I spent a chunk of

I spent a chunk of yesterday and this morning playing Soldier of Fortune - I know it’s pretty old news, but it was a freebie with my GeForce2 MX last month. I tried it when I first got the card, and got literally 1 or 2 fps out of it on the menu which didn’t bode well, so I put it away again. This time around, I got more respectable frame rates out of it - I figure it was the mishmash of nvidia release, nvidia beta and asus packaged drivers that I had installed. Now, new install, new wonder PC and a game that runs right (mostly - see later).

The game itself is OK, I guess. The level design is pretty uninspired - all terrorists apparently live in tunnels or ruined buildings (so far anyway). It has the train level from Goldeneye too, which is kind of fun. The main talking point with the game is the gore, apparently, which was a bit more prominent that some other FPS’s, but not to the levels of Turok 2’s Cranial Bore, although it is real red blood. The weapons choice runs to mostly realistic (no BFGs), and the controls are standard Q3A stuff, although with Lean Left and Right too, which are handy.

I plugged away through the first 4 or 5 levels since yesterday - NY Subway, train speeding through Russia, various bits of Kosovo. It’s all like a collage of other FPSs - Paul Denton nearly turned up at one point. The game also features locational damage to NPCs - that is, you hit them in different parts of the body and they behave differently. Hit them in the head, and they go splat. Hit them in the neck and they clutch it and collapse. Hit them in limbs, and they hop about like they scalded their hand for a minute or two then ‘get better’. WTF? Perforate all four limbs, and it still happens. A close-range shotgun blast to the chest always does the trick though, with a suitably energetical fall too, and actually blowing bad guy’s balls off never fails to amuse (they clutch their crotch, scream out, and crumple). The other odd things I noticed were that apparently at random the bad guys actually burst into flames when hit, and that the russian/slovak samples seem to include ‘Hasta La Vista’ slowed down and distorted.

I’ll probably play it a bit more, as long as I can get past the annoying bug. When you get into particular situations, the game decides the level has ended, and jumps into cut scenes that you have no control over. You are only there to shoot people and solve very basic puzzles - there is even one I just passed where you get into a room and ‘Hawk’, the black Mr T stereotype mercenary who you work with drops out of the ceiling, screws up some things, then disappears back up into the ceiling leaving you to shoot your way out. So the plotting is pretty stupid, but worse, in one particular one, the whole game just siezes up and as far as I can tell, an alert box appears on the Windows desktop ‘behind’ the game screen, and thats all I get. Not even Ctrl-Alt-Delete gets a task manager, although the mouse and keyboard are apparently active. We’ll see if the 18Mb patch sorts it out. I gots murder training (or something) to get on with.