Tim Smalley’s weblog

We talk about a lot of things in the office to help pass the time by - a lot of these topics focus around general industry trends because, after all, when you get a bunch of geeks together in a small space, they tend to talk about all things geeky. One topic that has really stuck out in my mind recently was one that Joe recently wrote a column about.

He asked what was the game that turned you into a hardcore gamer. There’s already an interesting discussion going on in the article comments and I’m really surprised by some of the responses.

The game that led me down the path of no return was Asteroids on the Atari 2600. I don’t know whether that’s me showing my age, or just me developing at an early point in my life, but I couldn’t get enough of that game. What’s great then is that an updated version was released on the Xbox Live Arcade.

I purchased it in an instant… without thinking twice. I knew I could go back to my childhood, playing a game that I used to play almost religiously… or at least when my parents didn’t tell me it was time to do some homework, or because Coronation Street was on. Yeah, I hated that show - it got between me and my game and I never liked anything coming between me and my game.

The game that really got me into PC gaming was probably Civilization - I used to play that game during my lunchtime at school. We had to break into the school network to get it installed, but that effort was well worth it. We then followed up with Civ2 when that came out in 1996, as it added multiplayer support over the network (well, technically it was introduced with CivNet in 1995, but we were quite content with Civ at the time)… but damn, that game sucked up a lot of my time.

I could go on and on about the games that I’ve been crazy about… but nothing comes close to Asteroids and Civ for me. Anyway, we’re interested to hear as many different angles as possible on this - please share your own experiences with us in the comment thread.

Ever since Nvidia launched its GeForce 9600 GT, I’ve been pondering a number of things - the biggest one being ‘why now?’. There are many cards in the performance mainstream market, and I think the problem boiled down to the fact that Nvidia was caught off guard by the Radeon HD 3850.

The result was a slew of cards from the green team that didn’t really compete with ATI’s excellent mid-range offering and just served to confuse the market. So what we’ve ended up with is The Sea of Grey, as I’ve coined it.

The problem is that because there are so many good-to-great products, the consumer doesn’t know where to start. Is the 9600 GT better value than the 8800 GT? What about the 8800 GS? And where do ATI’s cards fit into the picture?

Well, I hope that this article goes some way to answering the questions - I’d stick to the GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3850 512MB cards… and if you need something that’s in between the two (in terms of price), look at the GeForce 9600 GT.

A few weeks back now, me and Geoff landed on quite an awesome deal to upgrade our home cinema setup. Not only did it include a 50″ Samsung DLP HDTV, a 5.1 Dolby/DTS amp, DVD player and speaker set, but more importantly an Xbox 360.

I’ve been looking to get an Xbox 360 for a while, but I couldn’t justify buying one brand new - I’m not an avid console gamer, but I certainly enjoy playing some games on consoles in front of the TV. For example, I went out and bought a PS2 to play GT3, and then sold it once I’d completed the game. I then went and bought a PS2 slim to play GT4.

One game that I’ve really got into was Gears of War - normally that wouldn’t surprise anyone, because it is a truly awesome game, but it surprised quite a few of the guys in the office because they know I’m a usually in the “FPS games belong on the PC” mindset. While Gears isn’t first person, it’s still a shooter - a bloody good one at that.

I also really enjoyed Bioshock on the Xbox 360 too, arguably more than I enjoyed it on the PC when I had the chance to play an early build of both versions at 2K Games’ offices in July. That game, in particular, has left me in a bit of a sticky situation - I want to play the PC version because that’s my heritage when it comes to first person shooters, but I found myself really enjoying the 360 version too… so much so, that I think I might have to buy both versions of the game.

Anyway, the real point of this post was that I finally signed up to an Xbox Live Gold account yesterday, so if you fancy handing my ass to me in Gears (I’m not particularly good, yet…), I’ll see you online - my gamertag is “mitmitmit“.

On Thursday, the legendary Quake franchise celebrated its 10th birthday.

Carmack’s baby pushed the boundaries of PC gaming back in 1996 with features that had never been seen before. The style was a major departure from other 3D shooters of the time, with a blend of horror and fantasy that kept gamers on edge. The engine itself included complex textured 3D environments and polygon-modelled enemies with intelligence - graphical features that paved the way for today’s games.

It was a game that lead to massive demand for Intel’s first-generation Pentium processors and it was a game that created demand for 3D graphics accelerators, or video cards. Video cards have become an important part of any computer, and they’re going to become even more important when Windows Vista arrives early next year. I’ve got the Beta on DVD here, but I’ve yet to find the time to sit down and install it on my home computer.

Sadly though, they don’t make games like Quake anymore - it’s too risky to try something new or radical these days…