SiNful PC Gaming
Thursday, May 11th, 2006
It’s been two months, almost to the day, when I kicked the old habit and bought an Xbox 360. Since then, I haven’t spent more than a couple hours total playing games on my PC. I jumped on a couple times and played a couple quick rounds of Battlefront 2 and the odd level from Quake 4. But considering how much time I used to spend PC gaming, that there is pathetic.
Today I picked up SiN Episodes: Emergence. The first in a series of games which is built on Half-Life 2’s Source engine. I figured it would be a safe bet as far as system requirements is concerned. And I was right - runs great on my rig. I’m having lots of fun with it and I must admit, it feels great to be playing a game on my PC.
If you played and loved Half-Life 2 and are in need of something to play, you should shell out the 20 bones and get SiN Episodes. It looks and feels very familiar. Pretty much everything is done the same as it is in Half-Life 2. There’s health dispensers on walls, crates you can destroy that are housing ammo and other goodies, great AI that takes cover when you shoot in their direction and awesome physics that helped make Half-Life 2 a truly unique experience. I remember having to get used to being able to pick shit up and move boxes around. I’m pretty sure there was even an instance where I spent a few minutes trying to get around this wooden fence when I realized I could shoot it and the planks would break apart.
I’ve uploaded a bunch of screenshots to Flickr and will continue to do so as I play through the game. The first few minutes were, uhhh, eye-opening and truly unexpected. Lots of ridiculous boobies and cussing. Man, that cute little red-head’s got a potty mouth on her! She even dropped the f-bomb at a cop! Who does that? Anyway, watch for a review of SiN Episodes: Emergence in the near future.
8 people have had something to contribute so far.
I knew you would be back on your PC at some point, it was only a matter of time…..
To be honest, i havn’t been that excited about Sin, but maybe i will pick it up to fill the void until HL2 Episode One.
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Boobies you say?
That maybe enough to get me to try and overcome the god awful motion sickness HL2 gives me.
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Loading from Steam as we speak. Like I needed another game to waste away time this weekend…
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I’ve been enjoying this game once I got the stuttering issue fixed. I envision lots of fanpages of Jessica Cannon. She’s so hawt.
As for gameplay, the game feels polished, the dynamic AI difficulty is the real deal, not a gimmick, and some of the gags and hidden areas are hilarious. Lots of neat little touches here and there added up to a steal at $20.
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@Andy: I wasn’t very excited about it either. But there hasn’t been much coming out recently and I figured this would be a safe bet.
@Matt: What was your PCI latency set to prior to adjusting it and what did you change it to?
I didn’t realize there were hidden areas until I checked out the stats after playing last night. That’s a pretty intuitive stats system they’ve included.
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PCI Latency for sound cards were at 64 (setting it to 32 in the BIOS does the same thing as the PCI Latency program). I also set the video card latency from 248 to 64. That seems to have fixed the stuttering issue somewhat, although it still occasionally takes place, just not as bad.
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I don’t know about you but all I notice is how shitty and 2d the hair looks… looks like something out of Doom origonal or something.
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Picked this up yesterday. After finally getting past the horror that is Steam, I got to play. Feels more like an expansion pack to Half Life 2 than a different game, everything is so similar! I’ve found A LOT of bugs though, nothing major just small annoying stuff. Game seems to stutter a bit too, even after setting every setting to the lowest possible.
Only just got the shotgun though, and ever since that thing’s have picked up. That pistol is hopeless!
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