Call of Juarez

Besides digging Carbon almost every night, I put myself in a situation as a gunner from the West in Call of Juarez which I installed recently. Actually not a real gunner, just a young blood named Billy Candle, a loner who ran away from his town suspected of being the killer of his parent. Currently, I'm still at the BlackRiver mine episode, trying to escape from...guess what, another me,a character named Reverend Ray, which is also playable or should I say, must be played. Yes, in this game, a player has to play both opposing characters, which is a nice addition to this FPS genre game.

Graphics are good, sorry....great. One must choose the game with SM3.0 switched on to enjoy the experiences meant for the game. HDR is here, as well as other SM3.0 goodies. Oh yeah, Depth of Field is implemented in a very efficient way to enhance the gameplay. Oh wait, the fact is that DoF is so everywhere in this game!



Call of Juarez, nevertheless, is also a very taxing game graphically. Using FRAPS, I noticed an average of 30 (range between 25-35) fps, and things get worse when you're in a town area. I heard a lot of complaints about this in some forums. One more gripe is the loading time which is quite long.



My GeForce 7800 GT has to be overclocked to 490/1.18 GHz in order to gain some more framerates for this game. For an average gamer like me, I can stand the not-so-severe stuttering but hey, this is HDR without AA on. Yes, 7800 GT cannot perform HDR with AA, which is indicated by the in-game setting (under SM3.0, AA option is disabled). I wonder how things are when at least 4X AA is turned on.




Using Forceware 91.47, I did notice some graphical glitch while playing the game. I think it's time to use a newer driver.




Can't say much about this game, because I'm still playing it. I'll posted more on CoJ later.