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Spanky wrote a few notes on his first 10 hours playing Ascension..

Lets begin

The game starts out with a very nice movie sequence. I'm not sure who the people are, or what's happening.

There is a farmer pulling a cart. He hears a distant boom. A giant cylinder pops out of the ground. A big wave expands across the land killing people in a village. The Avatar wakes up in his bedroom.

The movie definitely set the mood for the game. The feeling I got was of a distant disaster and I soon would be in the middle of it.

The main character, the Avatar wakes up in his bed. Immediately the narrator greets me with a tip on what to do next.

The beginning of the game is to get you trained up with the keyboard controls and learn how to do a few things. The setting is definitely not Britannia. It looks like good ole' Earth.

In the Avatar's 2 story house... he's got his TV, VCR, bathroom, fireplace, recliner, couch, kitchen and even a computer. The computer makes a noticeable 'boot up' sound when you turn it on but that's about all you can do with it.

After being instructed to get some clothes on and grab a few needed items. I walk outside the house and wander a bit.

From here I'm quite impressed. The outdoor scenery is truly nice. There is no flat ground outside... the terrain is very detailed. The house sits between 3 large hills.

There is a wolf outside the house... standing around. I was a bit confused on what to do with the him. If the virtues were really watching me... should I attack the wolf now or wait till it attacked me first?

I could see the gypsy caravan just outside my general vicinity. I know what it meant to go in there.... It would be propell me into the world of Britannia... but first,! I wanted to get as much out of my peaceful surrounding as I could....... Ok, enough peaceful surroundings... lets play!

The gypsy lady is the first character I interact with in the game and here is the first time I get to hear the AVATAR speak. The voice is bold.. sounding a bit like an old, school film narrator... but I soon forget about that and accept the voice as genuine.

The gypsy presents a series of tarot cards corresponding to the 8 virtues. She asks me a question for each of them. I have multiple answers to choose from. Depending on your answers... the game will set your skills accordingly. My answers ended up making me a Ranger. *surprise*

Just outside the caravan... in a clearing... a swirly mist of particles appear. This is the entrance to Britannia.

"Am I ready?"

Journey to Britannia

After walking into the swirling particles.... another movie sequence begins...

The movie sequence is a bit confusing. It looks like I'm killed by a man ridding on top of dragon. But... I appear in the game again in good health. No explanation of what just happened.

The adventure begins in the city of Britain. The castle, where Lord British resides, sits at the northern tip of the city. It's separated from the rest of the city by a moat. South of the castle is where we can find a number of places such as the bakery mill, a pub, the blacksmith, a temple where they manufacture serpentwyne, the museum, a cemetery and a number of other places.

The city of Britain shows me what the graphical engine can do, and allows me to see the effects of the graphics options available to me.

Remember those fantastic screenshots Origin has on their site? ...the wonderful cityscape of Britannia where you can see Lord British's castle off in the distance or the long shot of Buccaneers Den with all the wooden docks and ships. You'll never get to see that... at least never get to see it at a framerate above 8 fps.

Hitting 'j' on the keyboard brings up the in-game journal. I have a menu to sections of it; Options, Save/Load etc... The first option allows you to adjust the viewable distance from near to far. Near, creates a gray cloud around you... obscuring distant scenery. Nothing beyond 20 or so feet from you can be seen. This is an irritating effect. I feel i'm always walking in a storm... it's disorienting. The graphics speed up a little because it doesn't have to draw past the cloud. The graphics performance doesn't increase much beyond this.

The highest setting, 'far', removes the cloud and allows you to see at a more realistic distance. Not beyond the horizon but enough to make you comfortable and keep a good bearing on your surroundings... but that's where the framerate REALLY drops. If you're brought into a conversation in town, The view moves between you and the he other character with like camera transitions. The Avatar responds to the conversations by multiple choice. Moving the mouse during these chat sessions with the highest viewable setting really jerks the performance down. The mouse gets quite hard to navigate around the screen at this point.

The graphic performance is bit of a let down. The fact that they recommend a 3dfx card with glide is even more disturbing. Origin should not push a propriety API on its products. Yes... I bought a Voodoo when it first came out.. a Canopus Pure3d. I bought into the hype and got exactly what I paid for at the time. Back then, Quake was the only reason people were buying VooDoo cards. Quake used Opengl not Glide. 3dfx has taken a very dangerous position in the industry by pushing development companies to make their games in Glide. The fact that I might find a game I like on store shelves... take it home and find out that it will only run on ONE brand of video chipset makes me sick. They are trying to corner the market buy forcing people to buy their cards.

The industry should be open and allow people to pick and choose what video technology they want to buy. That's where Microsoft's DirectX and SGI's Opengl is for. These are standardized technologies that ALL video card manufacturers can support in their cards.

As for the slow performance in Ascension, Origin has stated that it has to do with texture memory and the large amount of high resolutions textures in the game. I only believe half of that. My ATI Rage Fury has 32 megs of ram... all of which is available to DirectX 7.

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