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Half Life 2: Episode One
There's a wonderful new team dynamic at work in Episode One, thanks to the fact that Alyx battles alongside you throughout most of the episode. After playing on your own throughout Half-Life and Half-Life 2, it's refreshing to have a companion by your side, and Valve takes advantage of this by throwing you into situations where you must rely on teamwork to survive. Alyx is a capable assistant (perhaps almost too capable, since it's pretty tough to kill her off, and she seemingly has unlimited ammo), and she's often the difference between victory and defeat in many encounters, as she'll cover your back while you're busy trying to sort out the puzzle. Visually, Episode One introduces a lot of subtle improvements and enhancements in the Source engine, keeping it in line with video-card developments over the past couple of years. The new high-dynamic range lighting technology (seen only if your video card supports it) makes a big difference, as the outdoor scenes look a lot better, while indoor scenes feature impressive shadowing and atmosphere at times. Some of the textures in the game have been increased considerably, notably on Alyx and the other main characters, and the game looks incredibly sharp and with some pretty impressive HDR implementation.
Four AA samples and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering are enabled here. Anything below 1600x1200 = good.
Battlefield 2 - EA
The award-winning Battlefield franchise invades the high tech frontlines of modern warfare in the new sequel, Battlefield 2. The game brings the intensity and excitement of Battlefield 1942 into the modern era with enhanced team play and the latest, most technologically advanced vehicles and weapons systems available to man.
I just love what this game can do in terms of gameplay and image quality. We had to use FRAPS to measure the performance and by command prompt remove a nasty framerate cap. The results do not lie.
BTW the game by itself does not support these high resolutions, but simply make a little .bat file and insert the following:
bf2 +menu 1 +szx 2560 +szy 1600 +fullscreen 1
Would you believe that you are again looking at 4xAA and 16xAF here? Amazing performance @ 2560x1600 where we still have a ~36 FPS framerate. That's just really lovely.
