Most gamers known that IGN's reviews are worthless. They routinely have their "quotes" pasted all over the retail packaging. 90% of the time the quote is usually "paid" for by the publisher. Basically IGN is the payola of game review sites and a general disgrace to the online game review community."

What a load of horseshit. Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?

"Take House of the Dead. It had an estimated 7mil budget and made 10mil at the box office and 1mil from rentals. This from a movie that got 7% on the Tomatometer. RWS is just hoping to make a tiny bit of money off an expected flop."

$11 million revenue... on a movie with a $12 million production budget. And another $10 million spent on advertising.

Sorry, bro, that one stank it up like all the rest of his cinematic roadkill.

Check it: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=houseofthedead.htm

"Catalyst™ 5.9 introduces directional motion adaptive deinterlacing algorithm through the 3D shader. The algorithm will detect edges in 5 different directions. This reduces artifacts, and improves the overall detinterlace video quality."

This has to do with displaying video -- nothing to do with game performance.

...How much some people will go out of their way to tell the world that they have no interest in something. "I could care less!" Like I care that some random dude on the Internet is aggressively disinterested in a game. Sheesh.

...When you set antialiasing in Windows to "Application Preference" (for ATI cards), then turn off Light Bloom and set AA from within the game. And with the patch, you can turn off shadows, too, which is supposed to help a bunch. Whether or not the game actually turns your crank is a separate discussion, though :D. Survey says: You'll either love it or mostly dislike it.

"First of all, it was apparent through many articles and even the press release that Vivendi first let slip that it was going to be out on September 30th."

Wrong again! Vivendi never, ever set an official date on the release of Half-Life 2. It was always "Holidays 2003" up until *Valve* announced the delay. I challenge you to find a single Vivendi press release anywhere that ties them to a specific release date.

This has always been their offical postion: http://pc.ign.com/articles/431/431079p1.html

[i]"It was never going to be released this year."[/i].

Oho, nice try, Mr. Insider. But the logic doesn't work out. You don't stamp down a date months away for the most anticipated PC game ever, with no intention of ever hitting it. That creates catastrophic fallout, and no benefit that comes near making the backlash worth it. Now their super revolutionary game engine might actually debut in Vampire: The Masquerade instead of in their own frickin' game. You're either lying or swallowing someone else's lie, hook line and sinker.

SOE should have done this a while back, when PS subscription numbers really started dropping. The 7-day trial was too short to begin with, IMO. It saddens me that they apparently put the lion's share of their dev time into that lackluster expansion pack, rather than adding new content to PS and keeping things fresh. That and the fact that they're asking $14 a month for persistent-world Tribes, for the most part.

I loved teaming up with other people to take on a base, but the game runs like a dog unless you have a gig of RAM. It was also terribly buggy at launch. Several times a session my system would randomly lock up completely, and then there were the warp hangs, where you'd lose your Gal and half the crew was disconnected. Bit of a buzzkill.

I for one loved the drastic reduction in dropship wait time. I tore my hair out too many times waiting for a Galaxy crew to get their asses in gear, and too many times barely missing the dropship and hoping like hell that Instant Action would get me there. Then there were the times that IA didn't work because the active continents were locked and...I'll stop there.

That said, invading a base with a huge group of people against some staunch defenders never, ever got old. It was a huge, cool experience. But there wasn't enough content in the game to keep me interested in the long run.

<i>Play it for an hour, then see how you feel</i>

Simplifying design elements to make the same design work on two different platforms is not the same thing as developing a game for one platform, then using that same codebase on another platform. Whether or not I "feel" that it is a port is irrelevant to the reality of the situation, in which the game was developed for both platforms at the same time.

This comment was edited on Nov 20, 13:22.

KoTOR was developed simultaneously for the Xbox and PC. Microsoft "convinced" the developer to hold off on the PC release for a few months. It is NOT a port.

...covering everything that's been covered ad nauseum already. They didn't ask the one question that *hasn't* been beaten to a pulp: What's up with the benchmark? And the intro says you have news on multiplayer and release info, but Newell doesn't give you a single scrap of new information.

Nothing to see here, folks, move along. The only news here is that there *is* no news (referring to the article, not bluesnews, natch).

This comment was edited on Oct 2, 00:04.

...Even though you pretty much expected that, at this point, without any announcements in the past few weeks, it would be delayed. They started out strong, but the claims became more and more ambiguous and content-free.

Ginourmous.

I found the info on Sony's own fucking website to be approximately 80.2% more helpful than this half-assed dribble of an "article." I want this man's head on my desk first thing tomorrow.

...that it's the exact same two(!) screenshots in every single article? Two! All apparently issued from PR. Blah.

This comment was edited on Aug 15, 01:25.

"Sounds to me like they never should've announced the problem in the first place, they should've just fixed it. Lazy poop-brains."

They never announced anything. The story originated from an email exchange made public on a 3rd-party fansite.

Paranoid, and others discussing the AF thing, I should clarify that indeed the smoother AF levels with ATi don't exist across the board. Sometimes it a driver issue, sometimes it's a game issue. I don't want to sound like a fanboy here. AF looks much better in UT2k3, but I get that hard distinction in Planetside. But *overall* I've experienced cleaner AF and seen benchmark screenshots of cleaner AF and AA with the recent ATi cards.

Anandtech had a review a while back that compared these elements between the top two cards, and ATi came out on top--however, nVidia said that those screenshots weren't representative of final output because some additional things are done to the image after it leaves the buffer. They didn't specify, so it could be some proprietary algorithm or BS. Whatever the case, both high end cards will give you a great gaming experience, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the NV40 polished up the AF to be on par or better than what ATi is doing.

Also, as it stands *right now,* nVidia's current lineup drops of significantly in AA performance after 4x. Take a look at Hardocp's reviews, or any other review that graphs all AA modes, and you'll see ATi goes on a relatively gentle downward slope, while nVidia drops off a cliff at 8xAA. It's a little odd, and disappointing since the high-end nVidia cards are the only ones that do 8xAA, IIRC.

That said, I'm looking forward to seeing the NV40 kicking some ass. All I'm interested in is the best bang for the buck, and that requires at least two companies duking it out neck and neck in order to keep prices out of the stratosphere and features on the cutting edge.

Paranoid: You'd know which one was ATi because it would finish the benchmark first (when you've cranked up AA and AF, of course).

You'll also get hard anistropic filtering intervals in this game with an NV30 and above, meaning your ground texture will always have a moving line of

this farther area looks like ass
-------------------------
this closer area looks neato

at all times. Once you notice this, you will not be able to un-notice it. Meanwhile, the ATi aniso levels are smooth from right in front of you to far away.

And the "mumbo jumbo" is worth demystifying when you're coughing up this kind of money, dude. ATi has superior shaders. Prolly get the same visual result, but it's not a bottleneck with this card.

When the NV40 comes out, I'm sure it will kick ass. I have faith in nVidia. But let's not pretend that their current stock is something it's not.

I'm starting to think that even a news item that consists of nothing more than the words "Half-Life 2 is neato!" will still draw at least a dozen replies. It's truly created a mental gaming vortex. Not that this is a bad thing--the industry needs this kind of pull.

mort, that's because gaming journalism tends to have less journalistic rigor than the mainstream. Also, what's a better headline? "Half-Life 2 Delayed" or "Rumors of Half-Life 2 Delay are False"? Better for them to float a claim from "the publisher" rather than wait even half an hour, in which time someone else can post the story and get the glory (read: page hits).