Good News first
The guys from Blizzard had a short break in "balancing" (clear: playing) Starcraft2 and found out they hadn't released it yet ;-)
So here the Beta, maybe we will get it this year:
http://www.starcraft2.com/beta-faq.xml
You must have a Battle.net Account and run a short prog that detects what HW you have (well, thats what they say...)
I once heard that the hardware evolution according to Moore's Law will at one time bring us to a point where the software we have wont be able to fully make use of it.
Looking at PC Games you might think this is not true, because what ever the latest game is, it will make sure that your graphic card and processor are used 100%.
Thats right, but how efficient is it?
Have you ever wondered why the famous games today are release for nearly all platforms? I did and my guess is they only create one script, one times the textures and one code, in something like Eclipse. This will be auto-compiled, shipped to the customer, job done. A clear evidence for this is the "CookedPC" folder in the games!
All other other scenarios, including serveral human errors, cannot explain the complete failure of "The Saboteur" on PCs with an ATI graphic card. As far as I know the fix for this is still called "Beta patch 0.x".
Another thing that only gets generated once is the way you interact with in the game, it always just feels like a console game. A reason why I never played Operaiton Splintercell. I even tend to plug a controller /joypad into my PC, but this is not what I want, if I wanted that I had bought a freaking console in the first place!
Related to graphic files they have yet another issue: Space. Yes, I have a one Terabyte hard drive, but I don't want any bit to be wasted and looking at Mass Effect 2 with 13.3 Gigabyte I think there might be some room for improvment.
Maybe the should ask some guys from the Demoscene: Info-Vid (DE) (EN) Farbrausch: Demo1 (64k!)/ Demo2 (14.4MB) | FAQ
At least Mass Effect 2 was working fine at my PC with it's ATI card and playing it was very much fun.
I bought it online via the EA Download manager I got the game on my disc, thanks to my broadband I had to wait two days till I could activate it, because you could load it three days prior to the release date.
The Cerebus Bonus Card is an additional key that allows you to download more missions and Items. Needless to say you need online access for it, one extra mission was 500MB.
Today nobody has a huge problem with online activation, but when HalfLife2 got release and you had to activate it via Steam, some even refused to buy the game. Others who bought the game, and only had an modem-connection to the online world pulled long faces. I see them again when they try to download the bonus mission(s). Outside the urban areas this problem is consistent for years.
Looking at the stories of games, since Spore there is nothing really new out there, which tries to break the mainstream genre of shooters/strategy games.
Or wait, what is this: Dante, a game inspired by an old italian poem - this sounds promising! Well it will only appear for the console... |  |
