The time was right for a new venture so here it is, my new collaboration with Andy Griffiths is a site dedicated to Steam news and information that we like to call Steam Report.
Steam is where the most exciting things in PC gaming are happening right now. It’s where I spend most of my PC gaming hours and it has a subscriber base larger than any of the major consoles. For this reason it only seems right that a dedicated site be created for such a wonderful community.
After announcing it here over a year ago and having to endure a bit of crap about it from various people (including Bioware), Mass Effect has now been officially confirmed as coming to the PC in May. This year. Yes its a 6 month delay. Thanks for being honest from the start Bioware!?!
I am staring at the Windows XP installation screen as I type this. I just removed my Vista partition, formatted the drive and am going fully back to XP.
The final straw came a few nights ago. After trying and trying I simply could not get Vista to playback a 1080p video without slowing down, scrambling the picture or just cutting out completely. So I tested it on my MacBook - passed, tested it on an Ubuntu Live CD - passed, and then on a seperate XP partition - passed.
The fact that playback was better off a god damn live CD is proof enough that there is something fundamentally wrong with Vista. I’d stripped Vista down, tried different codecs, used different players but nothing worked. After trying out XP on seperate partion I started thinking why I actually need Vista. DirectX 10? Thats been a flop. Areo? More hassle that its worth (and not a patch on Leopard). Vista special features? Exactly.
I have had my “home cinema” setup for a few months now but totally forgot to blog about it until I was reminded recently. Right now I have an Optoma HD70 projector sitting atop some cheap IKEA shelves that boost it over the height of the sofa with anyone sitting on it. It’s far enough away from the wall that I can get about an 80″ to 100″ picture depending on how I feel. Luckily the wall in my apartment is very plain and clean and you don’t even notice the texture of the wall. 720p stuff looks amazing while standard def content doesn’t look too shabby either, especially when compared to and LCD TV. The projector has HDMI, component and VGA inputs so I connect my PC via HDMI and the Xbox 360 via component.
I knew I would have to get some new speakers to go with this when I got it so I went for the cheapest THX DTS set around. This turned out to be the Logitech Z-5400 which produces a ton of bass and has coax and optical inputs to connect to the PC and 360 respectively. The remote is a little flaky but nothing a few smacks can’t cure.
Alien is an awesome demonstration of the system. I have a 1080p version with DTS sound and it just comes alive with the creepy score and crisp visuals. Having this system makes me want to go back and watch the classics all over again and I have definitely found myself watching more movies because of this. Next on the list is Blade Runner Final Cut and Back to the Future (if I can get a decent HD version).
The 360 works nicely too but I did find myself getting slightly motion sick in Halo 3 from the first few hours of play. This is probably due to the sheer size of the screen alone but you do get used to and it only affects FPS games. Oh and playing games like Lumines, Tetris and Bomberman on the thing feels like total overkill!
So my recommendation if you are looking for a nice big screen is to seriously consider a projector. Obviously you need the throw distance, a dark room and a large enough wall but the price per inch of screen size cannot be beaten. Gizmodo put handy list of tips together recently which are worth checking out.
What’s not to love about this game? Like Total Annihilation did back in 1997 it completely renews the RTS genre once more and takes it in a totally different direction to anything else on the market or currently in development. As we have seen with other genres, games are splitting up into distinctly different sub-genres and now it’s the turn of the RTS. Games such as Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander while both RTSs take radically different approaches to the fundamentals of the genre.
Total Annihilation was a game I played for at least 3 years after release and up until the relatively recent releases of Dawn of War and Company of Heroes I felt the RTS hadn’t moved beyond it. This week it has taken a massive bound due to the vision of Chris Taylor and remnants of Cavedog. I really do not feel I can do the game justice in a single post here today so as I play through more of the campaign and experiment with the multiplayer I will record my thoughts. I urge you all to spend some time this week digging into ‘SupCom’ because this kind of thing only comes round once every 10 years.
Having obtained an OEM version of Vista a few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and move my main computer over to Microsoft’s much hyped new OS. Choosing to install the 32 bit version over the 64 bit one seemed like a wise move even with my modern processor due to the driver issues usually involved with the latter. Sure enough, after a smooth installation process, which is vastly improved over XP, I didn’t need to install a single driver to have a usable system.
So far so good. Booting in for the first time was cool, I quite like the effects such as the blurred glass and the window transitions. It gives Windows a much slicker feel then before even if purely aesthetic and of no functional use. After a playing about with this for a while and tweaking the system a little it suddenly hit me, where are the new features? I can see a sidebar, nice, now I don’t need to install the Google one, I can see indexed search, nice, now I don’t need Google desktop and I can see Giant Windows Defender, uhoh, better install AVG.
Having the Ultimate edition does entitle me to a bit of Media Center action. It hooks up well to the 360 allowing me to access all my masses and masses of Media Center recordings and the many WMV files I have stored right in the living room. Yeh so that’s not much use with the current crop of codec support. I am a strong advocate of MPEG-4 (especially AVC aka x264) and when it won’t even allow native playback of Xvid files it’s not much use to me. The fact that all they need to do is switch on direct show codecs to get it to work added to the fact the the 360 can natively decode x264 in software (!) makes it a bit of a joke.
Games support in Vista is a bit hit and miss. I played through the latest Sam and Max episode without a hitch but when trying to install Jaws Unleashed (I kid you not) I didn’t have much luck. Supreme Commander is looking like the next big thing to hit the PC so I will be nailing that in the next few weeks for sure. The real seller on Vista for me is Live Anywhere which won’t hit till summer making it perfectly ok to hold off upgrading. Getting achievement points for PC games is definitely appealing to me.
Third party application support much like the games is a mixed bag and I will write a separate post on this entirely to see if I can drum up some help.
Overall I am impressed with the OS if a little let down by the number of new features available right now. It’s certainly not a revolution but it provides some much needed polish to an OS that has been on the shelves far too long without an update. Once the Ultimate Extras and Live Anywhere hit I am quite positive that Vista will start to come into its own.
These are my Top 5 games on any platform this year. Being a transition year between console generations has been tougher than I expected on the release cycle. Early 2006 and summer 2006 were particularly sparse for releases, leading to a high number of titles launching in the Christmas season.
On a personal note 2006 was a year where I played very little between the months of January and May. Finishing up that degree seems so long ago but it involved going cold turkey for several months to get it done. With new releases on the level I mentioned this resulted in only needing to catch up on a small number of titles luckily enough.
This list is composed of games released in 2006 which I played, so anything which I didn’t spend time with is not included. I don’t see this as a problem as games which I don’t choose to play wouldn’t have made this by their very nature anyway. Argue all you like by the lack of Zelda Twilight Princess but it simply didn’t move the genre forward and ultimately was the reason for me not getting a Wii.
The two games perched far and away at the top of this list did move their respective genres forward. Both Gears of War and Oblivion are huge technical and creative achievements that have set the bar obscenely high for what games can do. If you play any two games this year it must be these.
It doesn’t matter how powerful your PC is, Just Cause will never look as good as it does on the Xbox 360. Just take a look at the video I posted to YouTube below:
It’s almost as if all the shadows and HDR effects have been ripped out of the game. Why short change PC players like this? The option to enable the features should at least be available to those will powerful enough hardware. Added to this the lack of native widescreen support makes this look more and more like a direct port on the Xbox (not 360) version. Bad move Eidos, haven’t you ever heard of XNA?
Strange I know but there is a huge similarity between Company of Heroes and Knights of the Old Republic. As Gillen puts it in today’s Eurogamer review of Company of Heroes, both World War 2 and Star Wars had been ran into the ground before these games rejuvenated their respective universes and made it fun again.
We are all sick to death of World War 2, I cannot see myself playing the next Call of Duty or Medal of Honour games (I’d had enough after Brothers in Arms 2), but Company of Heroes is simply on another level. It does for its setting and genre what KOTOR did for Star Wars and RPGs.
I have never had this much fun playing an RTS, I constantly feel challenged and every time I play it’s different. I just hope those who feel nauseous at the prospect of more WW2 don’t miss this stellar title.
Incidentally it’s good too see they weren’t afraid to awarded it a 10 over at EG. This week’s PC Gamer podcast (should I use that term?) had an outstanding discussion on the topic of scoring games in reviews if the intricacies of games journalism interest you. Definitely their best show to date.
Apart from TV’s absense over the last few weeks there have also been a distinct lack of games. The games industry is the worst offender for neglecting summer even when a large number of their customers are on their holidays looking for something to burn time on.
At the start of this summer it was a great oppertunity for me to catch up on some of things I missed over the last year. I nailed Oblivion, spent too much time with Civ4, finished Halo 2 at last and got back into Guitar Hero (expert mode baby!) after a long time away. All those weeks ago I didn’t think I would run out of things to play but I have and it’s very weird feeling after being so behind all year.
One look towards the Christmas schedule reveals a mass of games waiting to be played but all coming out within weeks of each other. Lets see what kind of ridiculous list I can come up with:
The time was right for a new venture so here it is, my new collaboration with Andy Griffiths is a site dedicated to Steam news and information that we like to call Steam Report.
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