Monday, December 17, 2001

RtCW Follow-Up -- 9:07 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I fiddled with a few of my settings in the Return to Castle Wolfenstein demo last night. I noticed that by default the geometry was set to "high". I moved it to "medium" and turned on lightmaps instead of the default vertex lighting. That made all the difference in the world. It still taxes my system something fierce, but it looks a lot better and it is playable.

The catacombs level is pretty freaky, although on my monitor it is almost impossibly dark. I realize it is supposed to be dark and foreboding, but it is almost impossible to see anything. I cranked up the video card's gamma to compensate. That washed things out a bit, but at least I could tell where I was going and what I was supposed to be doing.

The AI is certainly a lot better than most games I've played. The fact that you can use stealth to your advantage is a nice touch. Unfortunately, I think many reviewers are going through the game with guns a-blazin'. That's fine, but from what I've seen from the demo, you'd miss an awful lot. My $.02. $18.24 Canadian.

J.t.Qbe comments: I tried the demo again yesterday and the video annoyances (I have an ATI Xpert 128) seemed less annoying than before. It certainly is a nice looking game and the demo was pretty enjoyable. I noticed that Circuit City has it on sale for $35 or so this week. I don't think I'm going to buy it myself, though.

News for 12/17/2001

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