Shades Of Twilight

Eversince Assassin’s Creed, I have noticed that I start to observe how games perform on my PC more often than before. Worse, now I start to nitpick and say “this bit’s too laggy” or “I think I need to unload more stuff from memory”.

Whereas, before, I am just fine with 7 frames per sec, as long as I can still move

Anyway, here’s another short clip (about 6 mins I think) of a typical game session with Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 on my 5 year old rig.

Now, because I’m already getting pretty much low framerates with modern games, running FRAPS and doing video captures lowered the framerates even more, so what you see in the video is actually slightly more laggy than it normally is.

The one thing that I don’t like about the game lagging is this – when you’re aiming at someone, and he moves, and you try to move your crosshair to follow, and it lags right there, it totally sucks. On my PC, that happens fairly often. Sometimes I get killed due to this kind lag (affetionately known as “lagdeath” in multiplayer speak as well as in MMORPGs), and I have to reload from the previous “checkpoint”.

Also, I don’t really like the checkpoint-save system. Sometimes, some parts of the game is just so tough, it takes you 20 mins or more just to fight through it, then you round a corner and die before you reach the next checkpoint to save.

Which sucks totally.

Trust me.

Yeah I know I could easily download those “trainers” from the Internet, but why? Why play a game if it no longer poses any sort of challenge?

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.