Shades Of Twilight

Yes, we got Assassin’s Creed 2 before North America. Singapore had it since Thursday, 4 March 2010. I received an SMS (that’s “text message to you Westerners) from my regular game shop at 1pm saying that it was in Singapore. By 6pm I had a copy in my hands, and by 6.30 I was already home and installing it.

<RANT value=”copyprotect”>

The copy-protection on this however, is a little too extreme. It says it “requires” a constant Internet Connection for it to work. That’s lame, because what happens if you’re not on Broadband, but on dialup, and each minute you’re on dialup costs you money?! That is irrelevant in Singapore since everyone is already on Broadband, but it affects people in other locales.

Secondly, what happens if Ubisosft servers are experiencing heavy loads? We can’t connect to “authenticate” and thus we can’t play it? The North America launch is coming on 9th March, that is tomorrow. You can expect a sudden spike in users trying to authenticate to your servers, Ubisoft.

That’s exactly what happened to me the other day – Ubisoft Servers actually went down (see “Related Articles” below). The game just quit suddenly to desktop, and when I tried to relaunch, it was stuck at he Login screen of the launcher for about 5 mins. Then when the game started and I chose “Story Mode”, the game went to a screen saying “please wait, contacting server” and the only option available at that screen was “Exit To Windows”.

At least Bioware doesn’t force the requirement on the user. Dragon Age, for example, just says the achievements and scores won’t be updated on your web profile. Mass Effect 2 just tells you that you won’t get Cerberus goodies if you don’t have an internet connection. They do NOT stop you from playing their game!

And game companies wonder why people continue to get pirated copies.

</RANT>

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This is now my FIFTH run-through of Mass Effect 2. ME2 now holds the record for the most number of replays an RPG ever got from me. Basically all I’m doing is trying to do everything I didn’t do the first 4 times around.

The amazing thing is that I keep discovering small bits and pieces of funny things I never saw the first 4 times. The video below is a compilation of the majority of the funny bits:

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Yup I have been spending the past week just playing with my older games with my new toy – the ATI Radeon HD 4650 card.

I’m just constantly amazed by how much I can push the graphic details up to, and still maintain great framerates. One game in particular, Assassin’s Creed, never cease to amaze me in this part. In my previous entry, I put everything to max except the resolution. Now, I pushed the resolution up to the max my monitor could handle – 1280×1024.

As you can see in the video below, there is virtually no impact on the framerates to the naked eye. However, FRAPS did measure an average of 3 frames less than at 1024×768.

As you can see from the video clip, it’s still smooth on the whole. During recording of this video, there is naturally a drop of framerates. Without recording on, it’s smoother. Compare this clip to my previous ones:

1. Old PC – P4 3.0Ghz Hyperthreading
2. Old PC – same rig as above, with some tweaking

For an investment of just about S$100, I think my current rig can last me a couple of years more!

Since the IT Show 2009 is on right now (for people in Singapore), you might want to run out and grab an even better card than what I have – the ATI Radeon 4870. I hope they are selling it at a great discount over there. In any case, I won’t be going to the IT Show. I have nothing to buy, and I don’t want to tempt myself on non-essential stuff I might see there, and buy them on impulse