It seems trite to repeat what everyone else is already saying, but my sympathies go out to the Family Blue. It's a testament to her that her son managed to be a pioneer on the Internet, and do well to boot.

Da-Fly:

No demo, no purchase? Remember how long it took before we got the Uplink demo for the first game? If you really need a "good or not" judgement, just wait for a few reviews.

I think the ad in question is specific to Canadian visitors. We get this ad from Bell Canada for their Solo phone service, and of course the noise comes from the fact that the ad plays a looping ringtone. I don't find it a huge pain myself, but nor do I object if a lot of my fellow Canucks want the ad removed from the rotation.

The original UT is probably one of the most heavily played games by Mac users out there; UT2K3 to those fans in the Mac user base is like the second coming (not the least of which is because it means that other Unreal-engine games are likely to follow).

And as for the (multiple) people slamming Macs without much knowledge, for goodness' sake: just head over to www.apple.com and check out the hardware section. 800 MHz is where Apple hardware starts, not where it finishes. That's still slower than a lot of Mac users would like (though we may have a 64-bit Athlon/Pentium killer soon, in the form of the PowerPC 970), but trust me - you can definitely run modern games well.

June 23rd (or 23 June for you Brits out there) is conveniently when Apple's WWDC conference kicks into gear, and the big rumour is that Apple will announce PowerPC 970 (64-bit chip, much faster than the G4) Macs then. Maybe they're trying to mitigate the potential damage?

Or, it could just be a coincidence. Nah...

The game runs well on my system. Mind you, I'm being a bit conservative with the resolution (800x600x32, no FSAA) but that's because I know that these games benefit from being fast.

I'm using an Athlon XP 1800+, a GF3 Ti 500 (64 MB), and I have 1 GB of PC2100 memory.

Oh, and as for the game itself: so far, it's fun! I don't pretend that it's perfectly realistic or anything, but it "feels" like you're racing. I love the small touches like the bumping and knocking sounds you hear when you're inside the cockpit.

This comment was edited on May 29, 12:55.

Atari, as in the oldschool company of 2600 and Jaguar fame, went out of business awhile back; what happened is that the assets were acquired and Atari was basically just a name. Just recently, Infogrames (who held the rights to the name) actually changed its name to Atari. I believe the excuse was that more people recognized the name... and could pronounce it.

For reference, Infogrames is/was a French company, so the name would be pronounced "ein-foh-grahmms."

werbwerb:

You're not the only one who values the ability to write English properly. Heck, I just recently finished my English Lit degree; if I wasn't the sort who was fussy about things like contractions, I wouldn't be where I am today.

Is it just me, or is it nigh-on impossible to get the first zombie you meet? No matter how quickly I press the spacebar, it's JUST slow enough to get me killed.

The others are right, it's a bit of a surprise to see Frans go when it feels like he's still the new guy. Time flies, I suppose, but in this case I wish it wasn't flying by so quickly.

Take care, Frans. Hopefully we'll hear from you often!

I do think games are too expensive, but this is also why I bought the Collector's Edition... if I'm going to have that kind of outlay on a game anyways, I might as well go whole-hog and get the full package. Did that with Diablo 2 and enjoyed it, if for nothing else than having a box the size of a thick encyclopedia.

I'm somewhat eager to play this, but at my house I just KNOW that it's my sister who'll end up playing this to death. She's been a Blizzard fan ever since Warcraft 2 and still plays Diablo 2 almost every day.

Now, if I can convince her to buy it herself, and get the collector's edition while she's at it...

I don't know if I'd call Undying the best game of 2001; it did drag in parts. Max Payne may have been short, and definitely relied on the time effects to stand out, but it also had good pacing. There was little slack to cause doubts about where to go, or in the sense of plot advancement (such as the plot was). Not that Undying was horrible in that regard, but there was definitely a more relaxed, less defined pace.

That probably underscores the differences between the two... Max Payne was all about living an action movie; not particularly thought-provoking, but maybe more immediately gripping. Undying was more in-depth but could easily lose pace the moment you took a wrong turn.

No matter what you think of the two, I hope Mac users enjoy Undying and give it new life (pardon the pun).

In the interview they say they're still using the basic BSP process, but the lighting and visibility is calculated in real-time. That basically means that they don't have to rely on lightmaps or other tricks that were necessary with slower computers.

And they can get away with that real-time lighting due to the video technology that's been showing up in computers since Q3 came out. It's now reasonable to assume that most recent computers circa 2003 will have hardware T&L video (even if it's a cheapie GeForce 2 MX or Radeon) and at least some of those will have programmable pixel shaders, like the GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500. Many of the more recent cards can take the polygons, lighting and bump-mapping effects away from the CPU and give it room to handle things like gameplay or physics. When the Q3 engine was built, most of that just wasn't an option!

The file had briefly been pulled from that site earlier (possibly corrupt), but I just checked and it's back up. Try getting it again if you'd prefer not to wait at Fileplanet.