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What single-player gaming should be…

Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC (I'm enjoying it, "only" 47% done)

The date is January 2, 2010. No sign of any HP news or rumors so far… so before we get all busy with CES 2010 (Consumer Electronics Show) and the rumored new HP notebooks and stuff, I’d like to take some time today to talk about gaming.

For the last two days before the New Year, I had probably the most exciting and enjoyable single-player gaming experience of 2009. Batman: Arkham Asylum (yes it has a superhero in it, but it certainly won’t be small little children playing this game) is a game which came out in September 2009 for PC, and yes, I’m noticeably late to the party (3rd person perspective games have never been my thing, but a recent experience of Metal Gear Solid 4 on a friend’s Playstation 3 has motivated me to try out more recent 3rd person games for PC*). In terms of single-player replay ability, the Left4Dead series are easily at the top for most re-playable games recently released but in my opinion, Arkham Asylum takes the cake for single-player playing depth.

I’ve spent about 12 hours spread out over two days (New Year’s eve and the eve before the eve) and I’m only 47% through the game (see my little screenshot above). I estimate it’ll take me about 26 hours in total to complete the entire single-player of Arkham Asylum – which is excellent! Compare that to the 4.5 hours it took on the latest Call of Duty title: Modern Warfare 2… and Modern Warfare 2 pales in comparison with its overly short single-player campaign. Granted, Arkham Asylum and Modern Warfare 2 are two games of two different genres but Arkham Asylum is a great example of how single-player should be on every game.

Not only does it take several days (or longer, if you don’t spend too much time playing in one sitting) to complete the game’s single-player mode, the game also makes you feel like you’ve been playing much longer than you really have (especially with some scenarios where you have to sneak around and be stealthy, combined with several high-packed, heart pumping fights/boss fights – there’s a really nice stark contrast here). Arkham Asylum’s gameplay essentially gives you a dose of some ’stealth’ elements along with quite a bit of action, though it won’t be replacing games dedicated to those respective genres anytime soon.

Oh, did I mention the graphics and environment are both awesome (save for the few pre-rendered cutscenes. My eyes tell me they’re pre-rendered because the details and graphics in cutscenes are much coarser and lower resolution). The “world” of the Arkham Asylum island is nicely sized, and though you have to pass through or go back to some places at times, you don’t really feel “oh no, I’ve been here before, why am I here again” because there’s always something new: be it new bad guys having come back to patrol the area or giant “beanstalk” plants bursting through the walls and floors, presenting the need to find another way around.

What single player gaming should be: Sufficiently long with a good story line (this should be one of the top priorities in my opinion) – 24+ hours of singleplayer gameplay should be good, some level of non-linearity or dynamic/changing in-game elements and/or plot twists. With that all said, I think Eidos (Arkham Asylum’s developer) has won me over and just turned me into a potential customer for the upcoming sequel, Arkham Asylum 2. *Note: I still stand by the fact that I really wish someone would make an MGS4 port for PC!!

Notebook screen size comparison (9 vs 12 vs 14 vs 17 inch)

For those trying to decide the ‘perfect screen size’ for your next notebook, look no further – here’s a nice illustration/comparison between screen sizes of four screen sizes commonly found on notebooks/netbooks.

Starting from the bottom is HP’s Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation, featuring a massive 17 inch DreamColor display (1920 x 1200 pixels here!). Brilliant notebook and beautiful screen but perhaps size is the reason it sits on Mark’s desk 99% of the time.

Next is my trusty silver+black HP Pavilion dv4 notebook PC. It’s not the latest edition, as some HP fans should be able to tell “all-black” is the color scheme for the latest Pavilion dv4. It has a 14 inch screen (1280 x 800 pixels) which is a good compromise between size and portability.

The HP Pavilion dv2 has a 12 inch screen (Also with 1280 x 800 pixels)… and the reason why its screen seems to sit higher than that of the dv4 is the same reason why Trisha hates the design of this ultra portable – big bezel around the screen. But other than the design annoyance, the dv2 is a pretty good portable notebook: slim, light and it plays modern games like Call of Duty, Left4Dead and Need for Speed, and possibly Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC that I wanna get soon. In real life, other 12 inch notebooks with smaller screen bezel areas would be lower-profile, making them even more compact.

And lastly, sitting on top of all the other notebooks (good thing the Elitebook down there can support all that weight), is the HP Mini 2133. Yes, I still use it, although the 2133 has been feeling a little cranky this week – refusing to come out of sleep mode if I leave it for more than an hour. The Mini 2133 has a 8.9 inch screen, slightly smaller than the 10 inch displays that have become the staple of 90% of netbooks this year. The screen is a little small but it’s high in resolution (1280 x 768 pixels). People do ask me if I can actually see the tiny, ant-sized letters on the screen when I’m typing out a Word document at 80% magnification (so I can see two pages at one go).

That’s it for now. I’ll be talking about the HP Envy 13 and Envy 15 more later this week, so stay tuned for that!

Windows 7 + AMD Athlon Neo = Win!

Windows 7 Quick Scan is super-fast even on a HP Pavilion dv2!

Updated with a screenshot from the Pavilion dv2’s Windows Action Center/Windows Defender

Me and a friend have been testing the HP Pavilion dv2 ultra-portable notebook PC (featuring AMD’s Athlon Neo single-core processor and 512 MB of ATI graphics) for several weeks now and honestly, it rocks. Despite having an anemic-sounding 1.6 GHz processor, this thing runs like a champ. HP dv2: A typical Windows Defender scan of its 250 GB hard disk on Windows 7 takes about two minutes! In contrast, my HP Mini running Windows Vista with a 160 GB disk takes 30 to 40 minutes for Windows Defender to do an equivalent scan.

And let’s not even get started on how the Pavilion dv2 can run modern games (like Left4Dead and Call of Duty 5) on 1280 x 800 resolution (albeit at low settings, but extremely smooth frame rates)… I’ll talk about that in a few days’ time once I get some benchmark numbers.

I’ve been running AVG Free alongside the built-in Windows firewall for Vista (and recently, Windows 7) since 2007 and my system is always clean. Yup, Windows is quite secure as long as you’re visiting ‘good’ websites!

Gaming on the Elitebook 8730w

Besides running Photoshop CS4 and other heavy duty applications, I’ve found the HP Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation fairly adept at gaming, to a certain extent. That’s what I’ve been doing throughout most of last month: gaming on HP’s Elitebook 8730w.

Before I go on, let me give you guys a run down of the specifications on the one I managed to test out:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53 GHz
• 4 GB of RAM (2 X 2 GB)
• 17 inch Dream Color display (1920 X 1200 resolution!!)
• 160 GB SATA II Hard Disk
• NVIDIA Quadro FX3700M graphics card (1 GB of dedicated memory)

So this is sort of the middle child of the Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation line with top graphics and a really nice, but expensive, Dream Color display. Yet this isn’t the best processor it can take (there are configurations with Core 2 Extreme processors available) and larger hard drive options available (HP currently offers up to 320 GB).

Anyway, the Elitebook 8730w runs most games really smoothly, even at the highest settings. I say most games because I haven’t tried things like Crysis Warhead on it yet. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare runs fine (well, most of the time) at full 1920 x 1200 and everything else set at the highest/best quality settings; with frame rates going at around 60 to 90 frames per second.

Unfortunately, there are some shortcomings to using a workstation-class (!!!) graphics card for gaming. For those who aren’t familiar, workstation-class graphics cards like the Nvidia Quadro card on the 8730w are meant to deliver quality frames as opposed to quantity of frames on real gaming cards. Somebody told me that they’re both based on the same thing, only tweaked later for their respective purposes but we’ll save that debate for some other time.

So you can get an amazing amount of detail and fairly smooth frame rates, though you certainly won’t get  200 frames per second as you would on a real gaming PC. Enter very intense game scenes when using a workstation graphics card, and frame rate tends to choke. A good example is when somebody throws a smoke screen bomb or calls in an airstrike which lands in the area in front of you in Call of Duty 4, frame rate drops down to 20 FPS… and you don’t even need benchmarking software for that, for I could notice the frame rate drop noticeably with just my eyes.

It’s not HP’s or Nvidia’s fault for that by the way, blame me for maxing out all the textures and setting “soften smoke edges” to ON (LOL!). Again, I had maxed out literally everything in the game… if I had turned off or lowered some of the settings, perhaps the frames wouldn’t have dropped so drastically.

But really, a workstation graphics card, or a mobile workstation notebook for that matter, should NOT be used if you plan on doing some serious gaming. It’s fine if you’re doing some casual gaming (in my book, that means you don’t smash your head on your keyboard if you die because of choppy frame rates when someone calls in an airstrike) to unwind after a day of rendering Shrek 4 scenes. You could use the Elitebook 8730w at several LAN parties with friends, but you probably shouldn’t use it in gaming tournaments where the different between life-and-death matters…

Just reminds me of Voodoo PC

Yesterday while going out for dinner, I came across this ornament on a wall near the restaurant (picture on the right) and almost instantly, the word “Voodoo PC” came to mind (see the screenshot taken of the Voodoo PC logo on the left, from one of the pictures posted by Rahul Sood on his blog).

And this other one I came across today totally reminded me of Call of Duty: World at War, and the reason is pretty obvious: