New PC games

Shane · Post by **Shane** » Sun Jan 11, 2004 10:48 am

I was playing KOTOR all through Christmas, albeit on an X Box, I don't think I've ever played such an open ended game, love the fact you can go totally Darkside on everybody, and turrn your own party members against each other. Just completed the Darkside ending, I may go back to it and play through it again as a Lightside character.Halo's getting a little old now, IMHO it was always a little overated, it's still a fine game though.Shane.

Post by **AndyThomas** » Sun Jan 11, 2004 3:52 pm

I understand that the PC version of Halo is not a great conversion of the console original - although I find the PC online version works very well and it's pretty busy. I find the graphics very nice to look at when you actually stop and look at them - the water effects and so on are very good, although not being hugely into FPS I may be easy to impress!

FZeroOne · Post by **FZeroOne** » Sun Jan 11, 2004 9:49 pm

Halo for the PC is quite good fun. The A.I. is superb - the first time an alien rolls away from your grenade, you'll be so suprised it'll have shot you full of holes by the time you recover, and the first time you look up into the sky and see the curve of the Halo stretching away into space is one of those "wow" gaming moments that happens all too rarely. If you like semi-hard SF settings then you'll enjoy the story-line too ( its not often you get a plot where humankind is gettings its butt kicked all round the galaxy... )Edit: It also seems to be very well regarded as a multi-player experience, but thats no something I've tried myself.But... theres a bit too much running down very similar looking corridors, and halfway through the game they introduce something that completely undoes all the previous wonderful A.I. programming.It also requires a fairly nice PC to enjoy the best graphics.KOTR is also very good fun. It has some weaknesses - again, a bit too much running down corridors, a slow start, some poorly chosen voice acting, and late on in the game Jedi are so powerful they pretty much make the supporting characters redundant.On the other hand, the production values are generally very high, the NPCs are all well-developed characters ( the war veteran who tells endless stories of battles hes fought in is one of my favourites ), you have more freedom to develop your character than most other games of its type, the story is very engaging, and - this is important - it has atmosphere coming out its ears. There is nothing - nothing - like getting your first lightsaber and hearing that "vmmm-WHRUM-vmmm" noise as it bursts into life.It makes up for an awful lot of corridors.

Post by **AndyThomas** » Mon Jan 12, 2004 3:56 am

Mike, I actually found that my sound card could be an issue in Halo as it sometimes is with other games - try adjusting some sound settings down. Might also be worth checking you have the most current drivers for your graphics card. Games these days can be deeply fussy about this sort of thing - I think I ramped Halo down one notch from maximum to make it a little more playable, but then my graphics card isn't bang up to date now, so...

Zordon · Post by **Zordon** » Wed Jan 14, 2004 7:29 pm

lol that's quite spooky.

Post by **AndyThomas** » Wed Jan 14, 2004 10:51 pm

My immediate thought is Homeworld/Babylon 5 although with slightly crisper graphics than the former, perhaps. That and Asteroids of course...Mike, a number of other factors could be issues with Halo. It'd help to know what sort of graphics card you have? But I imagine issues like free hard disk space, speed of hard disk, memory, speed of memory, even motherboard will all have some part to play. That said, there was definitely "churn" on my system when I played it, hence my turning the graphics down a couple of notches.It's not supposed to be that great a conversion at the end of the day, and it may be that the singleplayer is actually worse than the multi given the sheer volume of enemies you encounter. If the thing isn't coded well, no amount of raw power is going to make it work better for you unfortunately... Stick with it though, I enjoyed it. I suppose what you could do is ramp the graphics all the way down and then gradually work up - compromise on the "clever" additions which your card might not be handling so well like special shading etc...

Post by **AndyThomas** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 9:43 pm

Speaking of Babylon 5 folks - if you're on a fast connection and like stuff like Freespace then you want to check this out:http://ifh.firstones.com/