Thrik

Yeah, sounds like this game is bang on. I've seen a few items in my RSS reader along the lines of "this game is amazing, 10/10, etc" pass by, although I didn't have time to actually read them. Definitely going to have to pick it up.

Man is that 17 quote poor.

Having thought about it I think the Consolevania guys probably got the best rendition of how a Hitman film should play out. Skip to 23:20 to remind yourselves.

It is.

Here's your hero of peace!!!!!

Not to mention the fact that Hitman is in actuality a cold, calculating, killing fuck.

Yeah, the way they present the overall information these days is fairly sound. I also approve of Game Daily's style, which is to have a long review but also give you the option of skipping to a "one minute review" which additionally serves as the review's conclusion. A natural-seeming way of doing it, but not so useful for sorting a whole shitload of games. But then for getting a general idea of decent games I'd use Metacritic, which has an advanced search that I suspect a lot of people have never looked at but can give great results.

Yeah, I was very underwhelmed too. Although it clearly looks a lot better, I was getting too bored of the formula to even finish San Andreas. Unless this drastically mixes things up I'm going to get bored of the graphics and stop playing it fairly quickly. I've also always thought the GTA animation has been fairly clunky/clumsy, and it seems to have remained so in this new trailer. I can't put my finger on what it is about it since it's not exactly badly animated, but it makes me a bit. Man, I don't even know what I'm talking bout!

Wow. You guys are all charitable!

Heh, kind of mental. I think I read somewhere a while ago though that it takes relatively few complaints in television circles to initiate an investigation and often measures, as not that many people do actually complain for the most part. The same possibly applies to games. Which is shit, of course.

It's certainly a more inspired visual style, but it does look kind of ass nowadays -- especially on my 24-inch screen which does a glorious job of highlighting any blurry textures or low-poly models. I think so, anyway. The Episode(s) have aged a bit better, but classic HL2 is kind of ";(". Not that I couldn't still thoroughly enjoy the atmosphere and whatnot. If I were to choose one as of now that is more visually stimulating to play, BF2142 would win hands down. It really is a very rich and beautiful game when things get going, and if it were adapted into a single-player game with more tightly restricted "on rails" play like Half-life 2 it could probably look fairly amazing.

Yeah, that does seem a slightly extreme example Yufster. I've never come across any that bad, but if I did I'd be obligated to literally tell them to fuck off. Physically blocking you from carrying on is crossing the line. In fact, getting their name by feigning interest and then phoning up their employer and mentioning a harassment/invasion charge might go some way to getting that particular bad egg off the streets.

Tee, yes. I'm surprised FEAR didn't run well to be honest; it could be that you had the soft shadows option enabled, which is for some reason a known FPS rapist. Even I got it to run decently on the older hardware I mentioned earlier. I'm not sure why you feel the need to wait a few years though, lobotomy. Considering your graphics card is almost certainly being bottlenecked by that processor, it seems like it'd be worth the £40 or whatever for an old motherboard that can handle a beefier processor. Then again, I'm not very conservative when it comes to splashing out on stuff like this. Really, Battlefield is a very scalable game and I'm not too sure what Wrestlevania meant. The only thing that's really going to slow you down is not having 1GB of RAM, largely due to the amount of stuff you've got going on at once (kind of like how RTS games often perform badly for people due to RAM bottlenecks, despite good components otherwise). Just look at the box's requirements and then pretend it says 1GB of RAM and you can't really go too wrong.

Oh and yes lobotomy42, you should be alright with that. With some tweaking of settings you should get a smooth game, although I'm not sure how the processor will fare and that's probably going to bottleneck your entire system until it's replaced.

The numbers have become fairly useless these days as you've no hope in hell of understanding the various specifications a graphics card has (go check them out to see what I mean). The best and really only approach is to look at performance comparisons on sites like Tom's Hardware and Hard OCP after getting a general idea (ideally from someone else) of what's hot. At the moment the GeForce 8*** series is what you want, with the 8600 being considered the mid-range performer, the 8800 GTS being the high-end performer, and the 8800 GTX being the ultra-end performer (very expensive, ridiculously powerful). A lot of people are opting for the 8800 GTS as it has supreme performance but is a lot more affordable than the GTX. One spec you can watch out for is the graphic card's memory. Generally, the more memory you have the more room you have for pumping up anti-aliasing, displaying high-resolution textures which eat up the memory, and generally keeping things running smoothly. The 8800 GTS comes with 640mb of memory and the GTX has 780mb. I'd consider 512mb a minimum these days. As for AMD, go with Intel. The days of AMD being the de facto standard for gaming processors are over at the moment, with Intel's Core 2 Duo having absolutely beaten them into the ground with both performance and price. The E6600 Core 2 Duo is probably the epitome of price/performance balance at the moment, with each of its 2.4GHz cores being enough to power a game like Battlefield 2142 or Command & Conquer 3 smoothly by itself. Get a game which uses both cores (finally starting to come out more frequently) and you'll have blistering performance. That said, there're other variations of the E6*** range that also perform admirably. The E6600 is particularly renowned though as it can be easily overclocked to around 3.0GHz with just air cooling in most cases. Take the above info and use it to find performance benchmarks via Google and you should find sites comparing them to similar ATI/AMD equipment (graphs for the win).

lol

I dunno, Half-Life 2 is a 2004 game. To expect a game that came out two years later and looks a lot better to run equally well would be slightly unreasonable. I found myself in the position of being able to play very few 2005+ games particularly smoothly with the older hardware I mentioned above, so it's not like Battlefield sticks out amongst its peers. I guess I just found your comment about the engine quite surprising since for what it actually does it's an extremely slick machine that handles dozens of players really well. You'd be very hard pressed to find a finer example of such a scale being handled so well. Anyway, we're probably getting a bit sidetracked here. I really should be working right now.

It's not that bad. My old machine which was an Athlon XP 2800 with 1GB of RAM and a GeForce 6600GT ran it and Battlefield 2 pretty decently with the settings turned down, which is to be expected considering it's a 2004 machine. I'd be a very big stretch to call that a beast by anyone's standards. On my current machine I easily push 90+ FPS with all the settings turned onto maximum and anti-aliasing with all its gamma correction, transparency anti-aliasing, etc. Although my machine is what you would consider a beast these days, it's not difficult to see that you could tone down the hardware considerably and still push 30+ FPS on maximum settings. Considering what Battlefield is, it's to be expected that the requirements might not be the same as your Half-Life 2s and whatnot. I mean, just look at it. The sheer scale of the gameplay and the amount of action that can occur on the screen at once is beyond what you get in most action-packed single-player games, nevermind multiplayer games. The only thing I can see really making Battlefield difficult to run is not having the vital 1GB of RAM. Considering 2GB is pretty much standard fare for making games run at their best these days and Vista itself really wants 1GB, having under 1GB and expecting to run modern games in pretty much madness. Way back in 2005 is when people started saying "You really need 1GB nowadays". Anyway, if you get it my name is RyanJW. Feel free to buddy and stalk me as I play a lot.

Okay, but surely that'd be country specific? It'd be madness to not sell a game on the console worldwide just because one of the countries in its domain gave it a high rating. Just because it's the US shouldn't mean it implicates Japan, Europe, Australia and everywhere else. I don't really know how Nintendo/Sony and their decisions on a country-by-country basis generally go, though.

Well, it was kind of Europe that started the whole thing. Unless you don't count the UK as part of Europe. No ability to sell in those two huge markets = retail suicide, thus inevitable delay to sort the game out. I can't see them releasing an uncut version early and then delaying the other markets for ages while they censor it to pieces (and go through the QA and god knows what else to get it fit for release).

Yeah but as was established earlier, these newspapers are quite valued by daily commuters who can't be bothered dragging/buying their own reading material and just want something to fill the gap. Spam is typically not bundled with something you'd actually find any value in. Plus, paper/charity pushers are just people looking for part-time work that's flexible and would rather be out and about amongst people than in some trashy shop or McDonald's. I know a couple who have done/do it and they're certainly not deserving of any contempt. Unless you're a big wuss who doesn't like saying no to people and just awkwardly walks past trying to act like you can't hear them, there's really no issue with just smiling and saying "no thanks". On a related note, at Nottingham train station you often get companies like Adidas or whatever giving you free cans of deodorant and milk, etc. Can't complain about that, even if it is a calculated risk to instil your confidence in the brand.

Haha, God. The first time I tried re-playing Twin Snakes with hard mode on I was almost in tears thanks to their massively superior vision and hearing, and literally took about two hours just to get out of that first bit where you come up in your scuba gear. It doesn't help that the attack force they send out for you is also highly advanced. I did actually give up just after I got indoors though as I sorted my PC out and got a Wii, so I'm looking forward to replaying all three games next year or something with hard mode for the first time. Just the first part of Twin Snakes alone demonstrated that it's a totally different experience, which is indeed a great approach to difficulty.

Hee. :~ 2142 really is fantastic. I played the older ones quite exhaustively, but they don't compare on any level to how enjoyable the gameplay in 2142 is. Everything has been improved and made more accessible and fun -- well worth getting, and there're no end of servers/players all day and night. My favourite part is that you can unlock lots about 45 things over time, ten for each class. One of the first in my case being stealth camo which is literally that from Metal Gear Solid but with a 20-second timer. You can practically be Solid Snake out there with your knife and pistol! Surprisingly it all remains balanced and fair, despite this. But then the point is you can totally specialise and have great fun doing whatever you like the most, which is what 2142 got right so much better than the other Battlefields.

Clearly time to get yourself some of this and then come stalk me up. ;