ChannelFlip

You missed out one important point which is that PC gamers can play online against other with just a free silver live account.

You are right that a decent GPU to play this will cost more than a 360 but you dont have to pay £39.99 a year to use your graphics card. Admittedly I spent nearly 10 times that on my last card but its the principle I dont agree with.

I love the way I can dig out my N64 for a bit of GoldenEye once every few years or play an online game of Rome Total War or Counter Strike once every 6 months but I wouldn’t be doing that if I had to pay to do so. Having to pay destroys the casual aspect of casual gaming imo. I dont think the 360 has a chance of really doing well unless they make Live free.

You definitely highlighted the thing that really turns me off about PC gaming; why spend hundreds of pounds on a new graphics card every 6 months when you can just buy a console that will last you for years & years (Red Rings of Death notwithstanding). And now with so many titles going multi platform between PC and 360 there seems to be an even lesser need for pimped out gaming rigs that run into the £1000’s.

That being said, I’m still tempted to upgrade my PC due to “Hellgate London” and “The Witcher” - aided in no small part by your recent videos

@ ktchong

WTF are you talking about? This is the first criticism I have made about the 360. I suspect you are that idiot who was attacking me a while ago for no reason.

I could just as easily say you are taking cheap shots at the PC. Grow up.

On Xbox live…

Norbit, you’re right that unlike Xbox live silver (ie free) you do have some online multiplayer options with the Windows live silver account, but this is a game review rather than a platform review so I tried to focus more on the features that affected gameplay specific to this game. But thank you for pointing it out, as you say it does give a little more value to PC gamers.

However I have to disagree with you about XBox live in general. Of course the socialist in me would love to see everything with free access (including the internet), but these things have to be funded from somewhere, and the system in place is certainly better than pushing up the price of games or consoles so that everyone paid for it regardless of whether they used multiplayer or not. It’s not the same as paying rental to use your 360 as you can still play offline or use a silver account for downloads and community stuff, and besides, £40 for a year of online gaming is not bad at all when you consider the hours that a lot of gamers clock up. For casual gamers, you can pay £5 for a single month of gold service if there is something that particularly catches your eye. Windows live does have differences between its silver and gold services, they’re just distributed differently, and you need to bear in mind that it’s a much younger service and needs to attract users. I’m not saying everyone should go out (or rather, stay in) and sign up for Xbox Live gold accounts, but I also don’t think they’re a rip off.

Btw, there is a glitch with the game now that it’s gone live… It’s pretty easy to fix though. Details here.

will you be doin reviews of any wii games coming up like super mario galaxy?

In a way I was a little surprised that Gears made it’s way to the PC in the first place as it seemed to be designed very much from the ground up as a console-centric game. The gameplay is very much centred around the cover mechanic takes some of the emphasis off of the pinpoint accuracy and sweeping movements required in a lot of PC shooters that the mouse is so brilliant. I suppose there was cash to be made and of course there’s the appeal of the editor as well, which is certainly a draw for a lot of people. Actually, thinking aloud, with the portability of the likes of the Unreal engine, being able to create content and have some mechanism for distributing it to Live owners would be something incredibly sweet that would extent the whole mod scene to console owners as well. Of course, there’s quality control and technical issues aplenty there and I’m probably being rather fanciful, but being able to play custom levels on the xbox would be awesome.

As for the platform debate, I was a PC superiority poster boy up until very recently. I succumbed to the 360 to sate my urge for sofa based two player and the promise of Forza, GTA IV and Assassins Creed, three games I’d be utterly unable and/or highly unlikely to play/enjoy on PC. I got it in August and my PC has done nothing but gather dust since. I’ve even managed to overcome my phobia of playing FPS games on consoles now and to be perfectly honest the slickness and integration of it all into a single whole just makes life so much easier. Of course, the PC still has it’s place for me, dedicated servers and the ability to mess around with content is a nice draw, as are some of the more unique titles that will only ever exist on PC, but for me vast expense has really reduced it’s existence as gaming platform to a bit of a niche in my house. Luckily, the ageing beastie should be able to cope with TF2 and the like, so at some point I may well get Orange box and there’s always DoD and HL1 in the meantime. Maybe I’m just lazy :/

The problem comes with games like CoD4. I like the look of it and I know my PC will never run it, but I’m not sure about buying it on the 360 as it just seems a bit ..wrong.

while I dont agree with everything on the review, I would have to agree with most of it. and us yanks love that accent Katherine. absolutely adorable!

Jonathan: I would dearly love to review Super Mario Galaxies - it looks awesome! However, I/we don’t have a wii and when we bit the bullet and went to buy one, our local stockist had run out, so we spent the budget on a PS3 instead. We do hope to get a wii before too long though. Sorry about that!

Thanks for the comments guys - and sorry for the strange threading; everything was waiting for moderator approval for longer than normal.

Schmung - thanks for that. And as much as I love console FPS, I totally agree with you about CoD4!

Ferdinand - good point. As for the grading system, I will bear that in mind next time I do a PC game, but please note I didn’t dock a mark overall, I gave two separate scores. For a game as demanding as GoW, I do think you need to bear accessibility in mind.

I love that idea Greg, thanks so much!

It’s not something I’d be able to do now for two reasons: one, the software we use to capture in game footage from the PC is causing a few problems and means that the shots are not always representative of the graphics capability and often look more jittery than they do without the software running in the background, and two, we don’t have the budget for multiple gaming PCs!

Maybe once we sort out the first issue (we’re working on playing around with the software as well as looking at completely different methods) I will capture footage of play in both high and low settings and this will be a start. But I like the idea of being able to show it on different setups eventually. I think we’ll need a whole forum to deal with the inevitable debates though!

Excellent idea for starters Norbit, and thanks for the link. As for the forum it’s definitely on the cards for the future.

I’ve never played the XBOX 360 GOW. I have a 360 but only a 20″ TV, which makes playing it more a pain than anything else, so it sits and collects dust. I would need to spend another $350+ on a decent TV to make it playable, so the overall cost of XBOX gaming is much closer to the cost of PC gaming then it was in the past. I do have a high end PC system, and I much prefer gaming on my PC. That being said…

GOW PC is great fun. A lot of people with mid-range cards can play it just fine maxed out at 1024 or 1280 resolutions. A $110US 8600GT should be able to play it relatively well at those resolutions, and a $250US 8800GT should be able to max it at even the highest resolutions. I’m running 2560×1600 with an 8800 GTX and getting 45-55fps constantly as reported by FRAPS. It is just absolutely stunning. It plays much more smoothly than Bioshock does at this resolution (25-35fps).

It is still definitely a console game. Controls are simple and actions are repetitive and it really feels like a console game whereas Bioshock distinctly feels like a PC game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does make you wish there was some more complexity to this title.

I would definitely recommend this title to people that have never played it before and want a simple game with stunning visuals. Sure, it’s not Crysis or COD4, but that’s kind of a good thing.

Lol mike (2), lol. Fact is I was playing with a GeForce 8600 with Core 2, 2.2 Ghz, but as I mentioned in the comments above, Frapps kills your frame rate.

Um Dan, while i’m very pleased for you that you have the means to drop large sums of money on gaming hardware without a second thought, for many of us 8800s are a pretty big investment. (Although if you have a link to one that costs half as much as a 360 I’m sure we’d all love to hear about it.) Also bear in mind that this review is now two months old so things like the cost of hardware and what you can expect the average gamer to have as standard will have changed a little.

Good review, and might I say that my lady Katharine is a lot more enjoyable to listen to than the poor drivel that exists on G4tv anymore.

That said, I suck at 1st-Person Shooters, always will, my rig is basic, with an x1650 pro I can usually pull about 50fps in just about all games with settings on medium, it works for me. The controls are as you said, crude and jerky, and the sign-up bullshit is just plain wrong. Luckily I had a spare XBLA sitting around so ended up using that.

Overall the game is still good, just wish the multiplayer maps weren’t so buggy for my computer, and the hackers should die, slowly =P

Nice review katherine. Always nice to hear personal opinions on games and have each person respect everyone elses opinions on things. I think you got this review spot on as I have played the game on both 360 and PC.

The targeting on the PC makes the game too easy and did not put up a challenge at all for me. I personally did enjoy it more on the 360 console. Seriously, in my opinion,

I think this game was not worth my money as the excitement I got from the 360 version was just not the same on the PC. However, all people without 360 consoles should check this out if they like FPS. But again, a decent graphics card is required for best performaces.