The Games I Play; The Settings I Use
Mafia 2 is a third-person action adventure set in the 1940s and 50s. On the surface, the game looks a lot like Grand Theft Auto, but Mafia 2 takes a much more linear, cinematic approach to the genre, using its large open world more as a backdrop than as an interactive playground.
Borderlands is basically a mix between an FPS and an action RPG in the spirit of Diablo — kill stuff and get random-generated loot. While co-op is arguably the best way to play the game (the game supports up to four players), it can also be played solo and it runs pretty well on a Mac that’s three years old.
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Tags: borderlands, diablo
I’m not an online gamer, but the EA Store had a great deal on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 a few weeks ago so I picked it up. Below are my settings for the single-player.
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Tags: battlefield
There’s not a lot I can say about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat that I haven’t already said about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. These are open world FPSes that, in turns, terrify and delight. They are games you play with the lights off and your headphones on so that you can soak up every drop of the atmosphere — because, face it, there’s nothing quite like wandering through the pitch of night with a tiny flashlight, while you’re slowly bleeding to death, your ammo is running low, and you can’t sprint because you’re too overloaded with the loot of other fallen Stalkers.
Dragon Age: Origins — Bioware’s return to fantasy. I’d been waiting for the release of DA:O ever since I first heard about it, and it’s one of the few games I’ve ever pre-purchased (Fallout 3 and Batman: Arkham Asylum being the only others). But what can I really say that others haven’t? You can read the reviews to find out how the game stacks up to others in and out of the genre. Needless to say, the game itself has lived up to my expectations and, in terms of its performance, it has exceeded them: Dragon Age: Origins runs extremely well on my Mid 2007 24” iMac.
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Tags: dragon age, batman arkham asylum, fallout 3, nwn2, drakensang
Update: I’ve posted my settings and impressions.
I am currently about four hours away from installing Dragon Age: Origins on my iMac — again. I pre-ordered the game from Impulse for 20% off (yay!) and downloaded it yesterday only to discover that transferring games from one computer to another doesn’t work that well in Impulse (unlike with Steam, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, or GOG.com). What I found out is that, in Impulse, you need to choose the Download and Archive option in order to download the game on one PC and install it on another. Otherwise the game installs by default and, if you try to archive the game afterwards, the archive is OS-dependent and won’t install on a computer with a different version of Windows. So, I basically wasted 14 hours and 8GB of my monthly bandwidth yesterday. Hopefully the second time’s the charm.
Tags: impulse, dragon age, steam, direct2drive, gamersgate, gog.com, digital distribution
This is just a quick note to mention that the new Diablo-style action RPG Torchlight works well on VMWare Fusion 3 using Windows 7. I’m running it at 1024×768 with Netbook setting. There are times when the frame rate dips, but it’s mostly smooth. The game didn’t work well on the Windows 7 RC I was using; instead, this is a final copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. In VMWare Fusion, I have the Windows 7 virtual machine set to use two cores and 1024MB RAM.
Tags: vmware fusion, diablo, torchlight, windows 7
I came late to the Gothic series of RPGs, having only played Gothic 2 in February of this year. I really enjoyed that game, however, so I bought Gothic 3 a month or two ago when it came on sale. While enjoyable, Gothic 3 was a bit of a departure from the second game (bigger world, less story) and left me wanting something more in line with Gothic 2. Enter Risen.
Tags: risen, gothic series
Well, my third hard drive in the last nine months is dead — well, dying anyway. I’m able to move files off of it, but it’s not running well (it keeps spinning down every few minutes and is running hot). Of course, it’s the drive I have all my games on, so… yet again, PC gaming is going to be put on hold. I’m trying to move the games as I write this, and hopefully that will be successful as I don’t want to spend hours and hours downloading and reinstalling games and mods. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I’ve been playing my 360 quite a bit (as you can tell in the sidebar Now Playing list). I heartily recommend Saints Row 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and Fight Night Round 4. At the very least, you should give all of these a rent.
I’ve never really been into strategy games; I don’t really have the patience and/or strategic mind for them. I find RTS games, specifically, the most difficult in the genre. It’s one thing to be able to think through an action completely when the opposing team is standing still and it’s your turn, but quite another when everything is happening in real time and you have to think and plan on the fly, anticipating and reacting in seconds to your adversary. Needless to say, I’m not good at RTSes. However, that didn’t stop me from picking up Men of War when it was 60% off on GamersGate. And while I find this World War II RTS quite difficult (even on the easiest setting) it’s also been a lot of fun to play. How does it run? See below.
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Tags: men of war
