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.

First, a two part developer walkthrough. He doesn’t play very well, but this is a good natural gameplay video with some comments from the developer. He mentioned alot of XBOX360 features, so I’m wondering if these translate well into the PC version.

Part 1:

HD version

Part 2:

HD Version

And here’s a little multiplayer video:

Some nighttime single player action:

And more single player mission objectives:

As if no one saw this coming. Spore will most likely be delayed until next year, or later.

Electronic Arts said it taken out “Spore,” a game where players build organisms from scratch, from its financial projections for the fiscal year ending in March 2008, adding that the game could be delayed until fiscal 2009.

Sure, many can say they never delayed a release date before, but that’s because they never really officially posted one. Hinting counts!

Electronic Arts Acquires Mythic Entertainment

EA is set to acquire Mythic Entertainment and turn it into a subsection cranking out only MMORPGs.

This is near to my experience as an ex-Origin employee, which was the first MMORPG company to be bought by EA. I was there right after the acquisition. Overall the experience left a lot of people laid off, a lot of false promises, canceled projects just prior to completion (UO2), and general stagnancy of creativity.

Ah well, DAoC was fun while it lasted. It definitely had the most interesting PVP in any MMORPG to date. Their ill-fated pseudo-Rome game sounded interesting but never really picked up steam before it got shelved for the Warhammer project.

Now Mythic will be relegated to over-hyping games that are never really completed, rushed to ship, and not supported much after release. Not pretty.