The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Sorry to hear about the difficult times Omega

Rather absorbed in Minecraft lately. A survival/adventure/construction sandbox game with a very simplistic art style and dangerously addictive gameplay. Just hollowed out a mountain by hand and built a huge fortress into it with an indoor port. All equipment, architecture and furnishings must be fashioned directly from raw materials. Granted the game itself is very simplistic. They could do more to add content and functionality. It could use a wider variety of NPCs, environment types, and vastly larger "villages". I say it in quotes because "villagers" are still largely treated like animals by the game mechanics. But when you understand that everything is completely randomly generated, and that the maps do go on to the edge of your PC's processing limits, the relative simplicity of the gameplay can be forgiven. The graphics, like those of Legend of Zelda Windwaker on the Gamecube or Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo, are ageless.

Minecraft has its own charm and is a refreshing and original game. Never even heard of anything like it. The closest I've seen in castle building freedom is the niche market Stronghold RTS series, which doesn't come close.

Speaking of Stronghold, it's still a game any RTS player should try out. They've recently released official HD repacks of both original games, Stronghold and Crusader. They allow you to run at proper resolutions in widescreen, and Stronghold always had above average 2D graphics. Really nice engine. Wind effects in the trees, herds of deer running around, and everything else make it very visually appealing. Almost like a work of art sometimes. This game has a certain amount of charm, nostalgia and fun gameplay that keeps me coming back even 10 years later.

Also going back to other older games lately like Half Life 2 and the CoD Modern Warfare full 3 part campaign. All three Modern Warfare games back to back make for one of the most epic adventures ever in an FPS. Heart pumping right to the final second of gameplay.

Half Life 2 and the episodes have aged extraordinarily well. With recently released versions of some popular mods, the graphics can be transformed, using all the power available in the Source Engine to really make it shine. Still a very pretty game. Technically superior to just about everything.

There is a LOT to be said for mods. The best looking games ever made are modded versions of games we already played a while ago. Crysis and Oblivion for example. I have made Oblivion every bit the equal to Skyrim in everything but performance . I imagine that will need an i5 or i7, possibly something even more powerful, and 2GB of video RAM to make modded Oblivion run really properly. It runs poorly but I'm so used to it from the years I don't care. Skyrim runs and scales better than Oblivion ever did. I will beat Oblivion in one last epic run through and finally lay it to rest. I had a very nice character with a couple hundred hours in it that got deleted. That really sucked.

 

Kevin, sorry to hear about your loss.

Hi Jeff, how did your character get deleted in Oblivion?

I picked up Bioshock 2 which you weren't too fond of, Jeff, mostly I suppose because you probably felt it was quite a letdown from Bioshock the original.

I watched 9 minutes of gameplay yesterday, still debating whether or not to play it, or maybe wait 6 months or so as I'm trying to kick the real estate back into gear.

I see that this time you play as a Big Daddy. I took a look at some other reviews, and no - there's not too much that's new - it's mostly a re-visit for the people who loved the original. That charming city again, and in a few instances, the sea outside in the diving suit. The reviews I looked at on YouTube said it had a good story. They say it is somewhat short compared to the original - I couldn't believe how long Bioshock kept going way past when I thought it was over, lol.

Kevin, the reviews said that you would enjoy 2 more, if you played the original first.

Wow, Jeff, the three Cod Modern Warfares all three played one after another - yes that must pack quite a punch! I have played COD4 maybe 4 times already, so I don't know when I would be ready for another run-through. Maybe for me, 2 and 3 would be worth re-visiting sometime over the next year.

With all those amazing screenshots you showed us of that space game - I won't question any game you play Jeff. How about some screens of Minecraft? Sounds interesting. By the way - the sequel to the RTS - Company of Heroes - came out, didn't it? Is anybody playing it - like you Jeff?

Kevin, Bioshock will amaze you, and it will play well on your equipment. For sure, just like I needed to finally play it, you should too. It's a classic - in a class by itself.

Oh, and the third of the trilogy - Bioshock Infinite - was exquisite.

The city in the sky has an ocean - check it out.



It looks like a great place to visit with some very lovely ladies.



Down at the end of the wharf beyond this attractive group, our heroine is dancing her heart out.



Here she is. The only way we can entice her to leave, is to promise to fly her to Paris - we saw how much she liked France just before we freed her from her tower prison.



The graphics are amazing. I have about 20 screens and I might post a few more later, but I didn't go crazy on screenshots like on Far Cry 3, where I have hundreds.

Aside from the sequel to Company of Heroes, which I thought was out - but maybe that's later in the year - what has anybody heard about other interesting titles, such as the first from Respawn. That's coming up pretty soon isn't it?

By the way, I played a bit with the utility for AMD graphics cards that smoothes out framerates and is supposed to eliminate stutter. I used it a few times to get used to it, and had it coming on in Bioshock where I set the frames at 80 fps. It's a little tricky to understand at first. I really need to try it on Far Cry 3, but I haven't gone back to that title for a while and might not for the rest of this year. As for Crysis 3, I'll probably hold off until it hits Steam, if that ever happens.

Rich

 

Been a while since I visited this thread - not much been going on here lately!

It's been suggested by my (hopefully) new employer to commit some of my time to making a proper go of a blog in the subject area I normally post about here, so I'll probably be trying to post a bit more to get back into things

 

I had a friend use my PC without permission and save over my character by mistake. Just about cried.

Bioshock 1 was a very solid game and was interesting to play. Bioshock 2 is a carbon copy of Bioshock 1 that doesn't really add anything new. It's stale. Not a bad game by any stretch, but a poor effort by the developers.

My favorite is by FAR Modern Warfare 2. "If you've got a family living in Arcadia, it's your lucky day, WE'RE GONNA GO SAVE THEIR LIVES!" And the battle in front of the White House and all the helicopters falling out of the sky. Just... WOW. MW2 is fantastic. I couldn't describe the amount of patriotism that game triggers in me. Fantastic gameplay, highly memorable characters, spectacular levels. The Treyarch games don't even hold a candle.

Ha maybe I will post a few screens of Minecraft. I have a few grand projects in the works

Company of Heroes 2 I m very excited about. Company of Heroes with Dawn of War 2 mechanics ie all the issues fixed. Will be playing that soon.

 

Sam - a blog? Sounds interesting. What exactly are you doing for your employer these days Sam?

Yes, Jeff, some screens will be nice!


SSD ON DELL T5600 CAD WORKSTATION

By the way, I just had a fun hardware adventure helping a brother do the final setup on a CAD Dell T5600 workstation with 32 gigs memory (xeon 6-core on 2-cpu motherboard - he has only one cpu populated - maxes at 128 gigs memory) with a Samsung 256 840 Pro series SSD as the Windows 7 drive.

The IT guy at his company, despite help from Dell support, couldn't get the SSD to work on the SAS controller, even after removing the standard SAS Raid card that Dell ships with these workstations, and was beside himself with frustration, so my brother told him he'd drive up to the main office near LA and pick up the equipment that he had drop-shipped there, thinking the IT guy would put it all together and maybe also get him some of the programs he needed.

Whatever Dell says they normally install was not installed when all the boxes came down to the sunroom here at the house. And the Dell CD was missing. There were four SAS ports, and two sata ports one of which had the DVD reader connected to it. My brother was upset, but he calmed down when I told him that I was able to get W7 to see the SSD by removing it from the SAS port and connecting it to the unused Sata port.



I had decided that the SAS/Sata controller would only be recognizable to Windows 7 after installation of special drivers, whereas the optical was already working and had loaded the windows 7 install disk without any issue.

Oh, and by the way, it's a mouse-enabled bios - the first time I've seen that, lol.

But the IT guy had likely done us a favor, through Dell support's suggestion, by un-installing the included Raid card - some OEM no-name raid controller that Dell probably gets for $20, with passive heatsink and two mini-SAS plugs, capable of driving 4 disks each, with a two-disk connector already plugged into one of them. Why on earth they would put an 8-disk sas raid card in a mid-tower case with only two drive slots - beats me.

So my brother was impressed, lol. I told him gamers have to know hardware. Haha.

Dell support had all the drivers - everything got installed, and later when I put it back on the SAS controller to see if that made it run faster, it ran half as fast so I put it back.

As you can imagine, I am a lot more familiar with SSDs, Trim, garbage collection, etc. as a result of that project. I bench it with HDTune and get transfer rates of 400 MB/sec, whereas the Magician benchmark tool shows 550. (I think that number is bloated, and that the HDTune number is more accurate, lol.)

We pulled an old seagate 300 gig drive out of his Mac where he has mostly 1 TB drives, and we initially used that as the SSD clone. But later I pulled some specs on the noisy little Seagate, found out it is the old CSS technology (not ramp load, instead has contact start/stop - lands on the platter) rated at 50,000 landings.

SMART data per HDTune or SpeedFan showed that while only having 15,000 power on hours, it had 53,000 start/stop cycles. I told my brother that the drive was already past warranted life, and talked him into getting another $80 WD 1 TB drive, with average transfer rates of 150MB/sec as verified by HDTune, as an insurance policy on his $6500 worth of hardware (he's running two Dell 27" 2560x1440 monitors side by side - first time I ever played around with dual monitors.)



I liked the idea, for just a few dollars more, of getting a drive to clone the SSD, virtually identical to the WD 1 TB data drive. The transfer rate on both drives starts at about 175MB/sec, so two of them, short-stroked, in a Raid 0, could conceivably provide 325-350 MB/sec - close to the SSD 400 - if the SSD ever completely crashed and burned, lol.

All of this in a mid-tower case - the motherboard, largest I have ever seen, fills the entire back of the case. And as I mentioned, there are only two disk drive slots in the case.

I scanned all the 285 reviews in newegg, and guys mentioned putting the SSD anywhere you want with a piece of velcro. That made sense, so in order to keep the clone WD 1 TB drive inside the rig, I pulled the SSD and its 2.5" to 3.5" aluminum disk drive tray converter frame, and duct-taped the outer part of the frame to the plastic cover over the unused cpu socket. It is in the air-stream of the exhaust from the hsf of the populated cpu socket right next to it, so I think that location is ideal and should keep the SSD cool, if that is a concern as some of the reviewers suggested.

The graphics card is an nvidia quadro 5000 (I think) set up for this kind of graphics processing as opposed to gaming. Anyway, for what he is doing with autocad and navis works, and other autodesk products, it tears up his work and outperforms the rig at the office by 2 to 1, making him more productive on all the stuff he's been doing for a new hospital going up near La Jolla. It's crunch time and he's getting huge pressure to meet deadlines from the major contractor (he's with the very key drywall and framing subcontractor) so he came up with this idea as a way to cope with the load.

They have a system in place called Dropbox that keeps all the drawings and RFIs and changeorders in sync - he created the dropbox folder on his data drive and moved most of the 150 gigs over from his Mac, and then let the program run all night indexing and updating several thousand files.

So it's all been running fine for about two weeks. The first week he stayed home twice - this week 3 times. Each day he does that not only puts him on a faster machine, but also saves him a 3-hour round-trip commute to San Diego, which is time he would rather be working on the drawings. They allow him to take 8 hours of overtime a week - but he works way beyond that - so this T5600 is turning out to be his life-saver.

It's a bit of a delicate maneuver to keep his boss in line, who would prefer to have Joe close at hand to yell at - he's out in the bullpen - he doesn't even have a private office in the main construction trailer they work out of. But so far he's been managing the politics of that - stressing all the deadlines and massive workload which his boss is somewhat aware of.

The two screens are kind of neat. Makes me wonder about eye-finity. But no - no way. My 30" at 4 megapixels is fine, thank you very much. If I moved any further beyond Jeff's sweet spot of 2.3, I would have to sell a lot more houses to keep up with the insane horsepower demands - plus install an air-conditioner like Sam did. LOL

Rich

 

Glad to see you guys having fun Me... well, let's just say my wallet is crying. But, a certain company keeps sending me devices to test, provided I leave an appropriate, intelligent review(giving the buyer informative information). And they let me keep the toys

 

Two 27" 2560x1440 displays is very nice, but that's not what's in your picture. Those look like 20" 1600x1200 monitors

Work is, haha, complicated, I'll disclose some details if the imminent change goes through, but in summary what I'm doing is IT support provided via the medium of cloud computing - replacing the locally produced windows desktop environment with one delivered via Citrix from a data centre, enabling old PCs to be reformatted or replaced as appropriate with thin-client based systems.
The blog will be a side-project, aimed at properly commercialising it, hopefully eventually becoming an affiliate with some retailers. Who knows, one step at a time

 

You caught me. Haha. Good eyes!

You're so right - his monitors are so much more wide-angle than that stock photo that I stuck in there, and I believe you're probably correct about them being 20" 1600x1200 because I do have 3 of those things (from the animator after his company standardized on 30" Dells.)

Yeah, it's kind of neat to pull a folder over from the right monitor, and slide it to the left onto the other one. Never did that before. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd go take a good digital photo right now, and you'd see one of the workbench 20s sticking its head up behind the two new ones.

I guess you're right, DDP, no particular requirement that the monitors all be the same size.

Kevin, did you happen to mention that you are now a professional hardware reviewer? That sounds quite exciting!

Ah yes, I remember you mentioning thin-client, and I had looked that up when you first got hired, but I have totally forgotten what it meant. Wiki to the rescue: Oh, yeah, less computational power in the user client device, more in the server. Somewhat of a swing in the pendulum back toward the beginnings, where large data centers supported multiple totally dumb terminals.

Back to when ddp started in the business.

Good luck on that - didn't you mention something about a pig fat pay increase on the horizon?

So Kevin is evaluating the manufacturers, and you'll be helping promote the retailers - both of you guys on the side? Cool. I still haven't made a real estate phone call in a while now, but at the rate you guys are moving - I better get my butt back in gear or I'll be left in the dust!

Rich

 

Trust me, I'm already being left in the dust! LOL! I may sound well off at times, but that's probably going a bit far. I simply got noticed. The main email suggested, that I was chosen based on past reviews. They probably noted my buying a strong percentage of PC equipment, and relatively high english skills. Perhaps I'm being modest, I don't know. I feel a bit guilty accepting the more recent device. It's slightly beyond my technical expertise. I'm gonna have to study the device real closely, to give a proper review.

 

Now I am curious, what did you get?

 

Let's just say it's a cutting edge wireless Router. Cutting edge to me anyway LOL! Networking is not exactly my forte either.

 

Hmm hardware review of a router would be tricky....have fun with it

 

That's an understatement :S Especially for a guy, who's only had a couple, and has a fairly basic understanding of them. I plan to study other peoples reviews, to get some idea of what should be covered. Recommended software for testing speed, as well as covering every possible environment the router may encounter. Supposedly it has the ability to be 3X the typical 'n' speeds. Depending on other hardware of course

 

I guess I haven't had much to add lately. As long as Crossfire Application Profiles have caught up, my video cards are STILL adequate to max nearly everything. With the resrugence of lightweight indie games, my system hasn't really been taxed much either. With the hex-core Thuban firmly in place at the heart of this system, I have reached a possible record plateau. I haven't given much thought to my PC hardware in quite a while, as now it always seems to just be "enough" for whatever I want to do. The whole thing has run like a top 24/7 for quite a while now. *knock on wood* I love wearing in a particularly trusty set of hardware and sitting on it for a long time

My only complaint is the few games that don't support Crossfire or don't have CAPs but would run very nicely if it did work. World of Tanks, War Thunder, I'm looking at you. Also, the precious few games that actually need more than 1GB to max. Battlefield 3 had the simple workaround of lowering textures to high from very high. Absolutely zero difference flipping back and forth between otherwise identical screenshots. The FPS counter in the corner is the only telltale sign of the setting being changed. Likewise other games have similar workarounds. Only Skyrim and Oblivion with mods pose a true challenge.

Congrats on everyone's respective accomplishments and recognition. I remain partially employed, and am currently enjoying not being in constant debt
-------------------------------------------

Oh yeah, we are now on 6 years of Crysis and Warhead being the best looking games available hands-down. Only The Witcher 2, Battlefield 3, and a few others have touched it. We've really been spoiled by Crysis. It's too bad nobody will be doing anything as ambitious as Crysis 1 until Star Citizen comes out.

I could spend hours taking beautiful screenshots for every person who says Crysis looks like crap because it's old. It still schools everything. Warhead even more so. It's lucky Crysis 2 was such a damn fun and fundamentally good game, because the graphics were disappointing. Not to say it doesn't have some pretty moments that rival anything in Crysis. But it's not a constant feast for the eyes and brain, like the wonderfully dense, wide-open vistas of Crysis.

 

Kevin, I take it you haven't yet gotten to Dishonored, since you are now a professional product reviewer! Congratulations on that by the way!

Jeez Luizzz, I second Red, that is going to be the most complicated thing I ever heard of - reviewing a wireless router.

I would not want that assignment. I know a fair (tiny) bit about them, working with two linksys wrt54g routers at locations a few blocks apart up in LA, cable modem type, recently switching one location off a DSL wireless router and dropping the DSL line completely, installing cable instead, after AT&T more than doubled the monthly fee. And here, I support two Linksys access points running two small LANS, off an apple airport wireless router, with another apple express plugin wireless router installed as a boost to the main one. (I went through three kinds of hell and stayed up all night finally getting that boost to work.)

But that whole topic is so friggin complicated.

And the boost, which unfortunately sends the strongest signal to one of the access points, has a nasty habit of giving away ip addresses which have already been assigned by the main apple airport wireless router, so I looked at all the settings, found I had it set as a relay, reset it as a remote (since there is not a third boost, just the two devices) but that didn't solve the problem, so every computer I can lay my hands on has a fixed ip address, but I don't know how to do that with the xbox 360 so I let that continue to be automatic.

In other words - good luck Kevin and before you commit suicide, consider just sending the thing back saying "Thank you very much and when I get my Ph.D. I'll consider reviewing your wireless router." Because that's what I would do, lol.

That sounds good Jeff. So are you actually saying you don't owe anybody any money, and in fact you have some cash in the bank?

Let there be no doubt - you love Crysis!!! LOL


FAR CRY THE ORIGINAL, WITH THE FORT DEMO

I did love it, I loved Warhead, and I loved #2. I pretty much played those three Crytek titles back to back over the course of several weeks in testing three different two-slot 7950s to team up with the three-slot HIS 7950, before giving up and changing cases and getting a second HIS. But regarding Crysis the original, I played it a long time ago, just the first chapter, for quite a few hours, fighting the Koreans, leaving my magical suit powers off, running around (with max armor) and seeing if I could beat the AI which is hard but not super hard (they give a little shout before they shoot so it isn't super hard - but not a piece of cake either.)

Because I had all those other games in front of me, once I picked up the first 7950 on my overclocked 9450 (first time with Crysis was on the P4 with the 3850, and NOT 30" gaming) I did not linger too long with crysis the original, and I did not do any of the running around the jungle that I had done on the P4. I did replay a few parts, though, and as I remember back, there was a lot of replayable value in the game for sure.

What I really should do, especially now with crossire, is go back one day and apply all those mods you posted about - I have all of those posts.

The ridiculous thing is that I played the first Crytek title, Far Cry the original - demo version - for hundreds of hours before even buying the full game!!! Just the demo - the Fort mission!! I had the difficulty maxed.



I remember the first time I played the demo, and I was immediately killed trying to steal a boat. We all thought - "This thing is really hard." Later we learned to sneak steal a boat, and then use rockets from a distance to kill everybody on shore. Now I could go back, and I have done it many times, and stay pistol only and kill everybody from concealed positions in the bushes. Even when they advance in mass, they don't grenade the bushes like they would in real life.

I was so addicted to the Far Cry demo, that the one time that I downed all 3 helicopters and had them all crashed and burning on top of the mountain (which was tricky because if they crashed beyond, they went down some ravine somewhere or off the map) I took screenshots of all of them nicely burning, to try to keep myself from playing that demo over and over again. Later I did buy the full game, and I spent as much time with that, probably, as you did with Crysis. The battle on top of the aircraft carrier reminded me of counter strike. The auto save kicks in when you start to climb the ladder to the deck, at which point the enemy helicopter arrives. I started the helicopter, then went back down the ladder the way I came in, jumped down to the deck not taking too much of a health hit, making it to the forward mounted gun, and killing off the helicopter. Then I climbed back up and with the p90 and the M16 on the quick change key, and tossing lots of grenades, I massacred all those mercenaries, again and again, lol.

So I would say that Crytek Far Cry for me, was probably similar to Crytek Crysis for you. LOL


Now let's talk about a new exciting shooter on the near horizon, coming out later this year, which is now in alpha stage with some sample missions. I am talking about the new Arma 3.


ARMA III ALPHA
OPERATION FLASHPOINT REBORN!!!!!

Jeff, remember Flashpoint? I am kidding, because nobody can forget those titles. Due to your tips, I played two of the series, Dragon Rising and Red River, and I thought they were both super great. That reminds me - I even bought the expansion pack for Red River with a few more of the side campaigns. I did play all of them - but they had some especially challenging "rescue the pilots campaigns" that would be fun to go back through.

Well - remember that Codemasters shut down their English studio, dropping the Flashpoint series, to concentrate on racing games, like Dirt or Grid, as I recall?

Well, from what I have read, some of those OF guys went to work for the original OF and Arma dev - Bohemia, a Czech company. In fact, wiki is saying that Arma came out with the first Operation Flashpoint, called OF: Cold War Crysis, back in 2001, before they moved over into making Arma. Jeff, you never told me about that one - did you play it? It goes back so far, to 2001 (whereas Dragon Rising was 2006) that I am guessing that the graphics are not too great.

Anyway, I of course thought that Red River was excellent, and I liked hearing that those OF guys from Britain moved over to the Czech Republic to join Bohemia, and hopefully push Arma closer to Operation Flashpoint, since I was not overly impressed with the Arma 2 demo.

Guess what - they did exactly that. I have been playing Steam ARMA III alpha, and it kicks butt! Wiki says the single player campaign will come out in third quarter of this year.





This game is very realistic. It is not as complicated as Arma 2 regarding how you move - I don't believe you can move forward and look left, for example, which I didn't particularly appreciate in Arma - I didn't think you really needed to be able to do that very much, to justify the complcated keystrokes you had to learn.

But it of course goes way beyond COD. It is so much more realistic, and you are not locked into a single-lane rail. And this is a game that you can easily be killed in, if you don't keep your head down, or keep moving. The AI is very good - especially if you play at hardest setting - like playing counter strike with the bots at highest expert setting.

And some really great news is that the graphics are superb!!

In that shot above, I have turned back toward the town, on the coast as you can see, just after taking out some mortar spotters. I had planned to rejoin my group, but the announcement over my coms said that the town is being targeted by major artillery and everybody is ordered to retreat!!

Those two areas of smoke is where major artillery just dropped - I am looking at one of my friendlies who is running from the town. That shot shows the gunsight that I believe I prefer, the red dot.

In case you can't see my team-mate who is running like hell, here's a closeup of the screen - note this is not the gun sight magnifying the image - the gun sight gives you only the first image: (You can switch to binoculars which will magnify even more than this.) But see if you can see him now:



And here, way before I was told to go find those mortar spotters, we were entering the town, and here I have stuck my head up - a very dangerous situation - and I am told there is an enemy that they want me to take out. They have spotted him and I can see the markers in my heads-up optics.




Here's a closeup of a piece of the screenshot - but let me point out again that the gun sights do not telescope like this - you get just a small boost in magnification from the gun sights. Notice in this case that there is no red dot - there is a cursor instead. The cursor or red dot happen randomly - maybe they will be an option when the game actually comes out.





Unlike Far Cry 3, where guns would not be able to shoot as far as you could see, in this game if you can see the guy, you possibly can kill him, but you might not hit him with the first shot. It's best to set the gun to single shot mode for any kind of accuracy at these long distances. The shooting feels very powerful and very authentic. It is thrilling to have the drop on a guy and start firing as fast as you can pull the trigger as he starts taking evasive action, and the dust clouds of your bullets pop up around him, until he finally collapses with a good hit.

But beware if he targets you as you target him. You better either get him with the first shot or two, or get up and run like hell. Otherwise you may suddenly be dead as he caps you in the head, even if you think you are fairly well concealed behind a rock. And worse yet, woe be it for you if he has a buddy 20 yards away that you don't know about who sees your burst signature and caps you while you think you only have the guy in your sight to worry about. That's where staying with the team might have been a lot safer.

I have played through the little trial campaign about 50 times by now, testing things like using lean left and lean right to shoot from behind trees, testing the grenade launcher, following direct orders and staying with my team, or going way out in front by myself to get into some more hairy situations, especially for the screenshots - more along the style of Operation Flashpoint.

As I said, you can very easily get killed - even if you hit the dirt and go full prone, even behind light cover, if they knew roughly where you were. This is intelligent AI. They will rake the bushes with fire, like in real life. The grenadiers who are around will launch at your likely area. You'll be lying prone, thinking you're safe, and then suddenly you're dead. Definitely not Far Cry the original.

Very nice, very realistic, very dangerous, and very fun.

Anyway, I have about 75 screenshots - so maybe next time I will post more than just these two shots (the closeups were just cropped from the 2560x1600 screenies.)

Regarding the grenade launcher, just like OF: Red River, you can launch a grenade a very long distance, and the blasts are very powerful. Since this is supposed to be realistic, I guess those launchers in real life DO pop out of those tubes travelling pretty fast. (I just watched the Generation Kill series, 7 chapters, from HBO, and he accidentally kills a civilian walking away from him about thirty yards out, hitting him in the back of the head with a smoke grenade, as he was trying to get an approaching car to turn around.)

But unlike Red River, the grenade sights, at least for now, are tough to get used to. You get a little circle, which has to be way in front of where you want the grenade to go. More about that later - and hopefully that will be fixed by the time they move from the alpha to the beta. In fact, playing the alpha, I'm supposed to be providing helpful criticism, so maybe I'll go to the official site and bring that up, lol.

Rich

 

Sorry for doing this, but I'm not sure if you got your PM Rich?

 

I probably didn't. I'll go check

Kev, for heavens sake why bury that in a PM. Somebody might have a tip or two for you. I was going to quote the whole PM just now but I didn't want to offend you.
But may I?

 

I would prefer keep that private. I don't want the etailer that I mentioned, to think they made a bad decision choosing me, just because one particular device. I left a review today, And I think it covers the necessary, and more. If they think it's unacceptable, and wish to discontinue my reviewing, that's of course their prerogative. I think anybody that's in the market for a Router, knows what they're getting into. So I tried to keep technobabble out of the review(so the less than knowledgeable don't feel stupid). I kept it general, while also covering what I felt was important. I think that may be why the etailer chose me, based on past reviews. They did mention it...

 

Rich, I am very excited about ArmA 3. One of the issues that kept me from playing the otherwise fantastic ArmA 2 was the dismal user interface. It is the single clunkiest and un-user friendly game I have ever played. I understand that it's meant to be an infantry simulator, but I shouldn't have to go through so much BS for something that feels entirely natural in other games with similar levels of depth.

Also, I have an easier time piloting a huge freighter into dock with true Newtonian physics in space than I do operating ArmA 2's aircraft or vehicles. This coming from a flight simmer who is used to difficult controls, realistic flight models and steep learning curves. The game is wonderful but just poorly executed and feels very unfinished.

I am hoping ArmA 3 addresses a lot of my issues.