デッドスペースのレビュー

デッドスペースがエレクトロニックアーツから2008年遺族ホラー第三者ゲーム上でリリースされるXbox 360の、プレイステーション3とPC。 私が検討されるバージョンは、PC版です。
エントリ»この残りの

デッドスペースがエレクトロニックアーツから2008年遺族ホラー第三者ゲーム上でリリースされるXbox 360の、プレイステーション3とPC。 私が検討されるバージョンは、PC版です。
エントリ»この残りの
これは、マフィア2年8月の蒸気でパソコン10日にリリースのデモのレビューです。
エントリ»この残りの

私は最近のAsus GTXは480 2 SLI'dを8800GTXグラフィックカード交換するピックアップ、それは偉大なアップグレード、負荷時にわずかに高い電力要件を主要な性能の向上です。
今夜は私がApacheのMPMはpreforkのから労働者のMPMには、この学習後、一般的にISPManager私が運営する、私はすでにPHPのmod_fcgidを使用して変わっていたが、サポートされて、これは私がDebianを動作さとして行うとしていたとしてmod_phpを削除していなかった変更私は、Apacheのエラーが時挨拶されるまで、それは1つまたは、他のインストールはかなり簡単だったする必要があります最初に実行:
Starting web server: apache2Syntax error on line 6 of /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf: Invalid command 'php_admin_value', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration failed!
I quickly learned that this is because fcgi doesn’t support the php_admin_value command, so I went into phpmyadmin.conf and commented out those lines, I was then shown the same error by squirrelmail.conf, so I did the same and the server was able to start.
After this I tried PHPMyAdmin and Squirrelmail finding that there’s no handler for them and then I realised that they are running on the ssl server with ISPManager, so here is the solution (or atleast workaround) to get PHPMyAdmin and Squirrelmail to work again with ISPManager and fcgi.
First going back to /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf I edited in the initial commands to spawn fast cgi, you’ll notice I basically just copied from ISPManager’s user apache sections:
Alias /myadmin /usr/share/phpmyadmin/
<Directory /usr/share/phpmyadmin>
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/phpmyadmin-php-bin/php .php
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/phpmyadmin-php-bin/php .php3
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/phpmyadmin-php-bin/php .php4
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/phpmyadmin-php-bin/php .php5
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/phpmyadmin-php-bin/php .phtml
AllowOverride All
#RemoveHandler .php
#AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
#php_admin_value open_basedir /usr/share/phpmyadmin:/etc/phpmyadmin:/etc/phpMyAdmin:/tmp:.:..:./:../
#php_admin_value upload_tmp_dir /tmp
#php_admin_value include_path /etc/phpmyadmin:/etc/phpMyAdmin:.:..
#php_admin_value session.save_path /tmp
#php_admin_value safe_mode off
DirectoryIndex index.php
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
and /etc/apache2/conf.d/squirrelmail.conf:
Alias /webmail /usr/share/squirrelmail
<Directory /usr/share/squirrelmail>
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/squirrelmail-php-bin/php .php
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/squirrelmail-php-bin/php .php3
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/squirrelmail-php-bin/php .php4
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/squirrelmail-php-bin/php .php5
FCGIWrapper /usr/share/squirrelmail-php-bin/php .phtml
#RemoveHandler .php .php3 .php4 .phtml
#AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .php4 .phtml
#php_admin_value open_basedir none
#php_admin_value upload_tmp_dir /tmp
#php_admin_value session.save_path "/tmp"
#php_admin_value include_path .:..
#php_admin_value safe_mode off
DirectoryIndex index.php
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Now to create the respective php-bin directories:
Create a file called php in a new folder /user/share/phpmyadmin-php-bin/ and in /user/share/squirrelmail-php-bin/ with the contents:
#!/usr/bin/php5-cgi
Make sure it has execute permissions for apache, perhaps changing the owner to apache's user/group would work, but apache must have execute permissions for this file or you will get a server error.
Lastly put the values for php_admin_value for PHPMyAdmin and Squirrelmail into a php.ini file in their own respective php-bin folders and you should be good to go, restart apache and they both should work fine again.
Updated 07-05-2010: Changed the code to fix rather than remove the original check code as it seems the cache flush bypasses or doesn’t read the original check properly, so it needs the extra one.
I use Bens Translator on my site and it has been working great, however at some point I noticed that none of my old cache was expiring, so I did a bit of digging and this i what I came up with:
I know from when I had the old version 1.41 before the filemtime fix that I had an issue with getting warnings regarding filemtime, but gives no real info on what was the issue with the file, well it actually does, but it’s easily overlooked, more on that later, here’s the error it gave:
Warning: filemtime() [function.filemtime]: stat failed for _it in /my-path-here/wp-content/plugins/bens-translator/core/functions.php on line 1703
I have figured out this is because the function bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale in /core/functions.php is doing a time check on the $filename variable, as shown below:
/**
* Checks if Cache file is older and moves to stale folder
* @since 0.9
*/
function bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale($filename,$lang){
bentr_debug("bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale:: Run");
$bentr_error_expire_time = EXPIRE_TIME;
if (file_exists($filename)){
$filetime = filemtime($filename);
}
else {
return;
}
$filetime_days = (time() - $filetime) / 86400;
bentr_debug("EXPIRE_TIME::$bentr_error_expire_time::$filetime_days");
if (EXPIRE_TIME > 0 && $filetime_days >= EXPIRE_TIME ){
global $bentr_cache_dir;
global $bentr_stale_dir;
$cachedir = $bentr_cache_dir."/$lang";
$staledir = $bentr_stale_dir."/$lang";
$src = $cachedir . '/' . $filename;
$dst = $staledir . '/' . $filename;
if (!@rename($src,$dst)){
bentr_debug("Unable to move cached file $src to stale $dst");
} else {
bentr_debug("Moving cached file $src to stale $dst");
}
}
ELSE {
$expire_time_error = EXPIRE_TIME;
bentr_debug("Created less than $expire_time_error day(s) ago");
}
}
However $filename is just the name of the file as it is pulling $hash at line 1115, not the full path, here is the code earlier in the file that sends the $hash variable’s contents to the function as $filename:
//check if needs to be scheduled for a new translation
$filetime_days = (time() - filemtime($filename)) / 86400;
if (EXPIRE_TIME > 0 && $filetime_days >= EXPIRE_TIME ){
bentr_debug("bentr_get_page_content :: The file $filename has been created more than " . EXPIRE_TIME . " days ago. Scheduling for a new translation");
bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale($hash,$lang);
}
So that instance of filemtime works fine because it is dealing with the full path, but the instance of filemtime in the bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale function fails because it is dealing with just the $hash variable which appears to be just the name of the file, but it doesn’t even have to run because it has already run in the above code before it is called, so the error message above was telling me what was wrong as it was giving me just the filename, not the full path.
The reason why I checked version 1.41 is because that is the last version of the code where the script even runs, so it seems the fix for the filemtime bug:
if (file_exists($filename)){
$filetime = filemtime($filename);
}
else {
return;
}
…is the reason why it won’t expire the pages, it’s ending the function early if the file doesn’t exist, but of course the file doesn’t exist because it is given just a file name, not a full path. So… this version of the function bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale should work:
Updated due to findings about the cache flush:
/**
* Checks if Cache file is older and moves to stale folder
* @since 0.9
*/
function bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale($filename,$lang){
bentr_debug("bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale:: Run");
$bentr_error_expire_time = EXPIRE_TIME;
global $bentr_cache_dir;
global $bentr_stale_dir;
$cachedir = $bentr_cache_dir."/$lang";
$staledir = $bentr_stale_dir."/$lang";
$src = $cachedir . '/' . $filename;
$dst = $staledir . '/' . $filename;
if (file_exists($src)){
$filetime = filemtime($src);
}
else {
return;
}
$filetime_days = (time() - $filetime) / 86400;
bentr_debug("EXPIRE_TIME::$bentr_error_expire_time::$filetime_days");
if (EXPIRE_TIME > 0 && $filetime_days >= EXPIRE_TIME ){
if (!@rename($src,$dst)){
bentr_debug("Unable to move cached file $src to stale $dst");
} else {
bentr_debug("Moving cached file $src to stale $dst");
}
}
ELSE {
$expire_time_error = EXPIRE_TIME;
bentr_debug("Created less than $expire_time_error day(s) ago");
}
}
I have tested it and it works fine for me every time I have run it, also I can’t figure out how the code could have worked for anyone, if $hash gave a full path which is the only way it could have worked then by the time the function is at the end the path would be doubled and would error out at the end anyway, ie /path/to/file/path/to/file rather than just /path/to/file.
Another little thing that I noticed was that the backup function doesn’t work in the admin area, because on line 5 of /core/bentr-cacheman.php there’s an incorrect path causing it to create an empty tar, the line should be:
exec( "tar cfvz $path/benstranslatorbackup.tar.gz ".WP_CONTENT_DIR."/ben-translate-cache");
Still not sure why the translation warning bar won’t show though.
Edit: Translation warning bar wasn’t showing because my body tag has no spaces in it and functions.php line 1082 has a space after the body tag that causes it to skip it on my site, removing the space worked for me and should work for all websites due to the regular expression:
$page = preg_replace("/<body[^>]*>/i", "$replace" ,$page);
D-Link has released the 1.34b03 Beta firmware for the DIR-655 router.
Changelog:
Disabling the SecureSpot feature, the router will not query Bsecure when the feature is disabled
Statistics will not clear under “Status>Statistics”
The first fix was available in the previous firmware 1.34b02, I have found it stops connections that people have noticed the router give to the Bsecure servers when SecureSpot is not running. The second fix addresses a bug that appeared in that firmware causing the statistics page to report ridiculously high stats.
Using this firmware is at your own risk and will most likely void your warranty if something goes wrong.
Download:
D-Link DIR-655 1.34b03 Beta Firmware (1.33 MB) 22-04-2010 or download from D-Link
MD5: 15644CB5660A27E7DC3EAF2CEA785CC7
Update 22-04-2010: D-Link have released the 1.34b03 firmware that fixes an issue with the statistics page for this firmware. Get it here .
D-Link has released the 1.34b02 Beta firmware for the DIR-655 router.
Changelog:
This code addresses disabling the SecureSpot feature.
The router will not query Bsecure when the feature is disabled.
Using this firmware is at your own risk and will most likely void your warranty if something goes wrong.
Download:
D-Link DIR-655 1.34b02 Beta Firmware (1.33 MB) 15-04-2010 or download from D-Link
MD5: DBE6A2D2628894B3253024111307735E
D-Link has also released SharePort version 3.0 for Mac OSX and Windows.
There doesn’t appear to be a changelog but I will add one if it appears.
Add a comment below with any results you have regarding these.
Download:
SharePort 3.0 Windows (5.47 MB) 15-04-2010 or download from D-Link
MD5: D42166F5E46E6AAA845BDC4B42EFAE32
SharePort 3.0 Mac OSX (9.01 MB) 15-04-2010 or download from D-Link
MD5: 30B1B71D1CADC69B5C5EB4D39247F38D
Updated 07-05-2010: Changed the code to fix rather than remove the original check code as it seems the cache flush bypasses or doesn’t read the original check properly, so it needs the extra one.
I use Bens Translator on my site and it has been working great, however at some point I noticed that none of my old cache was expiring, so I did a bit of digging and this i what I came up with:
I know from when I had the old version 1.41 before the filemtime fix that I had an issue with getting warnings regarding filemtime, but gives no real info on what was the issue with the file, well it actually does, but it’s easily overlooked, more on that later, here’s the error it gave:
Warning: filemtime() [function.filemtime]: stat failed for _it in /my-path-here/wp-content/plugins/bens-translator/core/functions.php on line 1703
I have figured out this is because the function bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale in /core/functions.php is doing a time check on the $filename variable, as shown below:
/**
* Checks if Cache file is older and moves to stale folder
* @since 0.9
*/
function bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale($filename,$lang){
bentr_debug("bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale:: Run");
$bentr_error_expire_time = EXPIRE_TIME;
if (file_exists($filename)){
$filetime = filemtime($filename);
}
else {
return;
}
$filetime_days = (time() - $filetime) / 86400;
bentr_debug("EXPIRE_TIME::$bentr_error_expire_time::$filetime_days");
if (EXPIRE_TIME > 0 && $filetime_days >= EXPIRE_TIME ){
global $bentr_cache_dir;
global $bentr_stale_dir;
$cachedir = $bentr_cache_dir."/$lang";
$staledir = $bentr_stale_dir."/$lang";
$src = $cachedir . '/' . $filename;
$dst = $staledir . '/' . $filename;
if (!@rename($src,$dst)){
bentr_debug("Unable to move cached file $src to stale $dst");
} else {
bentr_debug("Moving cached file $src to stale $dst");
}
}
ELSE {
$expire_time_error = EXPIRE_TIME;
bentr_debug("Created less than $expire_time_error day(s) ago");
}
}
However $filename is just the name of the file as it is pulling $hash at line 1115, not the full path, here is the code earlier in the file that sends the $hash variable’s contents to the function as $filename:
//check if needs to be scheduled for a new translation
$filetime_days = (time() - filemtime($filename)) / 86400;
if (EXPIRE_TIME > 0 && $filetime_days >= EXPIRE_TIME ){
bentr_debug("bentr_get_page_content :: The file $filename has been created more than " . EXPIRE_TIME . " days ago. Scheduling for a new translation");
bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale($hash,$lang);
}
So that instance of filemtime works fine because it is dealing with the full path, but the instance of filemtime in the bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale function fails because it is dealing with just the $hash variable which appears to be just the name of the file, but it doesn’t even have to run because it has already run in the above code before it is called, so the error message above was telling me what was wrong as it was giving me just the filename, not the full path.
The reason why I checked version 1.41 is because that is the last version of the code where the script even runs, so it seems the fix for the filemtime bug:
if (file_exists($filename)){
$filetime = filemtime($filename);
}
else {
return;
}
…is the reason why it won’t expire the pages, it’s ending the function early if the file doesn’t exist, but of course the file doesn’t exist because it is given just a file name, not a full path. So… this version of the function bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale should work:
Updated due to findings about the cache flush:
/**
* Checks if Cache file is older and moves to stale folder
* @since 0.9
*/
function bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale($filename,$lang){
bentr_debug("bentr_move_cached_file_to_stale:: Run");
$bentr_error_expire_time = EXPIRE_TIME;
global $bentr_cache_dir;
global $bentr_stale_dir;
$cachedir = $bentr_cache_dir."/$lang";
$staledir = $bentr_stale_dir."/$lang";
$src = $cachedir . '/' . $filename;
$dst = $staledir . '/' . $filename;
if (file_exists($src)){
$filetime = filemtime($src);
}
else {
return;
}
$filetime_days = (time() - $filetime) / 86400;
bentr_debug("EXPIRE_TIME::$bentr_error_expire_time::$filetime_days");
if (EXPIRE_TIME > 0 && $filetime_days >= EXPIRE_TIME ){
if (!@rename($src,$dst)){
bentr_debug("Unable to move cached file $src to stale $dst");
} else {
bentr_debug("Moving cached file $src to stale $dst");
}
}
ELSE {
$expire_time_error = EXPIRE_TIME;
bentr_debug("Created less than $expire_time_error day(s) ago");
}
}
I have tested it and it works fine for me every time I have run it, also I can’t figure out how the code could have worked for anyone, if $hash gave a full path which is the only way it could have worked then by the time the function is at the end the path would be doubled and would error out at the end anyway, ie /path/to/file/path/to/file rather than just /path/to/file.
Another little thing that I noticed was that the backup function doesn’t work in the admin area, because on line 5 of /core/bentr-cacheman.php there’s an incorrect path causing it to create an empty tar, the line should be:
exec( "tar cfvz $path/benstranslatorbackup.tar.gz ".WP_CONTENT_DIR."/ben-translate-cache");
Still not sure why the translation warning bar won’t show though.
Edit: Translation warning bar wasn’t showing because my body tag has no spaces in it and functions.php line 1082 has a space after the body tag that causes it to skip it on my site, removing the space worked for me and should work for all websites due to the regular expression:
$page = preg_replace("/<body[^>]*>/i", "$replace" ,$page);
D-Link has released the 1.34b03 Beta firmware for the DIR-655 router.
Changelog:
Disabling the SecureSpot feature, the router will not query Bsecure when the feature is disabled
Statistics will not clear under “Status>Statistics”
The first fix was available in the previous firmware 1.34b02, I have found it stops connections that people have noticed the router give to the Bsecure servers when SecureSpot is not running. The second fix addresses a bug that appeared in that firmware causing the statistics page to report ridiculously high stats.
Using this firmware is at your own risk and will most likely void your warranty if something goes wrong.
Download:
D-Link DIR-655 1.34b03 Beta Firmware (1.33 MB) 22-04-2010 or download from D-Link
MD5: 15644CB5660A27E7DC3EAF2CEA785CC7
Update 22-04-2010: D-Link have released the 1.34b03 firmware that fixes an issue with the statistics page for this firmware. Get it here .
D-Link has released the 1.34b02 Beta firmware for the DIR-655 router.
Changelog:
This code addresses disabling the SecureSpot feature.
The router will not query Bsecure when the feature is disabled.
Using this firmware is at your own risk and will most likely void your warranty if something goes wrong.
Download:
D-Link DIR-655 1.34b02 Beta Firmware (1.33 MB) 15-04-2010 or download from D-Link
MD5: DBE6A2D2628894B3253024111307735E
D-Link has also released SharePort version 3.0 for Mac OSX and Windows.
There doesn’t appear to be a changelog but I will add one if it appears.
Add a comment below with any results you have regarding these.
Download:
SharePort 3.0 Windows (5.47 MB) 15-04-2010 or download from D-Link
MD5: D42166F5E46E6AAA845BDC4B42EFAE32
SharePort 3.0 Mac OSX (9.01 MB) 15-04-2010 or download from D-Link
MD5: 30B1B71D1CADC69B5C5EB4D39247F38D
This review took a little longer than it should have.
At first I wasn’t too excited about the game, it looked interesting and the style was something different but I wasn’t expecting this game to really change much when it comes to a sandbox game. I only saw 2 reviews about this game before buying it and they were generally positive, they were reviewing the PS3 version however this is the PC version, I was expecting to have the usual PC issues but not as many as I eventually did.
This game seems polished at first, the animations are smooth and it has great atmosphere, the controls are easy enough to handle and the story starts off as expected, a little cheesy, but bearable.
Steep requirements. I tried running it on a PC similar to mine but with a Geforce 7600GT and even at the lowest settings possible it was unplayable, perhaps this is more to do with a lack of control over things to turn off but I could just not make it run well, my SLi 8800 GTXs were however able to handle it fine at maximum settings @ 1680×1050.
Speaking of settings, you know you’re dealing with a console port when the settings are chosen by a separate program, and even then it’s a little limited:
I guess it’s cheap that way
This is the basic stuff. Not even any anti-aliasing settings? It does it’s job, but PC gamers generally expect more customisation. Also I’m assuming this game can be run in Direct X 9 mode seeing as it runs on XP, but there’s no information about how to force it to do that on Vista/7, if the game has that ability of course.
Graphics wise it is quite a stunning game. The animations are extremely smooth except when certain characters suddenly stop lip syncing in cut scenes while the audio of them speaking is still occurring, or when they are moving about and suddenly twitch from pose to pose instead of animating that way, which breaks the atmosphere a bit, again this only seems to occur in certain characters, the main character for example is great compared to most of the others.
The environment is quite well done, especially the change between occupied and unoccupied areas, birds flying around, guards attacking bystanders and searchlights in the sky are little things that really help immerse you in the game.
There is however a certain blemish in the consistency, most of the game’s graphics are very polished, but some things are lacking, certain textures are low quality, there are numerous gaps where textures meet and the warehouse at the start of the game for example is obviously a simple structure but with low res textures and the minimum amount of polygons needed to make up the structure, it looks out of place in such a detailed and polished game.
Another point is anti-aliasing, it does have it, but in the case of edges, similar to Bioshock 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, it’s very low if not missing completely (to be honest I can’t tell), it is quite noticeable in this game occasionally, so those that love image quality may not like it. You can force AA now using nHancer but it is very slow, even forcing 2xCSAA slowed the game down to a crawl on my PC, however newer graphics card owners might be able to get playable frame-rates with it. This of course was the case for Directx 10, 9 (Windows XP) may be different.
The in-car music is pleasant and doesn’t distract from the game, it helps paint the picture of the time period, this is the same as when you are in an occupied area with the distant air raid sirens and loudspeaker announces.
I expected the main character’s comments about things (getting chased, falling from a height, entering a suspect area) to get annoying over time, however it still hasn’t, perhaps it’s due to it not being overdone when I don’t want it to.
In the same vein, I particularly like the times when you are climbing a building and a french woman yells various comments like “get down from there” or “you’ll break your neck”, it really helps make it feel like a real living city rather than just a bunch of NPC zombies around you.
The accents are a little cheesy and the lines are as well, but it works. The lip syncing gets let down occasionally though.
This plays much better than other sandbox games I have played on the PC, the controls are simple and efficient, though 1-4 to select weapons and scrolling the mouse wheel to holster them? That’s a strange choice that I still can’t get used to, as is forgetting that you use E for some actions like opening doors, chatting with characters and mouse clicks for others, like placing dynamite, this caused many frustrating situations.
The cars have a bit of a learning curve, they don’t handle like you expect them to, they seem to drive like hovercrafts in a way and they sort of slide while cornering like they’re hovering above the ground rather than being stuck to it which lets the realism down a bit. Once you get the hang of them it becomes easy to corner at high speeds etc. Most of the cars handle differently and go at different speeds which means if you want to use a car that can outrun the police there is actually one available that you can get quite easily.
Physics works well, except in some cases the car can hit something and fly up into the air for no reason, or hit the ground it is driving on and suddenly stop. Cars in this game are very sturdy and even more so if you get certain upgrades or perks, they can take a beating and still be fine to drive around, you can keep a car for many missions if you want to, cars also stay where they are if you leave them, unless you reload or restart the game which can be handy if you need to duck down the road to blow some things up and come back to your car.
Where most sandbox games make you lose your car constantly or hold back, this one gives you them by the truckload and lets you keep them for free.
Combat is also a little hard, using your fists/feet to fight works well and is fairly easy and shooting guns is what I was used to but the cover system is a little weak, most of the times the character doesn’t properly hide or give any indication he’s under cover, then occasionally he will stick to something when you don’t want him to, or stick to the wrong wall, there is also this odd thing that causes the character to crouch automatically at odd times and if you’re crouching you’re being suspicious and this can get you in trouble with the Nazis pretty quickly.
Also when you are behind cover you can’t shuffle your position, you will simply just walk out of cover again, so this can make aiming really hard if an enemy is obscured, your aim also changes between when you are shooting and covering, so aiming when you are covered, then coming out of cover, you must re-aim before you shoot, this is the kind of thing that can get your character killed in a firefight.
Climbing buildings becomes tedious after a while and constantly having to press the spacebar to get him to climb from window to window which may have to be done up to 10 times to get up a building is frustrating, it’s slow to climb, there’s a small but noticeable wait before you can jump again, instead of hopping constantly from window to window. I found myself hoping there would be a drainpipe on each building that I went to just so I didn’t have to put up with that, as drainpipes can be climbed quickly and without stopping.
A nice feature also is when blowing up things they can actually hit you and kill you if you’re not out of the area. The map allows you to select a location and will GPS-style guide you to it on the car, similar to GTA 4, though a lot more buggy.
There are many different weapons in the game but I spent most of it with the silenced pistol and either a rifle or a Panzerschreck, upgraded of course, upgrades are cheap and it’s very fast to get enough contraband to unlock them all.
The story is fairly simple, race car driver before the war, living in Nazi occupied France during the war and recruited into the liberation group, you must do missions for them in order to overthrow the Nazis. Nazis have been done to death in games but this one does it well the characters are believable to a degree and don’t make me cringe as much as other games do. The flashback at the start of the game where you play the character months before really helps see the world that he is living in and gives a good backstory.
If GTA 4 was a train wreck, this was the Hindenburg Disaster, this game has a serious case of the gremlins.
Apart from the physics issues above, the game sometimes freaks out and throws cars from the sky in the main menu screen but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
At release if you had an ATI graphics card there was a significant chance that the game wouldn’t even start up for you, if you had a quad core CPU the game could freeze occasionally and everyone experiences problems with the game crashing when opening notes.
With the one and only beta patch released some of the issues were fixed, some ATI users were able to start the game and some crashes stopped, their workaround for the crashes on quad core CPUs was to change the affinity when playing the game to 2 CPUs only. They seem to have not acknowledged the crash when opening up notes either.
What makes it worse is that due to Pandemic games not being with us anymore it’s unknown if another patch will be released.
To note: After installing the latest Nvidia Forceware drivers (197.45) the game has stopped needing the affinity workaround and hasn’t randomly crashed yet, though I don’t know what they would have to do with it I’m just happy it is working for now.
Graphics – Needs more options, anti-aliasing or at least control of, small glitches, consistency issues.
Sound – Bad lip syncing.
Gameplay – Bad detection of cover, random crouching (bug maybe?).
Bugs – Gremlins, very very bad, but surprisingly playable.
Graphics – Smooth animation, generally polished.
Sound – Atmospheric and enjoyable.
Gameplay – GPS/Map usage, retry missions shortcut, good controls.
This was a fun and enjoyable game, if it wasn’t so damn buggy it would be one of the best games I have played this year. it may be a bit of a console port that we are so used to seeing these days but if you’re worried about the bugs get a console version.
Ever since I ran Hidden & Dangerous Deluxe in a VMWare Windows XP machine in order to get around Windows 7 and Vista incompatibilities I have wondered what other games this would work with and how to get it working a little easier.
I haven’t played Age Of Empires 2 or the Conquerors expansion in a while so I was surprised when after installing it and starting my first game I ended up with strange colour issues, eg, red grass and purple water, the game would also crash occasionally when trying out different compatibility modes. So I tried my Windows Vista laptop, but the same thing happened with it, I tried using Wine on my linux laptop but 9 times out of 10 it causes x.org to crash and other times it just ran too slowly.
I had since deleted my VMWare virtual machine, so I looked for a quicker option and came across this to quickly convert an XP mode virtual machine to a working VMware image usable in the free VMWare Player, in total it took about 15 minutes to get up and running and at no cost other than a Windows 7 license that can use XP Mode.
The game works fine out of the box, here’s an example:
That example was for the expansion pack but it also works fine without.
We all like to relax sometimes, so here is the first of many game reviews, there will be one posted every Month.
First impressions were great, as a PS3 owner with an embarrassingly low amount of games I was ready to buy it on its first day of release, the reviews that I read praised the game for… everything , surely no game is perfect enough to score 10 out of 10 in every category?
I first started playing once I got my copy of the game fresh from eBay; the game was familiar and it was easy getting back into the GTA style gameplay. However my first issue occurred when in the opening cinematic and first missions I found myself completely blanking out when anything regarding the character’s story was involved, it just wasn’t interesting to me, but I was willing to overlook it.
Regardless of what you think makes a good game, graphics is the first thing you experience when you play a game. It’s what you use to navigate the game and is important as some graphics issues can cause hindrance to the game.
The graphics have been much improved from the previous games, there is much more going on in general and that helps create the atmosphere of an active city, the weather system works well at changing things up so that it’s not so static and the rain looks great.
The game lacks colour, things like cars, signs etc. have bright colour but the environment is quite grey and brown, this is most notable in areas of shadow, I feel that the game over darkens shadowed areas to the point where it’s hard to see, however at night the game is much more colourful due to the lighting and the general atmosphere seems much more real.
I also found the graphics in general quite blurry on my TV, this may be due to the 720p resolution but most games run in that resolution and are much more crisp, on top of this the motion blur is quite hard to deal with when you are trying to quickly turn around when in a fire fight.
The sound in the game has not changed much over the years, the familiar radio stations are back, though I found myself listening to PLR, Integrity 2.0 (The station Lazlow from the previous games is on) and WKTT. Ambient sounds have been improved, a nice addition is the ability to hear a car’s radio from the outside.
As I stated earlier, familiar controls get you in to the game easily and for a game that requires you to aim using a controller’s thumb sticks it’s not too hard. The cars seem to be harder to control now and it reminds me of how cars in the 90s PlayStation game Driver controlled, it’s a steep learning curve indeed but more realistic (if you’re into that kind of thing). The only issue I would say is that holding X to run is very hard to handle when you’re busy in a fire fight trying to hide.
Missions haven’t changed all that much from previous GTA games, but as the characters don’t vary all that much you get much less quirky missions and I found the amount of missions where you had to kill some guy or a bunch of guys and then escape the police to be quite repetitive. The locations change and occasionally you get to snipe people from a distance instead but it doesn’t change things enough for me. Vice City is a good example of a GTA game that shows that there can be much more to it than that.
The in-game map and GPS is great and very handy when you need to stop and grab a burger on the way to the next mission. It shows a green line to the destination that you choose and if you already have a mission based destination line it won’t override it.
There are much less side missions in this game, they seem to have replaced them by the annoying “call your friends/girlfriend and take them out” that the game nags you with occasionally, I found myself in a situation where I would need to deal with 3 people before I could get to the next mission or suffer the thumbs down treatment.
The city is expansive, not as much as in San Andreas but enough that it kept me busy for a long time exploring, it would have been interesting to have country areas included as the city got a little repetitive, something that bugs me is the safe house, there are very few of them and it is the only place to save, sometimes it takes way too long just to get back there to save, though this isn’t different from previous games in the series.
Character customisation makes a comeback, though I rarely do it if it’s optional, I did play around with some different looks for the character throughout the game, starting with basic clothes, then moving to a $2,000 suit half way through for that hitman look.
I found the retry mission feature handy but I tended to only use it when I failed a mission, if I end up in hospital or jail I find it much easier to just reload the game and deal with the long drive back to the same mission, which brings me to my next issue.
Loading times are horrible, perhaps I am used to playing PC games but I just can’t stand this game’s loading times, I almost change my mind about playing it while I’m first loading it up.
The core part of GTA games ever since GTA 3 has been the story, it plays out well, each game has had a different story and different characters, GTA is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
This game however has a somewhat serious theme containing your character, a wisecracking douche-bag that doesn’t shut up and wants to make a new life in Liberty City, he appears to be the only character in the game that was made with this seriousness in mind, many of the other characters thankfully contain the personalities that you expect in a GTA game.
As I mentioned earlier I wasn’t interested in the story when I first played and I am still not interested, I understand it’s common today for games to have a more serious and darker theme but it just seems like a misguided attempt at realism to me. Realism just doesn’t seem right with what else they have done in this game, it’s almost like they weren’t sure what direction to go.
Every game has bugs, this one was a train wreck when it came out for each system, thankfully I was unaffected by the freeze bug that caused the console to lock up, deleting the game data was a temporary fix at the time which I would not have been happy with. The game is fairly bug free now on the PS3, aside from the occasional graphics glitch and frame-rate drop. There hasn’t been an update for it since 2008.
Graphics – Bland, Grey and brown, too dark in places, bit blurry too.
Gameplay – Repetitive missions, annoying phone, long load times.
Story – Annoying character, boring story in general.
Graphics – Much improved, smoother.
Sound – Brings the best from the previous games and adds to it.
Gameplay – GPS/Map usage, retry missions shortcut, good controls.
Bugs – Quite rare.
Don’t care for the story, or the character, but the game is still GTA, it’s still fun and it can be enjoyed for short periods at a time.