Lately I’ve been receiving emails from the bluemars.com website advertising their latest updates and events.
I finally decided to download the Blue Mars client to try it out again. I signed up last year as a beta tester, but it was a very early beta and the client ran very slowly as it’s based on the Crysis engine and my Dell Dimension 9150 isn’t the fastest machine.
When I was a beta tester I did find a line to edit in an ini file to change the graphics settings so it would at least render graphics on my PC at a better than .5 FPS rate and I could walk around, albeit very slowly.
The client is a couple of hundred Mb in size and did not take too long to download. I reset my password using the website since I had not logged in for a long time and had forgotten my password. This was an easy task and the client was soon installed and I logged onto my account.
The client still runs rather sluggishly. (I will paste the specs of the Dell Dimension 9150 at the end of this post). I customised my avatar and logged into the start Welcome area. There were two people there and I had a walk around. I used the Settings button to lower the graphics to LOW QUALITY and the smallest Window Size. I could now walk around, sluggishly, and try out the application.
The graphics have a much higher detail compared to Second Life and it was easy to navigate around once I tried guessing the navigation. It’s probable the instructions are on the main website somewhere, but I wanted to figure it out myself.
I wandered around for a while and tried changing my Tshirt. This took quite a while to render and display, but did change without too much of a hitch. I logged out of the main area and selected another one.. I think it was called Dragon City. This area was about 180Mb to download, but once downloaded I could log into it instantly. I logged in and walked around for a while to see what it was like. The design is very beautiful and detailed, but this time nobody at all was around. I’m not sure if most people hang out in one particular area, if there was an event on everyone was at or if most members are American and were busy elsewhere. I am Australian and had logged on at about 8:30PM AEST.
I wandered around the city for a few minutes, but soon fell through the floor and watched as the graphics changed from a detailed area to grey blocks and finally a completely white screen. I soon quit the game as it was apparent I was not going to be able to recover from this.
Blue Mars seems like an interesting game, but it really has a very long way to go before becoming a popular place to hang out.
There needs to be more people visiting the cities and it has many bugs to iron out. You definitely need a decent system to run it on to be able to appreciate the high graphics detail.
Second Life has been around for many years now, so it’s obvious why you can log into any area and there are many friendly people welcoming you and available to chat to and make friends with.
Blue Mars may have a future, but it’s not a social game I will be returning to any time soon. Perhaps I will try it again in a year or two.
DELL DIMENSION 9150 SPECIFICATIONS
Processor: Intel Pentium D 2.8 GHz
Chipset: Intel 945P
RAM: 3Gb
Supported RAM Speeds: 533 MHz • 667 MHz
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 7300LE. 1Gb RAM.
There is a page with recommended System Requirements for Blue Mars.
(Image courtesy of GoSpeedRacer on Flickr).