New DirectX features like fullscreen antialiasing (or multisample antialiasing) are supported to improve visual quality. Hardware transform & lighting is now supported, allowing a lot of work to be offloaded from your CPU and onto your graphics card. * Updated graphics engine that uses (and requires) DirectX 9.0c for the best balance of compatibility and speed. There are more details about the unofficial patch here, but the main points are summarised below for your endless convenience: I'm too much of a coward to go up against guys who've been playing the game solidly for ten years.Īpologies if BZ2's continued support is old news to you, but I was surprised and pleased to hear the old man still has so much blood in him. I'm not quite sure which frighteningly wobbly tower of CDs in my bedroom contains BZ2, so I can't attest the efficacy of the changes myself, but the key points of 1.3 in general (beta 5.1 specifically brings performance improvements are bugfixes) an updated graphics engine that supports DIrectX9, hardware transform and lighting and anti-aliasing - in other words, a better-looking game and one that barely troubles CPUs.Īlso, a shedload of new multiplayer maps and tweaks - which is an aspect of the game I confess I've never dabbled in. Ten years on from the game's release, patch 1.3 beta 5.1 (crivens) has just hit. The unofficial 1.3 patch for what was once an infamously buggy affair was originally created by two Pandemic chaps, and they've continued to update it even as they spend their day working on other games.

While it's admittedly an acquired taste, it's one of those games I regularly bust out whenever I feel a spot of joystick nostalgia, alongside Crimson Skies and Mechwarrior 4. This took me by gentle surprise: ongoing fan patching of Pandemic's seminal but rarely namedropped 1999 RTS/FPS/tank 'em up Battlezone II.

Battlezone 2