Games – Page 4 – Mostly Harmless

June 8, 2007

Halo 2 on Vista

Microsoft could have done better for a Vista only game.

Two weeks ago I was at my in-laws house. My nephew has an old Xbox (not the 360) and was playing Halo. It was a little retro compared with Gears of War but it looked okay. So for $20 at Best Buy I picked up the original Halo Combat Evolved for my PC. I completed it quickly enough and had some fun.

Plasma grenades sticking onto the bad guys was fun; sometimes the little grunts would shout “Not again!”

Halo 2 for Vista came out and I picked it up too. It’s okay. It’s not as visually entertaining as Unreal Tournament 2004, and the Marines have already run me over in a Warthog.

Just like an original Xbox game, it feels a little retro but displayed in wide screen. So far the game play is acceptable, just not anything to get excited about. It plays better than the original Halo but there is nothing that I can see that justifies it being a Vista only game.

Microsoft should have gone with a port of Gears of War, now THAT would have been very cool.

Screenshot taken from Microsoft’s Halo 2 for Vista website.

April 14, 2007

Gears of War

Gears of War from gearsofwar.com I’m slow on getting the latest games. A few weeks ago my pal told me he got Gears of War for his Xbox 360 and loved it.

He and his son completed it on coop play. He described it as having fantastic graphics and great game play. The fact that if you don’t get cover, you’re dead was a nice touch.

I told him I’d get the game this weekend. I picked it up last night. I moved the Xbox 360 into the bed room so the kids would not get woken up by the carnage.

Except for Call of Duty 2 on the PC I’ve never seen a game where cover was required. And even on CoD2 ducking for cover is not done well. GOW handles getting cover and poking out from behind cover amazingly well. When the game started I opted for the tougher way to get out of the building. I picked up a couple of weapons and hit the game.

This game is done so well that I’m not sure a keyboard and mouse would make the play better. And the graphics were amazing. This game shows off the Xbox 360 so well that if I had gotten this game before I picked up the PS3, I might not have bought the PS3 at all. The shooting from cover is amazingly fun. You dart from cover to cover trying not to get shot.

What makes the game more fun is that the enemy does the exact same thing.

If it were not late and Lily did not remind me that today we have lots to do, I’d have played for a few hours.

November 21, 2006

Just Cause PC Game

Just-Cause-PC I am on vacation this week and besides

Chasing the kids
Shopping
Building from my pile of Gunpla
Blog entries

I also play PC based video games. I just picked up Just Cause and started playing. You play Rico Rodriguez and run around shooting people, stealing cars, and helping la revolucion.

Rico Rodriguez is a cousin of Max Payne; the action is right over his shoulder. So far Max Payne 2 plays better (probably just the atmosphere, Max Payne 2’s cut scenes and music really make the game), but the same point of view is maintained in the game. Rico even gets stunt moves which I have not yet figured out why. Although parachuting into a gun fight right at the beginning was very 007. It’s a fun game and so far not as hard as Max Payne.

If you have a wide screen monitor see this solution to getting the resolution to 16:10 versus 4:3. I installed the fix before I played the game so I have no before and after to compare. But the screen layout works so I am happy.

November 1, 2006

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point

Untitled-1 Over the weekend I purchased F.E.A.R. Extraction Point and Battlefield 2142. First person shooters, good fun for the whole family. Provided that the family is over 18; I don’t play these games with the kids around.

I’ve been playing F.E.A.R. Extraction Point since Saturday and just finished it. It’s an expansion pack and is a bit short. It does not really answer any questions about the story.

It does maintain the same atmosphere as the original game, just not the feeling of being in a horror/mystery movie. There are some points in the game that my reaction was “that’s not bad, pretty scary” but it lacks the story that drove the first game. The first F.E.A.R. game played well but had a story that made you want to get to the next part just to see what happens next. The original ending was very cool and creepy.

This follow up is okay but I can’t wait to see what Monolith does for a real sequel.

Oh, the graphic? You can’t read it but the launcher seems to be wanting to go to the URL http://whatisfear.com/us/launcher/us/html but for some reason that web page does not exist. The funny thing is that if you change the us/html to us.html the URL works.

Nice to see that Sierra really QA’ed the software.

June 3, 2006

Half-Life Blues

Half-Life 2: Episode One keeps crashing.

I figured it would be related to my Audigy sound card so I removed it and turned on the built in RealTek AC97. While I was at it I removed the wintel PCI modem. I never used it and wanted to make my PC as friendly to steam as possible.

I optimized my hard drive, ran the whole Symantec Norton tools, etc. I was able to play further but still eventually keeps crashing.

Sigh. Need to get a new PC, this one is becoming a pain to support.

Update: Last night I booted up into Ubuntu Linux, ran the latest Transgaming Cedega application and installed Episode One on it.

Amazingly it installed and ran. Still locked up though. The only difference was that it locked up the application and not the whole desktop. I was able to kill Cedega and not have the whole computer sieze up.

Transgaming rocks. Up until the game locked up Half-Life 2 ran at full speed.

I so need a new PC. The only thing I have not tried is swapping out the video card.

June 1, 2006

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

First person shooters are great fun (usually) and I have purchased and completed all of the Half-Life games. Half-Life 2 ended with a cliff hanger.

The next game in the series Half-Life 2: Episode 1 was made available today. I had pre-ordered and had the locked gamed downloaded and ready to be unlocked for a week now. After playing it for less than an hour it looks like good fun and continues the game.

The LOADING… portion is a pain. My PC is a few years old but it’s a P4 3.2GHZ with HT, has one gigabyte of RAM, a Nvidia 6800 AGP w/256MB, etc.

The loading of data is death and kills the flow of the game. I’ll do the usual optimization and make sure nothing is competing with the game. Once the loading screen is done the game plays very well but this is a pain.

Tag: Games (page 4 of 4)

Halo 2 on Vista

Gears of War

Just Cause PC Game

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point

Half-Life Blues

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

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Jan Dembowski

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