Just picked up Tomb Raider (2013) for PC and I thought I’d post the settings I’m using for others to try.  I don’t have the best card around so I attempted to dial in something the card was able to do while maintaining 30fps.  I’m running the latest Nvidia drivers as of 3/5/2013 and Nvidia has already stated that they were caught off guard so hopefully the framerate will improve with updated drivers and/or settings can be increased.

2GB 550 Ti Tomb Raider settings
 resolution: 1920x1080
 refresh: 60hz
 v-sync: double buffer
 fullscreen: on
 exclusive full: on
 display: 1
 monitor aspect auto
 quality custom,
 texture quality: ultra
 texture filter: anisotropic 4x
 hair quality: normal
 anti-aliasing: fxaa
 shadows: normal
 shadow resolution: high
 level of detail high: high
 reflections: high
 depth of field: normal
 ssao: normal
 post processing: on
 tessellation: off
 high precision: on
min: 30, max: 44.0, avg 33.2

Portal 2 Gets Release Date: “AndrewGOO9 writes ‘After what has seemed like an eternity since Valve initially announced a sequel to their lauded puzzle title Portal, a release date has finally been attached to the game. Originally slated to be released before the end of the year in time for the holidays, Valve instead opted to delay the game, citing reasons such as, ‘making games is hard’ as well as continuing their tradition of releasing games when they’re finished as opposed to rushing them out the door. Either way, mark your calendars for February 9th, 2011, and in the meantime, brush up on thinking with portals.’ There’s some new gameplay footage available, and Valve announced that Stephen Merchant will be lending his voice to the game.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

I thought I’d take a break from my usual topics and hit on something I haven’t talked about for awhile, gaming.

If you played Nintendo growing up and you are my age you probably played at least one Mega Man game. Mega Man 2 is the I played a lot of growing up and while it was really hard I still had a good time.

In today’s gaming world that kind of difficulty just wouldn’t fly. Games are much longer afairs today and require more time to complete. If a game like Metroid Prime was as brutally difficult there is no way I’d ever finish it. I’d be so frustrated that I had just lost an hour’s worth of play time I’d soon quit playing.

So when I heard Capcom was going to be creating a new Mega Man AND was going to be doing it the same 8 bit style Mega Man 2 was done in I was pretty excited. When I downloaded the game off of the Wii shop channel and started it up I couldn’t believe how well Capcom captured the feel of the original games. The sound effects, music and animations were all just right.

Then I realized that after no less than six attempts I hadn’t even made it past the first checkpoint in the Concrete Man stage. After twenty minutes I had just made it to the end, to Concrete Man himself, only to die immediately.

But I loved every minute of it. I haven’t had as much time as I would like playing the game but the $10 price is well worth it. If you liked any of the original 8 bit versions of the game you owe it to yourself to play this game.

Whenever I can I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This game has sucked me in more than I ever thought it would. In fact, I even once thought the game looked too chaotic, something that I wouldn’t like.

Well one of Brawl’s major components is online play and all to often I find myself playing with someone and there is a lot of lag. While I wanted to blame Nintendo completely at first I thought I should at least verify that the issue isn’t on my end first.

I set out doing this by getting my Wii connected to the internet through my usual wireless setup and thing sending a ping request to it from my Linux box. My wireless router is less than five feet from my console and yet I’d see at minimum a 2ms delay. 2ms doesn’t seem like much until you ping my laptop and get .600 ms over the same wireless connection.

I kept pinging the Wii while playing a round of Brawl online and I found that at times, the delay *just on my network* would go as high as 111ms! Now, the Wii might be doing packet prioritization but I doubt it. Anyway, 111ms is quite a bit higher than I would typically get to any other web site I usually visit. The round trip time to yahoo.com is around 64ms. If I’m seeing typical times to Nintendo’s servers and then I add in that my Wii’s wireless is contributing between 2-30ms (take out m y worse case) it’s easy to see why some Brawl games suffer from a lot of lag.

To combat this issue, I picked up a LAN adapter from Best Buy. When using the lan adapter the delay still isn’t great, but it is at least rock solid at 2-3ms no matter what is going on. This is a huge improvement in my eyes and if a person is at all serious about online play with the Wii, a lan adapter is key.

I haven’t really discussed my gaming habit for awhile so for those interested here is an update.

The holiday season added a number of games to our collection. I can no longer call it “my” collection as now there is a game that was purchased specifically for my wife. It is officially our game collection. Anyway, I’ve been filling my time by switching off between Metroid Prime 3 and Super Mario Galaxy. Both are excellent games.

When I’m not playing Wii I’m probably playing DS. I recently finished up The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and picked up Mario Kart DS. Mario Kart DS is an older game but is highly rated.

My Wii has now been back for a week and all is good. Although the shipping took forever the entire process went very well. It was refreshing to deal with a company that didn’t try to walk you through some idiotic script of did you try this and did you do that. I guess when you depend on your product to generate future sales you can afford to actually please the customer.

We (my brother-in-law and I) were able put a number of hours on it, along with the projector, playing a number of games including Resident Evil 4 and Super Swing Golf. My short review is, RE4 is a keeper, Super Swing Golf is hardly a renter. I usually stick to the first party Nintendo games so RE4 is a bit of a departure for me. Although I wasn’t able to put a lot of time into it, it was fun.

I stopped by our local Best Buy to pick up a classic controller. The place was filled with people and yet they had a number of Wii’s on hand and nobody swarming them. There are Wii’s on ebay selling for *less* than $250 (plus the outrageous shipping of course). Has demand slowed or production increased?