- Price: £34.99
- Players: 1-online
- System requirements (rec.):
- Windows 98/2000/XP/Me
- Pentium 3/AMD Athlon 500Mhz (1Ghz)
- 128Mb RAM (256Mb for WinXP)
- Hard disk space: 2.23Gb
- 32Mb GeForce2 video card or comparable
- DirectX 9 (included)
Back in 1982, at the age of 10, Tron
was a film for me which changed my life. Not only was I at an impressionable
age, although I can still be impressed at 31, but a fascination with computers
and a love of the look of the film just made me want to jump into the cinema
screen.
This was so much so, that when there was a competition held throughout the
schools in the country to win a prize by summarising the movie in 100 sentences
I got to work. For the life of me, though, to this day I can't remember or
work out why I never actually entered the final draft into the competition,
although the fact the prize was for the school and I'd get nothing personally
was probably the main reason. Also, when time came to make that year's Xmas
want list of things which I didn't have a hope in hell of getting, I wrote on
it, "One of those computers that made Tron". Well, it's the only time
of the year you get to make such a list...
Talking of not having a hope in hell of getting something, if you have a PC
with just the minimum specification listed above you won't have much luck in
running this. It runs great on the PC I use which is a Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb
RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440, although at first I was getting a jittery effect
that I first noticed while playing initially on the light cycles. Effectively,
I was getting a 'blip' every second, regular as clockwork, for a reason I
couldn't fathom. It made the game 'jump', if that's the right word, at that
frequency.
I turned the settings down to as low as they could be, but it was
only when I set the resolution down to 800x600 that it was resolved, although
once I'd overcome this hurdle I found I could increase it back to 1024x768 and
still watch it on my TV, and ramp the settings back up - including the gorgeous
glowing effect, and it still ran perfectly. Given the pressure this will put
on your system though, I'd recommend you reboot and shut down anything
unnecessary before playing otherwise you'll still notice the occasional
stutters.
However, it's worth taking such steps since all the effort is up there on
the screen.
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