This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below. >

(more…)

And in the game!> Ahaha! Ah. My little joke about Determinism there. What this is really about is how I feel after playing Rage, which is a feeling not uncommon to gaming throughout the ages: the feeling that the options a game presents are actually an illusion. Read on for ramblings… (more…)

Lists! Two of ‘em, in fact. But what do these lists do? They compare the top-ten selling PC games of last week on Steam with the top-ten selling PC games of last week at UK retail. What could we learn from them? Nothing, probably. Apart from which game companies became slightly richer over the last few days. Well done, those companies. (more…)

Question to the floor: how’s everyone doing with Rage at the moment? There seem to be mixed reports as to the efficacy of the recent patch – for some it did the trick, for others (especially on ATI cards – our own John Walker claims the game is still more or less unplayable on his 5850) it didn’t help the glitching and texture pop-in, and others still have claimed it made things even worse. Carmack claimed on Twitter yesterday that id are still monitoring forum reports, and suggested those experiencing difficulties browse said forum for help. They’re worth a check, even though it’s massively tiresome to have to do so for a game you paid good money for, as there are a raft of fixes and tweaks doing the rounds – most of which at least involve only the relatively simple act of downloading a replacement config file. (more…)

Again! Again! It’s our theoretically regular comparison of Steam’s top ten best-selling games over the last week with the same at UK retail. Will Rage have stormed its way to the top despite the outrage and buck-passing surrounding its technically-troubled PC launch? Or will foot-to-ball have conclusively proven that an Englishman’s national sport is more important to him than pretending to be a time-lost survivor of a planet-wide apocalypse? And will retail be a mess of Sims games while Steam is a confusing muddle of pre-orders, deeply discounted returning titles and new entries? Take my hand. Where we’re going, there be tables. (more…)

id’s legendary robo-brain John Carmack has broken the developer’s rather inadvisable silence about the mucky state of Rage at launch on PC last week. Apology? Nah? Accepting blame? Nah. It’s all ATI’s fault that id released a game designed for future rather than existent drivers, he says. Oh, and the reason the game, once working, is still not as super-shiny as we might have hoped is because “We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games.” Here we go again.

In happier news, the first Rage patch is out, and thank the god of textures, it introduces a much-needed graphics settings menu to the game. (more…)

Rage, the first id game since – careful now – Doom 3 – came out on Tuesday in American climes, and is due in the retailer-oppressed UK tomorrow. After initially losing a day to the PC version’s notorious technical problems, which ultimately led to picking up a different graphics card and manually tweaking configuration files, I’ve since been haring my way through its wastelands and tunnels, on foot and on wheels, and I’m ready to offer my verdict. Return to form, exploring new frontiers or compounding age-old problems? Let’s find out, stranger.> (more…)

Alec and myself are busy playing Rage, and rather enjoying it, actually. That said, we had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the damned thing working ok. We both used the fix detailed here in combination with enabling the GPU transcoding thing, while also updating drivers (particularly important for ATi cards). This seems to address most of the texture pop-in issues, and apparently ups the texture res, too. You’ll ideally need a card with 1.5gb VRAM to get a step up in texture quality, and if you have 3gb or more it’s reportedly possible to go higher still, although this article on the Geforce site said they found no immediate differences. Anyone with enorm-VRAM able to confirm?

Bethesda echo these and other fixes here.

Why, that’s the most boring headline I’ve ever written here. Still, it’s late, I’m tired, I’ve spent half the day unsuccessfully trying to track down an NVIDIA card so I can play Rage without feeling nauseous, but now I don’t have to because ATI have put out a fix for the unhappy state of the game on Radeons. Unlike the first supposed fix, this makes things better rather than worse. (more…)