You know, There are cycles in the PC gaming world. Vast timely voids of "no new releases", and yet there seems to be a never ending flow of new technology, what with the Core 2 Duos, DX10,Vista(although the jury is still out on that one) all the gizmos designed to go with them,New graphics cards/memory/hard drives, you get my drift. It is during those "no new releases" times that I go through my game stack and look for the games that were cutting edge technology on my last build.

For instance, since building my new rig I have re-played HL2, HL2 episode 1, F.E.A.R,(and its expansion pack), and I am currently about halfway through Doom 3(which I also have the expansion and will probably play after this). I play all of these with everything cranked to the maximum value, and suddenly I am instilled with a Re-appreciation of the craft, and of the games themselves.

While Doom 3 was repetitive at best, it was filled with a never ending series of way cool visuals. And with the bump mapping, and specular,particle effects and all that jazz all turned up, it still makes me go ooh! every so often.\

So, since so many of you have recently upgraded their rigs, what have you re-played/appreciated lately?

Note: If this devolves into another conspiracy theory thread, I'm gonna start kickin some asses around here. :biggrin:

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Quote from Nietzsche....God is dead
Quote from God....Nietzsche is dead

The only games I can think of I've re-played since I bought my computer a bit more than two years ago are Max Payne 1 and 2. I don't play that much, so that could be the reason why I haven't re-played more titles.

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What the Snarkpitters listen to!

But, wasn't there one about Intel buying out Starbucks?

Sadly, I haven't upgraded much beyond my machine that I had before the fire so I cannot add much. I did however buy a new video card with this machine, so thats an upgrade of sorts. (from a 9800 pro to a 7800 gs)

So far all I have played is HL1DM:S and HL2. Both to the max settings and the visuals are much improved over my older card.

I seem to be having a bit of trouble with F.E.A.R. though. I admit that I am not playing it but my son complains about a jerkiness.

Is this game harder to run than Doom III? Surely not.

Sadly, I still have not replaced my Doom III disk #2 so I cannot even try running it yet.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

If you liked the visuals in Doom3 you should play Quake 4, it's less repetitive and has cooler enemies and weapons.

I recently installed C&C: Red Alert, have yet to play it. Soon to install UT'99

Edit:
@Orph: Even though FEAR doesn't really look any better it's a lot more taxing than Doom 3 because of higher-res textures and more shader effects. FEAR is lame in any case =/

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o

I don't think I even own Quake 4. I'll download the demo now and see if I like it.

Juim said:
I don't think I even own Quake 4. I'll download the demo now and see if I like it.

But the demo won't have Andrews name inside the box.

Quake 4 is gooder too. I need to get it out again... I hope I still got it. Can't remember if it was in the fire or not.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

If you need something different to play and haven't tried it yet, I recommend Rainbow Six: Vegas. I'm playing it on the 360 and it's a rather stunning game, so it's a suitable test of a new rig. On top of that, it plays really well. Not sure how it would feel on the PC compared to the 360 - all the controls feel spot on for the console version and I dunno if it would work quite as nicely on a keyboard - but its a great game that deserves some attention. I hear the PC version of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is worth a look at too, and IIRC when it was released it was about as demanding a game as there was.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Agreed Reno, I've had Rainbow Six: Vegas for about a couple of weeks and its been a blast, probably the first FPS on the 360 I've played that feels perfect, even better than Gears of War. Like you I'm not sure if it would actually play better on the PC, which is saying a lot about how good the game actually is on the console.

You know its good when you can sneak up on two guys about a metre or two apart with a silenced pistol, go into iron sights, and drop both of them in a split second. That kind of control is something I only thought was possible on the pc.

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Just replayed aitd3. b3st g@me evr!!!11one

Just finished Quake 4 Demo, plus I ran around the multiplayer maps. Quite a good looking game I must say. Has that Unreal 2 feel to it, which is a game I enjoyed quite a bit. I think I'll go get it this week. Thanks for the heads up there.

Juim said:
Just finished Quake 4 Demo, plus I ran around the multiplayer maps. Quite a good looking game I must say. Has that Unreal 2 feel to it, which is a game I enjoyed quite a bit. I think I'll go get it this week. Thanks for the heads up there.

LOL, since we have been talking about KungFuSquirrels doing it for ages now.

No problem Juim.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Since Andrew has worked on this game I have a question. I can't seem to get antialiasing to work on either game. I can play in 1600 x 1200 with everything else maxed, but when I go to set AA to any setting at all it resets my screen size to minimal and resets AA to OFF. How do I do this?

Andrew if you're out there I need an answer.

Also, can I use the 1680 X 1050 setting?

On a PC R6 Vegas shows its crappyness.

No native widescreen support. No AA or AF ... pretty lame looking. Oh, and if I try to go higher than anything 1200 width it ceases to draw world geometry. It's not my computer, it's the game and there's tons of problems with it. It's sad that the PC version is just ... a pile of heaping s**t. Some serious work needs to be done by UbiSoft to bring the PC version up to par. All of this makes no sense of course, since it's running on Unreal 3 Engine which is built on a PC platform as well as many other platforms, it should port rather seamlessly.

Hopefully an UT3 demo will be out in a couple months! (Or a nice version of GoW on PC ... that doesn't require DX10)

A game that is fairly taxing, even on current machines, is Dark Messiah. I personally really like the game even though almost everyone bashes it to pieces. It will definitely put more stress on your graphics card if you have less than 512MB of ram there. It's on the Source engine, but it's been pretty supe'd up.

I didn't replay any games when I built my new machine, but did try stuff out, I found out that, BF games actually sort of ran (but very poorly), FEAR ran really well, D3 did as well. I've noticed a decrease in performance since I built the machine and I'm thinking that's because of the NTFS file system or something in Windows, since the hardware is fine.

I was able to crank stuff that I couldn't before so I was like "oooh" but that wore off pretty fast. I think, the biggest asset I gained by the upgrade was the ability to smoothly run HD video.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

My computer isn't spectacular, so I can't really put AA on anything. But stuff I've replayed on max settings;

Worms Wold Party, an old Robin Hood game by Strategy First (great game btw) and Unreal 2.

Booya.

Kinda off-topic, but don't expect UT3 before Q3 07

Feb 1st Game Informer interview with Jeff Morris of Epic said:
GI: So, you?re planning on shipping in the second half of 2007?

Morris: That?s when we think we?re going to be done. That?s our current plan on all the platforms. Who knows if that?s what it?s really going to be, but again, since our commitment is to our customers that everything with everything they buy from us is worth buying, we?ll never screw them to hit that date. Everybody?s happy to have that as a target, and I think we?re well on our way. I think we?re a couple of months away from alpha, where we?re totally feature-locked down, and we?re just gearing up to finish up our maps, polishing the weapons?all that kind of stuff. The big brainstorming phase is definitely coming to an end.

...

GI: Possibly, a demo this summer? You always release a demo first.

Morris: Absolutely. For the PC, certainly we?ll release a demo, because that?s where the most compatibility testing you can do is, and it also allows us to solicit feedback. So, you want to know when UT is going to ship? It?s about a month after the demo. ...

http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200702/N07.0201.1358.43054.htm?Page=1

I'm really really looking forward to this game (and UnrealEd4).

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Juim said:
While Doom 3 was repetitive at best, it was filled with a never ending series of way cool visuals. And with the bump mapping, and specular,particle effects and all that jazz all turned up, it still makes me go ooh! every so often.\

So, since so many of you have recently upgraded their rigs, what have you re-played/appreciated lately?

As a matter of fact i reinstalled D3 last week and finished it yesterday. First time i installed it i played it on a GF Ti4200, now on a GF 6800GT. I really appreciate it with all the visuals as it was intended.

I agree about the repetitiveness: the usual level constists of rooms where you enter, then the lights turn dark, enemies appear, and afterwards you find health. The PDA system succeeds to break this up a bit at first, but is soon part of the repetitiveness. Only the last 4 levels succeed at not being repetitive, both qua visuals as qua gameplay (soulcube) and story. In the first 2/3 of the levels you seem to be running around chasing a guy but not really having a clue.

Apart from the visual effects, the levels really pleased me. It's nice to see how much detail, both qua architecture as qua modeling (both moving aswel as statics), has been spent on many rooms. Not to mention the clipping, scripting, sounds, ... Here are just some screenshots i took during the game, couldn't help myself :wink: Yeah i'll try Q4 someday..