Torture for your PC

I couldn’t think of a better game to review on the eve of Halloween than one based on torture devices and cringe-inducing deaths at the hands of the infamous Jigsaw killer.  Zombie Studios and Konami, the marvelous guys behind Silent Hill, have brought the Saw series to life in the third-person survival horror game SAW.  I’m kind of glad they didn’t do some ridiculous spin on words for the title.  Those three little letters are still enough to send shivers down our spines when we think of all the painful ways that the creators of the Saw franchise have come up with to kill those undeserving of the lives they were given.

Released on October 6th, 2009 on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, Saw is meant to be a successor to Silent Hill, although no official sequel has been discussed thus far.  The PC version is due to be released on Halloween, the 31st of October, 2009.  I managed to get my hands on a copy a little early and see if I can bring a little bit of the horror to my fellow PC gamers before it hits the shelves this week.  Zombie Studios and the rest of the development team brought in the original creators of the Saw franchise, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, to write a whole new storyline and come up with some awesome new traps for the game.  So it’s not like those other crap games based on movies or television shows (i.e. Lost – Via Domus) that seem to have nothing to do with the original brainchild.  I played this, and I loved it.  The only way to get closer to the action is to actually be one of Jigsaw’s victims.  

Before we get started, let me clue you in on the requirements that your PC must have to play this game:

Intel CPU - Core 2 Duo E4700 2.6GHz
AMD CPU - Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+
nVidia Graphics Card - nVidia Geforce 7600 GT 256MB
ATI & Intel Graphics Card - Radeon X1900 Series
RAM - 2 GB
Hard Disk Space - 12 GB
Direct X - 9

It says on the box that these ratings are for guidance only and not necessarily the required hardware to run this game.  I am in total agreement, as this is the system that I am testing it on:

• Intel Pentium 4 3.2ghz LGA775
• Corsair 2GB DDR2 800mhz RAM
• Nvidia GeForce 9400GT 512MB
• 500GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
• DirectX 11
• Windows 7 Ultimate

As you can see, the processor in my test rig is a little below par supposedly for what is required to play this game.  Although the only time I had any lag was while FRAPS was running in video record mode, and that managed to slow things down a bit.  Other than that, I was getting a steady 30-40 FPS most of the time.

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Page Listing 1 : Torture for your PC 2 : Gameplay

Gameplay