As you can read in my previous article there are dozens of problems plaguing the latest entry in the Call of Duty franchise on the PC. These vary from heavy stuttering in multiplayer games even on the most capable gaming systems to ridiculously low performance in singleplayer. In this guide I’ll cover several ways to improve your gameplay experience until Treyarch gets around to releasing some comprehensive patches.

The focus of this guide will be on Black Ops’ multiplayer component, because that’s the most crucial part of the game for most players and it’s also where most of the problems are being reported. It’s not a performance guide that covers every possible tweak to get more FPS out of the game, mainly because that’s counter-productive. It’s actually better to get the game running in high detail so that it offloads more work to the graphics card which in turn reduces the multiplayer stuttering caused by heavy CPU load.

Anyway, let’s get to it!

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Call of Duty: Black Ops returns the franchise to competent multiplayer gameplay with the restoration of dedicated servers, console commands and a server browser. It also includes numerous excellent maps with great design and much better balance in terms of weaponry and killstreaks than Modern Warfare 2. By all rights it should be a halfway decent multiplayer game with a fairly competent singleplayer campaign right now.

But that would be discounting Treyarch’s incredible ability to screw up any PC game they develop – a feat they’ve managed to pull off yet again with Black Ops. The game is getting rave reviews across the globe based on review copies that do not represent the final product. Meanwhile all the gamers who actually bought a copy are experiencing a game riddled with performance issues, bugs and poorly implemented features that are a testament to Activision/Treyarch’s utter and complete lack of QA for PC releases.

Some of you may recall how gamers were warned away from Elemental: War of Magic a few months back. That game was released in much better state than Call of Duty: Black Ops – and I’ve played both – and its developers actually immediately sat down to patching and keeping the community in the loop. The only official notice from Activision/Treyarch has been that they’re aware of the fact that the game is broken all to hell on PC.

So consider this to be your ‘early warning’: do not buy Call of Duty: Black Ops on PC until its countless problems are resolved! What problems would those be? Read on for the full lowdown.

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Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

An astounding Halloween weekend may have already passed, but there are a lot of very interesting deals to note this weekend as well. The most interesting of all has to be the free weekend currently going for wild west third person shooter Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West and astronautical first person shooter Shattered Horizon on Steam in celebration of the launch of their Frontier Pack bundle. The Grand Theft Auto Classics pack offers some excellent free-roaming action gameplay with three 3D third person titles and the two original top-down 2D games. And there are some great strategy games up for grabs this weekend as well, with the captivating and intense World in Conflict Complete Edition set in an alternate version of the Cold War and the far future infinite war of Supreme Commander 2 with its cold and brutal strategic warfare on an immense scale.

Read on for more exciting deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offers!

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In Games Worth Playing I take a look at noteworthy games released each month. This feature focuses on new games that are worth playing, but also contains an obligatory list of highly anticipated games that may not necessarily be worth playing.

I try to play a lot of the games I mention, but some will invariably escape my attention and be featured on the basis of reviews and player comments. These games will be accompanied by a no hands-on experience notice.

September was absolutely packed with interesting games despite only a couple of high profile releases. Civilization V rightfully takes the throne as expected with its excellent new take on the franchises’ classic strategic world domination gameplay, but R.U.S.E. was a truly disappointing experiment in enhancing RTS gameplay that failed to make its basics fun. Amnesia and Recettear proved to be very pleasant surprises with quite a lot of value at very little cost, but there are also numerous other worthwhile games to mention, so be sure to read about the lot below.

My apologies for the overly late feature, but I intend to get the October version up much sooner, in a matter of days in fact.

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Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

It’s Halloween this week so we’re seeing some great extra sales on most digital distribution websites. Some great Halloween-inspired sales this week include the excellent underwater first person shooter with role-playing game elements BioShock and the eerie nuclear Zone of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bundle. The Left 4 Dead Bundle offers a great co-op (and versus) zombie killing experience, while the action games of the Overlord Complete Pack and the tower defense game Plants vs Zombies GOTY Edition add some humoristic flavor.

Read on for more exciting deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offers!

(more…)

Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

This week sees an interesting sale over at GamersGate, where numerous games are offered in cheap bundle packages with multiple copies. If you’re looking to play co-op or versus with a few friends, then those deals for games like Unreal Tournament 3 and Street Fighter IV are very interesting. The Commandos Complete package offers great strategic gameplay on Get Games, whereas Faces of War offers a larger scale representation of similar gameplay on Green Man Gaming. Port Royale 2 is also worth mentioning for its alluring singleplayer gameplay set in the 17th Century caribbean.

Read on for more exciting deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offers!

(more…)

Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

This week isn’t quite as impressive as those in the previous months, but certain titles do stand out. World of Goo, the sticky puzzling game that involves molding constructions from goblets of goo is now ridiculously cheap during Green Man Gaming’s “When it’s gone… it’s gone!” sale. The same goes for Darwinia, a retro real-time strategy game featuring neon colored stickmen. Adventure fans also have a great deal to keep them busy with the entire Tales of Monkey Island season up for grabs on Steam.

Read on for more exciting deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offers!

(more…)

Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

The strange competitive tower defense game Sol Survivor really stands out this week with its free weekend and accompanying half off deal over at Steam. Other fun strategy games are also up for grabs however, with Green Man Gaming offering an incredible deal on the great indie RTS Darwinia. And worth mentioning for its immense replay value is Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords over on Impulse, which may not include any expansion packs but can certainly provide hundreds of hours of hardcore turn-based 4X space strategy gameplay.

Read on for more exciting deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offers!

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