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Portal and the Orange Box

(25 Oct 2007 11:02)

After much cursing and grumbling, Valve convinced me to purchase the Orange Box recently, despite how I (and I imagine pretty much everyone else who bought it) already own HL2. The main game I was interested in was Portal, having not yet finished the main HL2 campaign (yeah I know, I'm working on it!) the episodes could wait. I would probably only be playing Team Fortress 2 at a LAN party, so I saw no need to prioritise that either. I had however, heard great things about Portal. Initially I tried playing it on a friend's account but on my PC, and it seemed to work, although after completing half the game having not heard anyone utter a single word, I thought "this can't be right", enabled subtitles, and sure enough, I'd missed a world of dialog. No matter how I adjusted things, the only thing I could get to speak was the toilet. So I reluctantly purchased the Orange Box for my own account, and despuite not downloading any files, when I opened the game, the voice was there. What's this? An Audio copy protection system now?

Anyway, only a few levels in I saw what all the fuss was about. The gameplay was great, the speech had me in fits of laughter, and all in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
A large number of people say the game was too short, to which I say, nonsense. The gameplay is solid throughout, but by the time I was a few corners from the 'boss' moment, It was time to call it quits. I think the game lasted a perfect amount of time. Long enough to satisfy, short enough not to bore.
And then there's the song at the end! The humour and execution of it all was quite frankly, genius.
More games like this please!

What also amused me about the game is the endless loops you could create with the two portal gun. That was enjoyable (and nauseating) to watch, and it became obvious why the game is used for Stress tests on PCs. Continuous endless rendering and physics calculations shoudl; stress any PC to the limit. Shouldn't it?
In all honesty, while my PC struggled at 2560x1600, at 1920x1200 max, the game ran fine, without needing to overclock my graphics card.
Hats off to the developers, the game looks good (albeit slightly simple) and is thoroughly enjoyable to play.
Now off to the bonus missions!

Oh, and I did enjoy Peggle Extreme. Is that a crime?

[ Comments: 5 | Post comments ]

Unreal Tournament 3 Demo Beta

(18 Oct 2007 16:10)

I've recently downloaded the UT3 demo, and I must say, I'm more impressed than a lot of people have been. It runs relatively well for a demo, albeit with a few glaring bugs as always. The demo includes two Deathmatch maps, DM-Heatray and DM-Shangrila, and a Vehicle Capture the Flag map, vCTF-Suspense.
DM-heatray is a well-styled map and is familar from all the preview shots I've seen. It also includes a necris Darkwalker, a war-of-the-worlds like laser deathray gibbing machine. A vehicle in a deathmatch map? Strictly, when there are loads of players, it gets eaten alive by firepower as it's weapon isn't fast, but because it's so powerful, you can easily get killing sprees with it, no trouble.
DM-Shangrila is a map that reminds me of a similarly styled map from 04, masurao I think it was called. Oriental themed, and themed well. However, there's an inescapable graphical blur that stops me from ever feeling fully involved...
The VCTF mode is a real hoot, and the hoverboard is hilarious to use. Get shot and you fall off, and are a sitting duck from the artillery shells of a Hellfire, blasts from a Goliath, lasers from the Mantas and Raptors, or bombs from the new enhanced Scorpion. On the whole I really enjoyed it, apart from when a tem-mate caryying the flag decided to randomly walk of a cliff to his death, leaving me sweating.

Graphically, the game looks good. Unsurprisingly, it can be summed up by the simple equation of UT2004 + Gears of War = UT3, there or there abouts. Not that that's bad by any means.
On my system, I can get around 30-45fps in all games with the 'max detail settings' of the demo (I'm told this will equate to medium in the full game, uh oh) at a resolution of 1680x1050, which puts it in the same league as the other 'high requirements' games I have, Rainbow Six Vegas and Stalker. I prey it gets optimised a bit more, or it'll seem far less forgiving than it's 2004 counterpart.

Also, at a file size of 750MB it's quite small, so I thoroughly recommend you give it a look if you liked the old UT games, but make sure you have a decent PC first!

[ Comments: 3 | Post comments ]

October 2007

Damn it!

Portal and the Orange Box

Unreal Tournament 3 Demo Beta

Quick praise of Thermalright


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