Pit of Despair: RAGE

Rock had quite a time with id's latest: RAGE. Although maybe not in the way you'd expect. Take another dip into the Pit of Despair, and see what the wonders of PC gaming have in store for you.


Fuck! Let me rephrase that. Fuck this game in its god damned stupid face! That was exactly how I felt after I'd spent a cumulative four hours trying to make RAGE work. Four motherloving hours! I could have watched two movies! Or one really great movie twice! I could have been sculpting my guns (ladies...) or just about anything else in the universe other than troubleshoot a god forsaken video game that should have been fixed long ago! FUCK! But I'm getting ahead of myself. Starting at the end is no way to start, unless your last name is Tarantino. But we've already gone and done it, so let's just Tarantino this bitch, shall we? Back to the beginning. (Oof, "Tarantino this bitch" sounds like a horrible thing to do to someone)

I can't remember when I picked RAGE up. Maybe during Steam's 2011 holiday sale. I always had a passing interest in it, but it was the fact that Adam Marcey chose it for his game of the year that really moved me to pick it up. Since I've always got a line of games in my Steam library waiting to be played, RAGE had to wait a few months. A handful of games later, my mind turned to RAGE, sitting there uninstalled, almost begging me to play it.

I stewed on the idea for a few days, building the anticipation. Finally, I went ahead and installed it and- what the hell? 22 gigs? Wow, ok well, I guess there were a lot of graphics (you can quantify those, right?) so maybe that's why it takes up so much space? Oh well I bet it's going to be awesome, screenshots I've seen so far have been just beautiful. After letting the download go overnight (not much internet in these parts), I eagerly started the game up and watched the opening cinematic. Ok pretty cool. Giant asteroid kills bunches of people. We're safe underground ok ok ok just let me play already! Finally. Oh man! This is going to be so awesome! And then...oh shit. What the hell is this?!

Hmmm. Something doesn't look quite right...

A quick trip to the internet revealed that holy god damn did this game have some issues. There was a lot of talk on Bethesda's part that basically blamed graphics card vendors for the issues. So the vendors went ahead and released some new drivers and guess what happened. The issue persisted for the majority of users. So what were people left to do but spend hours tweaking .ini files, essentially tricking the game to work the way it was supposed to.

Fuck you RAGE! Fuck you and the disc you rode in on!!!

Word on the street was that Rage had so many art assets (rumored to be over a terabyte of data), in an effort to get all that data on as few discs as possible (3 on Xbox 360), id Software resorted to a new compression method that they weren't very familiar with. This basically means that not only did id Software use a tool badly, but that in all likelihood they knew there would be issues with Rage when it launched. Granted, this is a bit of speculation on my part, but stranger things have happened.

No way does this slip by testers.

Well, I still really wanted to play this game, so I spent a total of somewhere around four hours tweaking different files, messing with settings, and in general just trying to make a game work like it's god damn supposed to! Fuck! Finally, after many stops and starts, I got the game to work properly. So how is it?

Ahhh, that's better!

Pretty god damn awesome actually! With intense, action packed gunplay, a sweet as hell crafting system and some truly great racing portions, Rage turned out to be just fantastic. I can definitely understand now why Adam Marcey chose it for his 2011 Game of the Year.  Oh, and the game is downright gorgeous, especially on PC.  Breaking from the norm, I'll throw a bunch of screen caps down below for your oogling pleasure. I know this isn't usually how Pit of Despair goes, but I thought it would be nice if we ended on a high note, for a change.

Not a word about brown-ness. Deserts are brown. Deal.

The towns are a delightful mix of technology and old west.

There's a pretty deep racing element with worthwhile rewards.

Did I mention that the game is drop-dead beautiful? I mentioned that, right?

The character detail and animation is truly astonishing.

Just one of the many interesting characters you'll meet.

Rock is currently preparing for the apocalypse. Follow him on Twitter.