Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain pretty pictures

What a game! After about a month of the game being out, many gamers have no doubt completed the game 100%. To celebrate this, here are some pretty screenshots.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain on NVIDIA GeForce 820M

V has come to. I've been playing MGS The Phantom Pain for the past 3 days now and without any shadow of a doubt, it's one of the best games released this year. One amazing thing about it is just how well optimized the game is. Hideo Kojima must be right that Fox Engine may be the most advanced game engine ever. It runs really well on my NVIDIA GeForce 820M and I just wanted to share the settings that I've been using and some screenshots for those who might be on the fence about buying it.

One VERY important thing I'd like to mention is that if you've got this or a similar graphics card, it is IMPERATIVE that you change "Post Processing" to "low" in the graphics settings. It will improve the performance of the game SIGNIFICANTLY and it will also look much better especially if like me you're running the game at a resolution of 1366 x 768 on your laptop screen. Setting "Post Processing" to high made the game look quite blurry. A bit like looking at an image who's resolution is much larger than that of the screen. Setting "Effects" to low will also improve performance but not as significant as "Post Processing".

 

 Settings that I use to get approx 30-38fps

I'd like to point out that I've set most of the settings on medium just to get a slight increase in performance. I suggest you play around with them to see what will work best for you. If you have a gpu like mine, you should be able to play on high quite well so long as post processing is low. All in all, it's an amazing game and highly recommended. Here are a few screenshots I took. Another thing is that I set the first option to full screen instead of windowed because it allowed me to alt+tab to another window without closing the game.

The biggest bug ever

We often encounter numerous bugs in most major games. Whether it's small ones like the Battlefield 3 Beta crawl bug or major ones like the numerous optimization problems that were in Arkham City on PC after its official release that rendered the game unplayable.

But it's not everyday we encounter major bugs that span the entire game. Or bugs that not many people have discovered, including the gamers and developers themselves. But there is one such bug that many have never realized.

Resident Evil 5 takes place in a region called Kijuju. According to numerous official sources, Kijuju is a region within West Africa.  It is depicted as  surrounded by coastline; savannah and wetlands. The issue that when playing the game, it looks as though it takes place in East Africa and not West Africa as mentioned by numerous official sources. Here are sources that claim that the game takes place in West Africa.

1. On the game's official website. 
2. On the official book, Resident Evil Archives I and II Bundle.
3. On wikia (though not strictly official)
4. On some versions of Wikipedia (again not strictly official)
5. The fact that Sheva Alomar, one of the main protagonists, works with the BSAA West  African Branch.

So while official reports say that the game takes place in West Africa, there are very strong reasons to believe that this is not the case and that the game takes place in East Africa.

1. The biggest starting point is the fact that the natives in the game speak Swahili. The thing is, Swahili language is mainly spoken in Eastern Africa, and is official language in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and DRC.
2. The names of things in the game are of swahili etymology. E.g. 
• Kijuju (the name of the main location in the game) - is from swahili word kijiji which means village. 
• Pepo karimu (one of the enemies) - means caring bat in swahili.
  
•  majini (the main bad guys) - derived from swahili meaning wicked people or to describe supernatural creatures. 
  
3. Some game items are clearly East Africa e.g. matatus with yellow lines.
   

 So this may perhaps be the biggest flaw in a game that spans the whole game and not known by many (including the game developers). Pretty neat.

New series on Africa in current Video Games

There will be a new series on "Africa in current Video Games" where we take a look at how the continent has been represented in major AAA video games like Resident Evil 5 and Halo. Stay tuned!