HIS Radeon HD 6950 Impressions

On Boxing Day of last year (which I suppose was only a few weeks ago), I managed to pick up a HIS Radeon HD 6950 from Memory Express on sale. I had been looking for a video card to rejuvenate my aging gaming PC for a while, and I figured that Boxing Day gave me a good excuse to take a chance on a distributor that I knew almost nothing about. I have chosen three games in order to measure the card’s performance: Battlefield 3 was chosen because it’s one of the most demanding games on the market right now in terms of resource consumption, Crysis was chosen because it’s considered by many to be the quintessential game for hardware benchmarking, and Hard Reset was chosen because I wanted to have at least one Unreal Engine 3 game on the list.

Here are the specs of my admittedly aging gaming PC:

Battlefield 3:

Here is a screenshot showing the video settings that I used while playing. It’s just the default settings that the game assigned to me - I didn’t bother messing around with any of it: http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/8758/bf3settings.jpg

Anyways, with those settings, I was averaging about 40-60 frames per second in a 32-player Conquest server (mostly Caspian Border and Grand Bazaar, though we had some Metro and Wake thrown in as well). The game only rarely dipped below 40, but for the most part, it held steady within that range. On a purely qualitative level, I was quite happy with the performance. Not once during my 2.5 hour session did I ever feel like the gaming was chugging. It looked great and ran great for the duration of my session. I had nobody to blame for my horrible kill-death ratio but myself ;).

Crysis:

Just for the hell of it, I decided to turn the settings up to Very High. The game had defaulted to High for most of the properties, but I was feeling slightly ambitious. Here is a screenshot showing the specific settings that I used: http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/8955/crysissettings.jpg

With those settings, I was getting around 30-50 frames per second, depending on how much action was happening on screen. Keep in mind that those frame rates were measured while I was walking around in a pretty large environment that overlooked the water and quite a bit of foliage. I took a couple of screenshots that show the environment I was walking through while these measurements were taken: here and here (looking at those screenshots in retrospect, I didn’t have my AA setting high enough, so that should probably be kept in mind when looking at those performance numbers). I understand that different people have different ideas of what is considered to be a tolerable frame rate, but personally I found the game to be perfectly playable with these graphics settings. Keep in mind that I only played through the first hour of the game, and so there’s a good chance that I could encounter an area later on that makes my frame rate take a nosedive (I remember Crysis Warhead taking a very large performance dip whenever the aliens were on screen, as opposed to the regular North Korean troops).

Hard Reset:

I didn’t mess around with any of the default graphical settings that the game gave me. The only thing I changed was AA, which I changed from “Off” to “FXAA”. Hard Reset’s options menu is really cramped (odd design decision), so I had to take two screenshots to capture it: here and here.

With those settings, I was getting around 80-120 frames per second during normal sections with a few small enemies on screen at a time. When bigger enemies started showing up and when I had 10+ enemies on screen at a time, the frame rate would briefly dip down to about 55 frames per second, but it typically didn’t remain there for long before jumping back up to the 80-85 range. The game felt very fluid, as you could imagine with those frame rate levels. Similar to my Crysis measurements, you should keep in mind that I only played the game for about an hour, so perhaps there’s a section later on in the game that’s going to kick my video card’s ass. I’m actually going to play this game through to completion over the next week (I’m in the mood for something nice and simple after Skyrim), so I guess we shall find out soon.

Hopefully that write-up was mildly helpful. As you can imagine, I don’t have a lot of experience with performance evaluation techniques, and so my impressions ultimately boil down to the rather unscientific question of: “is it playable?”. Still, feel free to contact me if you have anything that you want me to explore in further detail.

My Random Thoughts on Bastion

So after last week’s foray into somewhat serious territory, I’m in the mood to do another gaming post this week. Last month I played through Bastion on Xbox Live Arcade, and I enjoyed my time with the game quite a bit. It’s always nice to have a new IP that leaves you feeling good about this industry that has become increasingly obsessed with sequels, prequels, and reboots. Here’s a more detailed rundown of what I liked and didn’t like about the game:

Positives

Interesting weapons: Bastion is an action RPG, and as it turns out, the game does a pretty good job of paying attention to both the action and RPG elements of its weapon system. I can’t quite remember how many weapons are available in Bastion (I want to say twelve, but that could be off), but there were very few of them that left me with a bitter taste. The team at Supergiant did a pretty good job of making each weapon feel unique, despite having a relatively high number of them. You have your typical ranged weapons (pistol, shotgun, rifle, flamethrower) and your typical melee weapons (sword, hammer, spear), but they have all been adapted to the top-down perspective quite well. The upgrade system for the weapons was also implemented nicely, and the game did a pretty good job of making you feel increasingly powerful as you upgraded your favourite weapons to their maximum capability (granting you such abilities as being able to ignore armour, which came in pretty handy).

Looks beautiful: Don’t take my word for it - just go look at some screenshots. The hand-drawn visuals look fantastic by all but the most jaded standards. The Kid in particular is really well designed, and the little touches (such as the red handkerchief hanging around his neck) give him a very distinct appearance within the game world. I played the game on the Xbox 360, but from what I’ve heard, it looks even better on the PC once you get your resolution nice and high. Oh, and did I mention how colourful the game is? We really need more of that in this console generation. A lot more.

Excellent score: Between this game and ilomilo, I’m really impressed by how these smaller, more indie games have managed to get a hold of some really fantastic musicians for their scores. Not only is the soundtrack great (in fact, just talking about the soundtrack is tempting me to buy it), but the developers did a good job of putting music in at the right places, and the game does a good job building the intensity of the music as the intensity of the action builds. The music and the narrator also end up complimenting themselves nicely, and speaking of which…

The Narrator: When I first heard that the game was going to have a narrator, I immediately began anticipating the worst case scenario. I imagined becoming frustrated as an increasingly annoying in-game voice commentated on every little misstep I took. Perhaps that has something to do with the large amount of time I spent with NHL 11 over the past year. In any event, my predictions could not have been more wrong. The narrator is fantastic, and he really does a good job of adding some life to a world that is very much devoid of human life. Looking back on the time I spent with Bastion, I can honestly say that the game’s fun factor was enhanced greatly by the narrator, and I’m glad that Supergiant decided to take a leap of faith with the narration, because it paid off.

New Game Plus: We really need this feature in more games! I played through Bastion again as soon as I finished it the first time, and it was a blast both times. The game world has a series of idols that you can worship to in order to increase the difficulty in various ways (one idol makes enemies faster, another prevents them from ever dropping recovery items, and so forth), and so your experience with New Game Plus can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. Being able to continue with your already upgraded weapons was awesome, and the second play through encourages you to experiment with some different weapons once you get little bored with your fully-upgraded gear. New Game Plus is fantastic in almost all of its manifestations, and I want to see it done more often (I’m looking at you, Deus Ex: Human Revolution!).

Negatives

Aiming system: For some reason, Supergiant decided to abandon conventional wisdom, and they mapped the “fire” action to one of the controller’s face buttons. The problem with this is that aiming while shooting and moving becomes a frustrating exercise in finger contortion. The game has an auto aim system that works well most of the time, but every once in a while you’re going to want to manually aim at something, and doing so pretty much requires you to stop moving, take your left hand, and use that hand to manipulate the right analog stick while firing with your right hand. Just map that button to a trigger next time, yeah? They’re called “triggers” for a reason.

Some annoying challenges: The game has some pretty cool levels that basically test your skill with various weapons. Scoring high in these challenges grants you additional items that you can use to upgrade your gear. For the most part, these challenges are implemented well, but some of them are annoying beyond belief. One of them in particular has you trying to kill a bunch of really small flying creatures (and by “a bunch”, I mean about one-hundred) while they fly off the ledge where you can’t reach them. Oh, and you only have a melee weapon. You can throw that melee weapon, but you’ll hit about two or three of the creatures at best. And did I mention that you’re being timed?

Can’t move the camera: This one isn’t the end of the world, but it’s a pretty odd omission for a top-down action RPG. Considering that the environments are all hand-drawn, there’s a chance that they just couldn’t rotate the camera because the set-pieces were only drawn from one perspective, in which case I forgive them completely. It just seemed a little weird to me at first glance.

Automatically equipping new weapons: Some of the levels have you discovering new weapons. This would normally be fun and exciting, except for the fact that the weapons are always equipped automatically, taking up one of the slots that you had previously allocated for something else. It gets frustrating when you take your time carefully deciding which weapons you want to bring along (certain combinations compliment themselves more nicely than others), only to have your decision making thrown in the trash because the developers decided that you just had to experience that cool new weapon first hand.

It’s pretty rare for me to play through a game again as soon as I finish it the first time. In fact, the last time I did that was with Mass Effect 2, so Bastion is in some good company indeed. Oh, and this is also the first time that I’ve ever collected every single achievement for an Xbox 360 game, which I was pretty proud of myself for ;). The game is available for the Xbox 360 and the PC, so if you’re in the mood for a beautiful action RPG with a whole lot of personality, I suggest giving it a look.

My Random Thoughts on Section 8: Prejudice

Again with the long absence. Sometimes there’s nothing else to blame except my own laziness. Better late than never though, right?

In any event, my friends and I have recently been on the lookout for some good PC games to play together. We figure that since split-screen gaming on consoles seems to be falling by the wayside, we will just bring all of our laptops together and get a little bit of LAN gaming going (well, “LAN gaming” in a loose sense of the term, since a lot of games don’t support actual LAN play anymore). Thankfully, PC gaming seems to be going through a bit of a resurgence, and now we have plenty of smaller games like Sanctum that run nicely on laptops and provide some good co-op entertainment without breaking the bank. One of the games occupying the vast majority of our PC gaming time right now is Section 8: Prejudice, and since we’ve poured at least five hours into that game so far (5.6 hours according to my Steam profile), I feel as though I’m entitled to say a few things about it. So let’s start this off:

Positives

Spawning System: I feel like this has been talked about by people more eloquent than myself, but it bears repeating: Section 8: Prejudice has one of the most inventive spawning system that I’ve ever seen in a first person shooter. Rather than spawning at a control point, a squad location, or an otherwise random area on the map, this game has you jumping into the battlefield from an airship. You can drop in to literally any part of the map that you want, thought you want to steer clear of enemy territory, since anti-air placements can chew you to bits in short order, and you’re incapable of fighting back while in the air. It’s fun to perform a drop, and it’s even more fun to play a game mode like Swarm (where you fight off waves of enemies while defending a control point) and see your enemies dropping from the sky into the distance, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before their forces descend upon you.

Movement System: Having a game that takes place far into the future and features soldiers decked out in futuristic armour definitely comes with its advantages. Namely, you can basically ignore all of the common “realism” trappings that games like Call of Duty and Battlefield have to adhere to. Section 8 does this in the coolest way possible: by giving you jetpacks. While it’s certainly not the first game to have such a feature (Halo Reach comes to mind), it makes things much easier in a Battlefield-style large-scale FPS game, where you don’t want to waste time traversing staircases and elevators after traveling dozens of miles. Speaking of traveling dozens of miles, Section 8 does a pretty good job of handling that common annoyance by giving your character the ability to run at superhuman speeds if the sprint button is held down for long enough. This obviously wouldn’t make any sense in Bad Company 2 (which is why I’ve wasted many minutes of my life running to control point B in Atacama Desert, only to get sniped upon my arrival), but again, not having to worry about realism has its advantages.

Bots: I spoke earlier about how my friends and I are looking for games that we can play in co-op. While you can certainly cooperate in adversarial games with human opponents, sometimes we’re just not in the mood for all of the bullshit that comes along with your typical group of FPS gamers. And that’s where bot matches become a beautiful thing. The bot AI isn’t the greatest in the world (funny how the AI in the original Unreal Tournament remains some of the best that the gaming industry has ever seen), but it honestly doesn’t need to be. My friends and I have managed to sink numerous hours into games that have bot AI that I would describe as being “adequate” at best (Gears of War 2, Black Ops, Perfect Dark Zero), but it still manages to be fun, and you can always jack up the difficulty or increase the number of bots if things get a little too easy for you. Again, it’s hardly a novel feature, but it’s one that more games should include, regardless of how well the feature is implemented.

Price: We paid $15 for this game, and we’re not even close to being done with it. On the flip side, I paid about $35 for Brink, and I only managed to squeeze about eight hours of gameplay out of it (and a few of those hours were hardly enjoyable). Even if we were to drop the game today and never play it again, I honestly don’t think of 5.6 hours of fun for $15 as a bad value proposition. There are some $60 games that haven’t given me as much entertainment. And to sweeten the deal even more, Steam recently had a sale on the DLC map packs, and we snagged them for a very nice $3.39. It would be nice if a certain other gaming franchise gave you a break every once in a while with its map packs.

Negatives

Games for Windows Live: Again, this is a subject that has been discussed by people much smarter than myself, but Games for Windows Live is synonymous with “unnecessary”. When it’s not taking an eternity to connect, and when it finally manages to get out of your way, it just doesn’t do anything to justify the extra baggage that it brings along for the ride. Steam (and now Origin) already has a perfectly serviceable Friends system in place, and I don’t like the fact that I’m being forced to work within a system that is vastly inferior to something that I’m already accustomed to using. As it turns out, the hatred towards GFWL seems to be almost universal. If you don’t believe me, just consider how the announcement that Skyrim wouldn’t be using the service was met with a fair amount of jubilation among the gaming populace.

No Dedicated Servers: This is essentially a port of the Xbox 360 version (or at least it feels that way), and so perhaps the lack of dedicated servers isn’t entirely unexpected. Still, I wouldn’t mind playing this game in a 32-player dedicated server, Battlefield-style. I imagine that would be pretty damn fun, and it would certainly run smooth. When it comes to co-op, it’s not the end of the world (especially considering how we’re all in the same room connected to the same WiFi network), but it’s always nice to see developers go the extra mile while bringing their console games over to the PC.

Swarm maps could use a little more variety: Swarm is one of our favourite game modes in Section 8: Prejudice (right after Conquest, I would say), and the only things holding it back from true greatness are the lack of maps and the lack of variety among the maps. There are only four Swarm maps (the DLC might have more, but I haven’t checked yet, unfortunately), and they all play out in much the same way. While there is some distinction between maps (Eden puts your control point on a platform while Whiteout has it on the ground), I wouldn’t mind seeing them go in a direction similar to Gears of War 2’s Horde mode, where the map structure is drastically different from one map to the next. Instead, we’re left with four maps that are essentially giant fields, and battles that play out in the same way, regardless of which direction you’re facing in the map. It’s not the end of the world, and the game mode still manages to be fun despite this shortcoming, but I can’t help but think about how much more epic this game mode could have been.

So there you have it. Overall, I must say that I’m quite pleased with Section 8: Prejudice, and the fact that it only costs $15 just sweetens the deal even more (and let’s not forget about the inexpensive DLC, though I’m not sure if the sale is still going). While four-player split-screen gaming on the consoles appears to be dying a slow death (I sincerely hope that I’m wrong on this one, but I haven’t seen much evidence against my theory), the PC remains a great way of turning your pad into a realm of headshots, unhealthy snack food consumption, and plenty of cursing.

My Random Thoughts on Brink

Note: This is an old post from May 29, 2011. I’m reposting it here since it represents a good example of the kind of content I want to create from here on out (i.e. more list-based material).

I’ve been wanting to say something about Brink for quite some time, but I wanted to make sure that I gave the game a fair shake before committing anything to writing. From my Steam profile, you can see that I’ve dropped about eight hours on the game, so hopefully that makes my opinion somewhat worthy of consideration. Let’s start with the positives, shall we?

Positives:

1) Tries to be different: In a world crowded with military shooters, it’s refreshing to see a game that completely breaks the mould. Brink doesn’t just tweak the formula - it completely throws the formula in the garbage. Now granted, the idea of a mission-based multiplayer shooter is hardly a novel concept. Those of us who played hours upon hours of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory know all about the wonders of mission-based gameplay, and Team-Fortress 2 definitely rocks that style better than anyone else. That said, Brink is undoubtedly a game that stands out in today’s world. You definitely won’t be confusing this with a game like Call of Duty, Killzone 3, or Bad Company 2.

2) Character customization: I’m the kind of person who goes nuts whenever I’m given the ability to customize my character in a game. My Lion and Gau in Virtua Fighter 4 were decked out with the craziest accessories you could possibly find. They didn’t really resemble the stock characters anymore, but that was the point. They became creations from my own imagination. It works much the same way in Brink. Everybody starts from the same canvas, and there is enough customization to make something that is uniquely yours. There is a problem with the character design that I will discuss a little later, but the idea here is a really cool, I would love to see other games implement a system similar to this one in the future.

3) Looks nice: It isn’t going to take the world by storm in the way that Crysis did, but Brink is definitely a pretty game to look at. The levels could use a little more in the way of unique aesthetics - it seems most of them are either “office” environments with a bluish tone, or “slum” environments with more a brown tone - but the designs are all executed well, and Splash Damage did a good job of creating a game world that you can immerse yourself in and imagine yourself as a part of. When it comes to game design, that is a huge win in my books.

Negatives

1) Imbalance: This is the game’s biggest weak point, and it is absolutely impossible to ignore. Every game has its share of poorly balanced maps, but they’re usually exceptions rather than the norm. In Brink, literally every single map is an exercise in frustration due to a combination of map design and action speeds. In the eight hours I have spent with Brink, I have only seen the offensive team win in a handful of cases, and they were all situations in which the offensive team greatly overpowered the defensive team. When the two teams are evenly matched in terms of player skill and teamwork, it usually boils down to a stalemate in which the defensive team dog-piles the objective while the offensive team feebly attempts to make a small shred of progress in the allotted time. If the developers were to decrease the amount of time required to hack/build/detonate an objective, that might mitigate the problem. Until then, we are left with what ultimately boils down to a glorified game of team deathmatch where the kill counts are concealed and meaningless.

2) Guns don’t feel powerful: This might have to do with the sound effects, or it might be the result of numerous factors, but there’s no getting around the fact that the guns feel like pea shooters. Switching from a game like Black Ops (or even Counter-Strike for that matter) to Brink is a night-and-day difference in this regard.

3) Hard to tell classes apart: Yahtzee did a fantastic job discussing this, and so I’ll just direct you to his review. To be fair, it would be hard to include a rich set of character customizations if you had stock characters that look radically different from one another, but fighting games have accomplished this task quite well (case in point: the aforemetioned Virtua Fighter).

4) Parkour movement is clunky: Again, Yahtzee explained this better than I can, but it’s hard to take advantage of a parkour system when you don’t have an intuitive sense of where your legs are. Perhaps having the game switch to third person when you hit the shift button would help, though purists may not like this option very much.

5) Poor unlock system: Isn’t it funny how Call of Duty 4 was one of the first games to have an unlock system, and to this day it’s still the best in the world? The beauty of Call of Duty 4’s unlock system was that it didn’t make high level players significantly advantaged over low level players. Rather, the unlocks just granted you with a little more variety. Unfortunately, Brink is full of questionable unlocks, such as the engineer’s turrets, which become more and more powerful as you continue to rank up. The gun attachments are handled fairly well - they grant you certain advantages while adding their own handicaps - but the skills should have been looked at a little more carefully.

6) Buggy: The game has already been patched a couple of times, and it seems as though Splash Damage is on the case with this one. However, for a game to be released in this state is inexcusable, and it makes me recall that cynical argument about how modern games are oftentimes glorified betas as opposed to finished products.

Overall, it’s a game that has (had?) tremendous potential, but it just gets dragged down by numerous small problems that coalesce into something that is impossible to ignore. According to the Steam stats, this game already has fewer concurrent players than Empire: Total War (a two-year old game) and Bad Company 2 (a one-year old game). Furthermore, the game only leads Day of Defeat: Source (a positively ancient game) by a slight margin. While I hope that Splash Damage can fix some of these problems and nurture this game to health, I fear that it might be a little too late for it to achieve its full potential.