After 36 hours of non-stop PC gaming at NVISION 08, some weary champions stumbled home, catching planes, trains and automobiles back to residences either temporary or permanent. Others passed out in not-particularly-comfortable chairs as they awaited a tremendous raffle at which thousands upon thousands of dollars in graphics cards, power supplies, motherboards were awarded. I? I went looking for my next story.
Just after I stepped into the NVISION exhibition room for the very first time, my eye was immediately drawn to a familiar red, blue and white color scheme. It was Mirror’s Edge… running on PC. There was no more and no less of the game than we’d seen up to now — I sped past the same solar panels and fence, overhanging pipe, structure, balancing act, wallrun and final leap of faith you see in the game’s brilliant original trailer — but for comparison’s sake, the demo suited my needs perfectly.
Though the PC build at NVISION demonstrated some vertical sync issues, it was otherwise (on an Alienware machine housing a pricey, but not outrageous Core 2 Duo E8500 processor at 3.12GHz, 3GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 260) exactly what I’d hoped — smooth, quick, crisp and as intuitive as possible. First-person shooter fans will be right at home with movement on the standard WASD keys, Space to shift center of gravity upwards and Shift to shift it downwards, with Q and R bound to the 180° quick turn and Faith’s slow-motion focus ability respectively.
As I’d anticipated in our E3 preview, the addition of a proper mouse allows for that fluid first-person camera control that we found lacking in the PS3 build. Though we admit we haven’t seen PS3 in over a month, I got the feeling that all else being equal, these controls combined with the PC version’s notably higher resolution and smoother textures will give it quite the edge over consoles.
…and that’s before EA told me the official minimum system requirements for the game:
- Windows XP or Vista
- Processor: Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz
- RAM: 1GB
- Video: GeForce 6 Series with 256MB VRAM or better
As always, there’s no telling exactly what kind of image minimum specifications will produce, but a volunteer at the show offered that the game might run on “medium” settings with a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz thrown into that same mix. We’ll look forward to testing out the game’s scalability as soon as is humanly possible.
Being an NVIDIA event, there was no mention of equivalent AMD chips or graphics cards, but I can say that the ATI X1650 (or HD2400) graphics card, and the Athlon 64 2800+ processor are typically comparable to the P4/GeForce set listed. We’ve requested a full set of specs from EA as they become available.
In related news, 1UP reports that Mirror’s Edge will feature a new Time Trial mode where you can upload your own best times (on certain short parkour segments) to the online leaderboards, then challenge others by racing their ghosts to the finish. We’d much, much rather perform that feat in a synchronous versus online mode, but hey, what can you do, right?
August 31st, 2008 at 8:10 pm
ME features parkour, not free running.
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:30 am
@Greek: Mea culpa, now fixed.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
X1650 is a LOT better then nvidia 6 series,maybe GeForce 6800 is comparable with Radeon x1650 only
sry for bad eng
October 30th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Free running = Parkour.