FarCry 2, Dead Space

I played a lot of FarCry 2 last night. The game runs great, I was a tad disappointed to see that the grass is comprised of sprites and not 3 dimensional polygons like Crysis. I guess that was a compromise they had to make for consoles, it certainly lets the game display grass at a much further distance anyways, pop up is generally pretty good, I don't see it too often. It's so far been a much more linear game than I was expecting (even more linear than Crysis Warhead), though that could change later on in the game, and that's not exactly a bad thing either, sometimes I don't want to do a ton of backtracking just to scout the whole area (a compulsive problem I have). I also turned the music off in the game, hearing the ambient sound in this game is wonderful.

The game is best played with a gamepad I found. I started with the mouse/trackball combo, but found the movement to be too stiff. Not only that but vehicles greatly benefit from the pressure sensitive triggers (used for gas and break) and analog sticks (used for turning the wheel). All in all I'm pretty sure I'll play this game to completion. I'm also glad the developers included quick save for the PC version, I ended up mapping those controls to my track ball so I can have quick access to them.

I really like Dead Space. The PC version has some V-sync issues that can be resolved; when you enable V-sync through the game the controls have a pretty serious delay on them, however turning the option off in game and enabling it through your video card drivers seems to work wonderfully. The game crashed on me once last night, I'm a little worried that forcing V-sync through my drivers might have caused it, but it's too early to tell.

Using the mouse/trackball combo is my preferred control scheme for this game. I decided to play the game on hard mode, but after a very tough encounter I'm thinking I might need to rethink the difficulty. Definitely plan to play this game in the dark with headphones on exclusively, perhaps with a little bit of gonja on the side.

Haven't played much World of Goo, just about finished up with Chapter two. I'll write more on the game when I spend more time with it. To be honest I'm somewhat reluctant to play more of it until the developers patch in the option to change the resolution (when you forcefully change the resolution you mess up the controls in the game).

I really wish Fallout 3 wasn't coming out so soon, I'm okay with holding off on Fable 2 (If history repeats itself there may be a PC version), but Fallout 3 demands some attention. There's a bit of a break from big releases now, maybe I'll be able to squeeze it in.

Update: I was wrong, there are some pretty large areas in FarCry 2.