Unreal Tournament 3

Well between the demo version and the final version I've played about 100 hours of UT3 ... over-all I think its a good game and most the changes are for the positive. Of the things that they are fixing is increasing the amount of damage that shock, rockets and flak do to Mantas & Vipers. This is a seriously needed change as if you are on foot you are pretty defenseless against both vehicles, even if you have an avril the fire rate is so slow and the switching time makes it mostly useless unless there is some distance between you and the vehicle. There are a few exploits that look like they will be fixed, other re-balancing and UI changes that are really needed.

My opinion is that epic should have really released the beta demo six months ago to give time for it to be really tested in the live where you get real dickheads to find the exploits and do some better balancing. Other games have done it in the past ... I guess the reason is they were so far behind schedule releasing that this was not possible so they are basically selling a beta version of the game.

The single player is not much different than just a bunch of botmatches strung together with cut scenes ... I had hoped for better from the talks that various Epic reps had given about a fuller offline experience. I guess cut scenes supposedly makes it "fuller" ... not really IMHO.

nVidia 8800GT is out in stores now

Well the 8800GT 512MB is officially out now and looking at benchmarks from respectable sources it looks like the 8800GT is about 20% or faster than the 8800GTS and in some benchmarks almost matches the 8800GTX because of the faster stock shader speed than either the GTS or GTX combined with a price of about $250 dollars is incredible bang for the buck right now.

The only time the 8800GT start to slow down is when dealing with 1920x1200 and higher resolutions because of the 256-bit memory interface limits memory bandwidth compared to the GTX and GTS.

So far I've seen various version available from $240 to $280 depending on the exact mfg and if it's pre-overclocked or not.

Reviews & Benchmarks follows:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3140
http://vr-zone.com/articles/Nvidia_Geforce_8800GT_Review/5369.html
http://hardware.gotfrag.com/portal/story/40512/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/29/geforce_8800_gt/
Supposedly a cheaper version with only 256MB of RAM will be coming out in a month and nVidia has discontinued the 8800GTS 320MB version and will be discontinuing the 8800GTS 640MB version in a few months..

UT3 Demo on Friday

According to Robert at Voodoo Extreme the Unreal Tournament Demo will be released Friday. I know I can hardly wait!

Also it sounds like a demo for UT3 is in the works too according to Icculus' finger.

Icculus' finger also indicates that there may be a Linux version for GoW also ... extremely cool.

Still waiting for UT3

Well the estimated release date for the game is Nov 12th now and Epic is releasing a Beta Demo somewhere from two day to the infamous "two weeks". All I know is I'm chomping at the bit for the demo to be released!

I've been playing the ET:QW demo for the past few weeks to kill time, but it won't be getting any more of my time once the UT3 demo is released.

Online Product Activation gone Wrong

Well it looks like we have recently had a spat of troubles with people being able to validate and install to major products online ... the new game BioShock and Microsoft Office & Windows.

Of the two problems the most troubling is the issue with Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage server flagging systems as being invalid installs that had were genuine and had validated in the past. Many businesses depend on their systems being able to run and with Microsoft suddenly because of server issues flagging 12,000 systems as invalid and disabling them. This makes one wonder why one would make one's business dependent on a system that can be deactivated remotely by the company that sold it to you with little recourse.

The other one being a game is only an irritation to the people that purchased the game and a bit of bad publicity of 2K Boston/2K Australia when purchasers of their new game Bioshock could not register and activate their copy of the game. The other issue was that the game is limited to two installs and un-installing the game did not release the license key for another install. The current solution that 2K has done is up the number of installs to five and make a utility that can be used to release the key for further installs. This does not totally solve the problem as many users had hit the maximum installs already by re-installing multiple times before the tool was release and so those installs are lost unless they call the SecuROM help line to get a special key to use.

There is still a bit of a fury about over the two issues, but things are not likely to get any better in the sort as few publishers seem willing to forgo online activation as a way to counteract "casual" piracy. It's possible somebody might release a AAA game or major software application without copy protection as a trial balloon to see how badly it gets pirated and this may switch the industry's thinking, but it's more likely for things to get much worse before it gets better.

Still Waiting for UT3

Still waiting for Unreal Tournament 3 to show up ... Epic is saying the PC version will be released November. I guess only being one year after your expected release date is not so bad ... just look at Duke Nuke-Em Forever.