Games people are playing right now!

UT2k4 - Even after 3 years it's still the best multiplayer FPS out there for my money, Onslaught is WAY more fun than any Battlefield franchise game.

Oblivion - Archmage, head of the Fighter's Guild and Thieves' Guild, still working my way through the Dark Brotherhood and main quest lines and starting to play around with mods. I still catch my breath occasionally, at 1080p with full details the game is simply *stunning*.

Galactic Civilizations 2 - Fantastic space strategy, a deep DEEP game with huge replay value and very easy on the hardware.

DEFCON - Global Thermonuclear War from Wargames, on the big screen with high def sound it's COMPLETELY absorbing! A great, "simple" RTS that anyone can appreciate.

Darwinia - A completely different cyberspace RTS that I'm still working through, very very cool!

Uplink - Can you tell I like Introvision? Great hacker-type simulation/RTS game, although it's not really well suited to the big screen.

MAME - 'nuff said!

CCS64 - Playing Commodore 64 games on the big screen against friends connected over the internet is a vision I dared not dream as a kid in 1983!


Games I played through and uninstalled:

Prince of Persia 2/3 - #2 sucked (terrible camera, "aggro" Prince with tats and bad language, stupid soundtracl) but 3 was fun, and it's amazing the sheer number of ways the Prince can move once you learn how!

F.E.A.R. - Overhyped, and I hate those artifically dark graphics engines. If you've played Doom 3 and seen The Grudge, then you know exactly how F.E.A.R. will play.

Half-Life 2 - The first 30 minutes are the best single player FPS I've ever played, but some stretches in the middle with the boat and car are distracting.

HL2 Episode One - Huge graphics improvement, very nice environments but finished a bit too quickly.

World of Warcraft - Gets boring at 60 unless you feel like spending 20 hours a week raiding. I have a job already, thanks!


Of all these I would say DEFCON is the best game on the list for playing on an HTPC, as I can control everything with my Gyration mouse, and it's meant to look like the Big Board from Wargames or Dr. Strangelove so it works well on the big screen. Let's hear it from you guys, what's out there that's worth playing, and what works especially well on the big screen?

Cool, I'm interested in a racing game but I don't have the hardware at the moment. I'm a big F1/MotoGP fan, which sim would you recommend and what wheels/pedals should I use?

I'm glad you can make FSX work because I couldn't, what's your secret?

Here's a post I made on the FSX forum after I bought retail:


" My machine is reasonably powerful (FX55, 7800 GTX OC, 2GB PC4200 OCZ RAM, dual 74GB WD Raptors in RAID 0) and I can't believe how bad the frame rates in FSX are, even after applying the known tweaks and adjusting just about all the sliders in the game to improve the situation. As a comparison, I play Oblivion with full details at about 50fps, and that's a game which is stunningly gorgeous in virtually every scene, whereas with full details in FSX I can barely get 10fps, and that's sitting at Pearson International and looking out the window at a scene with maybe 5% of the graphic complexity of the typical Oblivion environment!

While I think you can make a case for realism, I think you can also design a game cleverly so that it will perform well on your average user's machine! For example when I fire up full details in FSX, I see single-pixel dots on the horizon which gradually resolve themselves into fully polygonal trees, along with fully rendered shadows. Compare that with Oblivion's use of SpeedTree technology (see http://www.speedtree.com/gallery/scr...?Game=42&Pic=7 for an example of SpeedTree in action in Oblivion), which uses clever optimizations to render individual leaves and blades of grass which all sway independently in the breeze and so forth, but without using 90% of your CPU to do so (and I think you'll agree the end results with SpeedTree results are MUCH prettier than the trees in FSX).

If only the FSX designers had put the same sort of effort into their rendering optimizations as their flight models, instead of taking the easy way out and just cranking up the polygons and expecting user's machines to cope. While I'm sure upcoming patches will introduce performance enhancements, I strongly doubt they'll be able to correct what appear to be fundamental design choices on the part of the dev team, so I wouldn't expect dramatic speed increases in upcoming patches.

What a shame!"


I was REALLY looking forward to buying some flight controls and all the rest for FSX too, guess I'll have to wait for a sim from Ubisoft or another developer that knows how to make games look great AND run smoothly.

Sorry, what I meant was that F.E.A.R. featured the visual style of Doom 3 with the horror element of The Grudge. I personally hate those artificially dark engines where a flashlight only works to 10 feet and shadows are pitch-blac; they're not realistic and turning up the gamma just makes the darkness a lighter shade, it doesn't let you see anything more.

I agree the AI was excellent, but personally I don't really care, it just means I might die a bit more than in a game with a simpler AI. If I want a challenge I'll take it online against some human opponents.

What I really bought F.E.A.R. for was the horror angle, I like Silent Hill et al but those games don't have enough action for me. And while the concept was great and the early execution was promising, it quickly became nothing more than "turn the corner, see the ghost" all the way up until the vault levels (which were very cool).

Of course maybe it just means the game wasn't exactly right for *me*, but mine is the only opinion I've got to give!

I've never played Halo but it seemed like the usual FPS to me, what's so different about its aiming system from say UT2k4?

Cool, UT features "lag lead" like any other online FPS, but the default weapon is pretty pathetic and can't be used to dominate, even if you're botting to get 100% accuracy. I'll have to give it a try on the PC sometime!

Oops, forgot that one! I loved Lego as a kid and who doesn't like Star Wars, so that was a lot of fun for me even though I can't get the hang of "console 3rd person 3D" (i.e. moving cameras and direction changes). I finished all three episodes but haven't gone back to try all the unlocks and stuff, is there any cool content in there?

I hear you about WoW, I managed to quit but with the expansion coming up...

My wife's away on training for her new job, so based on some of the recommendations in this thread I just picked up R-Factor, GTR2, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Serious Sam 2 and Virtual Skipper 4 (ok, I came up with that one on my own). My Sondigo Inferno (http://www.sondigo.com/inferno) just came in too, so it should be a great week of high-def surround sound gaming!