Spec Ops The Line : Yager's Song of War and Sand...

Yager are known for... well Yager , an impressive  vehicular scifi shootemup from Xbox days .Like that other great German softco Factor 5, Yager excelled in technical prowess and games where you flew around making things go boom in very pretty explosions. Yager was an awesome scifi flight sim in the vain of Incoming Forces only several magnitudes of excellence better ..

Spec Ops is a long lived strategic military combat franchise, competitor to the great and most excellent Hidden and Dangerous series on the PC .. Never quite managing to out do Illusion Softwork's greatest , but holding it's own through the years and now surviving it's competition in Spec Ops The Line. Sad thing that most of today's reviewers will see this game as a reaction to Call of Duty forgetting the heritage of the much older Spec Ops series altogether .

THQ throwing together the talent of Yager and the Spec Ops brand has produced one of the finest series reboots in recent memory . 

Playing Spec Ops The Line is going to surprise you ,Yager have nailed what makes a great FPS or TPS game great . And I do not refer to the games deep morally twisting story line , or the excellently paced in fire fight songs and music that together manage to place  you in your very own Heart of Darkness. From the above shots it looks like a generic TPS , but keep playing and the game starts to play you...

As Aliens was the best Vietnam film ever made without being set in Vietnam , Spec Ops The Line  is quite the finest 'Nam game in living memory not set in Vietnam.. or the the African heartland...But this is  Nam in the sense of all those tripped out surreal War movies which themselves are interpretations of classic tripped war literature. 

The thing that makes Spec Ops The Line a truly great game for me though is the combat.


Great PC shooters have an essential game mechanic , one which involves you getting a rush from barely surviving each fire fight by the skin of your teeth.  Yes you can save every second and replay , but skilled players achieve a zen like state of just about surviving . Take Doom or Half Life for instance , the most fun is had when playing at the highest difficulty setting , and making every piece of ammo count , taking hits and trying to survive whilst constantly attacking .. in Yager's game we get to do this whilst soaking in all the psycho babble ,Sun and sand of  Duabai too...

Now this gaming dynamic was totally done away when the Gears of War Epicdemic arrived and had people hiding behind school desks popping over to blast enemies as wide or wider than the entire screen with auto aiming precision .. ad  nauseum..  Unlike Mr Phoenix and his crew , the stars of Spec Ops The Line are nimble , have necks , and fight with almost a Ninja Gaiden esque style...

Spec Ops The Line doesn't entirely do  away with the old way of playing hide and shoot but  brings the FPS survival rush dynamic , into a third person shooter . So there I am playing an impressive TPS , music and tunes blaring and mysteriously mysterious happenings pulling the narrative along when I am dropped into the most ferocious fire fight this jaded gaming Vet has had since the good old days of those Half Life fire fights or rushing into a hall full of 100 imps in Doom and making it to the other side with 01% health .. 

Rush .. that's what you get with Spec Ops The Line : Did I expect this excellence.. no I did not .. check out the fire fight in question below : And try it out for your self when you get hold of this excellent game .

If you are fan of gaming you owe it to yourself to take a leap of faith with Yager's Spec Ops The Line ... 

I play Spec Ops The Line on a Lenovo X220T with 4gb Ram , Intel HD3000 , and using the siliconmicrodisplay ST1080 hmd to give me a 100"  screen to get lost in. 

 Ahh cliff hangers ... check out the game from Steam now to find out what happens next.....

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Spec Ops The Line on Intel Atom Nvidia Ion Win 8 Joojoo tablet

The magic of Steam comes across in the simplest of ways. Cloud gaming is all the rage right now, whilst Steam is perfectly still on the issue of streaming: it has a wonderful cloud game save feature. One that lets you continue your game of Spec ops the Line from where you left off from desktop to laptop to tablet or Surface as they now like to call Windows 8 tablets...


I have been reading a lot of nonsense re how the upcoming third gen i5 Windows 8 tablets will not be cool for gaming . Windows 8 is going to rock your gaming world across every device you own .. and to demonstrate I thought I would test out one of recent times most excellent games Spec Ops The Line on a Windows 8 Intel Atom Nvdia Ion powered Joojoo tablet .  Now Windows Surface Pro machines not to mention the machine you are using now are many times more powerful , the Surface pro will come with 3rd gen i5 , and at least an Intel HD4000 , so no need to worry on the Windows 8 gaming front. 


The joojoo can run Crysis faster than your old desktop that cost 3k back in the day . But how will it fair with one of the latest games releases ;


We will start off gently install the game from Steam of course , and start off with the lowest res possible 640 by 600 

This is the game as it installed not tweaks so you see the border , switching to windowed mode and hitting the maximise option will give you a full screen !  As you can see the speed is quite impressive . I was playing one handed in this video whilst  filming.


Next up we bump the res up to 1366 by 768 , now here's the thing many games run better at the native res of a device , as well as looking better . Now we see some slowdown  but this is still impressive stuff. 

and we continue ... at 1366 by 768 windowed and full screen windowed mode will let you mess with metro apps whilst playing ...

and by this time I am having too  much fun so let us continue

As you can see I can quite happily run a modern day game on Windows 8 using hardware that is a lowly as an Intel Atom /Nvidia Ion combo. On  a tablet they said could not run Flash... But what do they know ?


Is there a scenario where you will want to core game on a Windows 8 surface or tablet , hell yes. Thanks to cloud saving in the likes of Steam we can continue our games from device to device away from that monster desktop , or even that laptop , just pick up your Windows 8 slate and carry on . 


As far as hardware choices go , the lack of dedicated gpus is a plus point in my book , the Intel HD4000 ,will easily play this years games , the Intel HD3000 , GMA and as you can see the old Nvidia Ion carry off gaming duties extremly well. 


Plus the last thing you want in a portable device is an sli or cross fire setup of mobile gpus eating up power , generating heat and hot air just to get 10% boost over a modern integrated set up. 


So rest easy you will be playing Crysis 3 on your Windows 8 Surface Pro , and core gaming is where Windows 8 really does have no rival . And no Shadowgun and Dead Trigger are not core games , just approximations of feint whiffs of other actual core franchises. 


Contiuity from desktop , to laptop to tablet or surface will rock your Windows 8 gaming world . You really can continue playing from one device to another , and actual games not approximations or cut down facsimiles. 


It is a shame that Nvidia and Intel  did not work together to take the low voltage CPU + gpu further . 


That old Atom Ion combo in the joojoo still surprises me over and over ,  but Intel chose it's own route , makes you wonder though what those 12 core Tegra 3s would or could do paired with an ivy Bridge or two in upcoming Windows 8 slate hardware .. 


The other magical thing about Windows 8 is we can build our own hardware to run it , take the joojoo in the above videos , it was supposed to be limited to a cloud based Linux OS , but 3 years after launch runs Windows 8 and everything else you actually want to run on a tablet very nicely. 


So if you are like me bored of building a new desktop every 6 months , or turned off by the locked Apple hardware that gets updated at seemingly random points in space time  , the arrival of Windows 8 is a welcome change to the status quo , because as well as having dedicated hardware like the Microsoft Surface line , there is nothing to stop us building our own dream slates . Now if only the component manufactures would wake up to this new emerging market . 


Windows 8 will birth the first L33T slate generation , hopefully this will be a painless process.
As far as gaming goes you do not have thing to worry about !

Get Spec Ops The Line from Steam now , and if you see a joojoo ..buy it .. more to follow ..

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Max Payne 3 50% off on Steam today

This is why PC gaming will never die , deals like Max Payne 3 for £14.99 , so if like me you got shafted buying the retail version only to find it does not register on Steam , then this is a nice opportunity to sell the retail version or donate it to the local charity shop , as long as  like me you did not register it of course . 


Just be ready for the 37 gig download , mind you at today's Internet speeds it will be faster than installing it from the dvds ... which is why the simple pleasures of console gaming will never die ... there is just one Blu Ray for the PS3 version !

this content is © and originated from thegameveda http://the-games-veda.blogspot.com/  if you are reading it from any other site that has not provided a link back it has been leached