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Building the Ultimate Gaming System Vby Kirk, 2005-04-04 |
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Doom III
Game company id's Doom 3 is one of the scariest games ever. Period. With the engine in Doom 3 tailor made to make everything dark, creepy, and jumpy, this game will have you pissing in your pants in the first level. The sheer quality id put in Doom 3 is testament to how many gamers love the Doom series, and this is no dissapointment. Expect a full review by me on Doom 3 in the next week, by the way.  Doom 3 has, ironically, three big issues with the game that any gamer needs to know, computing wise: 1. Doom 3 favors nVidia like I favor hot chicks, 2. Doom 3 uses shadows like a crack addict, and 3. Doom 3 uses particle effects like.. a crack addict. The big three. The first one is and is not an issue, depending on what you have card-wise. If you have an ATI card that is DirectX 7 or less, you're probably going to have issues running this game. The issue is not so much the card itself as that the drivers and the software don't play fair, and there is no real easy way to fix it. ATI claims to be working on a fix (And they have, for the most part), but NVidia still has claws in Doom III. The second and third are issues only for older cards, regardless of brand. The shadows, of course, are to make it more spooky. Not to spoil any story, the particle effects are used for fire and the like, but there are parts in which these are gratuitously overused. As a nice thing to say, this game (supposively) scales down nicely, though I can't verify it. With all I've listed above, I certaintly would not reccomend this to someone with an old computer- you won't get the desired effect, nor will you get the gameplay. NOTE: As of yesterday, April 03 2005, Doom 3 has been released on the Microsoft XBOX. This is probably the best choice for anyone lacking a powerful system. Half Life 2 Almost every gamer's wet dream was Half Life 2 ever since Half Life was released. A long time in the making, Half Life 2 is one of the best sequels in gaming history. This game is graphically beautiful, difficult, and immersive- as well, it requires you use your brain more than your trigger finger, a factor that makes it integrally different than many of the other shooters on the market.  There are two (Haha, I'm making funnies) issues with this game that any gamer needs to know: 1. This game uses huge, highly detailed maps. Video RAM is a big issue. 2. The game's physics engine can easily overtax your processor. That being said, #1 and #2 are similar in the problem-factor. #1 is an issue because, obviously, your video card is going to take quite a while to process the level of complexity in these maps. Plus, for those of you with slow-ass Hard Drives, this game will take forever to load, which means you're pretty much screwed in that respect. #2 is an issue I encountered more in the mod "Gary's mod" than I did anywhere else, though it did pop up on occasion in the game. The game is the first to feature a complex, complete physics engine that features so many abilities thtat I couldnt even begin to name them. Simply put: You can take that bottle and throw it in the air and watch it realistically fall, or you can play with the speed "Toss" engine and chuck your enemies around like rag dolls. That being said, if you have a processor made of complete crap, you're going to find this game constantly lagging as things explode, throw around, and generally get chucked around. However, something needs to be said about Valve's ability to make a decent scaling system. My original test system for Half Life 2 was a borrowed 2.4 ghz, 64mb(DirectX 7) Video 256mb RAM system- not the optimal system for all the stuff going on, especially since it runs Windows ME. Still, I was able to play it at 20-40 FPS, somewhat nice considering the graphics and the system in mind.
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