Escapist Magazine

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.

Gametrailers HD

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The stats can be found on the Valve website. The stats are between the 18th November and 18th December and show which classes were the most deadly, how many wins per team on the maps and also more interesting. The locations of where people die the most on each map, which can be found at the very bottom of the page.

With these maps you do have to ask yourself how some people died on cp_well on the very far left where there is no actual playable area?

Similar stats can also be found for Half Life 2: Episode 2.

Of course some games are getting stark reviews for their graphics by reviewers. Most people will realise that I am refering to games such as Gears of War, Unreal Tournament 3, Timeshift and of course Crysis.  Yes, these games are graphically stunning especially Crysis, but what I haven’t seen in the vast majority of reviews of these games is that they do take very high end equipment to run at a respectable speed the graphics options turned up.  The most I see usually is a comment in the Cons section of the review which usually states ‘high end PC required for top graphics settings’.  That is fair enough to a degree, but hardware from a year ago should be able to play games with a highish degree of playability with high settings, not max, but high.

Crysis which I will pick out on is the worst of the group I have listed. It is good looking, on high to very high settings.  Now play Crysis on a 6-series or a 7-series Nvidia card and all of a sudden you are playing Crysis on medium settings with stuttering performance with a game that doesn’t really look all that much better than the current Source engine that Half Life 2 Episode 2 is running on.

How many of the current first person shooters have had you wanting to play more because of the gameplay?  I have to say none of the above.  Perhaps my taste in fps games is changing but the last game that I felt compelled to finish was Portal.  It was genuinely interesting and humourous.

Crysis

Graphically stunning, but doesn’t have a lot over any other first person shooter except for the suit.  The suit gives an actual reason for not dying from more than 2 shots from an enemy AK-47, although they are called something different in the game as it is from the future, yet the cars and boats seem to have been taken out of a 1998 catalogue.  From what I have played of Crysis you don’t have a whole lot of freedom with the game.  It is still linear like all other FPS’s but it has to be.  Even Postal was linear with the jobs you had to do, but like Crysis you could go around and do other things inbetween.

Gears of War

On the Unreal 3 engine it does look good, but the feel just isn’t right for the PC.  I played it on the 360 when it was first released and didn’t really like it, mainly due to the controls.  But I find myself wishing I was using the 360 controller again as the game was somewhat easier to play.

The only thing that seperates Gears of War with any other FPS seems to be that it isn’t an FPS, but has similarities with all other FPS’s.  Over the shoulder camera angle makes this game a nuisance and I would recommend it to be avoided unless you can rent it for the 360.

Unreal Tournament 3

A game that I have been looking forward to for years.  But alas after playing the “beta demo” I was moderately impressed, but also dissappointed.  The demo was released with only the low-medium textures, but even so the game did look incredible and one can only hope that AA is included in the graphics options for the full game which I should be recieving my copy very very soon, so yes that does mean I bought it.  The game felt like 2004 with some nice shiney paint and polished to give that better look.  The action is still fast paced and full of action, but it does seem darker, more evil… that is not to say that Unreal Tournament 2004 wasn’t a good game.  Far from it. It was an excellent game and still has a huge fan base but Unreal Tournament 3 gives no extras except for graphics in my eyes.

TimeShift

Well the timeshifting ability seemed good at the start but after a while got very boring and  was the only difference from all other games.  The graphics were good and it ran OK, but was very linear and didn’t even give a feel of any freedom.  Although saying that it ran very well on max settings with a medium-high end PC.

Call of Duty 4

A game I am genuinely interested in.  I am now pretty much addicted to the multiplayer part of the game and have found the single player shortcut not being used.  I have done the first couple of missions and the game seems to be what GRAW should have been but better and faster.

It seems Infinity Ward listened to the people that actually play the game rather than telling the gamers what they “want”.  It was also good to see them release 2 patches with a couple of days within each other to try to make the game as fair as possible fixing a glitch in the game.  Fair play to them, I believe it is a first I have said anything nice about IW.

The game was surprisingly short but I guess you could say it was expected as I thought it was going to end a lot sooner than it did.

The main highlight of the game for me was not the actual gameplay itself but GLADDoS. The hilarious comments throughout the game made Portal something special that seperated it from all other games. Every gamer who has played Portal will be walking around saying “The cake is a lie…..” while hugging their companion cube.

For those that haven’t played Portal yet, play it, if you haven’t bought it yet, buy it.

The whole Orange Box itself is worth the price. The box includes:

• Half Life 2
• Half Life 2: Episode 1
• Half Life 2: Episode 2
• Portal
• Team Fortress 2

If that isn’t a good package I don’t know what is.

Here is a review from Yahtzee:

The Escapist