So I was digging through the closet today and found all my old Guild Wars disks. (I have the first 3 campaigns: Prophecies, Factions, and Nightfalls). I went ahead an installed them all again. I wasn’t too surprised that I could max out all of the games settings and still have over 60fps constantly. One thing that I was noticing though was a higher latency than I do with almost any other online game, not exactly sure why this is but I was kind of put off by it. The game sure hasn’t changed too much in the past few years, well I guess there wasn’t much to change the game was pretty good back then. More after the break.

There are a few problems that I have with the game even after all these years.

1: There is no jumping, this really limits what you can do in the game. I feel like I am always having to follow a pre-constructed path every where that I go.

2. Another problem that I have is that there isn’t a defined skill trainer. I still to this day don’t have a clue where the hell I’m supposed to go to gain new skills.

3. This is one thing that bugs the crap out of me, although I understand why they did it it still pisses me off. The penalty that you get when you die in combat. Since everything that you do is instanced just for you and your party having a health and energy loss every time you die really takes the solo ability out of the game

Now there are a lot of things that I do enjoy very much in this game.

1. The ability to “hire” out group members. Sure they aren’t nearly as good as a real person but they do allow you to just go out and solo some of the easier content. This is something that I wish other MMO games would incorporate. A lot of times I really don’t fell like waiting around for an hour to get a party together only to have to leave for work once its formed.

2.The environment is beautiful.

3. The game runs great even on older computers.

4. Free to play. Thank god there is finally a MMO that doesn’t charge a monthly fee. I understand why they do but it is nice to have a MMO that you can play whenever without having to reopen your account.

5. Great map, this is another thing that I wish other MMO games would do is kind of point you in the general direction of where to go on the quest that you are on.

I hear that there is a lot of great content and game play in the PvP aspects of the game. I’m just not too big into the PvP combat in most games. It just not very rewarding. Now the destructible environments in Age of Conan and Warhammer Online sounds almost exactly what I’m looking for.

All in all the game is still pretty solid and if you can pick it up on the cheap, I would go for it. They do have a new expansion pack out called “Eye of the North” although I still haven’t picked that up yet. Maybe that will be something to get with that tax stimulus check. Thank you George Dubya.

PROS: Beautiful graphics and smooth animations even on this dated engine. Being able to “hire” out group members. Free to play. Runs great on older computers. Great map.

CONS: Terrible death penalty, no jumping. Hard to find new skills.

Over all I give this game a 8/10

Just click on the thumbnail to check out the full image.

Close up of the Assault Marines and the Ork Boyz.

Some more of the Assault Marines dropping in on the Orks.

Orbital Bombardments Rock!!

Once they release some more information about the game I will post it here as soon as I find out.

More after the break..

The newest addition takes the assault and onslaught modes from UT’04, tosses them into a blender, and turns it on. The resulting effect is the Warfare mode. In this mode you have to link together power nodes from your power core to the opposing players power core. Much like the onslaught mode from UT04. They did however add a rebel node somewhere on the map. These nodes can either cause a timer to start, in which your team has to keep control of the node for a given time to receive a special benefit. For example, in one map when you control the node for 1 minute a Leviathan will spawn (the Leviathan being one of the most powerful vehicles in the game). If you happen to lose the node in that given time the timer will reset and you will have to defend it again for another minute or so. Besides the rebel nodes on some of the maps, there are also some maps that you have to capture a specific power node to cause something else in the map to open up. For example, on one of the maps once you capture the middle node a bridge extends, once the bridge is extended you have to drive your teams Goliath tank over the bridge and onto a pad that will cause the gate to the opposing teams power core to open up. If the power node in the middle is lost the gate closes and the team has to capture it back before they can cross over and continue to destroy the opposing teams power core.

Another new mode is Vehicle CTF. This mode is virtually the same as CTF, but Epic through in a curve ball, Vehicles. Unfortunately you cannot carry the flag in the vehicles. But this makes teams have to work together more, you can’t just run in solo and expect to grab the flag and capture it without getting blown to pieces from the opposing team.

The Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and CTF modes all stay the way they have always been. The biggest difference being the update graphics engine.

The vehicles have been carried over from UT04 with many new additions, most of which are the Necris vehicles. I have compiled a list of all the axis and necris vehicles below. There are also links with images of some of the vehicles so you can check them out..

The Axis lineup: Cicada, Goliath, Hellbender, Manta, Paladin, Raptor and the Scorpion.

The new Necris lineup: Darkwalker, Fury, Scavenger, Nemesis, Nightshade and Viper.

A lot of the vehicles that were in UT04 have been revamped. All of them fell more natural when you are driving them they no longer fell like you are driving a brick, which is a welcome change from UT04. Another thing that Epic has added is the hoverboard. This will allow you to get into the action fast even if you don’t have a vehicle you can also grapple onto any vehicles that are driving by and can use them to help get you there even faster. The beam that connects you to the passing vehicle can also be used to decapitate any players that pass between.

Epic has also reintroduced some of the weapons from UT99, the impact hammer is one that alot of players really missed. They did also take some of the weapons that were in UT04 out, a couple being the shock rifle and the spider mines.

Although they added some new features there is still a lot lacking. I still to this day don’t understand why they would take out almost all of the game modes that were on UT04. UT3 is missing, Invasion, Assault (although they did say that they merged this with Onslaught and called it Warfare its still not the same), Domination, and Double Domination. Sure these weren’t the most played modes that the game had, there was still a huge user base that did play them. Another problem that there is with UT3 is the menu. Sure this really shouldn’t make or break a game, having to deal with seven screens before you get into a game is aggravating. The whole online game search feature is terrible, half the time no servers ever come up and you have to click on the refresh button half a dozen times before any show up. One last thing that the game doesn’t bring to the table is the shear map size when you need to download maps from a remote server. Sure this isn’t all Epics fault but come on having to download a 50 megabyte map over 5 minutes really starts to ruin the experience.

The up side is that there are starting to become more and more user created maps and mods coming out, some of which are custom skins like the Master Chief and Marcus Fenix. Another good thing is that they didn’t slow down game play at all, it’s still as fast paced as it ever was.

The single player experience is very lacking. For a game that is called Unreal Tournament there is absolutely nothing to do with a tournament. Zip, nada, ziltch. Its pretty much about a group of people whose home was attacked by a group called the Necris, that get hired out by Malcolm (from the original UT series games) to fight against various corporations. This does get kind of boring after a while but I guess its just supposed to get you geared up the multiplayer aspect of the game.

Over all I think that this game deserves a decent score, theres not too many games that you can go into, frag for half an hour and enjoy the scenery while doing so (just as long as you don’t have to download any custom maps). If you are thinking about picking up the game find it on sale.

PROS: Fast game play, beautiful maps and textures, still the good old Unreal Tournament experience.

CONS: No new content besides some new vehicles, terrible single player mode, slow downloads and very few players online at once.

Overall score: 8.5/10

First up was Crysis. I popped the DVD in the drive and away I went, past the damn EA logo that you cant skip, /pout, then clicked past all of the other videos. Up came the menu and I loaded the last game that i had. Loading screen………… BAM!! here comes the action. Before SP1 I was running Crysis at 1680 x 1050 at medium settings across the board at about a steady 25-35fps range. I was amazed to find that I had actually gained about 3-5fps, all at the same settings. I know it doesn’t sound like much but to have such an improvement in such a demanding game surprises the crap out of me. /cheer

After prying myself away from the Korean alien nano-suit action I pugged in some good old Unreal Tournament 3. On a side note, if you haven’t picked up this game yet go out today and buy it right now. Out of all the FPS games there is still nothing as good as running into a room full of n00bs and pwning all of them with the Rocket Launcher, ahhh. Any who, my rig can usually run this at a stead 40-50 fps range, depending on what level I am playing on and if I have any bots playing or if I’m in a multi-player match. I do run this game at 1920 x 1200 with all the settings in game maxed. There was a slight increase in the fps, just about the same as there was with Crysis, about 3-5fps. I was again happy to see this increase in performance.

In conclusion, I am over all pleased with the performance that came with the new service pack. Its good to know that Microsoft is starting to get there stuff together and make this operating system worthy of competing with its big brother XP. Also I just want to remind everyone that although Vista still has a ways to go, when XP came out back in 2000 everyone was saying the same negative things about it as they are about Vista. Time will always tell but I think that everything is going as Microsoft planned it. Regardless of what all the fan boys say.

Keep your eyes peeled in the next couple of days. I’ll be posting some graphs and benchmark results of Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis. Until next time Happy Gaming!