We crossed razor-wire and
miles of desert to learn the
truth about ALX, and all we
got was this damn logo.
1UicK Start
JUNE 2004 MAXIMUMPC 1
R
eal-time per-pixel lighting, volumetric fog and
glow effects, animated textures, bump-mapping,
and a 1 kilometer draw-distance—these terms are
the 34-22-34 for the über-game geek. Hey, baby, is
that a mip-map in your pocket or are you just glad to
see me?
In a perverse cycle, we gamers build state-of-
the-art PCs, and then vigorously search for games
that can bring those rigs to their knees, forcing us
to upgrade even further. We’re deeply afraid that
our new graphics card has a feature that is going
untapped, or a few computing cycles that are not
being utilized. A psychologist would probably dub
this a “cycle of dependency,” and recommend thera-
py, not realizing that $350 (the cost of a good card and
a copy of Far Cry ) can buy dozens of hours of good,
wholesome, therapeutic mayhem and visual splendor.
Measured against a $150 per hour therapy rate, that’s
a damn good return on your dollar.
Far Cry is, in fact, the game that separates the
Big Tough Man Rigs from the Puny Little Boy Rigs.
“Can you run Far Cry at very high detail and at
1280x1024x32 resolution?” is the gamer equivalent
of “What do you bench?” As a measure of computer
manliness, it’s a fair one, since Far Cry happens to be
the best first-person shooter in years.
I haven’t witnessed a break-out moment in an
FPS equal to my first sight of Far Cry ’s sun-drenched
tropical island vistas and crystal-clear water since
that moment in the first Unreal when I emerged into a
clearing and saw the landscape, with scores of birds
flitting through the air. Crytek has the bold cockiness
of a developer who knows exactly what its engine can
do, and is determined to prove it in the most dramatic
fashion possible. The bright light, dense foliage, bril-
liant translucent surfaces, complex models, detailed
textures, and vast draw distance combine to create the
most impressive technology debut in memory.
If the gameplay faded from that point on, the debut
of the Cryengine would still be remembered for a
long time. Fortunately, Crytek has learned from its
predecessors, cherry-picking the best elements of
Half-Life , Soldier of Fortune , and a host of other FPS
titles and combining them into a tight, engaging, riff
on The Island of Dr. Moreau. What it lacks in original-
ity, it more than makes up for in sheer craft.
And now that we’ve seen the first truly next-gen
graphics engine, what can we expect next? Can Half-
Life 2 and Doom 3 deliver something that will make
Far Cry a mere stopover on the way to the future of
FPS graphics? Whatever the answer, 2004 is already
shaping up to be a watershed year for 3D graphics,
making us all very lucky gamers.Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless magazines and
newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.The 3--3
oF 'aMing
'!-E THEORY BY^ THOMAS L. McDONALD
Hard Drive HYsteriaWe preview two new, innovative hard drives
Maybe you can be too rich, as Tyco executives Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz
might be thinking at the moment, but it remains true that your hard drive can
never be too big or too fast. These two breakthrough drives from LaCie and
Seagate ought to satisfy your craving for more, without landing you in the pokey
for being too greedy.LaCie Bigger Disk
Admit it—when you first heard of 250GB
hard drives, you engaged in a vivid
fantasy involving you, four drives, and
a single, Internet-devouring terabyte
array. Now you can indulge yourself with
LaCie’s Bigger Disk, the first desktop
storage device ever to hold a whopping
terabyte of data.
Inside the Bigger Disk spin four
250GB 7,200rpm drives (LaCie wouldn’t
say who makes them, but we do know
they contain 8MB buffers) spanned into
a one terabyte volume via an onboard
Oxford 922 chipset. Each drive is writ-
ten to sequentially as it gets filled, but to
the user, it functions as one giant volume.
The drive’s enclosure is made of alumi-
num to dissipate heat and is stackable as
well—in case a terabyte just doesn’t cut it.
Expected to ship in May, the Bigger Disk
includes FireWire 800/400 and USB 2.
interfaces for maximum cross-platform
compatibility and costs just a mere, ahem,
$1,200.Seagate Savio
Recently released, the Seagate Savio is the
first 10,000rpm 2.5-inch drive. This tiny
speedster sports an 8MB buffer, capacities
of 36GB and 73GB, and a claimed seek
time of 4.1ms. Though they’re strictly
SCSI for now, we believe the technology
in these supa-fast drives will eventually
trickle down to desktops and laptops in
the hopefully not-too-distant future.Boasting a whopping one
terabyte of storage, LaCie’s
Bigger Disk makes 400GB
drives seem puny.Seagate’s new 2.5-inch Savio
drives are 70 percent smaller
than a standard 3.5-inch drive,
yet offer big drive performance.WHAT COMES AFTER “TERABYTE?”
Ever wonder how much your hard drive will hold in 2010?
Given the fast-moving evolution of hard drive sizes, it’s inevitable we’ll eventually
move past the gigabyte and into the realm of the terabyte. But what comes after that?
Here’s a short breakdown—impress your friends! TERABYTE 1,000 gigabytes, or about 200,000 5MB MP3 files.
PETABYTE 1,000 terabytes, or about 200,000,000 MP3s (take that, RIAA!).
EXABYTE It’s tough to comprehend this much space, but it’s a 100,000 terabytes. That’s 200 billion MP3s.
ZETTABYTE Still with us? A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes, which translates to roughly 200 trillion MP3s
YOTTABYTE Yes, seriously. One thousand zettabytes equals a yottabyte, which is 200 quadrillion MP3s.
^ HELLABYTE One kajillion yottabytes. OK, we just made this one up.