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Gaming test: Prey

Prey tells the story of Tommy, a Cherokee garage mechanic stuck on a reservation going nowhere. Abducted along with his people to a menacing mother ship orbiting Earth, he sets out to save himself and his girlfriend and eventually his planet.

In Prey, players enter a living spaceship that enslaves alien races and devours humans for lunch. Prey turns the first-person-shooter genre upside-down with new gameplay features like wall-walking and gravity flipping, making for intense single- and multiplayer experiences. Prey is built on a heavily modified version of the Doom 3 engine and is developed by Human Head Studios under the direction of 3D Realms.

Prey remains to be a fantastic title. Lovely to play and look at. The 8600 OC2 does really nice numbers here, even compared to a 8800 GTS 320MB.

Gaming test: Serious Sam 2

March 2001, developer Croteam released the original Serious Sam for the PC and pretty much made other standard first person shooters look like they were in neutral. The game, along with its stand alone follow up The Second Encounter, had an impressive graphics engine, huge outdoor environments, some wacky weapons, a fun co-op mode, and most importantly some of the numerous and strangest enemies in FPS history. When players first saw the headless bomb filled suicide attacker charging at them full blast with a blood curdling scream, they knew that this game was something special.

Four and a half years later, Croteam's turn return to the plate with Serious Sam 2 and while it's basic gameplay hasn't changed it has enough new features to make it a fun and solid follow up to the original. The graphics are also greatly improved. Like the first, there is a story in Serious Sam 2 (there are even some extended cut scenes that pull the story forward) but you can pretty much ignore this aspect. It's all about "Serious" Sam Stone going from point A to point B and blowing up everything that gets in his way.

Constantly flaunting a huge draw distance, extensive foliage, many impressive lighting effects such as refraction and even HDR, plus more than solid framerates, the Serious Engine 2 looks like a real beast.

In the above chart you can see the results with HDR and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. Keep en eye on the GeForce 8800 320MB GTS. There's a very good reason why I include the results of that card, I'll explain in the conclusion.