STALKER – Shadows of Chernobyl

I obtained a copy of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Shadows of Chernobyl in 2008. Since it’s initial announcement in 2002 (?), this game always looked fascinating: abandoned regions, industries, freelancers, military, mutants, anomalies. And indeed, this game was fascinating. A little time ago, I spotted the Complete Mod 2009. It’s feature list sounded interesting, in short “greatly improving the game without touching the gameplay”.

Painkiller – shot gunning the pain away

Only a few words now as I don’t have that much time right now. For 3€ I found Painkiller Black Edition in store – I already own Painkiller and the add-on … but in French language. For very few €, second-hand. The Black Edition contains some bonus material – and, eh… yes, I now completely understand the movie sequences. ;-) 

SWAT 4 vs. Raven Shield: Rainbow Six

While checking my list of remaining games, I encountered SWAT 4. It took me some time and a little more money than usual to get this game but it was worth it. From the demo half-a-dozen years ago I already knew the game a tiny little bit. I’d like to compare SWAT 4 and Raven Shield: Rainbow Six as this turns out to be interesting.

Deus Ex 3 – when hope dies

I don’t know why but I missed some news in May ’11 which stated that Deus Ex: Human Revolution requires PC gamers to use Steam. I can’t find the original source but in my favourite board I just got to know that.

My hope died. Normally, I don’t spend 50€ for games right after their release, just in case of a disappointment, this is too much money.

For Deus Ex 3, I would have done so, let’s say after the first positive review, the whole stuff looked great so far. I’m Steam-free since 2007 and for this and comparable services, I won’t spend a single penny any more. And I have spent a lot of money over the years for video games – *free* games.

I have a plan how to spend exactly 0€ for Deus Ex 3 without missing any part of the game: Youtube. I know that there’re enough guys out there that record their game play on video and upload them to Youtube.

Ok, you cannot compare watching someone playing to playing the game yourself on your own machine. BUT considering Steam AND money as the alternative way, it looks much better. :)

SumatraPDF – garbage collecting Adobe’s crap

Let’s speak it out: Adobe Acrobat Reader sucks. It takes 300MB of your disk just for displaying some PDFs? Ah, no, it has support for Flash, Javascript, some 3D-model stuff and – as I heard – it contains an integrated mail server and some network support for survey completion. Whatever, 100% of those documents I’ve ever opened never made use of any of those features. Time for a better alternative: SumatraPDF.

GTA Vice City

I tend to watch CSI: Miami. Not because of Horatio-sunglasses-up-and-down but because of the colors. Yes, it sounds strange, but if you know German series and movies, my aesthetical nerv of color-satisfaction is not touched. The same holds for Vice City – even over San Andreas. Miami at it’s best – and I’ve been to Miami, twice.

Star Trek Away Team

Another rebuy, Star Trek Away Team for 0.89€. The description and screenshots of the game looked interesting, but there’re only little resources left on the web about this game. Similar to Deep Space Nine – The Fallen, it’s one of those great Star Trek games that never really made it into the charts, having nice phaser fights and sucking stealth missions.

Knight of the Nine – or better have 3 beers

The Software Pyramide just released Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition, which made me have my own copy of Oblivion, Shivering Isles and Knight of the Nine. I already wrote some things about the first two objects, so here a few words to KotN.

Tomb Raider Anniversary – strange bugs

I finished playing Tomb Raider Anniversary – my machine is a Win 7 64bit, Nvidia Geforce GTX 460, Intel Core i7.

The last time I played TR: Anniversary, it was on a Windows XP with Nvidia Geforce 6600GT.  I remembered it to be a very bugfree game, no obstacles preventing me from finishing the game – and no patch available.

But now, I encountered many strange things:

• some enemies are running circles or against walls – the TRex lost any attention by facing the wrong direction
• sometimes Lara immediately falls down when she climbed up
• sometimes Lara doesn’t fall down but gets stuck on the edge, unable to move back (and thus will eventually fall down the unsafe way)
• collision bugs, such as falling through some special walls
• not getting a jump from an edge to a platform in Obelisk of Khamoon, as seen here correctly (forced me to download savegames).

How does that come? A different machine and such a semantic difference. I tried playing in a compatibility mode, nothing.

Somewhere  on the web somebody stated the jump bug in the video may be related to the graphics driver. Or in general, the GPU is doing all collision computation. Ok, I thought collision detection was only done by the GPU in case of PhysX or so. But driver 270.xx is the newest one and so there’s little hope of fixing one or all of these issues by a driver update.

But overall, the whole game now looks like geometry is malformed in some places – if there’s anybody out there with an explanation or even a solution, it’s highly appreciated. :)

Reasons for uninstalling Warcraft 3

Ok, you cannot do big mistakes by buying a game second-hand for the price of 1.90€. Much less, if it is called Warcraft 3 – Reign of Chaos, hyped over years by nearly anyone and anything. Concerning the second part of the previous sentence, I was terribly wrong.