Flat, partially transparent textures in games like chain link fences and leaves tend to look pretty shoddy, even with regular anti-aliasing. Thankfully, fixing this issue clearly sat somewhere on both ATi and nVidia’s agendas and they’ve got round to sorting it. They just keep on bumping up the image quality from their rendering technology and that’s fine by me.

Lucky I can still type while excitedly hyperventilating. Take a look at this footage of the in-car view on PGR3, looks fabulous. Terrible, shakey-cam footage but the brilliance is abundantly clear. At long last, accurately rendered car interiors.

Adrian Carmack that is, not the better known (but unrelated) John. That’s not the most interesting part here though - apparently, Activision offered to buy out id. Hardly surprising though given the number of strong brands owned by id and published by Activision. Even so, um, woah.

More non-gaming bloggage here, couldn’t resist. One of the places I visited in Switzerland was Château St. Germain in Gruyères, a fantastic old castle which, strangely, also houses the Giger Museum. Nearby is the Giger Bar, a small bar which surrounds you with Giger’s designs. The seats, the walls, the windows, the floor, even the ceiling, all covered in stylings typical of the surealist artist with lightly sinister music completing the fantastic setting.

A great music video here for a song by French musician Lacquer. It’s edited down slightly but still offers some fantastic sights across America, even if they do flash by in seconds.

While they both form a very happy part of my childhood, those two words should never be seen together. So wrong.

On the stock market that is. Er, might want to release a game first gents, surely?

Having said that, I’m surprised to see they’re going to focus on making games that use your DVD player. So instead of using it to drive a menu system they’ll offer quizes and puzzle games. It’s a novel idea that might work for them, it’ll be a shame if Without Warning turns out to be their only console game though. Maybe they’ll do both?

In their apparent quest to employ more and more ex-PC Gamer staffers in a freelance capacity, EuroGamer had Jim Rossignol review Fable for PC. That’s not the point of this blog entry though, no.

The review got me thinking. The stark choice between good and evil (as seen in Black and White, KOTOR, and Fable amongst others) is a nice thing to have but the idea is starting to wear thin and feel blatant. There’s the potential for games full of difficult decisions with unclear outcomes that, when added up at the end of the game, practically reveal who you are, reflect elements of your personality, rather than simply showing which path you though would be more fun (e.g. “If I go Dark Side I get Force lightning!”)

The Outsider looks set to be one of the first games to try something like this, here’s hoping we get more of them. Clearly it’s something that requires far more content creation but then that didn’t stop people making the jump to 3D did it?

They’re shaky cam captures, but even taking that into account I’m still not hugely impressed by the visuals. The cityscape detail is nice as is the bump mapping on the walls, but everything looks shiny. The bricks look glazed for crying out loud. Now, I believe this is more a weakness of pixel shaders than the Xbox 360 but even so, can’t we add depth to textures without making them look polished to hell?

Anyway, it’s even harder to judge the gameplay but there are a few nice ideas on show here. It’s not like Rare need to redeem themselves with their track record but there’s still a lot hinging on this one.

According to Ars. While it won’t match the power of either of its competitors, it seems Nintendo are betting on more memory (800MB in total) and dedicated physics programming to give them the edge here. Not quite the draw dropping shocker the controller was, but if this is the near final spec then that’s still going to make for some impressive visuals. Hannibal agrees, and he know much, much more about this jazz than I do.

This CivAnon campaign continues to be hands down one of the best marketing campaigns I’ve seen for a game. Funny and spot on.

How odd. Now, maybe if this was CrazyTaxiCon, it’d make sense. But as it stands, I don’t see the connection aside from this being a nice bonus for attendees.