Shades Of Twilight

Remember I brought up that Ghost Recon has an Observer Mode, and that you could conceivably play the whole game in this mode, like an RTS game?

Well I went ahead and did that for the first mission again. Well, at least up to the point of capturing the camp in the wilderness. I recorded a portion of the mission, and here you will see about 1 min 30 secs of the action. I started recording just before launching the attack on the camp.

Yeah, towards the end, the final few seconds, I actually regained control of Bravo team I think, and had to shoot the enemy myself since the AI seemed a little retarded to return fire on its own.

Playing Ghost Recon made me itchy and want to install GRAW again (yes the original GRAW). I don’t really like GRAW2 though. The game’s too short. Also, the AI in GRAW, in my opinion, is much better than in GRAW2 as mentioned here.

Incidentally, it seems that DivX 5.2 really suck compared to XviD 1.13. I encoded the raw video capture using 2000 bitrate, and the results look sucky on DivX. I don’t want to use DivX 6.8 because the codec seemed buggy – I can’t seem to resize videos with it. On XviD and DivX 5.2, I can. So, it’s not a problem with VirtualDub which I use to encode the raw captures. It is actually a problem with DivX 6.8 itself! If DivX 5.2 can’t handle my in-game captures I may as well just remove DivX altogether, since XviD can playback DivX files anyway.

Here’s the video clip of Ghost Recon as promised in the previous post.

Watch Ghost Recon – Mission 1 in Video Blogs, Animation, and Game Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The cool thing about using Vimeo is that I can have a High Definition version of the clip available, such as the clip above, and it’s all done automatically by Vimeo. If you look closely, you can see a “HD” button on the right side of the video. If you click that, it will bring you to the high definition version of the same clip. The High Definition version will probably be almost as good as the original clip which I uploaded.

Update: 6 Nov 2008: Due to a surprising policy change by Vimeo, my gaming clips will no longer be hosted by them. From now on they will either be at Viddler or Veoh.

Anyway, Ghost Recon, as mentioned in the previous post, is an old game circa 2000 or 2001. The game autodetected my graphic settings as “HIGH” in all options (of course, it only required a Pentium 2 with 128MB RAM).

For people who know me, know that graphics actually isn’t a very big factor in deciding whether a game is “good” or not. It’s normally the gameplay that captures my attention. A game with zero content but very pretty graphics will soon sit on the shelf (or in my case, lost and forgotten in the depths of my cupboard). A game with so-so graphics but good gameplay will remain on my harddisk for a long time to come. Ghost Recon is just such a game. Operation Flashpoint is another example (OFP actually was on my harddisk from 2001 till 2006, when Armed Assault was finally released).

For a 7 year old game, it’s still pretty playable. Graphics don’t look too dated. Gameplay – beautiful. As you can see from the short 3 minute clip above, it still is pretty good. I think that the unique thing about Ghost Recon is that you can either play it as an FPS or an RTS. Let me explain.

In the game, you can actually activate “Observer Mode”. In that mode, the characters all come under the control of the AI. You bring up the command map as shown in the video, and give orders there. In Observer Mode, your camera is locked onto the team currently selected, eg Alpha, Bravo or Charlie. You cannot directly control any character in this mode. Hence, if you prefer a more RTS-like way of playing, feel free to permanently play in this mode. Just give orders, and your men will move and execute them. Your camera will follow whichever team you have currently selected and hence, you can see the firefight as it progresses.

So far, I have only played the first mission. I had to stop because of Chinese New Year and the reunion dinner thing.

Will have more updates later.

Ok you might call me crazy, I don’t care.

Yes, I was walking around Popular Bookstore today during lunch, and saw that they had Ghost Recon Gold Edition on sale! Naturally I grabbed it.

Why would I want to play such an old game? The specs said Pentium II (yes, TWO!), with 128MB RAM as minimum. Heck, it even runs on DirectX 8 only! Ok that’s way old, right? If I remember right, Ghost Recon was released somewhere around 2000 or 2001. Back then I was playing Operation Flashpoint alot.

Yes, I know it’s not GRAW. It’s the game before GRAW. In fact, if memory serves, it’s TWO games before GRAW. I seem to recall that they released Ghost Recon 2, before releasing Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter.

Since I enjoyed GRAW and GRAW2, and I also liked Rainbow 6, I figure the predecessor must be pretty impressive for its time. The Gold Edition comes with 2 expansions, and costs only $40.00, so it’s a good deal. It’s almost like having 3 games for $40!

Besides, I’m a little tired of getting modern games and having my PC just bogging down trying to keep up with framerates. Since this game needs only a P2-450, my P4 3.0Ghz should be blazing along and I should get really incredible framerates!

Well I should be posting in-game video captures of it soon on Vimeo. Well, after I do a reformat of my PC tomorrow. I should be spending almost the entire day reinstalling and reconfiguring stuff on my PC before I can seriously install Ghost Recon and start video-captures.