More thoughts on Tomb Raider: Anniversary

It's good. There, now you don't have to read all this.
by AC - permalink

I've put in some more time with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and I realized pretty quickly that it's a damned addictive game. It's actually hard to stop playing it. Most of this is probably because it's my first play-through, so I'm having to figure out all the puzzles (lot's of "Oh, I see" moments). Very few -- if any -- of the puzzles I've seen so far have been lifted straight from the original. I'm in the early stages of the second episode, taking my time and looking around a lot.

The combat is still a little wonky. I was more than halfway through the t-rex battle by the time I finally started to get a feel for the "adrenaline dodge" mechanic. In crowded quarters, against multiple enemies, it's even trickier. In fact, other than the rex fight, I think I've only managed to pull it off three times. Then again, like the original, the majority of the gameplay is exploration and solving environmental puzzles, which is definitely a positive. But there's a bright side to the combat, courtesy of Dragon's Lair: several cut-scenes feature quick-reaction controls, where you'll have to stab a direction to dodge an attack. It took me off guard at first -- I got my face torn off by a velociraptor (though judging by its size, I think it may actually have been a utahraptor). It's a new gameplay element for me, but I like it, and I think it bridges TRA's engine-driven cut-scenes with the gameplay brilliantly.

On the graphics front, the motion blur is becoming less distracting, and it's worth it for the distance fogging effect that makes the larger areas just stunning. In fact, I'm more and more impressed by the visuals the more I play. There's a slight bloom effect in open-air areas that works beautifully. TRA is so resource-light that I can run with all the eye candy enabled and a little anti-aliasing with 8X anisotropy at well over 60 FPS. It's just a really well-optimized engine, because it still looks great even without any bump-mapping (if there is some, I haven't seen it). Water effects are subtle and realistic, both from above and below. Poseidon's key room in St. Francis' Folly is particularly notable for that reason. Lara has a ton of animations that are generally pretty seamless, and her character model doesn't lose any quality the closer the camera gets to her.

TRA is also notable for its load times, or lack thereof. New levels and saved games load exceptionally quickly, and not just as compared to recent games. I'm talking three to four seconds, better than Quake III, and for the record, that game is eight years old. It's a far cry from games like Far Cry, or Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Quake 4, where loading a new map can take upwards of twenty seconds, and even loading a quicksave can take as long as five or six. While TRA has no quicksave function, checkpoints are numerous, and if you die or take a wrong step soon after finding one, it takes only moments you quit your current game and continue from the last via the main menu. More evidence that this new engine is just brilliant.

Digressing completely, I want to mention a work-around for Half-Like 2: Episode One that seems to be working, though I'm not terribly happy about it. After beating HL2 with only a few crashes by, apparently, unloading WindowBlinds, I decided to try my luck with HL2 E1. First try, I watched the opening cinematic, Dog pulled me from the rubble, and it crashed. Classic looping-sound crash. I noticed a texture setting that was different in my HL2 and HL2 E1 config files, so I changed it, completely syncing up the settings for the two games, and tried again. This time I got a looping-sound crash during the black screen before the cinematic even started. Lovely.

I didn't want to do it, but I tried running the game in DirectX 8.1 mode (as opposed to 9.0c) and it works. There's no bump-mapping, which is okay except when pointing your flashlight at things in the dark; Alyx in particular looks downright creepy. There's also no HDR, although bloom works, and Source HDR is so system-taxing that I tend to just use bloom anyway. Other than that, the game looks just fine, although running in DX 8.1 mode means the graphics settings reset themselves every launch, so you have to reset resolution and just about every advanced setting each time you start the game. But that only takes about thirty seconds.

As an added bonus, with no bump-mapping the game runs at what seems like nearly double the framerate (I was playing with v-sync enabled, and didn't run any benchmarks). Just lightning quick, even in big, complex areas with a lots of light sources, and even during combat in those areas. It's a trade-off, and may be worth it if you prefer high framerates to having every possible graphical extra turned up.

The bottom line is that I was able to play through the entire game without a crash, and that's kickass. Alright, almost the entire game. For what I think was the third consecutive time, it crashed during the train ride at the very end of the game, immediately before the citadel blew itself to hell. I don't know what that's about, because it used to work fine. Whatever.

UPDATED: June 23, 1:00am-ish

Lara Croft, '97 style.

This is why my PC is better than my Saturn.
by AC - permalink

Since playing the demo of Tomb Raider: Anniversary last month, I'd been kicking around the idea of buying it via Steam. At $30, it seemed like a fair enough deal, and although I have a bunch of games already registered with Steam, I've never actually used Steam to buy anything new. But this afternoon I happened to run across a retail copy of the game for the same price while picking up a big fat sack of food for my dogs. Same game, but with cool box art, the game media on its own DVD, and not tied irrevocably to Steam? Sold.

So far, Tomb Raider: Anniversary looks like a good buy. As I said, it came on a single DVD, and that alone merits at least a half-dozen cool points. I'm still completely baffled by modern games -- Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, for example -- that come packaged on four or five CD-ROMs when the vast majority of gamers have at least one DVD drive. Valve's Steam hardware survey proves this (scroll down to "Drive Type"). Anyway, installing TRA took a long, long time. Windows' task manager informed me that the TRA installer was updating my DirectX, which I had deliberately not updated, not yet anyway. Minus several cool points.

But once it was installed, TRA delivered. The game has run fast and smooth, no crashes, no hiccups of any kind. It's moderately tweakable in-game, but you'll want to force your desired level of anisotropic filtering hardware-side. Like the demo, it runs very well on my oldish hardware. I'm not big on the motion blur, but I like the depth-of-field effect, so I'm putting up with it for now, as you can't have one without the other. Gameplay-wise, it's the original Tomb Raider, so it's brilliant. The only sticking point is going to be combat, but there are three modes to chose from if you're playing with a mouse and keyboard, and one of them should work for you. The game is still obviously designed for a controller, however, and I had to push the mouse sensitivity all the way up to "20."

I've barely started the game, but I'm glad I bought it. Tomb Raider is one of my all-time favorite Saturn games, and TRA looks to be a PC classic itself. I'll let you know after I've had some more time with it.

Half-Life 2 and Ep. 2 news.

The joys of not crashing. Sort of.
by AC - permalink

I'm about three quarters of the way through my latest Half-Life 2 play-through, in the midst of Anticitizen One, and so far I've run into four crashes. That would be a lot in any other game, and it would have been a lot for HL2 a couple of years ago, but these days I think I've been pretty lucky. Early on I ran into what would have been a typical looping-sound crash, but I was miraculously able to alt-tab back to the desktop, where I was able to use the Windows task manager to manually close HL2 and Steam. That's a first for me, and the sort of crash I can live with.

Later, during Highway 17, I ran into consecutive crashes at the same place, which was somewhat ominous. Just after downing the first gunship, while loading the map with the mag-crane, it stalled out on me, and forced a shutdown. I don't know why. Then it happened again, but I realized I'd forgotten to unload WindowBlinds, so I was a little less worried, but all the same I went ahead and upgraded from Catalyst driver set 7.4 to 7.5 (again using NGOHQ's Catalyst + Control Panel installer).

I tried again, this time taking no chances and setting my desktop resolution and refresh rate to the same I'd be running in the game. I made it through the map transition and played on.

The last crash was right at the end of Sandtraps, just before entering Nova Prospekt. In the middle of that furious battle against two gunships, the game instantly quit to the desktop as I tried to quicksave. Weird, but as Source-engine crashes go, pretty damn tame. And it's run fine since then. In all, it's something like seven hours of gameplay with three inexplicable crashes, and with HL2's track record, I call that progress.

Moving on, if only laterally, Shacknews is reporting another unofficial release date for Episode 2, this time directly from Valve, of October 9th of this year. With the Black Box canceled, I can't see myself buying the Orange Box with HL2 and Ep. 1 (both of which I have) plus Ep. 2, Portal, and Team Fortess 2 for $50. The word is that what would have been the retail Black Box (Ep. 2, Portal, and TF2) will be available on the PC, but only via Steam, and for a price not yet set.

It would be nice to have the option of buying each of these games separately, as originally promised by Valve's original episodic content concept. As good as Episode 2 looks, from the Shack's new preview of it, it looks like they're incorporating a lot of new tech geared towards newer video hardware than I have, even though Valve's own Steam survey data indicates that I'm practically on the cutting edge with my old X800 XL. So all I really want is Portal, but current Steam pricing leads me to believe they'd probably charge no less than $20 for it. At that price it would make more sense to pay $40 for the whole Black Box.

How to not crash the Source engine.

Are you kidding?
by AC - permalink

After putting it off and putting it off, after playing all the way through nearly every game I have, I finally gave in and just had to try to play some Half-Life 2. I love this game. It's one of my favorite shooters ever, but the instability that seems native to the otherwise brilliant Source engine makes it hard for me to even launch it. I know it's the engine and not just the game because Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life: Source have the same problems. Source games have crashed my PC more spectacularly than any games I've ever played. But I may have found the problem.

Before starting another HL2 campaign, my first with my new CPU and PSU, I tried, yet again, to troll through the Valve support site and forums for some overlooked magical cure-all. In the middle of this year-old post, I noticed the following:

"Tuneup WinStyler Theme Service has been found to cause a crash with the Steam client application and WindowBlinds may cause crashes with Source games."

It can't be, I think to myself. WindowBlinds? Seriously? I've been using WindowBlinds for almost a decade. I'm a registered user. I paid twenty goddamn dollars for WB 5 (now 5.5), I look for new themes literally every day. I've never had it interfere with any game I've ever played. But I unloaded WB, shut down a couple of iTunes-related running processes that I've never been happy with (ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice.exe [I don't even have a fucking iPod]), and launched the game. And I played for two hours and it didn't even blink. Later in the day, after a reboot, I went back into HL2 and played for about 15 minutes before it crashed, and once again locked up my PC in the process. Then I realized WB is in my startup. I rebooted, unloaded WB again, and started HL2. I've been playing for over an hour.

This is insane. "Game freeze or crash with looping sounds" has got to be the most common Source issue ever, and of all things, I can fix it by disabling WindowBlinds? What the fuck? Obviously, I'll keep playing the game, and I'll update if anything else happens (like a crippling crash with no obvious cause).

Moving on. Seems Ars Technica agrees with pretty much all my complaints about the new Windows-compatible Safari 3 beta. They also raise an interesting question: if Apple is hoping apps like Safari (and iTunes) will sway Windows users toward switching to Macs, this is not the way to do it. Sure, Safari behaves on Windows just like it does on a Mac. But it's weird and inconsistent with the rest of my OS. That makes it annoying, not attractive. And releasing it with at least two downright dangerous security flaws is not especially compatible with Mac OS's image as the most secure mainstream operating system on the market. Don't get me wrong, gaming aside, I'd love to have a Mac as a second computer. But I think I'd rather run Firefox or Camino as my main browser.

Thoughts on the Safari 3 beta.

Hey, look. It's another web browser.
by AC - permalink

I've had some time to dick around with Safari, and while it hasn't crashed or anything, it also hasn't done anything spectacular. The bookmarks manager that I mentioned earlier is still a little odd. By default, Safari appears to stick a big mess of links into the general bookmarks pool, along with any Mozilla and IE bookmarks it imported during installation. But only a few are listed under the bookmarks context menu in the menu bar. You'll have to manually drag links or sub-folders into the menu or to your bookmarks toolbar. It's not difficult by any means, but it isn't particularly intuitive either. I wouldn't expect, say, my mom to be able to figure it out.

Safari is definitely fast, though. It appears to start drawing a page on the fly, as it's loading, as opposed to Mozilla browsers, which will display the page after the page data has been downloaded, then start filling in the images and embedded media. But customization is limited. In the beta anyway, there's only one theme and not much can be done with the toolbars. Extra buttons can be added and rearranged horizontally, but toolbars can't be moved. Tab customization is even more limited. There's no "new tab" button, and the only way to add a blank one is to right-click the tab bar and add one from the context menu. Which means the tab bar needs to be enabled even if there's only one open tab. And there doesn't seem to be a "single-window" mode, or a way to redirect links that open new windows into tabs instead. The RSS viewer is not bad at all, although it doesn't have a universal feed menu, as in Flock or Firefox's numerous RSS extensions. To keep them centralized, you'll have to manually create a feeds subfolder in your bookmarks, then put all new feeds into that folder.

Finally, Safari, or the beta anyway, doesn't seem to work with the Java runtime environment at all. Games at Pogo, for example, just don't load up. I ran into an issue earlier today after uninstalling Netscape 8 and K-Meleon 1.0 where my JRE seemed to be broken, so I uninstalled it and upgraded to JRE 6.1. It's working again in Firefox and IE7, but it's still a total bust in Safari.

On top of not having the option to block ads or even create a blacklist for cookies, all these issues are enough to keep me from using Safari for anything other than a novelty, at least for now. I uninstalled Netscape and K-Meleon today for the same reason. I already have Firefox, Flock, Opera, IE7, and Avant Browser 11 installed on this rig, and with no unique features that I can see other than a slight speed boost, the Safari 3 beta looks a little redundant right now.

Safari ported to Windows.

But will anybody use it?
by AC - permalink

Apple has released the Safari 3 public beta, and for the first time it's available for Windows XP and Vista. This might actually be kind of a big deal. Safari has been recognized for a long while as one of the better browsers available, but being limited to the Mac it's been dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox in the market share reports. I believe Safari 2 was the first major browser to pass the Acid2 test, followed by Konquerer, Opera 9, and the Firefox 3 alphas.

Apparently it's fairly buggy on Windows, but that's not unexpected. I'll hold off installing it for a more stable beta or the final release, but I'm looking forward to playing around with it. There are a lot of browsers out there, but unfortunately most of them are either useless or made obsolete by the elites. The only ones I use on a consistent basis are Firefox, Flock, and Opera. The addition of another high-quality browser to the Windows market should help push the others to get even better, which is good for everybody.

UPDATE 11:53PM -- I went ahead and downloaded it a couple of hours ago. Seems decent enough, but it isn't blowing me away. I don't know what to make of the bookmark interface, which seems to hide most links from you, forcing you to open the full bookmark manager. It's weird. On the security side, Safari has reportedly already been compromised in several different ways. This doesn't mean exploits are already in the wild, of course, but the potential is there.

Linux eludes me.

It's not me, it's the computer that's stupid.
by AC - permalink

I'm been dicking around with VirtualBox for a couple of days now in an attempt to get Ubuntu 7.04 running as a virtual machine. I've never used any form of Linux in any way before, and it's not working, and I'm not sure why. One thing I am sure of is how much easier VirtualBox is to use than the merciless chasm of an app called Virtual PC. The documentation is also worlds better, but that's not so surprising, considering it comes mainly from the community. In any case, I downloaded the AMD64-flavored ISO, verified its integrity, and burned it to CD. I should mention that an hour into the download I realized I should probably have gone with the 32-bit i386 version, because I doubted my 32-bit version of Windows would be able to deal with a 64-bit VM. But whatever, it was almost downloaded, and in the meantime I couldn't find anything one way or another in the docs. So I created the VM, gave it a partition, mounted the drive, and successfully started Ubuntu. And it told me I needed the other version.

So OK, fuck it, live and learn. I dumped the VM and started downloading the i386 version. To pass the time I drove way the hell out Kirby/Whitten to pick up the lawnmower from the shop. So that was fun. I had Definitive Swim in the CD player.

The next time, didn't burn the ISO, I just mounted it as a virtual virtual drive or whatever, and again it started up fine and didn't even give me an error message. It didn't do anything at all, in fact, which is actually worse. I get the Ubuntu splash and the boot menu, but when I select "Start or install Ubuntu" or "Boot from first hard disk" or anything else, it shows me the "Starting the Linux kernel" dialog, and then a blank screen with an underscore in the corner. And it just sits there, indefinitely. I dunno what the hell is up, and I'm only slightly inclined to try to figure it out.

I suppose I can always take my shiny new Ubuntu CD and set up a dual-boot situation with it, but I've never done that before either, and frankly I don't have any idea how. I'm sure I could figure it out, but do I want to?

Anyway. Both DirectX and Catalyst have been updated in the past week, and I haven't installed either. I'm in one of those rare windows where all of my games and software seem to be completely free of glitches, crashes, and bugs, and I'm not about to tempt the Gods of Fucking Shit Up by updating anything that doesn't seem to need it. Source engine games are always iffy, of course, but I've been so frustrated by how buggy they are now after, if I've counted accurately, 6.7 million unnecessary patches that I don't even try to play them anymore. Those goddamn games have produced the most spectacular system crashes I've ever experienced, and I would just write it off and move on if they hadn't once run so beautifully before Valve started screwing with them.

But whatever. IFC played Kill Bill Vol. 1 tonight, and Vol. 2 is on tomorrow night. I'm just looking forward to that right now. The hell with Valve and their Orange Box clusterfuck.