Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3276

Lots of Games

by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 15, 2007 6:57 PM EST


Half Life 2: Episode Two came out and I was struck by a sudden desire to benchmark the crap out of it; I called Derek over and we went to town on testing Valve's latest incarnation of the Source engine. This unfortunately brought back horrible memories of staying up all night benchmarking Half Life 2 upon its release. For some reason, the Source engine makes me nauseous after about 30 - 45 minutes of staring at the screen. No other FPS does this to me, just anything in the Half Life 2 series. Admittedly I haven't tried testing with v-sync enabled, which Derek is convinced will fix my ailments but I haven't had time to because of...

Unreal Tournament 3.

Just as we finished testing HL2Ep2, the UT3 Demo beta was unleashed and we immediately shifted focus. I've been playing with the UT3 demo beta for the past couple of days and wow does it look pretty. I'm not really impressed with the graphics in Episode Two, and I think testing it back to back with UT3 has really made me appreciate UT3 all that much more. It still doesn't look nearly as good as Gears of War, but at high res it's really a good looking game.

It's unfortunate that the vast majority of developers have to make PC games for relatively low minimum system requirements in order to justify the investment, because we could really have some amazing titles with something like the 8800 GTS 320MB as a reasonable minimum requirement. It'll never happen, but it'd be nice to have a PC-gaming driven industry rather than one that is very console focused, at least in order to get better looking games, quicker.

It is ironic that I'd say that however, given the most beautiful game out currently in my opinion continues to be Epic's Gears of War, which is currently Xbox 360-only. The PC version will finally be out this year and that should give us something nice to gawk at on our computer screens.

I've been wanting to talk about Halo 3 since its release, I just haven't had the time to. Halo has always been heralded as a first person shooter with a real story, very much like Half Life in that sense. I always felt slightly dumb that I could never really follow the Halo story, so I was happy when Gabe over at Penny Arcade said the following:

"I never really got into the Halo story. I thought it was because there just wasn't much story there to get into. I got this link last week though and I realised that there's actually a really cool story, the problem is the games do a terrible job of telling it."

I still haven't had a chance to read through the thread he mentions, but I'm sure it would clear up a lot of confusion I had about the Halo stories.

The game itself is a lot of fun, the matchmaking is on point and it's great to be able to play with my friends spread out over the city/state/country. Halo 2 was basically a way for a lot of us to talk to one another and also play an entertaining game at the same time - Halo 3 continues the tradition.

Graphically, Halo 3 isn't bad but once again, no where near as pretty as Gears. It's slightly disappointing when you get a load of the aliasing everywhere, but it doesn't make the game any less fun. It's exactly what you'd expect a Halo on the Xbox 360 to look like. I'll cut my Halo-lovefest short, but I do like the game.

Right now I'm working on the CPU side of this UT3 article, as well as toying with the idea of doing an integrated-graphics look at HL2: Episode Two. The game's GPU requirements are low enough that you could actually play the game with integrated graphics, the question is: would you want to?

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