UK chart: Empire topples Killzone 2 News

Killzone 2 beaten by an exclusive PC game...
OH THE HUGE MANATEE!

PC gaming is dead.

Ohwaitaminute!

I picked up KZ2 at the weekend, very good FPS if you're not bored to death of FPS already, not played much but online seems fun as well.

Also good to see TR U still hanging in there, criminally underrated title. Didnt Eidos bitch a lot about how low sales were for this?

I can't believe that Halo 3 is at number 30. Hasn't everyone who could possibly want the game already bought it by now? How few units do you have to shift to get in at that position? It's a reasonable enough game, but still...

The biggest selling PC game that lots of people were not able to play on launch! If any more major PC games are handled as badly as Empire was then I'm afraid they are putting the PC gaming format at risk! Took me 24 hours to actually start playing the game after purchasing, and there were many more who couldnt play it two days after buying it. Absolutely rubbish launch.

very good FPS if you're not bored to death of FPS

That statement could apply to any genre. You need to find a new hobby.

"That statement could apply to any genre. You need to find a new hobby."

Nah, admittedly I'm jaded after this gen but I couldn't leave my DC, PS1, PS2 and emulators! :)

But really KZ2 does nothing new to FPS, sure it does it VERY well, but it's nothing we haven't seen for the last couple of years. But hey it's still quite good. I probably won't bother with the single player tho, it was mainly bought for online GUNS as Gears2 is just too broken and I like a little online death dealing.

WHERE'S YOUR GOD NOW?

^_^

Gratz, Creative Assembly!

@Wastelander

I think there are like 100 billion more PC's out there then PS3's:P

@menage, it may seem that way, but your maths is way, way out there.

/pedantic joke. Please, nobody point out that menage was joking. I GET it.
:)

Loving seeing Halo back in the charts!

It's still the uncontested champion of console shooters, a million times better than that flash-in-the-pan piece of tedious crap called Killzone 2.

Bring on ODST so that Halo can rule the charts for another couple of years please!

Go Empire, the PC lives!

REALLY good to see a PC game get the no 1 spot, and also REALLY good to see CA's games going from strength to strength. Haven't bought Empire yet, as I've got a dozen games on the go and still knee-deep in Medieval II, but I'll definitely be picking it up later this year. It looks fantastic.

PC game on top!?Madness

TOTAL WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!

@bad09

Take a break from games and you'll come back refreshed!

I rarely play on-line nowadays so I can't say why Gears 2 is broken. Loved Gears 2 / Killzone 2 apart from the Call of Duty style intervals. Wasn't expecting much from either other than solid shooters with crap stories.

I'm really pleased this game has sold. It's a great series.

Very tempted to get Empire. I don't really play a lot of PC games, purely because I spend most of my working day in front of a PC so prefer to sit in front of the tv in an armchair when chilling out at home.

Empire is great, i wanted to buy it on Steam to give the most cash to the developer, but when it's 39.99 for a digital download compared to 24.99 to ordering an actual copy to be sent to my door which i register on Steam anyway, Digital Download seems rather expensive!

Glad to see Empires up there, from all the reviews it sounds like it deserves it. I would love to see what these charts would look like if they included Steam and other digital distribution services.

Great to see LBP still hanging in there.

"Digital Download seems rather expensive!"

I got the Steam version in the end. Am still playing Rome (base game, not the expansions) but when I could get Rome, Rome's expansions, Medieval II and its expansion as well as Empire for a combined €60 it was too good a deal to pass up on as I was planning to get those eventually*. And it ran better than expected on my 1.5 year old iMac (2.6GHz Core 2, 4GB) using boot camp.

If you just want Empire, €50 is rather steep though, I agree.

* except of course for Rome which I owned already. But even with already owning Rome it's a good deal IMO. I no longer have to put the install disc in the drive for example if I want to play the game. ;)

@ rogermellie

Yeah I'm trying to take a break from this gen playing more old stuff, but I can't take a complete break I love games to much! Still a few games in the few months I want, KOF, Riddick, Ghostbusters, so current gen isn't dead completely :)

Gears 2 was a great SP game but online was broken because you had to wait an age to get a game, even when you did manage to get one the lag was terrible (even with my nice new 20-meg virgin), so off it went to be replaced by KZ2. Like I said KZ2 is a really good game especially online, it's just I've played too many shooters this gen and KZ2 does nothing new even if it does do things well, and TBH, COD4 killed any following FPS game for me (except L4D), I'm hoping another stretch in Butcher Bay will rekindle my love of FPS tho.

Here's my handle

@Donbhoy

Pretty much every PC game is available for pirate download before it's released.

I might check out Medieval 2 at some point, want to get stuck into a Total War game.

Very good news! Now that they've got us all to buy the game, they can concentrate on, you know, actually *finishing* development!

Empire: Total War seems a bit too hard to get into for me (going by the demo), even though I generally like Strategy games such as CIV. However, I'm glad that it has sold well and given another boost to the PC market.

It's an especially potent sales success , actually, since Empire is a PC strategy game that has out-sold, I assume, a console RTS that bears the Halo tag. I think this is proof that the PC is still ahead in some genres, and publishers would do well to remember that.

Empire: Total War seems a bit too hard to get into for me (going by the demo), even though I generally like Strategy games such as CIV.

Bear in mind that you'll automatically get a lot of practice with the land battles, and that there are even different difficulty sliders for the campaign (which is the strategic, Civ-like game) and the real-time battles as featured in the demo.

"Empire: Total War seems a bit too hard to get into for me (going by the demo), even though I generally like Strategy games such as CIV. However, I'm glad that it has sold well and given another boost to the PC market."

When I first started playing the series (first Medieval) I started out with mainly playing on the campaign map and auto-resolving most of the battles (coming from a Civ background myself as well). But as I started to get to grips with the game, I started to enjoy the actual battles more and more. And once you get more used to them, it'll save you huge numbers of troops vs. auto-resolving as well. ;)

@ Les

Is that Empire that works well on your iMac?

I have a year old iMac (silver one). I bought Empire with more of a hope it will run well under boot camp. I think this is the game that will make me finally use boot camp and install windows. I have XP and Vista, would vista be the better option? Ta.

(sorry to hijack a little!)

I can't believe that 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand has dropped out of the charts, I thought it would be GOTY for sure

Is everybody here indeed disciplined enough to ignore the baits from both farticus and evilfox or are those two just on too many ignore lists?

"@ Les

Is that Empire that works well on your iMac?"

Yeah. Wasn't really in the market for it yet but wanted to try the demo and see how such a new game would function on my 1.5 year old silver model. I was pleasantly surprised with how the demo ran on my iMac at 1900*1200 with medium to high visual settings. Figured the retail version would work even better but haven't tried that one yet (has just finished downloading but I downloaded it in virtualization mode so can't play it without a reboot).

I'm not what would be called a graphics whore around here so I can live with the fact that I can't maximize all visual settings and still get a good framerate.

And while on Steam for the demo my eye fell over the Total War package deal and it was just too good to resist so I got it after finding out that it would run.

"I think this is the game that will make me finally use boot camp and install windows. I have XP and Vista, would vista be the better option? Ta."

I used boot camp before I got Parallels but have rarely used it since (which also meant I didn't play PC games much anymore) until I decided to try out this demo. Which led to all kinds of problems as I had installed XP SP3 through Parallels in the meantime which meant I had to remove SP3 or otherwise booting into Windows wouldn't work anymore. But uninstalling didn't work so I did a 'repair' (IMHO a re-install shouldn't be called a repair) which somehow screwed up my existing anti-virus software (AVG) which I couldn't get ridd of anymore (through Add/Remove programs as I wanted to try out a new virus+firewall solution). Re-installed AVG, then removed it but that lead to my admin rights getting screwed up so all of a sudden as admin I wasn't allowed to create network connections anymore amongst other things. Wiped my Windows install and started from scratch again and now it works fine (from a Windows POV). If games like Empire would ever be available for Mac, I'll never look back to the crap that's Windows.

As for the XP vs. Vista, don't have the latter so can't say much about that other than what I read on the internet and that seems to suggest that XP still has better performance.

Thanks les. Appreciate that.

Done a bit of poking around, and the ATi HD2600 inside my iMac seems up to the job. But Like you, I'm not a graphics whore at all. I can totally live with everything on super low if it has to be.

Just got to find some time now to sort out the installation.

I really wish more company's would make games mac compatible. I have to applaud EA, they seem to be taking the lead here.

That statement could apply to any genre. You need to find a new hobby.

Interesting... I suppose you'd call logic.

I can't believe I haven't bought Killzone yet. I really should but I think I'll buy Madworld instead.

Fantastic. Haven't sparked my copy up yet, think I'll leave it till the weekend.

"Done a bit of poking around, and the ATi HD2600 inside my iMac seems up to the job. But Like you, I'm not a graphics whore at all. I can totally live with everything on super low if it has to be."

Tried the full version. It restricts some of the more advanced features, they probably added some between the demo and retail versions. It works well enough on medium settings for my tastes. I am coming from Rome TW though.

I loved Rome TW. It was the last "proper" game my PC could run. I still have a flitter every now and again. The balance was perfect in my opinion.

If empire looks like Rome then I will be more than happy to be honest.

Btw, came across this site:

http://www.easydriverupdate.com/blog/dri...

Tells you how to install the apparently 'proper' drivers for the graphics card inside your iMac. Have tried it and it looks like it has indeed improved performance a bit. The automatic installer didn't work in XP (at least not on my set-up) but manually browsing to the driver file worked fine.