More flashback gaming.

Plus, the dumbass guide to troubleshooting.
by AC - permalink

The gaming press was all a-titter when Crystal Dynamics took over the Tomb Raider franchise not too long ago, probably because they couldn't possibly make things any worse. I didn't think much about it at all, since the only Tomb Raider game I really liked was the first port of the first one, and it was pretty unlikely that a change in developers would do anything to resurrect an eleven-year-old Saturn game.

CD first produced TR Legend, which got decent reviews for being better than the last half-dozen TR releases, but it was short and had unnecessarily high system requirements, so I passed. But now out of nowhere I find the demo for a new game called Tomb Raider Anniversary on Steam, and took my pessimistic view of how CD would treat the origins of the franchise and kicked it in the ass. This demo is fucking awesome.

Anniversary is a sort of reimagining of the first game, with a few more modern gameplay additions and a reworked camera system. For a die hard TR1 fan, it has its pros and its cons, but overall it looks fantastic. The original stuck with a rigid behind-the-character camera that occasionally pulled directly back during gameplay. You could always take direct control of the camera, however, to look around. Anniversary gives you constant control of the camera via the mouse, but frequently moves the perspective around to help you out during various gameplay sequences. It feels console-oriented, and can be frustrating at times, as the directional controls change when the camera wheels around. But it works most of the time.

Movement controls have been streamlined from the original, which used all nine of the Saturn controller's buttons. The jump and crouch keys are now context-sensitive and multi-functional, and elements like drop-to-hang and climb now happen automatically. The new grappling hook is easy enough to use. Really, I can sum up the new control scheme by saying I got the hang of it in about 15 minutes with no documentation at all.

What I was most concerned about when I realized what this game was attempting to do was the music. Tomb Raider 1 has some of my all-time favorite game music, and the major themes are present, if slightly reworked, in the demo. The graphics, obviously, have been significantly enhanced and look great, thanks mostly to performance. These are not state-of-the-art visuals, but more toned-down, high-framerate fair, with great animation and a few flairs, like motion blur and bloom. It runs startlingly well on my 16-month-old hardware, and that performance is probably going to be the tipping point to get me to buy this game when it becomes available on the 5th.

One other note tonight: I ran into a really nasty Far Cry bug where the game would reboot my PC as soon as it finished loading a map that kept getting more and more frequent until I finally fixed it by installing the latest (1.4 cumulative) patch. It also seems to have fixed that hideous rainbow-colored shadows bug that's been a problem in some maps since I first installed the game. I should point out that "Install the most recent patch, dumbass," is troubleshooting step #1, and I didn't try it for weeks. For whatever reason, I thought I had Far Cry all patched up, but it seems to have been running OTB all this time. Oh well, lesson learned.

The San Andreas sweet spot.

I love it when hardware and software meet in the middle.
by AC - permalink

I think I may have finally found the perfect set-up for GTA San Andreas for my PC. Before upgrading my CPU, something about the way the game handled the in-game shadow and fog effects forced me to run with the "visual fx quality" set to low to get over 45 fps at any resolution. It's probably the 1MB L2 cache, but whatever the reason (and I don't really care), with my new 4000+ I can hover right around 60fps with any fx quality setting. Unfortunately, my cheap and rather shitty monitor can only manage a 60Hz refresh rate at 1280x1024, which makes enabling vertical sync, which I almost always do in all my games, not very effective, as the framerate keeps jumping back to 45.

But I found a lovely solution. In a game like San Andreas, with rather low-quality textures and low-poly models, dropping to 1152x864 makes no difference at all during gameplay. You do lose some clarity and aliasing becomes more pronounced, but the upside is my monitor can hit 75Hz at 1152, which means I can turn of v-sync and get very little noticeable tearing because the framerate, even with that visual fx setting turned all the way up to "very high," stays well over 60fps almost all the time now. The only slow-downs are in the middle of Las Venturas, for whatever reason, but even then it's only in the 45- to 60-fps range.

To sum up. In-game, all settings maxed, except resolution at 1152x864, and AA at "1," which means 2x. This is very low, obviously, but moving up to 4x doesn't look much better and it's dramatically slower. Hardware side, anisotropy is at 8x, and refresh rate forced to 75Hz (after checking that my monitor can support said refresh at said res). End result: seamless framerate way over 60 90% of the time with virtually no evident tearing, and no jarring fps switches from 60 to 45 to 30 and back, while the game looks damned good compared to the console versions. And keep in mind, high framerates means easier gameplay.

I should have bought a new CPU a long time ago.

Blogged with Flock

Quake, '96 style.

Old school is the new school.
by AC - permalink

Quake was an important game for me. Even more than Doom, Quake is what converted me from a console gamer to a full-on PC shooter fan. The first game I ever played on my first new PC, a smokin' Pentium 133 rig with 32MB of RAM and a huge 1.6GB hard drive, was the shareware episode of Quake. I learned to play it online, with a 33.6K modem, which meant I was lucky to find a server that gave me a ping lower than 350.

What's more, Quake was my introduction to Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor composed Quake's soundtrack, which is still one of the all-time creepiest original scores for any shooter. He actually went further than that, recording sound effects for what would become the Quake alpha test demo, most of which were replaced by the time the game went gold. But my point is, if I hadn't become so enamored with that eerie, haunting Quake soundtrack, I never would have picked up Broken from my local record store (because it was the cheapest NIN album there), which led me to buy Pretty Hate Machine, which led to The Downward Spiral, and so on to today.

Not so much for musical reasons but for nostalgic gaming reasons I finally ordered Quake, in a download-only form, from id Software's online store yesterday. It took some work to get it to run properly in WinXP. It came with the WinQuake and GL Quake ports, but WinQuake runs software-only, and the version of GL Quake shipped barely worked. I tried an older GL Quake I downloaded years ago, and it works fine. It even works with my old Quake Mission Pack CDs I bought a decade ago, which means I've finally (nearly) completed my Quake collection. I have Quake and its two official mission packs, Quake II and its mission packs, Quake III Arena, and Quake IV. What I'm missing is Team Arena, the only official Quake III expansion.

And there's one other thing I don't have: Quake's soundtrack. The downloadable Quake I bought was only 24MB zipped, which obviously didn't include the ten-track Reznor score. I have no idea why, but it sucks all kinds of ass. Fortunately, a Google search ponied up the tracks immediately, but I still have to go through the bother of burning them and manually starting the tracks while playing the game. What the fuck, id? Twenty bucks is a lot to ask for an eleven-year-old game in the first place, but stripping out the soundtrack, that's just fucking cold. I suppose I owe you for including Quake II and both mission packs with the DVD edition of Quake IV, but when are we going to get a similar package for Quake 1?

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be out soon, but honestly I have no plans to buy it. It looks to be a sort of Battlefield 2042 in the Quake IV universe game, which doesn't interest me at all, unfortunately. I know id is working on a new IP, and assuming my hardware can run it, I'll be first in line. But ripping a historically great soundtrack from a monumentally important game does not set a great precedent, especially for hardcore id Software fans. And I know I must be a harcore id guy, because Doom 3, which most people seem to consider a huge let-down after all the hype it generated a few years ago, is one of my all-time favorite PC shooters.

I'd ramble on some more, but I'm halfway through Scourge of Armagon, and I haven't even started on Dissolution of Eternity...

Living with a working PC.

Shouldn't something be going horribly wrong?
by AC - permalink

A week after installing my new CPU, its cooler, and my new power supply, I'm adjusting to life with a PC I don't have to constantly monitor and mollycoddle. I've been watching my CPU, GPU, and ambient temps closely, and finally felt comfortable enough to run closed-boxed for several hours this morning. I'm still popping the case open and employing the desk fan when running games, as it still lowers the GPU temp by a good 10 to 20C under load, and my vidcard, running solely of the PCI-e slot's power, doesn't have much of a fan. The good news, though, is that the new AMD 4000+ CPU has made for some noticable improvements in some of my games over the old 3500+ chip.

I've seen the most gains with GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2. They both hover right around 60fps at high resolutions now with all the bells 'n whistles on, which means annoying drops to 45 and 30fps with v-sync on. My cheap monitor can only handle 60Hz at 1280x1024, but a sudden brainwave led me to try running them at 1152x864 with a forced 75Hz with no v-sync, and they look fantastic. This doesn't work for slower-paced games, like Doom 3, when the tearing is much more pronounced, but with my new CPU it's even more rock-solid over 60fps, so it still looks badass.


Going back to GTA, though, I did a little more research into the LOD issue I was having with Vice City, and eventually I came across this thread at PlanetGTA, which pointed to this thread at the DriverHeaven.net forums. And as unlikely as it seems, altering the shortcut to run in Win98 compatibility mode worked perfectly. Unfortunately, while I'm in love with Vice City for its ambiance and music, San Andreas makes the control scheme and mission layout feel frustrating and limited. But whatever, I only paid ten bucks for it.

Not to digress completely, but I want to mention the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, which I bought last week. It's fucking awesome. If you've heard With Teeth, it's sort of like that, only much more awesome. And it... well, it's hard to say this about a NIN disc, but it's got a groove to it. Not a groove on par with something like Definitive Swim, but it's definitely the most accessible NIN album since Broken. I still think The Fragile is the best NIN LP ever, but Year Zero is now easily third behind The Downward Spiral.