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Monday 1 May 2006

GRAW [Lurks]

There is no love lost for Ubisoft among this clan considering how many times our favourite French games publisher has stiffed us in the past. At one point we were working on an ubisoftsucks.com web site but Beej got lazy and it never happened. The latest game of course is Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter which is out in a few days. Course now we love this sort of game so much we'll all be instantly off down the shop to pick up a copy right? Well, we would if it didn't insist that you uninstall your virtual drive software. So in that way we're better off with the warez version which doesn't deign to tell you what software you can have installed on your PC.
More puzzling still, the game only allows selection of a 1280x1024 resolution display. It's one small concession that at least it understands aspect ratios and will adjust so you're not either in stretch-o-vision or border-o-vision modes. I'm baffled though. This is supposed to be, and actually is, a cutting edge graphics engine. It looks superb and then they want to cripple it by making my monitor upsample and blurr everything out? And why? It's just another stupid arbitrary limitation that serves no purpose whatsoever. This sort of thing really pisses me off about PC gaming.
And we're not even done yet. This game is the first proper game to support the new Aegea physics cards. These being a deeply pointless excersize in building hardware to try get gamers to pay for, hardware they really don't need. Now it's fine that the game supports this right, whoopy for you if you want to blow 150 quid on something with no real benefit whatsoever - I mean... it's not like you can use the freed horsepower to up the goddamn resolution. No, what pisses me off is that in order to implement the physics of the game, you need to have the Aegea software drivers installed. They've basically used the Aegea physics API and after you install these drivers, this hilarious bit of software installs a system tray app because clearly you care very deeply what a physics API is doing on your PC. A physics API which is deeply pointless and actually going to be hardware accelerated on, oh, call it 50 people worldwide maybe.
I guess I have to justify the moaning in some sense, since it's completely obvious that this is an amazing looking game. It could well be the cooperative and multiplayer panacea that will draw us back to the genre of multiplayer gaming that we love so well. It just frustrates me, more than anything else, to see Ubisoft and Grin just go and do these seriously annoying things for no good reason.
Where do these fuckers get their advice from? Dudes, honestly, anyone that is going to even consider dropping £150 on a fucking physics card, has probably got a monitor bigger than 17 fucking inches. I don't want your goddamn Aegea system tray shite and I most certainly do not want to be told what software I can install on my PC. Gah, wankers!

4 comments:

  1. Turns out you can go into data/settings/renderer_settings.xml and edit in your resolution directly. Slim tells me you can disable the Aegea system tray icon too although my rant above centers on how stupid that whole thing was in the first place :-)
    When is this thing out anyway? Will it be completely fucked hosting a server, doing coop etc like Raven Shield was to start with?

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  2. Spent 10 mins (not enough to pass judgement), but I can say it's graphically lush cranked all the way up. A very detailed environment with rubbish in the streets etc. If anyone wants to play co-op, count me in. Edit: you only get three squaddies to control but it's much more like the red storm games of old rather than the console port pap of lockdown. Not much use of the Z axix in combat yet (console heritage I guess, pity their gamepads). I'll be getting this one.

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  3. Errr - there is a 1920x1200 setting on my one. Oh and you just uninstall the Aegea thing - doesnt seem to make any difference. In the immortal words of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels...." Chill Winston!"
    Game deffo r0x0rs.
    Lord "karma" Houmous

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  4. Hokies, well I installed GRAW and had my first sesh last night. It's utterly wank on my 9700 lappy: every setting is LOW and the fps still crawls. But, it's cool. I love ordering my squad around. I love love love it because you can pepperpot around the place and hope you survive a random firefight (with a cliched south american :-)The install nearly didn't happen. Classic Ubi. You enter your 16 digit key and it just barfs it. Oh, is that a UNIFORM or a VICTOR? No, after 5 attempts at that it turns out that it has to be uppercase. Of course it does!The "hi, I'm your eye in the Sky (oh and I'm flying a helicopter simulatenously)" is just super teenfantasybullcrap. That's taking multiskilling a bit too far. But more importantly, the script is terrible. Eye-wateringly cliched. The cliche of the grizzled veteran giving you guidance over the link. The cliche of the General shouting "man down!!" when you cark it. I bet there's loads more to come!So I'm only on the first map, I skydive and parachute into the centre of this city, and it's... practically deserted... ooookay. So where are the zombies? Oh look, a model of a mercedes SLK just parked here in the street. HOW HACKNEYED IS THIS?! I was just praying to the Church of the Mac10 that I'd run into someone, anyone, to shoot (a child would be fine). I go past one building on the way to a checkpoint, and then I'm sent back there 10 mins later [after being asked to control the drone] because of some evil RPG dudes that popped there? You're getting RPGed all the time mate? That's funny, I didn't hear anything, or your helicopter. Oh look, a coke can just rattled by my foot, isn't it quiet! No warning about the RPG guys or men manning gun emplacements when I walked by that building 5 minutes ago, maybe the int guy in his fucking helicopter could have warned me off about them before I walked past last time!Controlling the UAV drone is a bit rubbish. So I can direct it, and watch the feed, but I can't point the camera? Maybe I'm missing something. Why not just WASD the damn thing?Love the way you get your team moving around and can see their Alienscam in the corner (In fact, I love the way that some of them speak like they're in the movie Aliens as well, that gives me a hard-on). But for the first map that I've played so far, its a bit different to R6 in that they're always in a "make lots of noise" assault mode. So they'll open up with a Minime if they see a shred of movement. But I was just moving our sniper into a better position you fucker, couldn't you wait? Stop lighting people up before I'm ready, I can't see shit! Gung-ho fuckers, maybe there's a whole platoon behind that crate and you just alerted them.I'm going to have to post you guys a screenshot. GRAW looks pretty bad on 9700 :-)

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