and yet still launches in *this* state...? (ripped from Steam forum)

Issues: No Custom settings for Video Cards
Video Cards not being detected properly by the Auto-Detector Resulting in using 0MB of Vram and using the lowest texture/gfx settings...
No Console command
No Vsync options - Results in screen tearing - Forcing Vsync causes the game to crash the drivers and game(AMD)
Unable to skip intros??? To disable the intro videos put this "+set com_skipIntroVideo 1" in the launch options of Rage Via Steam.
Mouse acceleration?
Can't use Crossfire or SLI..
Bad FoV for PC's - Short-term solution: FOV adjustment howto
(Nvidia)Enabling V-sync by forcing it in the control panel causes the game to Stutter and have lines appear:
OpenGL Issues: GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex not available
Missing Files or GFX card not compatible? - List of compatible card: http://feedback.wildfiregames.com/re...ts_base_vertex this issue seems to be common with laptops and mobile video GFX processors meaning the game may not run on a mobile GFX chip(Laptops)


Bugs:
Texture Streaming is bad and slow resulting in always reloading the same textures thus causing the textures popping in effect - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Ch6TX-Cbs&hd=1
Missing/blinking textures...
Random Crashing: when exiting the Arc, after intro video, including when trying to start a new game and loading new areas.
LoD issues(popins dispersing items)
Audio stuttering and not blending properly.
Occasional Artifacts appearing- http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/9...0322215294.jpg
Low Frame rates with occasional fps spikes
Loading saves causes videocard drivers to crash...
Game Fails to start with error code #51.
Shadows turn Green
Binding keys don't always save and remain unbound and unable to be set
No Sound? this is a common issue with creative soundcards - Possible Fix: Buy a new soundcard or try and use your onboard sound.


But for some reason, because one of the guys who worked on it did some cool stuff a few years ago, this is somehow acceptable?

and get over yourself. Nobody gives a shit about the contents of your old hard drives. Nobody.

The EDL can't even muster decent numbers for a march most of the time. Their last effort, the police planned for the claimed 600 marchers, and had to police only 250 EDL members, who were seriously outnumbered by the anti-fascists who'd turned up for a counter-demo.

They've already called off one march through Tower Hamlets, because they'd get slaughtered. I'm sure they'll try to find a face-saving way of pulling out of the one planned for September as well. In much the same way as the KKK might act all big and tough in downtown Podunk, but wouldn't have the nerve to march through Compton, or Harlem; the EDL have most success in places which are predominantly white and working-class.

And yes, I suppose you could call them the most significant far-right movement in the UK, but that's only been because there really haven't been any others for comparison. Nobody takes them seriously, they're not perceived as having any real influence. It offends me that they have attempted to claim the UK flag as somehow 'theirs'. They're not soldiers, and certainly not the Aryan warriors they often present themselves as being. They're shouty morons, fuelled by bad lager and stupidity.

"I'm sorry I haven't done anything original in 15 years. Please buy my latest iteration of Doom anyway. I promise you exactly the same crap I've been peddling for the last 18 years, but with 5% extra shiniez. No nasty surprises,no interesting gameplay mechanics, no unusual environments, just generic corridor shooting the way you like it. Legions of cookie-cutter mooks from the clone vats, despite the fact that doing a little randomising on the facial features would take zero effort. Locked doors won't respond to anything but the correct key no matter how much ordnance you have, and if your way is blocked by two pieces of furniture piled up, get ready to find an alternate route. All enemies are combat robots, who are 100% effective until you drain all their hit points. This mechanism made sense 20 years ago on machines with tiny RAM and limited hardware, so there's no reason to stop using it now, just because it's silly.

We're trying to make money here, not games or works of art, so please buy yet another generic FPS, if for no other reason than it's got my name on it and I did a couple of cool things 20 years ago. Admittedly, if you're old enough to remember or care who I am, you've probably got dozens of near-identical FPS games in your library anyway, but please buy this one, because at least I'm not responsible for Daikatana."

in The Warlock in Spite of Himself. If not the precise methods, then at least the ideas behind them.

"Squawking by radio had proved singularly effective, due largely to an automatic record of the squawk. The problems of records and other bureaucratic red tape had been solved by red oxide audio recording tape, with tracks a single molecule in width, and the development of data-retrieval systems so efficient that the memorization of facts became obsolete. Education thus became exclusively a training in concepts, and the success of democracy was assured."

I don't remember 200+ 11-digit numbers, I have my phone remember them for me. My intelligence is limited, but my extelligence is growing all the time. I've noticed when I deliberately take holidays in the Highlands - no wi-fi, and only enough mobile signal for emergency calls, it takes a few days to acclimatise to the concept that I can't just Google/wiki any item that comes to mind, to settle an argument, or complete a crossword puzzle, or identify a bird species.

I like the idea that I don't have to remember anything I don't really want to, because I can always look it up if I need it.

1 - yeah, quick comment was incorrect. True, it's not on-rails like Time Crisis, or HotD, but it is on rails like so many other shooters in that there is a set path, and a single objective, and you don't get to do anything else until you go do what they want you to do in the way they want you to do it. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is particularly egregious in this regard, as it gives the illusion of a huge, open world, but one step off the defined path and you're 5 seconds from insta-death.

2 - I did watch a video of the gameplay - quite a lengthy one - and it's based on that I made my comments. I saw no evidence of wounding or hit location being important. if you have a link to a video which does show this, I'll gladly watch it.

3 - I watched a 10-minute gameplay video and saw nothing innovative, challenging, or particularly imaginative. If they're going to do that, you'd think they'd put some of it in the video to make gamers go Wow. Again, if you know of a video that shows something different to every other corridor shooter aorund, please let me know.

4 - I don't know if Carmack is the designer or not, nor do I care - I used his name because he was the one being interviewed and he was the one doing the puff piece for his new game, which looks for all the world to me like every other one that he's been involved with, in whatever capacity.

5 - Really? How clever? Does it change the way the gameplay works? Will it revolutionise the industry? Because it looked pretty, yes, but so does Homefront, Aliens vs Predator, Crysis and a ton of other recent AAA FPS titles. The humans were all still clearly wedged deep into the uncanny valley, and the environments looked nice, but so what? If you can't interact with them in any meaningful way, they might as well be blank polygons for all the effect they have on how you play the game.

An on-rails shooter in a vaguely Mad-Max style world, with a colour palette of grey and brown, and a small selection of identikit, cookie-cutter mooks as enemies. They all have the same faces, the same hairstyles, the same body-armour, like they were stamped out of cardboard, and they all act in the exact same fashion. They're all combat robots, who give up only on death and are 100% combat-effective until that point. None of them will run away after being wounded, none of them will try to crawl away after being legshot, none of them will beg for mercy. Doors you're not supposed to go through will be made of impervium, and react not at all to your strongest explosives. Two oil drums piled up will provide an immovable barrier that you'll have to find an alternate route around.

So it's Doom with pretty graphics. Whoopee-fricking-skip.

Just like every other FPS that's come along in the last 20 years. I know this guy had a hand in creating the genre, but it's like he had one really excellent idea 20 years ago, and he's been milking it dry ever since. I can't fault him for that; if there's people willing to keep paying his wages to do the same thing he's always done, but with 5% more shiniez than last time, good luck to him.

It's just after all the hype about this damn game, and a development cycle only slightly shorter than DNF, I was expecting something a bit different. But why bother actually doing something different and clever, when Big Guns, Shiny Metal 17 will sell just as well for a tenth the actual effort, especially if it has Carmack's name on the box.

That's all this is. He can't need the money. He's desperately trying to pretend he has still got something to contribute to the arts.

Pioneer One tells a compelling story with essentially zero FX and a budget that wouldn't pay for nose-candy on most movie sets. Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was rendered in the film-maker's kitchen. The Hunt for Gollum manages to produce a digital Gollum (ok, for a few seconds...) that's not too far off the best results of WETA Digital. Give Seth Green a handful of Star Wars figures and a digicam and he could probably come up with something that stayed within canon in about 20 minutes.

But George Lucas, with all his years of experience, skill, contacts and vast gobs of cash can't make a couple of seasons of a watchable TV show because the technology's not there yet? Absolute bollocks.

Technically, if you have 500 Facebook friends, then every time you update your status you are in contact with 500 people. But Dunbar's number is a measure of the fact that you are not just in contact with people, but know something about them. You'd recognise them, you'd remember their first name if you met them in the street or at work, you have some idea if they're married or single, have kids or not.

It's also a handy indicator of the efficiency of a group. A group of people smaller than Dunbar's number can be updated on the status of all the others quite quickly, probably in a single pass. More than that, and you start getting so many people who are unavailable at any given time, that you need multiple updates to make sure you've reached everybody and the amount of work needed to simply keep everyone informed rises dramatically as a result.

Graphics look amazing. Crysis on high-res looks like you could open the TV screen and pick a leaf off a tree. But the immersion factor of the gorgeous graphics breaks down when you try to play with them. When you shoot a car windscreen, and it doesn't break. Or shoot the tyres, and they don't pop. Or the gas tank and it doesn't explode.

Even sillier - shoot your AI squadmates in the head, and they just go "Ow, quit it!". Worse, you have a magic gun that won't let you pull the trigger if you're pointing it at a non-enemy. I played the opening level on Halo Reach, and was so bored when I got to the first farmer, that I just shot him in the head to shut him up so I could get on with alien-killing. Well, the gun went bang, and a blood-spatter hit the wall behind him, but he never missed a word of exposition. I shot him 10 times - the same thing happened. On the 11th shot, I just died. Up until then, my teammates hadn't seemed concerned about my actions, and they didn't actually take offence, just some mighty vengeful god struck me down until I agreed to play nice.

Or the world looks open and inviting, but you're just as much on rails as if you were playing some arcade light-gun game. Like Bad Company 2, where any deviation from the set path gets you a 5-second countdown to insta-death. Or Gears of War, where you're a grotesquely-muscled space marine who can be forced from his chosen path by three chairs piled on a table.

The thing is, many games have got bits of it right. Just Cause 2 gives you an enormous world, and near-total freedom within that world. Heavy Rain changes the gameplay based on your actions. The Witcher makes every choice have a consequence you might not like, but at least you get to make the choice. Modern hardware has the power to create incredible, immersive game experiences, but a lot of studios would rather make Big Guns, Shiny Metal 5 using a well-established engine because that's easier, cheaper, and practically guaranteed to sell to their target demographic.

Maybe the next arms race will be environment engines that come a little closer to replicating the properties of objects, so that glass always breaks, wood and cloth always burn, and you don't need the red key if you've got the rocket launcher.

Wow! Sounds amazing! So fresh, original and innovative! But wait... How did you *know* all this...? You must be psychic! Can you use your awesome powers to determine if the palette will have three colours, four, or maybe even the legendary and much-rumoured five-colour palette?

would be like watching Enterprise, and not wanting to watch original Trek because it was dated and didn't have bucket-loads of CGI for space battles.

He's good, but for the full flavour, you need some of the early stuff.

Start with 'An Unearthly Child', then 'The Daleks' - the first two stories of Hartnell. Try 'Tomb of the Cybermen' - the first existant Troughton. Watch 'War Games', then 'Spearhead from Space' to get the transition to Pertwee's doctor. Most Pertwee stuff is pretty good, but with special mention for 'Terror of the Autons'. Tom Baker had a lot of good stories, but again, special mention for 'Genesis of the Daleks', 'Pyramids of Mars', and 'The Masque of Mandragora'.

Peter Davison is a little harder to pick and choose, as they were running loosely-connected plot arcs over entire series at this point, but 'Earthshock' is a good one.

From Colin Baker, I'd pick 'Vengeance on Varos', and for Sylvester McCoy, 'Battlefield', and 'The Curse of Fenric'.

Remember, budgets were pitiful, it spent a lot of time being perceived as a children's show, and yes, they did script pacing differently back then. Sets are wobbly, some effects are woeful, and some acting isn't up to much. But underneath are stories, characters and entire mythologies that make something greater than the sum of their cardboard spaceships and bad chromakey effects.

The Daleks, the Cybermen, the Doctor himself, these will be myths and legends long after everyone's forgotten Firefly.

Simply because of the massive outpouring of shock, rage, and incessant bloody whining from people who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality and so assume no-one else can either.

A triple-A game costs $lots, and every developer wants to maximise returns. They want words like 'fun', and 'exciting' to be used by reviewers and players describing their games. Phrases like 'screams of the wounded', and 'dragging intestines' are right out. It doesn't matter how good physics engines get, or how much memory is in a PC; when bodies are shot, they will fall to the floor inert, and no amount of further shooting will do anything other than maybe nudge them about a bit. Enemies will have hit points, and once they're gone, they're dead, but until then, they're fully functional. Nobody's ever going to crawl away with a shattered kneecap, or frantically flail for their medkit trying to staunch a spurting artery.

There will never be children in a warzone, either as refugees or inhabitants. There will never be veiled and burqa'd women with suicide vests approaching soldiers at checkpoints. There will never be entire rows of houses filled with the dead, some still frozen in place with food in their hands, killed by cyanide gas bombs. What will be presented in-game will be the illusion of war, as seen from the safety and comfort of an armchair; sanitised by the news corporations who don't show you footage of anything that might actually upset you. Oddly enough, this doesn't extend to natural disasters, where they're often ghoulishly happy to show piles of fly-blown corpses, or 'dozers shoving piles of limed and flopping meat into vast unmarked graves.

It would be perfectly possible for a developer, hell, probably even some members of the modding community, to release a game that came a good deal closer to replicating the horrors of war than anything we've seen so far. Instead, I think they'll continue releasing things that are essentially toy soldiers, because nobody wants to be pilloried in the media for what amounts to trying to tell the truth.

The latest and greatest Nvidia gfx card is a little over £420 right now. For that price, I could have a PS3 and a Wii, or a 360 and a Wii. And lets not forget, that's just for the gfx card - if I want the rest of the PC to match it, I'm looking at over £1000. I know this, as I just had a gaming rig built for my son's 18th birthday and it came to just short of £900, and that wasn't a top-of-the-range gfx card.

Since I acquired my consoles, the only things I've played on the PC are clever indie games - Defense Grid, Master of Defense, PvZ, Robot Unicorn Attack. With so much gaming goodness instantly available and always working on the consoles, the urge to replace my somewhat elderly PC rig is non-existent.

The last PC game I bought was HL2:Ep2, and the last PC disc I bought was Trackmania Sunrise. Everything else has been console-based. The PC is for email, word processing, Oovoo and Facebook, and the occasional foray into image manipulation. I don't need a screaming monster rig to do that.

Also, it annoys me when HL2 ran beautifully on my machine, and a lot of other games since then simply fail to run at all, because (presumably) they are so badly programmed. UT3 was abysmal - I could either have 8-bit graphics and 20fps, or recognisable graphics and 2 secs per frame. There's really no excuse.

At some point, my current PC will fail sufficiently to make it worth doing a complete replacement of everything that isn't the mouse, monitor and keyboard, and at that point, I will acquire something decent and play through the handful of PC exclusives that require a better machine than mine (Crysis, etc.). Until then, there are so many other excellent games on so many other systems, that there's really no need to rely on the PC for gaming.

What constitutes 'realism' in the first place? I remember being very impressed with the guard's walk-cycle animations on GoldenEye years ago, but I also feared that when I dropped a guard with a headshot, I might go over to him and find the wallet had fallen out of his pocket, to display the photo of his wife and kids and I'd never be able to play the game again.

Do you want to be able to get forensic on the results of a sniper shot ("Look! Sinuses!")? Does having a car's brake discs glow red under heavy braking in a race game make any appreciable difference to the game, especially if the 'realism' is thwarted somewhat by the usual drawback of 'licensed cars'='no damage modelling'? Does accurately mapping the tread pattern in GT5 actually have any effect on the car's handling?

I don't know if I could handle genuine AI in video games. I think I have a hard enough time with Artificial Stupidity. There are already games with CPU enemies that can see your muzzle-flash from 800 yards away, and shoot you in the chin from the same range. I've just been playing Uncharted 2, and if the guards and enemies actually knew how to use cover and flanking manoeuvres, you could never actually progress past the first level. When it's you and a pistol against multiple enemies with armour, shotguns and grenade launchers, they can't be allowed to be particularly bright, or they will be as unbeatable as they would be in real life.

What does bother me is the level of stupidity on the civilians in some sandbox games. How many times have citizens in GTA walked past 10 yards away, oblivious to the fact that I'm murdering someone in broad daylight? At least in Prototype, the citizens will react if you 'hulk out' in front of them and run away, but leave the area, go back 30 seconds later, and everybody's walking around perfectly normally, like they hadn't just seen me beat someone to death with their own spleen. And how 'realistic' were the GTA series anyway, where there was nobody under the age of 18 in the whole city, and no schools, so there was no way you could ever kill a child.

I seem to recall that games like Theme Park etc. have little personal 'scripts' running for all the patrons of the park - how hungry they are, how bored, thirsty and the like. Would it be possible to have the same for a sandbox city, even down to your approval rating, in a superhero game? Crush one too many criminals with a squad car, and have to go rogue and vigilante, instead of being the media's latest craze.

Realism is difficult - I appreciate this. Designing a world to give players maximum freedom is much more complex than the very tightly-controlled worlds we're currently being offered, where wood does not burn, glass does not break, and a rocket-launcher will not break through a wooden door. As long as we're willing to accept these strictures and just keep buying and playing the latest iteration of whatever 3D engine is the current hot property, there is no reason whatsoever for any games company to attempt to offer us any semblance of true realism.