PC Gaming

EA will be showing off Crysis, Hellgate: London, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames and The Orange Box - containing Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 at the Game Developers Conference next month. Journalists attending the event will also be able to meet the developers involved with each game, “these games will not be shown on the show floor,” the publisher said.

Engadget recently picked up on a study published in the Archives of Surgery. This study proved that those surgeons that played games for at least three hours per week performed 27 percent faster, made 37 percent fewer errors and scored 42 percent better in surgical tests. Although the study is not completely comprehensive due to the fact that only 33 surgeons participated. I wonder if it’s all that defibrilator use in Battlefield 2 that’s led them to be so much better than your average surgeon.

Engadget

In a recent interview with TeamXbox, Mark Rein of Epic games has once again hinted that Gears of War could be coming to the PC. “I don’t think that’s any great secret that we would like to do it on PC, but for now it’s a 360 game, eventually we’ll get around to a PC version. I just don’t know when.”

He went on to talk about the challenges of porting Gears of War to PC. “The big challenge is to make a game that was designed solely for the console… to take advantage of every last little corner of that console, to fill every little crack and run as many threads as we could and do as much to exploit the power of that machine, and make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing. That’s a challenge.”

From what I’ve heard about Gears of War on the Xbox, it sounds like a fantastic game so I’m really looking forward to hearing more about them porting it to PC.

Yup, there’s finally been a video release. From the YouTube description:

A guy named Bip Chizzle leaked a video showing off a lot of the weapons from the Halo 3 Alpha. A lot of the weapon animations are most likely placeholder, but it’s nice to see what some of the weapons look like in first person

The complaints about gaming on Vista have started to grow with numerous reports (and personal experience) of crashes, artifacts and low FPS issues on high end machines. Granted, the majority of the games were coded for Windows XP but, still.

I was in the Vista beta program and had the same problems as a lot of people are reporting, e.g: In Counter-Strike:Source I average 100FPS on XP and that dropped to ~20 on Vista, which is simply awful. Chris Donahue, manager of the Microsoft Games for Windows Group stated that they tested 1,000 games from the past five years on Vista; he said that most worked well. Not very in depth there, Mr Donahue.

Vista is, however, gearing up for DirectX 10, the new rendering technology from Microsoft which games such as Crysis are being written on so all we can do is hope that the inclusion of DirectX 10 will increase performance and stop these bugs with Vista.

This post on nVidia’s forums summed it up pretty well:

“Formatted PC, installed Vista, updated any drivers possible. Now half [of my] games will not run, or run with corrupt graphics,”

And the reply:

“You installed Vista. You deserve your problems. Heh,”

The developer of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Funcom has stated that it aims to support cross-platform gaming between the PC and the Xbox 360. Erling Ellingsen, product manager of Conan stated that Funcom were “toying around with many different solutions”. However, it is obvious that there are still lots of problems to be ironed out if this is going to happen. “There are several issues with mixing people on the same server. Will they be able to communicate well enough with each other? Will the console users be less responsive than the PC users? There are many issues that must be addressed.”

I think it’s a great idea to be honest, not only will the cost for gaming reduce to the fact that people could play the same game on their console as they could on the PC, but there’s also a choice between control, if you prefer the Keyboard and Mouse combination over the console controllers then you can do that and vice versa.

World in Conflict more than excites me. It is an upcoming Real Time Tactic game being developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Sierra. It is to be released at some point this year, the graphics look naturally stunning and the game promises much:

These 2 video’s are actual in-game footage.

I, for one, can’t wait! Now where’s that pre-order button?

Screenshots inside.

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Yup, the first in-game screenshots of Halo 3 are starting to trickle out. Halo 3 is due out this year but when, we aren’t sure and the fact that it’s still in Alpha stages shows a lot for how much development there is still to go.

—— Video links down, working on it. ——

Aside from the amazing looking graphics, the maps look stunning and it looks like there’s going to be whole new dimensions of game play in this final episode of the Halo series.

Aside from the completely obvious and astounding CUBE: Defender of the Polyverse, here is our top 5 games of this week!

1. Company of Heroes

Set during WW2 you have to fight your way through an array of realistic and (vaguely) true to history missions. The game follows the company now known as Able Company through such missions as the D-Day landings in Normandy.

2. Rainbow Six: Vegas

Vegas is the fifth original game in the Rainbow Six series. The storyline introduces a new Rainbow team that has been dispatched to Las Vegas to defeat a terrorist organization that has taken control of the city.

3. World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is the first expansion pack for the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft. It became the fastest selling PC game ever, selling over 2.4 million copies within 24 hours of release.

4. Medieval Total War 2

This game is set between the years 1080 and 1530. Like the original Medieval, it focuses on medieval warfare, religion, and politics in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

5. The Sims 2

The Sims 2, developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts is the sequel to the best-selling computer game in history, The Sims. It sold a then record one million copies in its first ten days.

That ought to do you for this week! Don’t forget to check back for next week’s Top 5!

This is a complete unit round-up for the newest in the Command and Conquer series: Tiberium Wars. Courtesy of Vilham at BF2s.

You can find out more about Tiberium Wars here

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I’m really excited about this game, especially since the release of 2 developer diaries releasing more information about the game, which is due to be released in March 2007. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW 2) will carry on from the highly successful GRAW from Ubisoft. In the first episode they explain all about the engine and teams, the engine looks simply stunning, on a par with Crysis maybe. Still, it’s a shame nobody will ever be able to run it on their computer! The second episode covers the get-ups these “soldiers” wear along with the weapons and the new advanced AI.

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Ok, so most of you that are reading this will play games online and we all know how annoying lag is. So I sent myself out on a mission to find the top 20 lag reducing tips of all time, unfortunately I only found 12 so you’re stuck with them! I’ve tried to make sure that they’re all general tips rather than game specific ones. So, read on…

Online, Lag, Reduction

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There’s been a very interesting article posted over at Down Left Punch about the socialism of gaming in general. This is a subject that I feel strongly on and I for one have made great friends on the “internets” and made better real life friends through playing (owning, duh) them online.

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There’s a been a whole lot of hype over the upcoming new release in the Command and Conquer series. Tiberium Wars will be released in March 2007. The game will take place at the advent of and during the “Third Tiberium War”, after the Brotherhood of Nod (hehe, a sleeping army won’t be much good) launches an unexpected and worldwide offensive against the Global Defense Initiative, abruptly ending a period of seventeen years of silence. GDI field commanders rally their troops and begin to combat the Brotherhood’s second re-emergence, trying to restore lost hope. The game will also feature the introduction of a new third faction to the Tiberian series of the Command & Conquer games called the Scrin. This is also the second C&C title in which the player will be able to upgrade their forces. An interesting feature that will be added in this installment is VoIP (Voice-over IP) in the multiplayer game, this will be highly useful in team games. Now, I’ve never been highly attracted by the C & C series but this has really got me looking in to buying it. As release date comes ever closer more and more screenshots and gameplay videos have been released, I’ve collaborated as many as I can here and frankly the game looks awesome! Videos and screenshots inside.

Command and Conquer, 3, Tiberium, Wars

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After reading an article on how the female gamers feel on Digg I decided to find out some more from straight from the people that were affected and found the girlz clan, a girl only clan - hence the name - that plays all type of games. [*Girlz*] Trinity kindly offered to do an interview with me:

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