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The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom

The Secret of Star Wars Fandom

If you run into somebody who tells you they thought the franchise was quite enjoyable, and they very-much liked the originals as well as the prequels, and even own everything on DVD, and a few of the books, these imposters are not Star Wars Fans.

Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.

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So the Medal of Honor: Airborne Demo was released yesterday. Supposedly it was exclusive to fileplanet, but I saw a host of other download sites being posted around the web’s tubes.

My quick impressions:

After playing the demo a few (dozen) times, I’ve got to play with all the weapons up to their max upgrades. It’s pretty shocking how easy it is, as I was able to get all of the weapons to their max except the pistol and grenades (I got close on the pistol!). Albeit they were on successive replays. I’d say the weapon that gets my favorite upgrades is the German SMG (an MP40? I can’t remember). You get a double sized clip and a brutal one-shot knife melee attack. But the garand grenade attachment is also a blast (pun intended, I guess).

The German SMG is a beast from the beginning, and just gets better. The thompson is more deadly but it is more erratic in fire, so you can’t do midrange nearly as well. The two rifles are both nice, the garand slightly less powerful and less accurate than its german counterpart (the KAR), as expected. grenades have a neat explsion cloud and make people fly everywhere. In fact even pistol shots can make bodies fly, the “PhysX” works a little overtime.

You can seemingly jump from most roofs without any damage. But when I was trying to do one of those trick landings, I fell right down the middle of a staircase and went kerplop. I only got 3 of the supposed 5 trick landings. The hardest being the balcony opening one. I did the church steeple and the open staircase as well, but I have no idea what the other ones are. Landing on the mayor’s house doesn’t get you any reward except a hail of bullets.

I started off with all settings on high but with no post-processing. This was playable but had that famous MOH mouse lag. I didn’t want to reduce my prerender limit, so I just dropped down to medium on everything, which was slightly more playable. I then went back and turned models to low and left everything to medium and it plays beautifully, and the only thing I noticed was shadows were reduced. So I’m happy enough with that. (I have an 8600GT vidcard).

This is the first game to tax out my core2duo. It stays at 100% usage on both cores the whole time. I have a feeling this was the result of Ageia PhysX slurping up as many cycles as are free. At least , I hope that’s what it is, because having your processor pegged solely by a game usually results in CPU lag, which is the worst kind. I didn’t notice any though. I may run a performance graph on processes later.

So I may be able to squeeze out just a bit more life outta this vidcard. Surprisingly both Bioshock and this game are highly playable on it, but I think having to step down to low settings for the first time means it is on it’s last legs. I’m hoping that my processor will hold out until the Penryns come out and have at least one price drop.

The Perks system in Call of Duty 4 seemed like a cross between a cheap arcade powerup ripoff and a cheap Battlefield 2 ripoff rolled into one giant cheesy ripoff. I wasn’t impressed when Infinity Ward first started gushing about it. Their initial videos and explanations didn’t help my outlook.

But now they either got the hint, or further refined the system, because it actually looks cool. The perks don’t look useless, nor do they seem necessary to succeed. They just add a little color, and specialize your character a bit. They should have waited until it worked like this before talking about it:

Oh, and the pseudo-public beta is supposed to be released today. If you are interested and still haven’t signed up, try the publicity site for COD4 at CharlieOscarDelta.

Team Fortress 2. Used to be the butt pocket joke for whenever a game took forever to be released. Now it is tantalizingly redone and looking better than ever. They did a few films before where the classes spoke about themselves, and now the soldier gets his turn. I never thought a cartoony game would make me think “amazing graphics” again, but this one does.

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pencil and paper, it’s been a long time:

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This will be the best game-to-movie ever. Look out Uwe Boll!

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One of the biggest reasons many PC gamers don’t enjoy FPS game son consoles is due to both the familiarity and the superiority of the mouse and keyboard combo. It’s just far easier to aim and shoot. Sure, you can get used to the controller in FPS games, but as many controller-only gamers will grudgingly agree, you can never be as quick or accurate.

Well, apparently due to overwhelming emails from people on the official Unreal Tournament forums, they decided to include functionality, native in the game, on the PS3.

Mark Rein
Administrator

Folks,

I checked with Steve Polge and he said that YES we are supporting keyboard and mouse in Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3. He is confident we are doing it in a way that will be balanced without feeling “gimped” for either side. We’ll also allow people to choose whether or not they want to allow mixed controller vs. keyboard/mouse games or not.

I think you guys are going to love UT3!

More details to come later.

I’m not sure how the “anti-gimping” will go, as controllers are not gimped, but inferior by nature. But we shall see. This won’t make me buy the console outright, but if more PS3 games follow suit, it will make a strong case.