Early this year I purchased Doom 3 at a discounted rate from Microcenter. We were having a LAN party and I wanted to be able to play the game if we did a LAN version. I installed the game, made sure I had all of the updates installed and never once launched the game. And now the worst part. It’s been over 6 months and I STILL haven’t. I was more interested in FarCry and Tron 2.0 at the time. Now BF2 and Star Wars Battlefront II are occupying my time and I STILL haven’t launched it.
Anyway, there is an interesting article at Yahoo news by Joel Durham Jr. in which he writes about the ‘Gamer mentality’. He talks about our need to build our own machines (although some of us have just gone to Dell) and the trends of tweaking machines to gain performance over another gamer’s machine. We’ve gone from frame rates to graphical smoothness.
I’m disappointed in his lack to mention BF2 or SW:BFII. They are both beautiful games.
I remember tweaking my Cyrix 133 with my Diamond Viper 330 and 128MB of memory so that I could get 32 FPS out of my Quake II game. I also remember that chip rebooting my machine all the time. But even when I went to a Pentium 160Mhz and overclocked my graphics cards — I still only averaged in the 40 range. Increasing Processor speeds on both the main platform and graphics cards changed all of that. The TNT2 Ultra changed that for me. I ran that card for at least 3 years until Unreal Tournament 2003 made it impossible for me to keep up. Now I have a P4 3.2 GHz Machine with a NVidia 6800GT. BF2 runs without pause with everything set to High. In the article he is right about one thing… I could not care less about my framerate anymore. I just want the games to look pretty. But once in awhile I still get the urge to run “Timedemo 1 map=demo1.dm2″ and see what happens.
(if you can't use cheesy pshop effects on GCycle, where can you?)
Add A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.