Rage in Numbers

At the time of writing, the main support topic for Rage on the Steam forums has been viewed an amazing 475,000 times. The comparable thread on Bethesda’s forums – a whopping 140,000 views.

In addition to the most egregious issues with texture popping above, Vsync, Anisotropic filtering and texture quality settings were only added in a patch. The first (1st) and only (1) patch. Certainly, omitting these more fine-tuned customization features in this day and age is not in the least unheard of, but finding the paragons of the PC platform since 1991 – Id Software – as the offending party is rather inconceivable, even in a gaming world where Crytek, Epic and Rockstar Games have long since bailed out.

The texture popping above is related to the game’s texture Auto-Balancer, which somehow tends to load and utilize 4096k textures instead of the much crisper 8192k (or the gargantuan 16384k textures that take most of the game’s 21659 Mb install size!). 1)http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks

More puzzling yet is the inability for players to bind numpad keys properly – especially the number 5(!?) – leaving left-handers in a proverbial bind. Different mice and keyboards are exhibiting various symptoms as well.

Let’s not even mention the 64-bit executable. …or lack thereof. Let us however mention the missing idstudio level editor, which is apparently dependent on the very same 64-bit .exe.

To wrap up this terribly clever post before things get utterly out of hand, we could take a look at the game’s collector edition (check out the comparison photo on the left), which comes bundled with a Rage comic that not only is 2/3 the size of the normal issues, but also only contains 2/3 of the Rage story arc. Boom!

References   [ + ]

Read More

Maximize Your Torment

Planescape Torment 01As you might have heard, after reissuing a portion of their back catalogue digitally, Interplay also seem to be re-retailing some of their classic games. Make of that ethically what you will – especially in relation to the recent, omnipresent lawsuits – but as things stand, it seems that the earlier Planescape: Torment release date got pushed back a month, and the current release date stands at the 20th – that is, in a few days. That means we have just enough time to outline how to best install mods for the game!

First off, we would start with installing the official v1.1 patch. This is not required for 2CD versions of the game, though I’ve never come across those. After that, the smartest choice is bigg’s unambiguous Widescreen Mod, currently sitting at v2.2 – as an added plus, it works for other games built on the Infinity engine, too. To get more bang for you buck with the bigger resolution you just got, you should also install GhostDog’s PS:T UI mod for the aforementioned. According to the site, it makes “1280×800, 1280×720, 1280×768 and 1280×1024 resolutions viable for Planescape: Torment by changing a number of things in the UI.”

(more…)

Read More