What's your game?

What I’ve been playing

Just because I haven’t been posting regularly doesn’t mean I haven’t been playing games. It’s actually been a really busy time for me.

I picked up Soul Caliber II and Unreal Championship for the Xbox the other day. I originally was just going to get Soul Caliber, but when I saw that Unreal is down to $20 bucks, I picked it up to play with my buddy Marty down in Florida.

Soul Caliber is very good. If you’re not familiar with the premise, it’s your basic fighting game, but instead of using mere kung fu to beat the shit out of your opponents, you use bladed weapons. The controls are very simple, one button does a horizontal attack, one a vertical, one kicks, and one blocks. Like any good fighter, there are literally dozens of attack combos, defense combos, grabs, throws, and power moves. The only problem with it is that I’m completely incapable of beating Gina. She absolutely spanks me every time we play.

Unreal Championship is a little different. It’s essentially a dumbed down port of the PC version, which wasn’t particularly smart in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, UT is the purest form of online Deathmatch, but it’s a tired formula these days. The weapons include standards, like the machine gun, chaingun, and rocket launcher, as well as some unique weapons, most notably the Link gun, which you can use to power up your teammates attacks during certain types of battles. This isn’t a great game, but it’s definitely worth $20.

I’ve also been playing the Battlefield: 1942 expansion, Secret Weapons of WW2. It adds a bunch of weapons that were under development by both sides of the war, but never saw action. Controversially, this includes a German rocket pack, which many people argue destroys the ‘authenticity’ of the game. Bah I say to them! The rocket pack is fun, it’s not easy to use, and it doesn’t really affect the game one way or the other, except that it makes anyone using it very easy to kill. I’m going to play it more in the next few days. I’m reviewing it for our November issue.

Last but not least, I went to an ATI event in Seattle earlier this week where we talked about 3D card technology and how it pertains to forthcoming DirectX 9 games, like Half-Life 2. There’s been a lot of press about it, at places like The Tech Report and ExtremeTech. The short version is that Valve, the company that is developing Half-Life 2, has had to go into their game and write special code to accomodate nVidia’s 3D cards. The problem lies in color complexity. DirectX 9, and Half-Life 2, use 24-bit floating point numbers to describe the color of ever object in the game. Unfortunately, nVidia’s boards only support 32-bit and 16-bit colors. The problem is that in 16-bit mode, the numbers don’t give a large enough range to describe the colors that show up in the game, and in 32-bit mode, the game is too slow to play on even the fastest nVidia hardware. That’s the short version. For the long one, check the November issue of Maximum PC magazine, or check back here in a couple of weeks. I’ll post it here once the issue goes on newsstands.

Anyway, I’m off to see the White Stripes in a few hours.