Painkiller has recently gone on sale over at Steam. For less than 10 bucks, you get Painkiller plus the expansion and I think that’s a steal.
I’m only in the second chapter of the game but I’ve been having a blast. The game is an entertaining old-school shooter done with new-school technology.
(Shotgun + ragdoll physics = endless amusement.)
The version on Steam has been patched to 1.64 and is approximately 3.4GB in size. The download includes the manual in PDF format (which can also be downloaded separately from the product page) and a readme text file with addendum.
The game support widescreen resolutions including the 1680×1050 native resolution of my Dell 2007WFP. I had to change a setting to increase the field of view, though.
To do this, dig down to the following folder:
Steam\steamapps\common\painkiller gold edition\Bin
Then locate the config.ini file. Find the line that reads:
cfg.FOV = 95
Since I had a 16:10 display, I changed that to read:
cfg.FOV = 105
There are screenshots on the Widescreen Gaming Forum page I linked above that illustrate the differences between the two settings.
Screenshots are taken with the F12 key and saved in the BMP format. They’re stored in:
Steam\steamapps\common\painkiller gold edition\Data\Screenshots
rather than:
Steam\steamapps\common\painkiller gold edition\Screenshots
I have no idea why there are two screenshot folders.
I optimistically set every graphics and audio setting at maximum but I was thoroughly crushed to find the in-game performance awful. Movement was in slow-motion and jerky on top of that.
The problem was actually not due to anaemic hardware. In fact, the opposite was true. My hardware is too damn good for the game. It’s specifically caused by the game not knowing how to deal with my AMD X2 4400+ dual core processor despite my having installed the AMD Dual Core Processor Windows XP driver. The fix for this is to get the AMD Dual Core Optimizer. Once I applied the optimizer I got silky smooth performance.
The game seems stable. The only trouble I had was when the game seemed to freeze at the start of the Paris Opera House level. The game recovered after about a minute, though, and I was soon waging battle against Dark Ninja and Evil Samurai.
I’m sure there’s some deep socio-cultural insight to be gained from the fact the protagonist is battling evil Japanese warriors within a symbol of European high culture but I’m not capable of offering anything other than this: the Phantom of the Opera would have been a much shorter book if the Vicomte de Chagny had a Stakegun with a Grenade Launcher attachment.
