Shades Of Twilight

To recap, eversince I got my new ATI HD 4650, I have been re-playing old games just to get a “feel” of how much things might have improved.

One of these is Call Of Duty 4. Previously on my old rig, the P4 3.0Ghz Hyperthreading (single core), I get respectable framerates (about 20+ FPS) with “medium” settings. Resolution was at 1024×768, and certain graphic details were turned off (notably Anti-aliasing). When I got my new (current) rig, with the integrated ATI HD3200, performance was better. A few more graphic details were turned on, some were set to medium. Framerates were about the same, ie 20 odd.

With the new card, it auto-detected everything at High and whatever that was off, was turned on. Anti-aliasing was set to 4x. However, resolution was still at 1024×768. I manually turned the resolution up to 1280×1024, the maximum that my monitor can run on.

With FRAPS running to measure framerates, I started COD4. To my jaw-dropping amazement, COD4 clocked an average of 45 FPS! Even with FRAPS capturing video, it never went under 30 FPS, but hovering around mid to high 30’s.

Ok, yes I know I am pretty bad at COD4 after all these time. In fact I think I should re-play it again, because this Nikolai mission made me realise I forgot alot of the story (and hence, enemy placements and locations) to justify another run-through.

The next entry, I’ll probably bring you a video of the new Stalker game. I had a pretty rough time running it on the integrated HD3200 chip – many parts of the game were stuttering and jerky, and I estimate framerates to be about 5 to 10 in some places.

Today I’m awake for longer amount of time. My meds are gone, I’ve completed the entire course, and yeah I do feel better.

So, what better way to spend the time than to see about completing COD4?

I loaded up the savegame where I had left off, in the middle of the missile silo, 10 mins left to save the world, and I’m stuck right in the middle of a heavy firefight. After dying a couple of times (I’m really glad it’s just a game), I finally broke through the defenses and entered the command centre, and saved the world.

Next mission – escape! I had to high-tail it out of the missile complex, to go after the bad guy. On the way, I had enemy trucks and helicopters chasing me and I had to shoot at them. And then, THE END!

WTF?

Ok, I won’t give away the ending, but it was a disappointment to me. It’s a very short game, somewhere around 6 to 9 hours of play time (Xfire says I played it only for FIVE hours). 5 hours!! How could you go through a whole game in 5 hours?! Even Half Life 2, which I thought was short, had me playing like 30 hours (well 29 hours, according to Xfire) to complete it.

No, I didn’t “get better”. The game is really short. Considering that I paid over 50 bucks for it, it hardly seems worth the money. Oh yeah there’s multiplayer and all that, but hey, I bought the game not because of the multiplayer. Games I buy due to multiplayer are stuff like Battlefield and Battlefield 2142 – those I’d bought knowing full well I’m only going to play multiplayer on them.

Disappointment aside, since I’d completed COD4, I’ll uninstall it soon since I seriously doubt I’ll get hooked by the multiplayer. Back to saving London from the Hellgate….

Speaking of which, Patch 0 is supposed to be released, but I have been unable to get it. The official website, ie http://www.hellgatelondon.com requires an account to download it. I can’t create an account because part of the sign-up process requires my CD-Key, and it does not recognise my CD-key as “valid (?!). There’s no “contact us” link to send an email off to, for help, and clicking on “Support” tells me I need to log in first. Well, I can’t bloody log in because it won’t recognise my CD-Key as valid, hence I can’t register an account!! *fume*

Seriously, they need to think about situations like this – no valid CD-Key = no account? Nice way to build your customer base, dudes.

However, the other website that is stated in the manual, iahgames.com, *does* recognise my CD-Key as valid and I managed to create an account on it, and it’s also where I play multiplayer Hellgate on too. The patch is however, nowhere to be seen on iahgames.com.

So, where else can I get patches?

Bittorrent. One can find almost anything on bittorrent, as I’m sure you know. I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes the next time…

Being sick sucks. It totally screws up my internal body clock for example. I’ve been sleeping the whole day, and now, right in the middle of the night, I wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

So I take my meds, and wait for them to kick in and make me go to sleep again. In the meantime, I fired up COD4 and thought I’d record mission 1. Note that I used FRAPS and it DOES impact framerates. Without FRAPS running, it’s smoother. Even so, as I say time and again, it’s pretty amazing how smooth it is on a single-core, 4 year old PC.

Mission 1, part 1

Mission 1, part 2

Again, I have to break the video up into 2 parts to get around Youtube’s 10 minute limit. By the way, anyone knows of an alternative website where videos do not have a 10 minute limit?

You’d also notice that in the video, I fired on friendlies twice (“friendly fire” is an oxymoron). My excuse is I’m sick and it’s war! Sick people shouldn’t be fighting in battles! That’s why we have Attend-C in SAF hah!

Hope you guys enjoy the videos. I’m off to bed…