http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1792
He is a rhetorical genius. 

I totally agree with him :) im sick of spending a fuckton of cash to play games on my pc.

I think another good example of a AAA game that runs well even on older systems is call of duty 4, and that looks great too.

I probably would have enjoyed crisis more if the framerate was above 30. 

and half-life 2 of course, even when it was released it would run on older hardware, and look at all the money that made :) 

about Crysis justified not making it as scalable as Far Cry. I originally played Far Cry on a PIII 850 mhz with a GeForce 2 card, and it played well. Crysis is not that different in game play. In fact, I preferred the original game's interface more than Crysis. For instance, to climb a ladder in Far Cry you only had to stand beside it and move forward while looking up. In Crysis you have to use an interface. Interfacing GUIs should only be used for things that can't be done any other way to minimize the disruption of the game flow. However, I had the feeling these elements were added to make console and pc versions compatible. 

Anyone else heard of this XBox 540?
Google it... 

http://www.gametap.com/grimm/episode_01.html

All the episodes are free in the first 24 hours after release, how nice. Gonna try it now. 

Great fun, I played ~50 minutes, no challenge but you can speedrun.
Unfortunately (well, no surprise) it runs not very well on my old rig, the graphics look nice even when all settings on low, thanks to the style.
Try it! 

all that is to it is running around painting stuff?

It runs like shit on my rig, and looks like it could easily run fine on q3 tech. The art style is nice, but they're not doing anything q3 tech couldn't do. 

gametap IS pretty evil, isn't it? 

You basically run around and paint stuff. Just like you run around shooting stuff in FPS.
There are objectives, enemies, moving targets and such. Pretty fun!

Try setting the graphics as low as possible (the "visual quality" too). I doubt the q3 engine could do that dynamic world changing.

Dunno about Gametap. But hey, it does not cost a cent. 

it isn't really dynamic, is it? (i only played about 10mins with ~10 fps) it just changes to premade stuff.

All the option don't help at all with my system (and make it look like 320x240 quake). They seem to be really, really cpu bound. 

http://www.fileshack.com/file_download.x/12645

Looks really cool I think. Like the graphics, like the style.

Two major concerns:

1. Integration of driving bits and FPS bits?

2. How on-rails and linear will it be?

(Potential for both of these to work well i.e. natural integration combined with exploration, but I don't have high hopes).

Two minor concerns:

1. How well will it run? (but I'm overdue an upgrade anyway)

2. How easy will the vehicles be to control? (but since it's Id they'll probably keep it easy). 

It looks nice yeah, I'm looking forward to it. But I can't help wishing it was an open world type game like Stalker or Oblivion or something, but that just seems impossible considering the ammount of detail everything has, would take ages to make a large world. =\ 

Would suit it well.

But why not have a "smaller" typical-Id-game-size world, but with some non-linearity to it... 

it would be nice if they integrated a system similar to farcry/crysis where you just tell the engine 'this type of terrain has these types of debris and plants' and it just plasters them randomly on the ground.

it would even be easier since they have their megatexture stuff, they just have to paint a giant mask texture to tell the engine what to go do with itself.

that'd solve the problem of having huge open areas. they could still spend all their dev time on doing the actual playable areas without any procedurally generated stuff, but the rest would be filler that was basically 'free'. 

bland is the first word that comes to mind... 

Not very exciting. =/

Singularity
Unsure as of now, but has potential. 

wow, trailer blew me away. Is that all in-game footage? 

Yep. Now imagine Doom4, which according to Carmack is 3 times as detailed. 

I thought something appeared a bit odd about that first picture from Rage:

http://ve3d.ign.com/images/33683/PC/Rage

I increased the brightness and contrast, and it appears to me those two models are blue screened into the scene. Is it from a cutscene sequence then? 

But more likely just a render - the characters look in-place, if you know what I mean.

The shots look more like wallpapers than anything. 

?

Wolf looks okay, but just more wolf really. If it plays like RTCW but a bit spanglier, I'd get it. 

this is a pretty cool game.

Seems to have the right mix of action and RPG elements. And although I'm not sold on the art style, the graphics engine is superb (anyone know if its a custom one or a HL2 spinoff?). More variety in monsters/opponents would have benefited it too I think.

But still, I'm enjoying so far. 

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/37901.html

Tim Willits: "[mutants] they're very scary, they pop up everywhere..." 

"They pop up out of anywhere"