October 2009 Archives

Borderlands.... release! Rant -- (But it has a happy ending!)

By So.TADA on October 27, 2009 8:18 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, I have some beefs with Borderlands. Despite ensuring the PC fanbase that Gearbox understood their platform (after all, their pedigree was born on the PC with Half-Life: Opposing Force), and announcing a week-long delay for the PC version (aside: Actually, they might not have ever officially said the PC delay was to polish and deliver the best experience possible -- that was probably fan conjecture on good faith), the PC version of Borderlands, "out of the box" felt like a straight up port.

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. =)

Config.rar

Borderlands PC - T-Minus 1 Week!

By So.TADA on October 18, 2009 8:06 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I ended up not getting Resident Evil (waiting for a Steam sale - also waiting for a sale on Mirror's Edge).

NFS:Shift is still arcadey. It's better than GRID, but not quite there to the (Gran Turismo) level that I'm wanting. The crappy low-level cars in these quasi-realistic racing games handle "sluggish" and heavy, but they feel like they have a nice weight. But as you get faster and better cars, I feel the handling diverges further and further from the feel I'm looking for.

i.e. the Mustang is a tank in GT (it's worse than the BMW in that it really only goes in one direction), but in GRID, it handled pretty nicely, and I could use inertial drifts fairly nicely.

With Borderlands a week away, I'm playing some Ace Attorney and Scribblenauts. =]

Ace Attorney is really good. I had only played part of the first one before (I can't remember if I beat the original Phoenix Wright), but now I'm starting with Apollo Justice. I'll move backwards from there.

Games Money

By So.TADA on October 3, 2009 4:31 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Borderlands has been pre-ordered!

I regret Mini-Ninjas. It was a very impulse buy, and the game wasn't worth the $30 at all. It was a neat experience, but had shallow story and no replayability. ;_; I like my games to last!

L4D2 is available for Pre-Order. L4D1 came about when I was starved for a good co-op game. I've played a few since then, and it seems there are now many options out in the market for co-op games (of the 4-player variety). I have the feeling the Borderlands should have basically everything covered that L4D2 has to offer, other than awesome voice acting.

Killing Floor was a similar concept that was put together with far less resources than Valve had for L4D, but at its core, the game play appealed to me more. Borderlands will most likely have everything KF has to offer and yet more.

-- of course, this is discounting L4D's competitive Versus mode. But if your Co-op game makes a better Versus game than it does a Co-op game, then you've missed a mark somewhere.

GRID was a pretty neat game, though it wasn't a Gran Turismo replacement like I had hoped. Still, if I wanted to speed down roads with a semblance of a car that had weight, it was okay. Graphics were beautiful! (if not all nuked yellow). Need for Speed: Shift is out now. I'm curious to see how it stacks up against GRID.

Street Fighter 4 is basically the other "big purchase" I made this year. My original plan was to wait until the price dropped from $40 to pick it up, but I kept thinking about the game day and night, and eventually bought it anyway. I did play the game a lot, even though I didn't like it -- I want to like Street Fighter 4 because it's the newest Street Fighter game that's not 10 years old. I hope the future (Super Street Fighter 4) sees improvements.

Street Fighter 4 is just Street Fighter 4. I've been playing SF3 some more recently, and the flow of that game just draws me back to it every time.

But... that's okay. Hopefully Borderlands is good. Should be fun stuff-- other than that, I'm looking forward to Dragon Age: Origins, and.... uh. Resident Evil 5's price to drop, or go on sale.
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