

I didn't try using the European patch. Do you think it will install on the US version without any problems?

I read somewhere that it should work the US version. No promises with this game though I'm afraid…

I played it for about 30 minutes this morning (unpatched) just to get some first impressions. I wanted to see first-hand how bad it was without any patches.

The worst thing by far is the mouse control. It's absolutely terrible in Windows 7 64 bit. I can't pan the camera left or right without the crosshair floating around vertically. Hopefully this will be better after I patch it because there's no way I could play the entire game like that.

Didn't notice any bugs during my short playtime other than distant vehicles sometimes popping in and out. The in-game anti-aliasing seems to be broken though. Even at the maximum setting, some objects in the distance are horribly jaggy.

Also, I got a security alert saying that Windows firewall blocked Xenus.exe for some reason. Not sure what that's about…

Gonna try the patch now…

Ok, I played for a few hours today after patching it. The European patch seemed to install just fine on my version.

This game is very rough around the edges, even with the 2.0 patch. Still, I can easily see why it's so popular with some people. The game world is huge, and the level of freedom exceeds just about anything I've ever seen in an open-world game.

I really like how you actually have to learn how to do certain things in-game. For instance, you can't just jump into a helicopter without being trained to use it. I wish more developers would take that approach.

Those things said, there are some aspects about BP that really irk me…

First, why do non-human enemies only attack me? I see snakes, etc., go right past soldiers and neither side reacts, but everything goes aggro towards me as soon as I come into view.

Then there's the drivers… talk about annoying. They did a horrible job in regards to making NPCs drive realistically. What's worst though is the way they'll sometimes constantly honk their horns over and over again for no apparent reason. I actually stopped playing today because I was getting so irritated with it.

Are there any mods for this game? I did a quick search but didn't come up with anything. I'd like to give BP a serious run, but I'd have to tweak some things first. I'd like to mod out the car horns, and change the crosshair to start. I'd also like to be able to toggle run/walk, instead of having to hold down a key to walk, which seems backwards to me.

This game has so much potential. I'd like to see someone like Wesp turn his attention to it.

I played Boiling Point when is was released and I loved it despite it's bugs because the world was so huge with so many things to do! But the ending sucked and there wasn't a SDK around at the time so I wouldn't know what to do. Also most of the BP issues are beyond editing dialogue files which is what I do in WG and TP. I think it's too late now…

BTW, have some of you played Dead Island? It reminds me a lot of BP and WG with the open world setting and lots of small missions. Only the game runs much better (Chrome engine) and Techland got a trendy theme (cool zombies) and thus a hit on their hands!

I played it for a short while but wasn't impressed. I really hate it when a game's single-player mode feels like multi-player, and that's the impression I got from Dead Island.

I'm still keeping it in mind though. There's already a few people working on mods to improve certain aspects of the game and make it more realistic.

That was my first impression too, when I noticed that female characters were addressed like males, but then I continued and there is no multi-player feeling left for me at all now!

Yeah, some game elements seem stupid, like getting health from food and drink while not be able to use bandages or painkillers that you find. Or needing money to repair weapons instead of necessary parts. I guess this could be changed but then the game would probably have to be re-balanced…

You made it tasty, so I checked the shots in Gamespot and "borrowed" a copy, my opinion- if you like Left for Dead 1&2 with Caribbean flair than your on the right place, sexy chicks except for the infected ones :-), lots of spladder from the first moment and some good features with collecting any kind of crap and making defensives out of it, sure thing that it is far away from any perfection but BP and WG fans will like it from the environment and instead of doing gentleman kills it now changes to pure slaugtherhouse style.
There always is a reason to complain about something but I guess the same we are doing with our other game topics in that forum. I will buy Dead Island and give it a "pro" with hoping that the community mods even can refine it after a while.

I had fun with Dead Island but I'll wait for some mods to fill the gaps before I get serious about it.

RE mods for Boiling Point, there was a site called 'born to be freeform' which hosted all sorts of great stuff but it disappeared a couple of years ago, and all that stuff went with it. There were some pretty big mods out there once, and I've seen at least one 'overhaul' in the works that never eventuated - one of them using the CryEngine I seem to recall!

But I think it's a case of 'what you see is what you get' these days. I'd like to know what happened to Deep Shadows, I doubt we'll ever hear from them again. And I doubt we'll see games like these again very often either - if the devs had received the financial backing required to finish them properly, then I think the associated pressures (i.e. too much to lose) would have meant far less ambitious games being permitted. It seems to be one or the other these days.

There were mods for boiling point but when the websites for the game died all of the mods went with them.

Okay, I checked a favorite old-games-site of mine and found the following two official mods that I never heard from before. Maybe someone of you can try them out…

http://3dsl.game-host.org/3DSL/modaddon4.htm#466

Thanks for the link Wesp5. Those look like they're mostly just additional missions and such, but I might still give them a try if I take a serious run at Boiling Point.

I checked my files for Boiling Point and besides the SDK I have a mod that increases view distance, 2 vegetation texture replacers, and a content mod called Renegade Storm. I can upload if anyone wants them.

Hi guenthar, I'm interested in the view distance and texture mods please.

I think you should upload the Renegade Storm mod too, before it dissappears forever…

I am uploading all of the mods I have (including an alternate map mod that I had also) and I am creating a new thread for that. I am going to copy the post linking to the mods Wesp posted over to the new thread for easy access.

The only patch required is the European Retail patch. iirc it was 192 Mb.
Link: http://www.shacknews.com/file/7078/b…il-patch-20-eu
That was about a three hour download for me in 2005, on dial-up!

Don't worry with any of the other patches. Believe me!
The bugs in the unpatched version were pretty hilarious, but not game breakers.
The size of the moon was one bug they fixed…no big deal.
You could destroy the police station with crossbow bolts.
The jaguars used to *fly*, and grannies would attack you with grenades.
I played though once unpatched just for the fun of it. Though I would not recommend it to anyone now. After playing modern games, you have to be a die-hard to play unpatched BP. The MAIN problem unpatched was the driving controls. And as driving is such a major part of BP gameplay, it was very unpleasant.


Renegade Storm MOD by ShadowMoses was the only playable MOD I came across. There was talk of another playable mod back in the day but it was incomplete/buggy/not generally released, at least I never got to play it. But Renegade Storm was almost to the same commercial standard as Boiling Point itself, props to Shadowmoses!

Unfortunately most of the magazine reviews at the time were made on the first released/unpatched/buggy version of BP, which lead to the commercial/marketing failure of the game. By the time the European Retail patch was released, the world had already moved on. Except for people like us, eh?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007…e-of-the-moon/

Another bit of useless trivia from the old days, some fourteen-year-old discovered that the moon in BP was just a series of jpgs, which he replaced with pictures of naked chicks. The thread where he announced this at xenus-hq.net had the most number of views there, by about twenty thousand!
Similar thing happened at the DeepShadows forum where there was a thread titled something like "Topless Babe" on the White Gold board that 50 000 views, whereas most other threads topped out at about 1 000.

< insert smart comment about nudity in video games> :blush:

You were still using dial-up in 2005? :thinking:

I am ten k from the exchange, via ancient copper cable network. Half my neighbours still can't get broadband! I have ADSL 2+ now, but speeds are still barely above dial-up, it is a joke! Still, it is nice living out of the city, at least I don't have whores and drug addicts fighting in my front yard lol.
It typically takes three days to download a 5Gb torrent! But at least we have fresh air, no traffic, no crime.

Oops! I better say something on-topic! Last time I saw BP on sale, it was going for AU$7.99. What a bargain! But I bet none of that made its way back to DeepShadows. Pity they did not do what CD Red Project did with The Witcher 2 - set up their own on-line distribution company so that 100% of revenue went to the devs.

i assume the devs sold their soul to the devil (Atari) and were not allowed to set up their own on-line distribution channel.