Thursday, March 11, 2004

So Pretty...

I've downloaded the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo for Linux last night/this morning and I can already tell I'm going to buy this game as soon as it's on sale for Linux. I haven't been too in touch with the series since the original Unreal Tournament, so a lot of stuff that was in 2003 seems totally new to me. I've had a chance to try the Deathmatch, Bombing Run, Assault, and Onslaught game modes of the demo so far and they're all completely awesome. I did have to drop the resolution to 800x600 to get the game to run perfectly smoothly though, which made me really glad the I just upgraded my graphics card.

I'm not a big fan of spending tons of money, so I got a GeForce FX 5600, which I'm pretty happy with so far. The nVidia driver for Linux seems a bit buggy, for example Vendetta now has a strange bug where about one quarter of the screen is garbled, but 3d performance is damn good (glxgears averages 3500 FPS). The UT2004 demo must be taxing something pretty hard, because even though both Cube and Legends at their highest detail settings and 1024X768 resolution run perfectly smoothly(even when I set FSAA to the max) UT2004 chokes up a bit at 1024x768(with no antialiasing). There is an awful lot of stuff going on in UT2004, so it's not too suprising.

Anyway, over the last week whenever I wasn't busy crapping my pants about how damn good Legends looks now, I found some time to download quite a few free Linux RPGs. Well, games with RPG-ish tendencies that describe themselves as an RPG anyway... I'll have more on that next week, if I don't just spend the whole time gushing over UT2004.