voxelation/BLOG

Okay, so due to extenuating circumstances, I now own both of these games.

Dragon Age: Origins is still waiting... it's on the queue, because I'm not touching it until next year after I come back from Taiwan. RE5 is... omg, fun. Even after beating it with Jon/Josh on the PS3, it was still really fun for me to play through again on the PC. I never actually ran out of ammo (though I used the 92FS, so ammo was fairly common), but it didn't feel limitless, and there were times when I had to conserve. It's a nice feeling.

Even after beating it on the PC, I'm still having tons of fun... RE5 has struck some kind of chord in me that makes it one of my favorite games ever. I enjoyed it a lot on the PS3, but experiencing it again on the PC has basically reinforced the notion that it deserves a spot among my favorites.

I don't expect it to be great fun for everyone -- even the gamer house friends put it down when we couldn't manage to unlock any characters in Mercenaries mode -- but then again, in my experience, most of my favorite games are the ones that appeal to some quirk within me.

They are -

• Day of Defeat: Source - good times with OYWA
• Street Fighter III: Third Strike - an acquired taste, but once acquired, it's destined to stay
• Infantry (CTF and Skirmish) - Quite possibly the deepest Team vs. Team game out there, skill and persistent RPG elements combine with a very deep class-based system on large-scale battlefields
• Resident Evil 5 - best Co-Op experience... possibly rivalled only by Duke Nukem 3D

.... I now realize I'm fond of making lists. I keep making lists of my favorite games here and there.

I've been interested in this since I first heard about it, as a fan of BioWare since NWN rocked my world. It's finally out! And it seems like they weren't just spouting PR stuff when they said they were going back to their Baldur's Gate roots.

It's got some of the slick presentation that they learned from Mass Effect - though not quite as cinematic. However, the world setting seems to be very well crafted and fleshed out better than any other game I've seen. Animations might not be as smooth as the latest cinematics, but they're plenty good enough, and the voice acting and story content more than makes up for it.

I'm definitely buying this at some point. Pastor Liao was talking to me about being a consumer, and he had a very interesting point. It's strange how it's so hard to part with some money to buy something you really want, but that same money could be spent in an instant on other things without any thought.

I can't justify buying Dragon Age right now... but just yesterday, I spent $100 on new lenses, and got a $50 parking ticket for forgetting my car overnight. That's three Dragon Ages right there, friends.

I mean, it's better than ports that have come out recently from EA, who honestly just don't care - at least you can adjust some video settings manually (I mean, wtf- NFS:Shift even tried to simplify Resolutions into a numerical scale!), but it's pretty obvious that the main platform Borderlands was built for is the Xbox360.

Mouse movement felt completely wrong, and sensitivity was WAY too high by default -- sliders are everywhere in the options without visible or editable numeric feedback (not to mention, you can't even drag those sliders around! Arrow keys to adjust). It's not just the options either.

The In-game HUD is animated at 30FPS ... this is probably not noticeable for most things that don't have smooth movement anyway, but it looks really bad with the compass at the bottom of the screen. You can get away with this on consoles where the FPS is hardlocked at 30 max, but this doesn't fly on PCs. The Halo PC port (also by Gearbox, btw) is terribly guilty of this. All the animations in that game were done at 30FPS, including the guns and the enemies. The game could be running at 60FPS (so movement and mouse-looking was smooth), but the firing and reloading animations as well as the death animations of the enemies was terribly choppy in comparison.

Consolitis.

I though Halo PC was just a bad example - I mean, Bungie was made to develop for the Xbox, right? But seeing a relic of that in Borderlands is rather disappointing.

None of these things are game-breakers, but they all point to a developer that's gone little beyond what's absolutely necessary for a PC port; which is disappointing particularly because the developers themselves had stated that the PC version would feel like a PC game, and delayed it for a week.

But at least they left the guts of the game open to modification.

Following some forum posts for Borderlands, I went and disabled some specific graphical options to boost frame-rate on my computer (which has an aging 9600GT mobile), as well as disable Mouse Smoothing and removing the long list of unskippable intro movies. I tried out everything at once, and now the performance of the game is WAY smooth.

Slick framerates all the way, and it feels right ... like a PC game. I don't know which tweak or tweaks were responsible, but I don't really want to mess with it either. I'll log what I can remember, and upload the tweaked .ini here.

I used nhancer.com's software to try to force AA (the black outlines at low resolutions are terribly thick and jagged), but I didn't notice any difference in-game, so I don't think that worked.

I edited .inis in Documents/My Games/Borderlands... etc. ... in particular, WillowEngine and WillowInput.

Disabled Dynamic Shadows - there's an option for this in-game, too... but I think there are actually two of them in the .ini. Disabling it in-game only turns one of them off.

Disabled Mouse Smoothing - I don't know what this does in particular, but someone mentioned that it made it feel like a PC game.

Added -DX9 to the command line - Dunno if this helped either, but someone posted a thread about this on Steam, so I tried it out.

So there it is.

Before these tweaks, Borderlands was around a 7.1/10 for me... co-op was a bit more fun but the game didn't really feel so right. Literally, after the tweaks with a significantly smoother frame rate and feel, I feel like rating the game a 9/10.

See you in the Borderlands. =)