http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/100/1001659p1.html

Is this a dream? It's not April 1...

Yay! It's been a long time since I've had some Mech love.

I would totally buy it.

I saw "Mechwarrior" and thought the unthinkable...thank god it isn't so.

w00t! It's about time. I loves teh Mechy Warri0r! I still have MW4 loaded on my comp

Then again, I still have JK loaded on my comp.

Welcome to 1999.

Ahhh... mechwarrior 2. Loved that damn game. I never got 3 or 4 though.

ive never played mechwarrior

Ah, yet another new game that will require a $500 pc upgrade to run properly.

Looks interesting though, I'm just getting sick of the graphics competition between gaming companies. If they keep the bull**** up, they'll kill off PC gaming because everyone is going to get sick of paying for top of the line video cards in order to play the newest released games, and instead buy them on 360/PS3.

2 was a favorite. <3 Ghost Bear expansion pack was right up there too.
3's controls were all wonky, but fun in that you could shoot/squish the wildlife.
4 was ok, but no longer able to game hunt.
The Black Knight expansion was not so good.
Mercenaries was not so good either.

I haven't played any of the other Mech titles since.

Are you joking? Save Crysis, you should run pretty much any game at very reasonable setting with an 8800GTX from 2006. The way games are optimized for consoles these days there's really hardly any point to upgrading.

If this is MW5 on PC, and it has preorder, i am totally doing it

From reading the interview, it sounds promising. I need to finish Ghost Bear's Legacy, still got the cd in front of me.

I played IV, I think. I got frustrated because I didn't like the look of the more humanoid mechs, and I couldn't rock the last couple of levels in my... well, whatever I had. I can't remember now. I know it was pretty light. Might have only been a medium mech.

I read on RPS that you might be able to get more experienced with your mech if you stick with it, avoiding constant upgrades or something and giving a bit of diversity.

MechWarrior 3 was a huge part of my childhood

Funny how Mech5 will probably look better than the cutscenes in Mech3. xD

Article, trailer linked from there.
:awesome::awesome::awesome::awesome:

Well, that depends on the port job. Games like Assassin's Creed, GTA 4, Gears of War 2 have surprising system requirements despite being console-oriented games.

mech3 had cutscenes?

http://battletech.catalystgamelabs.com/2009/07/09/mektek-net-to-distribute-mechwarrior-for-free-on-battletech-com/
MW4+expansions to be free soon

I remember playing Mechwarrior 4 online. People were either a Daishi (huge, giant tank of a mech) or a really small, light Osiris to outmaneuver said Daishi's. Hardly anyone choose anything in between (except the ones that could fly well). I think one of the big problems of Mechwarrior 4 online was that there were hardly any variety of Mech specs on the field.

Oh yay, the games I bought with my hard earned nickels will soon be free. :-P

I think I sold Mercs a long time ago.

wow, forgot about this series

It had an opening cutscene..

Sometimes devs are lazy, but that has nothing to do with getting into a graphics contest. Besides, even those games should be pretty playable by now.

I remember the beginning of the game... near the water and a dock... a little shack on the dock... seabirds waiting to eat bullets...

Key word is should. GTA4 runs like crap on almost everything, not to mention the fact that you have to be logged into 2 different stupid services just to be able to save your game.

I know you weren't speaking precisely, but I don't think devs being lazy is ever the problem. More likely a push from marketing or product management groups to release the title by a certain deadline. This happens all the time.

Yeah, that's probably true.

I really hope they make MW5 more like the tabletop game. The rules in the past games were far too simple. I'm not talking about hyperrealism, I'm talking about sophistication. Things like melee combat and DFA were never properly explored. Being able to target joint actuators to disable movement or aiming of weapons was never implemented. Many other features that don't require the players to be aware of them, but can still take advantage of them.

Another thing that really annoyed me with ALL the games is that you cannot aim individual weapons. What I mean is, you have weapons mounted on the arms, these are free moving and can be pointed anywhere in the mech's field of view. Instead they have been locked to the torso. Mech 3 and 4 let you aim them to the side using a view hat, but that's pretty much worthless.

There's a in-progress fan remake of Mech 2 called Assault Tech 1: Battletech. Aside from a retarded name, the game features a lot of the things I discussed above. You use the mouse to aim weapons and torso and the keys to move. It's early in development so the controls are clunky, but they mouse control is highly effective. You can target knee actuators to stop movement, or elbows and shoulders to stop weapon aiming. You can do a real DFA that actually kills the enemy. Weapons do a lot more damage and mechs don't last nearly as long.

In one or more of the Mech incarnations, you could target arms (haha, a typo originally said ars) and blow them off, effectively removing those weapons from the fight. Of course, if I was going through that much trouble, I would just target the cockpit.

Yeah, but in MW2:Mercs I loved doing an alpha strike on an enemy's leg and dropping him instantly to the ground, completely disabling him in one shot. Unless they were the little bastards with the jump thruster things.

There are a few reasons for the higher requirements:

For starters, the PC ports generally have higher-quality assets. The PS3 is particularly problematic in this area due to an unfortunate combination of poor texture compression support, minimal video memory and a slow disc transfer rate.

PC games also run at a higher internal resolution. Many 360 games, including Halo 3 and Perfect Dark Zero, run at 1152x640. I play games at 1920x1200, but I imagine most people here use 1152x1024 at the very least.

But the biggest source of performance loss is the nature of the beast. There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes in your OS that prevents anything even approaching a maximum utilization of your hardware. PCs are really bad for games. They always have been: the NES did things in 1983 that PCs couldn't do until John Carmack's first great VGA hacks in 1990.

That started in Mech 2, blowing off arms and legs. If I remember right from Mech 4 though, blowing a leg doesn't shear it off, just causes the Mech to limp a lot. Mech 2 I would take out one leg to strand it, then shooting the other caused the whole thing to blow

This'll be a good reason to get my Saitek out of the closet. I've got an X45 that has been collecting dust due to my lack of PC flight / mech games.

A gay joystick you say?

My x52 is behind my monitor, waiting for the eventual craving to fly.