Gears of War Installed
981 words.
I installed Gears of War for the PC this past weekend. I bought it about six months ago… and only now experienced just the right combination of boredom and lack of creativity to turn to a video game.
Like any modern game, it took almost the entire afternoon to install. Then it crashed when I tried to run it. Per the usual routine, I downloaded the latest drivers and made sure I had the latest version of DirectX installed. It still didn’t work. It turned out I had to create a new user account with Administrator privileges to run it. This was on Vista by the way (it’s only the second game I’ve tried on Vista). Curiously, neither game installed any icons on the Start menu. Even re-installing under the administrator account didn’t install any shortcuts. I just made my own.
I’ve only played for a handful of hours, but so far I like it. It’s different from the usual first person shooter because, well, for one thing, it’s a third person shooter. The over-the-shoulder view is pretty cool, and it doesn’t detract from shooting accuracy because when you press the aim key and fire, it zooms into a more first-person view. And I really like the emphasis on cover… it makes the strategy different from any other shooter I’ve played, which gives it a fresh new feel.
On the negative side, checkpoints blow. I’ve never liked them and I still don’t. It’s no fun to repeat a section of the game you’ve already finished if you die right at the end (and in this game, there are usually about 3 little mini-encounters per checkpoint, and they are always progressively harder, so you are more likely to die at the end than the beginning). Games should always have a load and save feature. Admittedly, this might be a consequence of the game’s Xbox lineage… but still, it’s a PC game now. Put some effort into it.
On the aesthetic side, will there ever be a time when shooters aren’t stealing from the movie Aliens? And does it have to be an elite squad of steroid-juicing soldiers with an enormous flat-headed black guy every time? I would think, considering the U.S. Army’s continuing reliance on remote robot technology, that soldiers of the future would actually be more like the local chess nerd than The Hulk.
My video card is pretty dated for modern games (it’s an Nvidia 7800GT), so I have to run in 960×600 with a lot of options turned off to get decent performance. Still, GoW looks pretty nice. (Hey, I used to play games in 512×384 with no effects at all… and it snowed all the time… and we had to walk uphill… both ways…) I can run at 1280×720 (the nominal resolution of the Xbox 360) which looks much better, but it gets too glitchy… I’ll sacrifice visual glamor for performance any day.
Game Controller Experiment
I wanted to try an experiment with GoW. Because of the aforementioned dated video card, lately I’ve been thinking about getting an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 instead of upgrading my computer. The price would be roughly the same. The main thing that holds me back is that most of the games I like to play - FPS, RTS, RPG — tend to work better with higher resolutions and a mouse/keyboard interface. The higher resolution is not so much of a problem anymore, but I’ve never been able to see myself playing a shooter with what I imagine to be the limited precision of a game controller. And for some completely mystifying reason, apparently nobody has yet invented a keyboard/mouse controller for game consoles.
So I thought I’d try to play GoW with a Logitech game controller I’ve had sitting around forever. If I could make it work and have a reasonably enjoyable experience, then I would feel better about moving over to a game console.
Let’s just say my initial attempts have been comical.
Maybe it’s the controller. GoW is designed for an Xbox controller, but I’m using a cheap Logitech controller. The default configuration has the left analog stick controlling movement and the right analog stick controlling your viewpoint. But I can’t seem to get it configured so that moving the analog stick forward moves the guy forward… it’s always reversed. So when I move the stick forward, my guy runs backward into a wall. I can tell you right now there’s no way I’m going to try to get used to having to pull backwards to move forward. And why am I using a stick for movement anyway? Wouldn’t the D-pad work better for movement? It’s crazed I tell you. No wonder kids today are so screwed up.
Google Not Much Help
So naturally I turned to Google for information about fixing my controller configuration. Every game in the universe has cryptic commands you can put into an autoexec.cfg file to tweak the game settings to your liking. It’s yet another feature that id Software invented in Quake oh-so-long ago that everyone has mindlessly copied ever since.
Unfortunately, Google is almost no help to me. You young kids may not know this, but there used to be a time when you could look up console commands for a game without being subjected to 50,000,000 pages of cheat codes, “first look” game reviews and idiotic “help I can’t make it go” (followed by “stfu you stupid noob”) forum posts. Those days are apparently long gone. Google should really look into improving the signal-to-noise ratio for game-related searches. In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep hitting the “Next” link, hoping someday to stumble over some real information.
At any rate, I tried for several hours to make the controller work and I finally gave up and went back to the mouse. I guess I won’t be getting a console after all.
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