Thursday, er, Thownloads
What a lot of words we posted yesterday. You must be exhausted from all that reading, bless you. Is ickle baby tired? Does 'is ickle eyes need a resty-poos? Well, why not take some time out to play some games instead? Here's a quick round up of recent free digi-delights (and, um, some more reading. Sorry.) potentially worthy of your exacting attention...
- The Crysis 1.1 patch is live at last, promising, amongst others, these things to the four people who bought the game (KIDDING I'M KIDDING): "Improved SLI / Crossfire support and performance; Improved overall rendering performance (DX9 and DX10); Enabled VSync functionality in D3D10." I'll be giving that a go myself shortly, as I had massive slowdown problems on my quad core, GeForce 8800 PC even at miserable Medium settings. Apparently the patch too is not without problems - there's a long thread here containing some solutions should you number among the cursed.
- While I'm on a Crysis tip, IGN has a post-mortem with Crytek's Cevat Yerli about the divisive FPS. No great revelations, unfortunately - mostly it's just an exercise in how many different ways a man can say "everything is fine." Love it, hate it or, heaven forfend, quite like it, Crysis turned out to be a troubled game, and it'd be fascinating to hear its developers' unfettered thoughts on it at some point.
- Speedball II: Tournament, the remake of the era-defining, one-button sport'n'violence mash-up, gets the demo treatment. No-one at RPS has played anything of this beyond preview code as yet, which didn't really seem to capture the requisite spirit of fizzy pop and Monster Munch we associate with such halcyon 16-bit days. But hey, try the demo and tell us if we're wrong.
- World of Warcraft gets itself a system benchmarking tool in its latest patch. Given this is a game that barely troubles a PC made of steam and cheese, such a toy seems a little futile at this stage, but mayhap I'll end up using it in my other, tech writing life when testing low-end hardware.
- The final version of acclaimed Half-Life (1, not 2) singleplayer mod Paranoia is out. Its creators claim they've done all the work they need to on it, which may mean they're turning their attention to a new project. Paranoia HL2 perhaps? Not looked at this yet, to my shame.