Payne, Max Payne
Friday, 7 September, 2001
Well, Serious Sam was just boring. Too many monsters, just keep shooting and running. Yawn.
I picked up a copy of Max Payne. Now there's a good game. The game play reminds me of Half-Life a little, in that all the weapons feel real. The story's good and the graphics finally made me go out and get a faster graphics card.
For years now, I've had Matrox cards. First a G200, then more recently, a G400. They're great general purpose cards and adequate for most gaming. For really intensive stuff, however, I decided to go nVidia. I've now got a GeForce2 MX 400 with 64MB. It only cost me HKD 590 as well - a bargain. It's about twice as fast as the G400 in some tests and feels *much* faster in others. I think the limiting factor now is probably my processor speed (350MHz). At some point soon, I'll probably replace my mobo and processor with an Asus/Athlon combination. I'd like to get a dual processor board as well, but I haven't seen many around. A pair of Gigahertz Athlons should speed things up a little.
Whoa!
24 August, 2001
This page is, like, years out of date. It's from the original text of the site back in about 1996 or so. Currently, I'm playing Serious Sam, having gone through Quake I, II, III, Half-life, Descent 1 and 3, SiN, etc.
You're Fragged!
What is my favourite type of game? The first person, personal
armament simulation, of course.
id software
The company that started the whole genre off with Wolfenstein 3D. They blew the market away with the original Doom game which gave anyone on a network the ability to blow their colleagues into small pieces during their lunch hour or after work.
Further refinements to the Doom graphics engine gave us Doom2.
Sadly, not the great leap forward that had been expected. That lay
a short while in the future. The release of the Quake game
demonstrated just what could be done with the pc. It also
demonstrated the dying gasps of the plot-writing arts.
3D-Realms
Trying to compete with the impending release of Quake, 3D-Realms
released Duke Nukem 3D. This is a good game in its own right,
perhaps unfavourably compared to Quake. The engine is... different.
a little more stylised and the mood is certainly lighter. Some of
Duke's comments have this tendency to turn up on computers if
someone's annoyed me...
Ravensoft
Ravensoft have licensed the various game engines that id software have created, made some slight improvements and translated the whole game back to a pseudo-mediaeval setting. Sometimes a plot gets added as well.
The first of these was Heretic using the Doom engine. A good game, but never one of my favourites. Fortunately this was followed by Hexen, and Ravensoft were redeemed in my opinion. Based on an upgraded Doom2 engine with lots of extra stuff added in, a choice of character classes, huge levels (often spanning many different environments) and wonderful ambience. I recently went through the whole thing again and found that it stands up quite well, even when compared to Duke/Quake.
Waiting in the wings, ready to blow away the gaming world is
Hexen II. Take a look at the 3D-Realms site for some
screenshots.