Quote: "It ran pretty well on my ATi X600 pro (2 and a half years old). Thats only a 256mb. Compared to todays standards of graphics cards, thats pretty low."
On the default Medium Setting it should run on most cards, but not amazingly well. You'll still need a Mid-Range Radeon or GeForce to get reasonable performance, and the graphics seriously affect the physics interactions.
If you play it on the lowest that seem to be able to run beautiful even down to a GeForce 2 at 60fps+ you'll see my point about that.
I'd also suggest being wary of the Texture Resolution, god knows why but they're so ridiculously demanding yet default to "high"
The biggest slow-down aspects of the graphics mind by far are Anti-Aliasing (which is MSAA 4x), Refraction and Bloom.
Just having each of them on (or on low) killed the framerate on here down to a mere 10% of what it was. So I'd say that unless they've released a patch with updated Shaders, someone needs to go back over his own code and optimise it a bit.
You can get it looking good on an half-decent card, but seriously can only get it looking beautiful on a top-end card (like X1900 or 7900).. it really shouldn't be doing that much pixel processing power to achieve it's results but unfortunately it does; as it would be more than easy for someone to remake this in DBP with similar graphics and DarkPhysics without incurring the performance killer fariae.
On the whole the puzzles were quite nice, although most of them I found it was easier to cheat around using parts of the level designed for the larger picture puzzle.
A good example of this is there is a level about half-way through the Cloud (2nd world) level set, where you've got to put down a number of boxes on ropes to make a bridge. Only I found if i took a small run-up on the inflator I could get across without doing that part at all. Another part later had you navigating a semi-complex verticle maze only the camera made this frustrating, so again i used another inflator used to get in the maze to begin with to bounce up a set of stairs there for you to fall down if you messed up and skip the entire section.
I mean the game is quite good and some puzzles are well done, however the further you get in the more the game looses the polish it begins with.
It is also insanely short. As I was able to complete all but the final 2 worlds (out of 6) within the demos hour time limit.
Add this to niggles with the physics engine, that I'm not to sure are the developers fault but perhaps PhysX and you can have some extremely frustrating gameplay mechanics later in the game when things become a challenge in precision movement with a fairly imprecise movement system.
Overall I did quite enjoy it, but longevity and niggles really made me think twice about wanting to purchase it. Thank god it supported the 360 controller out of the box too, because playing with the keyboard or mouse only I would've gone insane.
As for the difference between the North American and UK Live Arcade selections:
http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/livearcade/
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/livearcade/
first thing that pisses me off about the US LiveArcade is, if anyone recalls we used to have a very similar and nicely intuative system on the UK site before the "update" a couple of months ago.
to reasons only known to god and the muppet who designed the update to our live arcade we now have the retarded old American version of Live Arcade.
Now a couple of months ago (back in June just after E3) the US Live Arcade, had 2 games over us; as of this wendnesday they'll have almost 12.
While I can sorta see why this is, but while the Americans have had the Xbox promise of a new game every wednesday.. the UK one has seen a very distinct lack of this. What's more is more of the games we don't have still include those original two we never got.
Maybe there are some publishing conflicts (on a digital service that microsoft are basically the sole publisher for??
) but quite honestly this is getting beyond a joke.
I mean this is something that is slowly endeering my Playstation 3 back into the living room, as it now has quite a bit of content on it which I know is exactly the same here as it is in America or Japan (in-fact there are a few Japanese title that seem to crop up that haven't been translated from time to time)... The same can be said about the Wii as well, sure it's a pain in the arse to use that little console but atleast we're not being screwed for reasons that a corporation just refuses to answer on.
The only reason I can see for these delays is so they can "translate them" for the other European nations but seriously.. I've yet to see a single "choose your language" screen on an arcade game. Probably because you can check the language flag of the runtime and adapt without the user needing any input.
Still, if a game isn't available for those other nations due to translation issues then b******s to them. Release the English/Spanish version that is released in the states.. I firmly believe if that happened they'd see better sales.
Cutting out Europe (and even more bizarely Australia) from release, means they're loosing over 2/5th of their Xbox Live market. If it's due to ratings, then jesus Microsoft should get with the program and exclusively use PEGI which is the ratings board available to practically everywhere except Africa and Asia.
Seriously I just fail to understand why this is another thing that the UK and Australia are being screwed over about when it comes to gaming.
