Another perspective on CPU value
As you might have already seen, the value section of our grand Athlon II vs. Core i3 showdown article includes performance-per-dollar graphs based on whole system prices. We began including these numbers some time ago at the behest of a readers who rightfully feel that, if they need to buy a whole PC to begin with, then processor pricing is only part of the equation. For example, if processor A costs $200 and only performs 50% better than processor B, which is priced at $100, then the prospect of paying double for 50% extra performance may not seem that worthwhile. In a $900 system, however, paying an extra $100 for 50% of extra performance suddenly becomes far more enticing.
We changed our full-system formula slightly this time, factoring in all the components you'd need to build a workable PC, including a case, power supply, and optical drive. Picking the right components proved to be somewhat of a challenge. In the end, we settled on parts we thought representative of a system your average enthusiast might buy: a new-ish motherboard with USB 3.0 connectivity, 4GB of RAM (or 6GB for the Core i7-900 config), a Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, a 640GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and a good quality case-and-power-supply bundle. Those parts pretty much correspond to the middle-of-the-road Utility Player build from our system guides.
What happens if you're not shopping for a middle-of-the-road system, though? What if you're on a tight budget and really have to cut corners? How do the performance-per-dollar CPU rankings end up looking then? We were curious to find out, so I fired up Excel, entered the low-end components below into our giant spreadsheet of doom, and watched the rankings rearrange themselves.
| Platform | Total price | Motheboard | Memory | Common components |
| AMD 785G | $410.90 | Asus M4A785-M ($79.99) |
2GB Kingston DDR3-1333 ($56.99) |
HIS Radeon HD 5670 512MB graphics card ($89.99), Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB hard drive ($74.99), Samsung SH-S223L DVD burner ($28.99), Antec Three Hundred with 430W PSU ($79.95) |
| Intel G43 | $410.90 | Asus P5G43T-M Pro ($79.99) |
||
| Intel H55 | $420.90 | Gigabyte GA-H55M-S2H ($89.99) |
||
| Intel X58 | $545.90 | Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R ($188.99) |
3GB Crucial DDR3-1600 ($82.99) |
For our low-end component choices, I went with very affordable, micro-ATX motherboards with integrated graphics on all but the X58 platform. I stuck to 2-3GB of RAM, and I replaced our graphics card with a $90 Radeon HD 5670, since having a decent discrete GPU has uses beyond extreme gaming. Also, I opted for a cheaper case-and-PSU combo priced just under $80. All of this brings costs down quite significantly: minus the CPU, our AMD platform now costs around $411, down from almost $609 in our original set of numbers. Even the X58 platform has tumbled from $759 to $546.
And here are the results.
The points in our scatter plots follow almost the same pattern as in our big roundup, but all of a sudden, budget-friendly processors like quad-core Athlon IIs score much better in our performance-per-dollar rankings—no great surprise, perhaps. Interestingly, the Core i5-750 and Phenom II X4 965 remain neck-and-neck in the top two spots, albeit with their positions switched. It's tough to beat Intel's cheapest quad-core Nehalem, especially once you start taking power into the equation, as we're about to do.
Again, very little is new under the sun when it comes to our scatter plot. Looking over to our power-efficiency-per-dollar bar graph, we see the Core i3-530 and Core i5-750 have switched places, with the former now claiming the gold medal. The Athlon IIs have climbed up the rankings a little, but they still pale in comparison even to the old Core 2 Quad Q9400. AMD has higher load power consumption pretty much across the board, and no amount of fiddling with value numbers is going to change that.
I think we can draw two conclusions from this little exercise. One, quad-core Athlon IIs are very clearly the best deals if you're building a low-end rig and don't care too much about power efficiency. Two, even in a low-end rig, Intel's Core i5-750 still delivers by far the best mix of performance per dollar and power efficiency per dollar, at least among the processors in our test suite. If you can afford to plunk down $200 on a CPU, you can't go wrong with it.
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Last by wira020 at 12:54 AM on 03/16/10
By now, many of you must have looked at, or at least heard of, the experimental, HTML5 version of YouTube. And if you read the news, you'll know Steve Jobs now expects HTML5 to replace Adobe Flash altogether as the predominant web video standard. Such a development would conveniently make the iPhone and iPad's lack of Flash support a non-issue.
HTML5 video isn't quite there yet, of course, because browser makers still can't seem to agree on whether to use Ogg Theora or H.264 video codecs. But HTML5 is much, much more than just another way to embed videos in a web page. I've been looking at some example applets that showcase HTML5's other capabilities over the past few days, and I can't help but be impressed. Let me show you.
One of the first examples I came across was Gil Megidish's partial HTML5 and JavaScript port of Another World, a cult adventure platformer from 1991:
Playing is as simple as pressing the right keys in the browser window. The port bears a striking resemblance to the original, too; just compare it to this YouTube video of the full game. As Megidish acknowledges, however, this isn't a perfect port—more like a proof of concept.
Old-fashioned 2D games aren't the extent of what developers can put together. Next up: Jacob Seidelin's port of Wolfenstein 3D, a much more elaborate application with pseudo-3D graphics, music, and sound:
The game seems to capture mouse input, but you can play simply by hitting with the arrow keys to move, X to open doors, and C to shoot. Here, too, we can see some occasional graphical glitches, but the port works surprisingly well and uses little CPU power, to boot.
Finally, here's HTML5 and JavaScript put to use in a graphical image editor with draggable palettes, multiple undo levels, customizable brushes, and all that good stuff—Michael Deal's Sketchpad:
You can check out some more examples over at Chrome Experiments. Some of the applets there are pure JavaScript, but many use new HTML5 capabilities like the canvas element. To use anything with HTML5, you'll need the latest version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera. Internet Explorer doesn't support any of this functionality right now.
Lack of support in IE could be a pretty big roadblock toward broader adoption of HTML5 features, of course. But considering Microsoft's new-found embrace of web standards with IE8, I wouldn't be too surprised to see the company hop on the bandwagon sooner or later. After that, it'll be up to developers to decide whether they want to write their web-based apps, games, and video players using open standards or Adobe's proprietary tools. I think the mere presence of a choice can only mean good things for the web.
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Last by tygrus at 8:48 PM on 02/08/10
I wrote a post in this blog two years ago extolling the virtues of my LG KU990 cell phone. I deemed the device a bargain compared to the expensive (at the time) iPhone, since it offered a touch-screen interface, 3G connectivity, video playback capabilities, and a relatively sophisticated camera for a fraction of the price.
Has my early appraisal stood the test of time? Well... not quite. In fact, I'm almost set on picking up an iPhone after my two-year contract finally ends next month.
I don't think I necessarily made a bad decision by picking up the KU990. However, as Apple continued to update iPhone software with more and more enhancements, and as third-party developers built up a huge library of apps, the KU990 received a grand total of zero software updates. That means the QWERTY keyboard still isn't available in some parts of the interface, the only third-party software comes in the form of Java apps not designed for a touch screen, and I've just had to live with all of the annoying little bugs and imperfections.
Prolonged use also revealed some limitations. For example, while the KU990's integrated web browser does use the WebKit rendering engine just like the iPhone's, it also seems to crash when asked to render long pages every now and then. The device's external speaker also died some months ago, so I have to rely on the admittedly loud vibrate function. I refuse to pay to get it fixed, though—I'd rather just put that money toward the purchase of a new, less terrible device.
In short, while iPhone users are now enjoying apps, still-solid web browsing, and many layers of added polish, time has left me with a device barely competitive with the original iPhone running the original OS. By today's standards, that's almost like having to use a smart phone with your right hand lopped off. Oh, Ben, why didn't you tell me...
What's done is done, though; all I can do now is just not screw up my next phone purchase. But that's trickier than it sounds. If all goes well, I'll be moving to Canada some time within the next couple of months—closer to other TR editors, the sources of our review samples, and the time zone in which I've worked for almost four years. However, I'm very much unfamiliar with Canadian cell phone carriers, and local conventions puzzle me.
As far as I can tell, all carriers in the Great White North seem either to tie smart phones to three-year contracts or to sell them contract-free for exorbitant amounts of money. The folks at Rogers, for example, sell the plain iPhone 3G for $99 CAD with a three-year plan and $580 CAD on its own. (The cheapest plan will set you back $65 CAD a month, though, which looks to be a little cheaper than in the U.S.) I've gotta admit, the idea of being stuck with the same phone for three years bothers me.
The release of new and exciting Android-powered phones from Motorola and HTC only complicates things further. Sure, the iPhone still looks very tempting, but phones like the Droid and Nexus One have bigger screens, and Android isn't a dead-end like my KU990's proprietary software. One of my friends who just got a Motorola Droid seems overjoyed with it. On the flip side, another acquaintance who got a T-Mobile G1 last year says that device already feels largely obsolete, and my latest brush with the emulator in the Android development kit has left me somewhat unimpressed. Generally speaking, I think Google's user interfaces have a nice, minimalistic quality to them, but they can feel dull and awkward to use, too.
I'm just not sure what to think. Apple rumor sites seem to be hinting at a new iPhone launch in April, so perhaps that'll make my decision easier—or harder.
What do TR's loyal readers think? Would you stick with an iPhone or an Android device for three years, hoping software updates keep the device current despite the aging hardware? Would you pay the full price for a contract-free phone up front and upgrade sooner? Or is there another option I've entirely overlooked?
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Last by moritzgedig at 8:44 AM on 02/07/10
A good number of you read my first impressions blog post about James Cameron's Avatar, in which I praised the visuals and cinematography but gave the plot and stereoscopic 3D a thumbs down. The more I looked back, the more I felt I had been overly harsh about the film—and a handful of you said just as much in the comments. So, over the weekend, I decided to go see Avatar again. This time, I made sure to watch the film in English (which involved leaving the 3D goggles at home), sent off my film-snob neurons to have a cappuccino or something, and tried to enjoy the ride.
I loved the visuals on both occasions, but at the premiere, the formulaic plot and one-dimensional characters just bothered me. I felt let down, in no small part because of the massive amount of hype surrounding the film. Were things different the second time? Yes and no. Let me explain.
I still stand by what I wrote in my first post, but that's only one side of the story. A huge part of Avatar—something I overlooked the first time while piecing together a blog post in my head—is the immersion. Cameron aptly draws you into a completely computer-generated world, makes it believable, and most importantly, makes you want to be there. Cheesy lines and cliched plot devices may break the immersion at times, and that's a shame. But the sheer magnetism of the movie is still something to behold.
In spite of the characters' relative lack of depth, I found myself building an emotional connection to them—more so than in other movies. I can credit both the music and the incredible detail of the Na'vi's facial expressions for that. This connection seemed to persist after viewings, too. I realize this is going to end up with readers calling me a big sappy girl, but Titanic is the only other movie I can recall that elicited that kind of response. I guess Cameron has a way of building up his characters that works for me.
Oh, shush.
The Weta Workshop folks also did a fantastic job rendering Pandora, the fictional alien moon that serves as Avatar's setting. Large swaths of the movie feature CG characters acting in a CG world, but Pandora stills looks and feels incredibly real. Oh, sure, Pixar has been making all-CG movies since the 1990s (and I love all of them, by the way), but you always know you're looking at a sort of 3D cartoon. Avatar is something else; it shows you something you've never seen before and makes you want to be a part of it. Too bad the plot doesn't do as much.
In a way, though, I think the cookie-cutter story serves its purpose. Like I said in my previous post, kids will love the movie. Any adult who doesn't over-analyze it will love the ride, too. Cameron is going to make a killing (Avatar has already made over $300 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo), which will likely help persuade Fox to go along with that trilogy idea of his.
Yes, Cameron has openly talked about making another two Avatar films that follow Jake Sully and Neytiri on further adventures. Makes sense, right? The team already has the characters and the world put together (as Cameron says, "a lot of the start-up torque has been done"), so sequels should cost less than the first opus and probably draw in just as many eager viewers, if not more.
I've seen some folks around the web draw a parallel between Avatar and the original Star Wars. Only time will tell if Avatar becomes nearly as much of a game-changer, but there are definite similarities. A New Hope had fantastic (for the time) visuals and a nice, self-contained story heavily inspired by previous works (Dune, in that case). The sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, used a lot of the same snazzy effects and put them to use in a far deeper, darker, and more original work—some say the best of the six Star Wars films. Conveniently, by the time Empire came out, kids and young teens who saw the first movie were older and better equipped to appreciate the more complex and nuanced sequel.
Perhaps Avatar II and III will have more in common with the Matrix sequels than the Star Wars ones; nobody knows at this point. However, I sincerely hope the next Avatar gives me the same sense of wonder and immersion with a better plot and more character development to go with it. In the meantime, I think the first film is a good movie with disappointing but forgivable shortcomings.
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Last by clone at 10:51 AM on 01/30/10
Last night, I went to see the Avatar premiere. James Cameron's massively hyped CG epic came out in Europe a couple of days ahead of the U.S. for some reason, so I now have a chance to spoil the movie for most of you guys. Sweet! I even selected a theater that was showing the film in full stereoscopic 3D glory, so I pretty much got the full experience.
Well, except for one detail: the thing was dubbed in French. Yes, all movies are dubbed over here, especially big blockbusters. The dubbing admittedly sounds pretty seamless—all of the right post-processing effects are applied—but any English speaker will find himself cringing in certain parts, like when the infamous "Ladies and gentlemen, you're not in Kansas anymore" line from the trailer turns into "Mesdames et messieurs, vous n'êtes plus au Kan-sas." Bleh.
First and foremost, though, I went to see Avatar to figure out if the hoopla surrounding the visuals and 3D cinematography was justified. This movie has been hyped for many things, but one of them is definitely the newfangled stereo HD cameras James Cameron put together. According to this Wired piece (entitled "James Cameron's New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever"), we can credit Cameron for almost single-handedly persuading theater owners to invest in stereoscopic 3D projection. The filmmaker even let other directors, including Spy Kids 3-D's Robert Rodriguez, shoot with his camera system in order to spur demand.
Avatar also took something like 14 years to develop. Cameron reportedly wanted to create a completely believable computer-generated world and characters, and he had to wait until the technology allowed him to pursue his vision without compromise. None of that 1990s fakey-looking CG here, no sir. What a visionary!
Now, let me pause briefly to say that, before the first teaser trailer came out earlier this year, I didn't know the first thing about Avatar. Heck, I hadn't even heard of it. I thought the trailer looked sort of neat, but I couldn't really understand why everyone was so incredibly excited. I had to read the aforementioned Wired story to join in the excitement.
The visuals
So, last night, I eagerly sat in my theater seat and waited for the show to begin. My impressions of the graphics were two-fold: one, the CG rainforest of Pandora looks completely believable and absolutely incredible. Unless I started thinking too hard about why trees were so big or why a mountain floating in thin air had a waterfall coming out of it (where's the water coming from, huh?), I just bought it lock, stock, and barrel. Sometimes, I genuinely wondered whether I was looking at a live-action set or a CG one. I guess that's the point.
Two, the 3D cinematography added nothing to the experience. In a way, it almost detracted from the visuals. I'll admit we were among the last people to walk in, and as a result, we had to sit pretty close to the screen. I therefore didn't get the absolute best 3D experience. Separately from that, however, the 3D glasses just made Pandora look dimmer and less vibrant. I think dimness is already a problem with standard theater projections to begin with, at least compared to a good LCD display, so the goggles only made things worse. Just poor contrast and saturation all around.
The 3D effects worked very well, mind you. They made Pandora look exceedingly realistic at times, causing no headaches or nausea in the process. I pretty much forgot about the 3D half an hour into the movie, though, and I was only reminded when something flashed in the foreground... or when the goggles induced double vision, probably because I was wearing them over my regular prescription glasses.
For the life of me, though, I can't understand the appeal of 3D cinema like this. I've never looked at a photograph or a painting and thought, "Yeah, this looks okay, but it would be so much better if I got an artificial sense of depth by looking at it through thick-framed sunglasses." Why should a movie be any different? The goggles, the dimness, and the occasional double vision gave Cameron's beautifully rendered alien rainforest the same aftertaste as a gimmicky theme park short. I don't know anyone who's ever had trouble immersing themselves in a 2D movie; I don't see how adding depth and taking away some of the image quality is supposed to help.
On a separate note, this may be one of the last movies I go see in a conventional theater. Every single time I've been in the past few years, I've come out disappointed by the image quality. It's usually too dim, too blurry, and too flickery. I think we've gotten to the point where watching a movie at home gives you a better experience, which is pretty unfortunate. In a way, I can't help but feel like stereoscopic 3D is a last-ditch effort by the movie industry to make theaters deliver added value. As far as I'm concerned, the semi-awkward 3D is only one more reason to wait for the Blu-ray or DVD.
The movie
This section will include some spoilers, so if you want to experience Avatar with a mind as fresh as the morning snow, stop reading now.
As impressed as I was with Avatar's CG graphics, the script just seemed like an unimaginative blend of Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and The Smurfs. Cameron succeeded in creating exquisitely detailed and masterfully animated aliens capable of displaying believable emotion, only to make them spout banal, simplistic lines. The Na'vi may have their own indigenous language spoken throughout the film, but it plays no important part, since all the important Na'vi characters speak English (or French, in my case) from the outset. And the Na'vi have the exact same vocal range as humans despite being 10 feet tall and from an alien moon, so they end up speaking only with a slight accent. Neat, huh?
The story can be summed up as follows... actually, the trailer pretty much explains it all: Soulless Corporation has a mining colony on Pandora, an alien world that orbits a blue version of Jupiter. Jake Sully (John Smith), a former marine who's paralyzed from the waist down and apparently has no friends, is tasked with assimilating himself among the Na'vi (who are also blue), gaining their trust, and convincing them to relocate so the Soulless Corporation can mine a really precious mineral from under the giant tree they all live in. Jake remotely pilots a genetically engineered Na'vi-human hybrid to do this. He soon meets a female Na'vi warrior named Naytiri (Smurfette/Pocahontas), who shows him what it means to be in touch with nature on Pandora. None of the Na'vi except Smurfette seem to like him, but he takes the Na'vi's side anyway, betraying and slaughtering his former comrades so the Na'vi can stay in their tree.
Almost all of the characters in this epic are strictly one-dimensional. Soulless Corporation has no clear motive—the film glosses over the fact that the mineral under the Na'vi Hometree is worth "20 million a kilo," but there's no explanation of why it's in such high demand or what it does—and the main antagonist (Gargamel) calls the Na'vi "savages" and considers them sub-human scum. I guess circa-19th-century colonial imperialism is back in full force in the 2150s. The Na'vi, meanwhile, are completely good: they even mourn the creatures they kill for sustenance, although their tribe also includes a number of warriors. Not sure how that fits together, exactly.
Toward the end, Gargamel delivers a cartoon villain speech to the remaining faithful mercenaries, saying the Na'vi are about to attack. To survive, the mercs must "fight terror with terror" and "attack pre-emptively," he says. Perhaps Cameron was attempting to draw some sort of parallel here, but if he did, it was far too subtle for me to pick up. By the way, Gargamel's pre-emptive strike involves blowing up the Na'vi's monoetheistic goddess tree to crush their spirit for "generations and generations." Did we mention he was evil?
At one point in the movie, you learn that the forests of Pandora are actually a giant neural network, sort of like a moon-sized brain. So, destroying them is really bad. But the entire movie has been demonizing Soulless Corporation non-stop at that point, so this discovery only serves to justify a brief deus ex machina moment: when the final battle between the Na'vi and the colonists seems lost, the creatures of Pandora suddenly turn against the invaders. Also, one of the fierce carnivorous beasts lets Smurfette ride it to fight the evil colonists.
Cameron seems to have gone for a similar "Remember, kids, recycle!" message as in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Wall-e. Here, that message is only cemented by repeated references to Earth having become a "dead world," because the humans have no respect for nature. I guess humans eventually ended up putting Al Gore in the same landfill as postcolonialism. (They weren't recycled, clearly.)
Speaking of nature, much of the hype associated with Avatar also revolves around the incredibly detailed world of Pandora, which has its own distinct flora and fauna. According to Wired, Cameron even hired a scientist to "write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created." Here, too, I came away partly underwhelmed. The flora is certainly beautiful, but the fauna seems to suffer from either an overabundance of imagination or a dearth of it. For example, Pandora has little helicopter creatures that just spin around awkwardly and aimlessly like dogs strapped to ceiling fans—how that trait helps them survive and reproduce, I have no idea. On the other side of the spectrum, the horse-like creatures the Na'vi ride are basically horses with anteater heads. Heck, the Na'vi themselves are basically giant humans with catlike features and tails (a furry's wet dream). They have belly buttons, human dentition, and human-like feet, even though they spend much of their time climbing trees. I don't want to nitpick too much, because the excess of human attributes obviously makes them easier to relate to. But a little more imagination wouldn't have hurt.
As a whole, the experience just seems unfortunately shallow. All the beauty is on the surface, with very little depth or nuance in the story, characters, or message. Greedy corporations and colonialism are bad. Indigenous people in touch with nature are good. Cameron reproduced none of the shades of gray seen in films like Dances with Wolves, where, for instance, John J. Dunbar has trouble reconciling his fondness for the Lakota with their slaughter of white trappers who killed bison for their skins.
Walking out of the theater, I started talking with my fiancee about the main female Na'vi character. Suddenly, I realized I had already forgotten her name. My fiancee had, too. When was the last time you saw a movie and forgot the name of the second-most-important character five minutes after the credits started rolling? Kids will love Avatar, I'm sure, because the simplicity and black-and-white characters have a very kid-friendly quality to them. And you'll probably like it, too, if you can look past the formulaic plot and dreadful scriptwriting to immerse yourself in the visuals. Watching Avatar is like going out for burger and fries at a five-star restaurant: great taste, great presentation, still-poor nutritional value.
Update 12/23: I went to see the movie a second time and wrote a follow-up post to elaborate a little bit.
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Last by mattthemuppet at 4:03 PM on 01/02/10
I'll make no apologies: I was a fan of the original Left 4 Dead. By the time my interest waned and my friends and I stopped playing, I had clocked in somewhere around 100 hours of gameplay. Probably more. Much of that time was spent in the game's Versus mode, which pits four survivors against four player-controlled "super-infected" zombies with different powers. I talked a little bit about that mode about a year ago, but suffice it to say the thrill of orchestrating attacks on survivors and then having to survive the other team's onslaughts kept me hooked. Playing with Internet pals only made the experience better.
Valve released Left 4 Dead 2 on November 17, and Steam tells me I've already sunk just shy of 40 hours into it since launch day.
Left 4 Dead 2 is a strange animal for a Valve game. L4D2 came out exactly one year after the original, first of all, which seems like a preposterously quick release cycle by Valve standards. We're talking about a company that took six years to make Half-Life 2 and has yet to announce a launch schedule for Half-Life 2: Episode Three two years after releasing Episode Two, after all. This new multiplayer zombie shooter debuted so quickly after the original that some accused Valve of peddling a glorified expansion pack as a full game. A boycott movement was born, demanding that Left 4 Dead 2 come out as downloadable content for Left 4 Dead. I had some reservations myself about whether L4D2 would really be worth the $49.99 (or, in my case, €49.99) asking price. I mean, how much more content could they really put in?
As lukewarm as I was about the price, I was still eager to give the game a shot. Valve was promising a fresh round of monsters, characters, and weapons, plus some fresh locations with daytime segments. Everything looked like it would be bigger, meaner, and more intense, sort of like last night's leftovers cooked up Cajun style with plenty of hot sauce. I could hardly turn that down.
40 hours of playtime later, I'm hooked again. Valve may have kept the basic mechanics the same, but just about everything else has changed—sometimes subtly, sometimes not. The Louisiana locations give the game a fresh coat of paint, as do the new characters, zombies, weapons, graphical effects (you can shoot chunks of flesh off zombies now), and sounds (even certain weapons from the first game sound different now). The game certainly looks and feels more like a sequel than an expansion, so that's a start.
Altogether, the gameplay changes almost forced me to re-learn how to play, especially in the Versus mode. Ever huddle up in a corner with teammates to face a sudden influx of zombies? In the original, a team that did that was practically untouchable. In Left 4 Dead 2, that strategy is no good: all it takes is to spoil things is one attack from the Spitter super-infected, which hocks up a pool of acid goo from a distance, causing heaps of damage to survivors. Ever stick together tightly while walking down a long corridor? Good L4D strategy, bad in L4D2. Here, the Charger super-infected can run down the entire team, grabbing one of the survivors in the process, carrying him a few dozen feet away, and subsequently pummeling him mercilessly into the ground as his teammates recover.
Valve has added a third super-infected zombie. The Jockey has the ability to hop on the back of a survivor and steer him away, which often proves pointless and makes the character frustrating to use. However, this ability can be a godsend when one needs to split up the survivors or make one of them stumble over a ledge, which can either kill him or leave him hanging for his life as teammates try to fight off the zombie horde. In Versus mode, those playing as the Infected will have to learn how to use the Spitter, Charger, and Jockey effectively and coordinate them with the original Boomer, Hunter, Smoker, and Tank. That's harder than it sounds, trust me.
The survivors also have new tools in their toolbox, of course, not least of all the melee weapons. Those help tremendously with large swarms of zombies and when you need to save ammo. Good thing, too, because ammo has become much scarcer in the sequel. Besides, nothing's more fun than running down zombies with a chainsaw, a katana sword, or a baseball bat. Players will also find additional firearms. I'm glad Valve mixed things up a little here; the lack of variety in L4D1's guns made things dreary for me toward the end, since there were basically two good weapons: the assault rifle and the shotgun. L4D2's arsenal includes two extra shotguns, another sniper rifle, two more assault rifles, and a grenade launcher, all of which complement the original weapons.
L4D2's revised scoring system also doesn't factor in how many health packs you have left at the end of a round, so if you've made a habit out of not healing until you're almost dead, you'll want to re-train yourself. You can also pick up a defibrillator instead of a health kit; this tool will let you revive a dead comrade, but you won't be able to use it to heal when your life bar gets into the red. Decisions, decisions.
Survivors will have to reshape their play style to fit the Louisiana campaigns. In Swamp Fever, they'll face lots of open areas with trees and zombies that can crawl out of the bayou. No crocodiles, though. The Hard Rain campaign is my current favorite: in the first half, players navigate through a small town, some industrial areas, and a cane field toward a gas station. The survivors must then bring the gas back to their boat, which involves backtracking through the same levels—only now, a thunderstorm is raging. Some areas are flooded, and the storm rages more or less fiercely depending on how well the survivors are doing. At the storm's most intense, players have next to no visibility and can barely hear other players over the voice chat, forcing everyone to yell commands and pleas for help.
I should also throw in an honorable mention for the Dark Carnival campaign, which has zombie clowns. Zombie clowns, man!
I'm still coming to grips with some of the updated gameplay mechanics, but in almost every way, L4D2 feels more intense and tougher than the original—great for players like me who know L4D like the back of their hands and are looking for a fresh challenge. Valve hasn't altered any of the fundamentals, though, so if you liked the first game, you'll almost definitely like the sequel.
On the flip side, if the original didn't enthuse you, then you'll want to stay far, far away from Left 4 Dead 2. This advice goes especially for folks who were miffed by the first game's bugs and oddities. Valve's latest title feels generally polished, but some quirks can cause a generous dose of frustration. For example, the Charger's, er, charge can be stopped dead in its tracks by an obstacle. Makes sense, right? Only sometimes, that obstacle happens to be a tiny piece of wood sticking out of a wall or a small object on the ground that was barely visible from a distance. Such quirks are less apparent in the co-op and survival modes, but if you're playing Versus or the new Scavenge mode, things like that can get on your nerves.
In my experience, the best way to have fun playing Left 4 Dead 2 is to play with friends. As long as you know at least three other people who share your taste for the game, you should be able to have a good time. If you find seven others, then Versus games will have you relishing the moment and reminiscing about (or debating) the events of the campaign for hours afterward. Just like with the original, though, playing on public servers gets old quickly—especially because you're not familiar with your team and their play style, which makes coordinating effectively more difficult.
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Last by shaq_mobile at 8:34 AM on 12/16/09
Since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 apparently broke records with the biggest-ever entertainment launch two weeks ago, odds are you've already played it. Heck, considering the brevity of the single-player campaign, you've probably finished that, too—unless you're one of the folks "boycotting" the game for its lack of PC dedicated servers.
I played it, too. On November 12, the day my Steam copy unlocked, I launched the game and didn't get up again until five hours later, after the credits rolled. Those five hours must have been the most intense I've ever witnessed in a game, and for better or for worse, they may well have redefined what I expect from a first-person shooter. Infinity Ward's latest title felt more like an interactive action movie than anything else, tightly intertwining grandiose cinematic visuals with intense run-and-gun gameplay.
Strip out the gaming element, and Modern Warfare 2 almost seems like the kind of movie Michael Bay might make if he had an unlimited budget and, inexplicably, no desire to include a busty female character. The SP campaign is rife with explosions, fast-paced action, several boatloads of military hardware (not to mention several military boats), and, disappointingly, a mildly confusing and unbelievable storyline. Just like the new Transformers movie.
While I loved the ride overall, Modern Warfare 2's storyline is one of the two things that soured the experience for me. Before I air my grievances, let me give you a chance to stop reading here if you haven't played yet and don't want anything spoiled. You've been warned!
I'm not a picky guy, especially when it comes to action movie plots. I loved all of the Rambo films. Die Hard, Predator, the first two Terminator movies... I love all of those, too. Modern Warfare 2 belongs in a category of its own in terms of sheer implausibility, though. The story trudges along well enough until the airport level, where you (as an undercover CIA operative) infiltrate a group of Russian terrorists and gun down civilians at the Moscow International Airport. While you have a million chances to terminate Vladimir Makarov—the villain you're supposed to "get close" to—and his acolytes, the CIA apparently wants you to murder civilians, instead. Okay, fair enough.
At the end of the mission, Makarov turns around and shoots you in the face, revealing to the world that an American participated in the massacre. Oh snap! In retaliation, Russia launches a full-scale ground assault on the United States mainland.
I could go on about how, say, one of your friends later hijacks a Russian submarine and detonates a nuke above Washington, D.C. to paralyze the invading Russian force, or how Captain Shepherd, the guy you serve under, eventually turns out to be behind everything. However, my suspension of disbelief had long since checked out at that point. Russia invading the U.S. already seemed implausible when Red Dawn did it in the 80s, but now? Seriously? Don't get me wrong; it's pretty original and kinda neat to stage combat missions in the Virginia suburbs around gas stations and burger joints, but I just couldn't get into it. Every time the game attempted to draw me in, my mind tugged me back to reality. "The Russians are invading? Really?"
If you don't share my disbelief, let me just point out some per-country military expenditure figures real quick: France spends more on its military than Russia, and the U.S. spends over ten times as much. Yet somehow, the Russians in the game have enough state-of-the-art military hardware to launch a full-scale invasion of the world's fourth-largest country—and they're winning. I guess that one American killing civilians in Moscow was all Putin needed to flip the "military superpower" switch under the Kremlin back to "on." Who knew?
Now, let me insert a brief disclaimer: I really wouldn't have minded if Infinity Ward explicitly set Modern Warfare in a starkly different alternate reality. As far as I can tell, though, it didn't. The game even starts in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan, for heaven's sake.
Fun gameplay could be a great antidote to the hare-brained storytelling, but here, too, I'm left a little disappointed. While the spectacular cinematic visuals are definitely enjoyable, and you do feel like an action movie hero at times, the Call of Duty series' raw gameplay mechanics don't seem to have evolved significantly since the first couple of games. You still face wave after wave of respawning enemies, moving from invisible checkpoint to invisible checkpoint while taking massive amounts of damage and killing enemy gunmen by the dozen. It's cool, though; your health regenerates within a few seconds if you hide behind a crate somewhere.
At times, progressing through Modern Warfare 2 almost feels like braving a hailstorm. You face a never-ending barrage of bullets, shells, and grenades without much of a chance to stop for a breather or admire the environments—which, by the way, are beautifully rendered despite the game's cross-platform nature. The combat gave me the same "wack-a-mole" feeling as Borderlands, except in this case, killing bad guys wasn't anywhere near as satisfying—not a single enemy shrieked while dissolving into a pool of acid.
Oh, sure, the designers tossed in a few vehicle sections, some stealth segments, and a brief cliff-climbing mini-game to break things up. Sadly, none of that really takes away from the unpleasantly repetitive slaughtering, which accounts for the vast, vast majority of the SP campaign. It's a shame, because Infinity Ward has otherwise cut out so much of the filler that normally permeates first-person shooters, condensing the experience to a breakneck cinematic ride. But instead of making it satisfying to become part of the action, the game almost forces you to endure punishment just to see how the story develops. It's almost as if Michael Bay had his own flavor of Twinkies, which you could only eat while running on a treadmill to burn off the calories.
I would have no problem forgiving unfulfilling gameplay if Modern Warfare 2 were meant to portray real-life urban combat realistically. But you're a nearly immortal one-man killing machine gunning down entire enemy regiments in a world where CIA operatives fire into crowds of civilians with machine guns and a post-Cold-War Russia sees nothing wrong with a full-scale ground invasion of the United States. This is far, far from a serious combat simulator. Why couldn't Infinity Ward just dial down the hailstorm a little, make individual kills slower and more meaningful, and include fewer of them?
Still, I can't get too mad at Modern Warfare 2. It looks, feels, and plays like nothing I've ever played before, and I loved the ride despite its flaws. I think this game may force some adjustments from other first-person-shooter developers, too. If they try to emulate it, we may see the rise of a new genre: the playable action movie. And I could get down with that—especially if someone manages to make it more fun.
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Last by StuG at 4:49 AM on 12/27/09
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