I'm about 3 hours into Skyward Sword...just got to the Faron Woods section. I'm not really sold on the art style for this one yet. It's kind of a mixed bag. I like the character design quite a bit, but the environments are sort of bland so far, and some of the distance blurring just looks weird when combined with the watercolor-ish effects.
Just had a quick go on Silent Hill 3 HD. Bleeming balls, it's like running through custard, the slowdown is so bad. In the mall with a monster; slowdown. In a small hallway by myself; slowdown. It's not playable for me, I'll hold out for a patch or something but my hopes are low.
The mechanical flying beetle that you find in the first temple in Skyward Sword is a pretty fun gadget. It almost seems like a cheat in some ways when you first start using it.
I just finished the 4th temple and am really enjoying this. The game is very much puzzle driven, even getting to the dungeons requires you spend time with puzzles. Even though it looks like there will only be 6 dungeons plus an inevitable final it isn't a short game because of the puzzles. I saw reviews saying 50-60 hours and although I have no idea how many I have put so far I can easily believe it. The weapons though fewer than in TP all work well and the bosses are all good fun. The boss of the 4th dungeon was my favourite so far. The Wii doesn't have many great games but I think I would class this as one. Once again a first party title that is done well by Nintendo. The first 1-2 hours were a bit slow but I would recommend people to persevere as one you hit the surface this game really gets going.
Mirror's Edge This was a game I bought cheap awhile ago during a Steam sale. I only ever played the first couple of levels to see how it ran and then forgot about it. To be honest, this game has one of the first really original concepts I've seen in gaming in a long time. But it seems like the execution could be better. The courses seem to require a lot of trial and error instead of just flowing smoothly.
This was my exact issue with the game. I played it to the end but it feels clunky and rigid. Sometimes it felt like i was doing the motions to execute a move at the right time but it just didn't work and I'd fall to my death or get shot by the people chasing me. DICE get top marks for trying something different and it would have been really groundbreaking had it worked.
I loved Mirror's Edge. My only gripes were that the story was far too short and getting 3 stars on the trials was brutally difficult. If they made a sequel, I'd buy it in a second!
I loved Mirror's Edge as is. It's beautiful, artistic, challenging, and exciting throughout. The rapid pace is fantastic. If I get a high end Nvidia card, I plan to replay it yet again for the PhysX features that was far too taxing for my GTX 460.
@AKS Maybe nVidia's drivers have gotten a lot better since you played it? I know this was one of the earlier games to use PhysX after nVidia acquired the technology from Ageia. In fact, I'm remembering now why I never played it beyond a few levels. I bought it back when I still had my 8800GTS, and I remember it being a clip show with PhysX enabled. I think I put it on the back burner until I got a better card. On my 460, I'm running it on the highest settings at 1680x1050 with 16xQAA and PhysX enabled and it's smooth as glass. The PhysX effects in this game are quite impressive, bullets tearing through cloth for instance. Along with the unique art direction, this game is really something to behold.
That's possible. Regardless, if I do pick up a GTX 680, I'm looking forward to playing some of my games with features like PhysX/Cuda features in Mirror's Edge and Just Cause 2.
I was given Aliens vs Predator for the PS3 a while ago and started playing it today. I've started the marine campaign and the first thing I noticed is how much harder it is to kill the xenomorphs in this game compared to the original. I feel this helps with the scare factor that was incorporated in the original marine campaign. Looking forward to the Predator and Alien campaigns but I've really gotten back into playing Skyrim recently and am feeling the hunger again so a proper crack at AvP will have to wait a while.
@aks PhysX is one of the big reasons I don't think I could ever go over to the AMD side of things. Plenty of games support it these days.
I wasn't crazy about PhysX when I used the GTX 460 because at the time it made most of my games that used it run like crap. Maybe they've got that sorted with the drivers. It turned Mirror's Edge into a slide show. I'd love to return for another run through it. Mirror's Edge should age much better than most games because it was so outstanding artistically and stylistically. The CUDA effects of Just Cause 2 looked nice, but the card wasn't quite powerful enough to take full advantage of it. I don't think I'd have any such issue with a GTX 680, however. I think the combination of my bad experiences with XFX and irritating delays with AMD's drivers have brought me to the conclusion that it's a good time to switch back to the Green Team for awhile. AMD's cards themselves are great, and I'd rate the HIS IceQ X Turbo as easily one of the best cards I've ever owned, but AMD still doesn't have their act together to really take advantage of the cards they've developed. I often wonder if they made a concerted effort to completely sort out their driver issues how much better their cards would perform. I honestly would not be surprised if that made the gap between AMD and Nvidia much smaller, even including the exceptional new Kepler cards from Nvidia.
You're describing an issue that ATI cards have had as long as I can remember, long before they merged with AMD and going all the way back to the late 90s. They make fantastic, often revolutionary hardware, but the drivers suck balls. I had one of their 9700 All in Wonder cards back in the day, and pretty much none of the HTPC features on the thing actually worked because the drivers were so bad. Opting for the All in Wonder version turned out to be a total waste of money. I also remember the drivers for my X800 Pro being pretty crappy for a few months after I bought it. Nobody even took ATI very seriously prior to the Radeon 9700/9800 cards because they were notorious for having such awful drivers. Somewhere around 2000 or 2001 I bought one of the original 32mb Radeon cards, and I ended up returning it because the drivers just flat out sucked for most games. They had to produce cards that were a full generation ahead of nVidia (the 9700 and 9800 series) from a hardware standpoint to finally be taken seriously. nVidia cards seem to have less impressive hardware and they usually cost more, but the drivers are much better and they generally work the way you would expect. I've owned a lot of nVidia cards over the years and I've never had much trouble with them.
I've had AMD cards forever until recently and I've honestly never had a problem... that's my story. No seriously, I've not had the big dollar cards and my day of playing new games are pretty much done but I'm racking my brain and I can't think of a SINGLE problem I can blame on AMD (except just recently when I first got my Brazos notebook... but that WAS the first month of production and it was better a week later when the second month drivers came in. my problem was it wasn't better than Atom :x). I've plaid old games and new games, I had the AIW x800 (agp!!) when it was semi new and even used it to watch tv and record ps2. Other than that I've kept to sub 100 dollar cards but. I now have a GTX 260, my first Nvidia card. I like the drivers... though I bought it when 460s were new so I didn't bother updating it unless I had to... I actually bought it to use with my igp but Nvidia NEVER got that (PowerSLI I think it was called) to work at all talk about lieing out of your teeth. Anyway in my eyes both are fine. But that's probly cuz I'm not a SUPER early adopter (other than Brazos) and I really don't mind waiting for the right drivers like I had to with Brazos. I'm not all that demanding either, never got around to OCing my cards just too lazy I don't even OC my cpus (Though I did play new games back from the HL1 days to like Sim City 4.... the age of MMOs killed my super enthusiast attitude :x).
I’ve been 50/50 with the red and green teams over the years and I’ve never had a single problem with drivers from either side. The whole AMD driver issue has been a non-issue for me. Now historically crossfire drivers really suck and are about 6 months late for any new game releases. Nvidia has a commanding lead when it comes to dual card drivers.
I have a 2x 6950 Crossfire setup, which I why I'm probably having quite a few more problems than other AMD users. It doesn't help that the XFX card seems to have been made from leftover refurbished parts from their junk bin. I will never buy another card from those jerkoffs. Anyway, the power of Crossfire setups is exceptional, but AMD inexplicably has been incredibly late with drivers for some games. I don't mean for obscure titles, either. Skyrim had NEGATIVE scaling when it was released. People running a single, lower end card would get much better performance than I was getting with two 6950s. I was also getting weird purple textures and crashes to the desktop. After they updated the drivers, it ran beautifully, but I encounter this game after game with Crossfire. I can understand updating drivers to get improved performance now and then, but major titles having no support at all at launch and constant crashes is not acceptable, even for a Bethesda game. It's stunning to me that AMD has spent the time developing such efficient and potent CF power, which sometimes reaches 100% scaling, yet they never seem to get their act together in supporting it in a timely, consistent manner. I believe I had issues with 3 or 4 major titles in a row, which had either no CF support at all or major driver problems for quite awhle.
There really are issues with AMD drivers, BUT, you'll only see them if you play that specific game. You can go 15 years all on Radeon cards and never run across any of them since you never play those specific games. I have been fortunate. With my years on an all in wonder radeon 9700 pro and current radeon 4870, I've ran across issues on maybe 2-3 games. I don't recall running across any issues on my geforce 2 gts, 6800gt, or 7800gt.