This year was one of many an amazing title and clearly showed that PC gaming is still where it’s at. In fact, there have been so many great games that many a PC gamer will likely still be buying some of these titles one year from now - and playing through them all seems like a task that will take centuries. We’ve had sequels in franchises long thought lost: BioShock, Command & Conquer 3, Sam & Max Season 1, Supreme Commander. Excellent new games: Crysis, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, The Witcher, World in Conflict. And just all around great games/sequels/expasion packs.

In light of all these impressive games, I’ve done my best to include the most popular and impressive amongst them in a new poll… where you get to vote for your favorite game of 2007! If you’re still missing a game, leave a comment, or contact me, and I’ll add it to the list. Now go ahead and vote for your favorite. I’ll leave it up for a couple of weeks and share the results with you afterwards!

As for the previous, somewhat similar, poll which asked what game you’d be playing on a winter’s day. Let’s just Unreal Tournament 3 raked in a landslide victory with 5 out of 15 votes, which is perhaps not particularly surprising considering almost 50% of the content on this blog has been UT related as of late. The Witcher came in second with 3 votes, leaving Call of Duty 4 tailing that with 2 votes. Lastly BioShock, Crysis and The Orange Box all received 1 vote, rounding out the list.

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As you may know the low playercounts have been one of the main concerns for Unreal Tournament 3 (PC) players as of late. Fortunately this Christmas has been quite Unreal for many people it seems, as player counts have risen dramatically over the past couple of days. New players have been streaming in by the hundreds, as servers keep on filling up - and activity mounts worldwide!

It’s great news for UT3 players who were concerned for the game’s health! Things are starting to look up as player counts rise and rumors are creeping in of Midway actually starting to get advertising going in some parts. Why Midway chose to waste it’s advertising budget on mediocre games like Blacksite Area 51 and Stranglehold is likely to remain a mystery for many years to come, but at least it looks like they’re coming to their senses and starting to promote their star title!

Meanwhile a couple of mappers have created a “Hardcore Oldskool Low-Poly” map pack, featuring a collection of excellent DeathMatch and Capture the Flag maps based on old classics. Definitely not the prettiest of maps, but they’re awesome fun to play! So go on, head on over here and download the HOLP Map Pack!

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Yay, I got the F.E.A.R. Platinum Collection for Christmas from a relative! So I install the games and run into zero problems, until I insert the second DVD containing Perseus Mandate. What happened next was so silly, so stupid and so retarded - I still don’t believe any company could conceive a tiny, but major, screw up like this! Turns out Sierra fucked up big time on the installer and ensured it could only be installed on your C drive (even if you change drive, it will still try to install everything on C, it just ignores any alternative installation paths), which means only PCs with shitty formatting arrangements can install it without resorting to registry hacks.

Awesome job Sierra (or Timegate, the developers) - you guys just made me edit my registry to install a game. Definitely the most retarded (and obvious) screw up I’ve ever seen from a game company. Hell, this screw up even makes Epic Games’s royal screw over of anyone with a decent PC setup running Unreal Tournament 3 look like no big deal. Being forced to overrule game addressing lines just so you don’t have to install every map and mod on your C drive - seriously, who comes up with this stuff!? Let us decide where to put our game files… just dumping save files (BioShock, The Witcher) and even character files (Neverwinter Nights 2) on someone’s C drive is just plain wrong.

Ah well, here’s to hoping that at least the game is worth it.

Merry Christmas!

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InstantAction.com is the name of a browser-based gaming service set to launch some time in 2008. Initial impressions seemed to point to a mostly casual gamer site that tries to combined services like Steam with sites like Youtube. Not particularly interesting for the ‘hardcore’ PC gamer.

That all changed yesterday with a newspost up over at Shacknews, which features a video and snapshots demonstrating a Tribes-like game, in development at GarageGames, for the browser-based InstantAction service. According to comments from one of the developers on the project this is leaked footage featuring their current alpha build, which has only been in production for a mere 3 months. In fact, it only hit alpha status last Thursday!

More inside.

Read the rest…

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You may have been wondering why there still hasn’t been a review of The Witcher on this blog. Truth be told, I haven’t actually played it much since the release of Unreal Tournament 3 and my EVE Online account reactivation. Aside from that, I have been waiting for CDProjekt to release it’s next patch, which promised to solve the notoriously long loading times and occasional crashes. As of last Thursday this 1.2 patch has been released - and has proven to be a welcome surprise well beyond anything anyone could have expected.

Random crashes are essentially gone, as are a couple of minor bugs. These are of course only minor issues - and not particularly worth noting (or at least, not worth writing a blog post about). The real reason why everyone has been waiting for this patch is in the promised loading time improvements. And these certainly do not disappoint. I loaded up a later game and started moving into and out of houses in the most demanding area of the entire game. This highly demanding area used to take 30-35 seconds to load. Now it takes 5-8 seconds! Needless to say houses are nearly instant loads and there’s absolutely no way anyone is going to get fed up with these loading screens anymore.

So let it be known that on Thursday the 20th of December, any and all The Witcher reviews containing complaints and deducting points over loading times and/or crashes - instantly turned into trash. You can download this godly patch here.

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