Just reinstalled it.  How in the world do you change resolution?  I have a 2560x1440 monitor and it looks pretty bad.

My monitor is 1920x1200 and it looks, well, like the screen shots. However, that's with the GWX3 mod and the mod may be what's making the game look ok, at least to me. I didn't play with any resolution settings when I did my installations.

I got rid of my starforce laden copy of the game, but keep forgetting to pick it up on steam again.  Have you played Silent Hunter IV?  Is that better or worse than this game?

It's been years since I played it, but I remember that SH4 was as good as SH3, except that in the vast distances of the Pacific it seemed to take forever to get to places. However, I'm playing SH3 with the Grey Wolves expansion, which is pretty awesome and significantly better than vanilla SH3. 

For those who might be wondering, I installed the latest Grey Wolves GWX3 Gold mod over a new Silent Hunter 3 installation downloaded from Steam. I didn't need to do any tweaks or adjustments. And <cross fingers> I haven't had any crashes at all.

That review made it sound really awful.

I don't think it's a 3/10 game, more like a 6/10. It has a somewhat interesting business mode that is let down by a bad interface. I shouldn't have to search the map over and over to find certain buildings each time. The relationship between functions of certain buildings is briefly mentioned but instead should be more thoroughly presented. And so on and so forth. There are some good things in there, but it really lacks the flavor after a while. You just keep setting up businesses till you reach the critical point, after which the money just rolls in and you have little interest in doing anything else other than sitting back and waiting.

The tactical combat has some good features, but has too many bells and whistles that are of little use. Also the AI is pretty good at times, seeking cover and flanking, then does something dumb like running up right into the middle of my guys to beat on one of them, which gets him killed as soon as it's the turn of my guys. And there is such a disparity in weapons. For instance, I was getting the short end of several battles because my three guys only had revolvers. I got a chance to add one more guy, and I selected a guy with a rifle. So in my next battle I set up the rifle guy to shoot the baddies while my other three guys hung back. Sure, it's good tactics, but why wouldn't I just equip everyone with rifles? Because that's something that comes as a perk later on. It's frustrating.

Probably the most frustrating thing about the game is that you can see where they went wrong. The decision to make the campaign be a series of strung together missions on different district maps means that whatever happened on the previous maps makes no difference except that you bring along the same guys in your gang from map to map. There's no sense of building an empire. Also, there are no competing gangs, other than scripted events. You don't feel like you are competing against an AI opponent, just the game system. This works ok in some games, like Tropico, but in a gangster game you just feel like you are going through the mechanics.

I do have to qualify the above to say that those opinions are based on playing four of the fifteen (or twenty?) missions of the game. Maybe it gets better, but I'm not seeing it right now.

Also, THERE'S NO DAMN MANUAL!

maybe it'll be up soon.  GOG is advertising a manual as part of the game extras.

The shame is that I posted earlier on Kalypso's own Omerta forum about the lack of a manual and no one official has said boo about it.

[there is no manual]

I got this through Steam earlier today. It is my sad duty to tell you that it isn't worth full price . It might not even be worth half off .

Assuming you were interested enough to play the demo, you can look at my comments above since the full game's first mission is exactly the demo. Further observations are as follows:

- No manual. Nada. None. This isn't Call of Duty, there are aspects of the game that do have to be explained. More on that below. There isn't even a hotkey list. There is in-game help, but that only pertains to character traits, perks and other items that are involved in tactical combat.

- From PC Gamer: "A combination of distinctive weapons, solid AI, plausible friendly-fire risks, and interesting damage twists (concussion, panic, blood loss... ) mean Omerta can hold its head up in the company of XCOM, Jagged Alliance and Silent Storm.". No it can't. I have played those three games, sir, and you are no Jack... oops, sorry, I meant Omerta's tactical combat doesn't hold a candle to those. Oh, it has a lot of bells and whistles, but they don't really do much for the tactical game.

- The main gameplay comes on the district level map. That's the one showing all the buildings. Unfortunately there is no way to keep track of which types of buidlings are on the map except to move your viewpoint around the map looking for them. And even once you find a particular building you are looking for, say the residence of a deputy, any time after that you want to go back to it to activate one of it's actions, you have to search for it on the map again. The mini-map doesn't help except to show there is some kind of building there.

- Another irritation. There are Joints and Premises. You buy those to set up your own warehouses, safe houses, businesses, etc. Except that each one of those businesses requires either a joint or a premises, but can't be built on the other type. And since there is no manual, you sometimes buy the wrong type and don't know it till you try to set up an establishment and find out it was the other type you should have bought.

I could go on, but it's just more of the same. I've played three missions, which means I've completed three district maps. I think there are 15 or 20 of them. I'll keep slogging through the game, but I'm not optimistic anything is going to get much better. Maybe if I HAD A DAMN MANUAL I'd know what was coming up...

Oh my, we have taken damage...


And we have flooding in the after compartments.


And now the flooding is critical! 


Tragically, it's too late for any heroic measures. We all drown. Very sad


And this is how my careers winds up.


Thanks for following this AAR! I'll post another one sometime.

And another half hour goes by. They are certainly persistent.


Especially this guy.

[five]

It's a bit brighter up top, so I send my remote camera (did I mention it can be launched from underwater? It can ).


It's a bit hard to see, but I count five enemies looking for me.

There are so many ships up there, they are illuminating each other with their searchlights.


There's a pretty ship.


Still, I'm moving away bit by bit. It's been over ninety minutes so far.

After the encounter with the mystery ship, I decide to try my luck further north... say, why not Scapa Flow, British Home Fleet base?


Just before dawn, I'm on station south of the main entrance. Suddenly...


Well, that was to be expected, a British destroyer. Time to go deep.
Now I hear his friends arriving.


I send my crew to damage control stations.


They are on the surface, looking for me.


I have worked my way to the south and away from where they are circling, but I'm almost aground! Only five meters under the keel. Time to bring the boat up a bit.


More depth charges.


We are still being depth charged, but they are all to the north now. I may just escape after all.

We have a bizarre encounter in the middle of the night. In the rain and the darkness suddenly we come across a large cargo ship, completely blacked out. It is only a few hundred meters away. I swing around and fire two quick torpedoes, but they miss. I then run up past him, swing around and fire two more from a better position. They too also miss. I move quickly past him and fire off my single stern tube, which also misses. Then I lose sight of him. I go back and search, but I cannot find him! Five fishes and no results. They will not be happy in Berlin! Meantime I slowly reload my tubes.



After the mission, Abwehr intelligence discovered that indeed, we did sink that ship ...


However, it was a neutral

The weather continues nasty, with rough seas.


I go below and lay in my bunk and consider; do I indeed have hair in my nose? Doesn't every one have hair in their nose? It troubles me.


It is night again and we are laying offshore from Aberdeen.


Next day the weather continues abysmal. I move closer inshore towards Aberdeen, but I find nothing.


We are close enough to be seeing landbirds.


My Zerstreutes Kameragerät sees that it is raining in Aberdeen as well.


Thankfully the rough seas have subsided, but it still raining.

It is now daylight on the 27th. We have been at sea five days. The weather is terrible, raining and overcast with a rising sea. The first officer wants to know if I have hair in my nose. I am suspicious.

We lay on the surface for the rest of the night, then slowly start moving southwest towards the coast again. It is quiet until an Anson is spotted. We crash dive.


Heading down to forty meters, we remain there, drifting, until almost sunset. Then we surface.


We resume heading southwest towards the coast, but as night falls, so does the barometer. There is rain and wind and little possibility of finding any prey. And in worse news, we drink the last of the good beer

However, it is a busy night. We submerge for awhile, then surface to move away from the coast. My hydrophone operator picks up sound of a merchant to the ENE and we move towards him:


Suddenly my lookouts spot him!


I plot a course to move closer:


We man the deck gun:


I give the order to fire at will:


The merchantman turns on his searchlight, but it is far too late:


We are hitting him badly:


Still his searchlight is illuminating us! We must finish him quickly:


Suddenly he is ripped by an explosion:


Another explosion. She's going down:


We head off into the night. The Captain's log records the results:

[Scheiße!!]

Well, this is embarrassing. After looking at the sunrise I ordered a course of 270 degrees at one third ahead. I then went to my little cabin and started tinkering with another new device from the Reich Ministry der neuen Technologie, something called a Schoß Rechner. I was studying this function called Minensuchboot and lost all track of time. Suddenly I see the red night vision lights go on! It is already dusk! Gottverdammte!. I run back to the navigation room and look at the chart...



We are right off shore!!!



I immediately order a course of 045 and full speed ahead. After a few minutes it looks like we might have gotten away with it, then suddenly....



Scheiße!! A closer look through the UZO shows it's a torpedo boat, but thankfully it doesn't appear to see us. We shall slip off into the night.

I have to wait in this sector twenty four hours before I can free roam.


It's 0900, dawn of the third day. Sea is like glass, which isn't very good for being stealthy.


Depth under keel is 64 meters, plenty if I need to dive very, very quickly.

On station in Sector AN52. We are 195 kilometers from the coast. I suspect things will be getting exciting when the sun comes up.
Damn, I'm wearing my brown shoes! Where are my damn Adidas?

New message from The Big Talking Head:


Yeah, sure thing.

A quick check of the instruments. Batteries fully charged, air pressure tanks at max, CO2 fine, and almost full with fuel. I'm keeping the boat at 14 knots so we can get closer to the English coast before dawn.


Did I show you this? No? It's the map of the minefields and booms around many of the ports. Pretty cool, eh?


And it's sunrise, the start of the second day. Hopefully some good hunting today!

We have been cruising all day on the surface, quiet so far. It's sunset....


... and moonrise.


Have I introduced you to the crew? No? Here they are:

And now it's off to our patrol area, AN52.

And we approach Helgoland. Thankfully we have a Zerstreutes Kameragerät on board, a gift from the Reich Ministry der neuen Technologie, so we are able to obtain some excellent aerial photographs. I feel this device will come in handy later on.

And more visitors, like a Raumboot:


And a Vorpostenboot:

We chart a course to Helgoland, a place less interesting than it's name.


We have another visitor, a Scnellboot.

In the control room. It's comfy right now, but then everyone took a shower this morning. Things will change.



Our escort is heading back to dock. We wish them well... not really.

Still following our escort as we make the turn to head out to the North Sea.



Oh, somebody else is working, hauling coal.

My navigator is busy keeping notations in pencil on the chart as to where we are. He erases very well, you can't even see where we've been! By the way, we are the diamond near the center of the screen.


There are other ships out here as well. This one's flag means it's from... ah, the Netherlands? That can only mean Heineken and Grolsch aboard.


And it's not just working ships. This little yacht is probably the property of some Party member, having a party with his member. Sorry, it's the lack of beer talking.

Looks like someone else has a big ship ready to go in harm's way!


Oops, probably not. No guns. No turrets.

This is our escort through the minefields. Bet they will be back drinking beer before dark


We follow him out through the minefields:


My first officer tries to hide his gaze from me, but I know what he's thinking. Oh, I know.

And we are underway! Good bye, Wilhelmshaven! Good bye, fresh beer! Good bye, fresh women


Last look at the dockyard. Lots of smoke!


Old Wilhelmshaven is a nice place. Shame someone will probably bomb the hell out of it soon:



I do see a neutral ship at the dock. Hmm, Swedish I think. Probably important that I be able to recognize flags.

Thanks Soulchilde. I haven't done one of these in a while, but they are fun.

Finally, on the boat. Damn, bit of a swell today, even at the dock:


My first officer. He's a bit leery of me. Or maybe he looks that way all the time:


We do have a band for the send off. Bunch of damn draft dodgers if you ask me:

Adjust the Realism settings (ok, I'm a wimp, only 52% )


And my mission orders:


Area AN52 is off the coast of England (might be hard to see here).


Here you go, a bit better:

I'm a bit bored from spending several days reading Jefferson: The Art of Power, so I decided to fire up SH3 and do another war patrol, my fourth.

First, fire up SH3 with the Grey Wolves expansion:


My trusty Mark VIIB


Back at HQ:

Omerta: City of Gangsters via Steam.

Clearly it's worth at least trying, but what are your opinions of it after regular use?

For me it's been easy to set up and use. Also I have gotten a number of legit notifications from WinPatrol, mostly new utilities I've been trying that want to start on Windows start or alter which programs are now the default for various extensions. WinPatrol otherwise hasn't nagged or popped up unnecessarily. I'm pretty happy with it.

How do you take screencaps from the game? The scenery is pretty nice and would like to record some of my "adventures". Right now I'm just driving around Italy which looks pretty good.

According to the manual it's F10, but since I have Steam I just use their F12 capture, so I haven't tested the F10 route.

I seem to be one of the few who generally has good experiences with Gamestop, so I would prefer they stay in business. And if that means they have to limit their expansion, ok. Just so long as my local store stays open.

And the mention in the article of the Borders closings brings salty tears to my eyes

New patch coming out soon for ETS2:

A New ETS2 Patch Almost Here
In a few days we should be ready to finally update Euro Truck Simulator 2 again. We are working on improving many parts of the game, we are definitely not just in maintenance mode. The development effort is substantial; we are committed to evolving the game for a long time. But things take time to get them done right, more than we would like for sure. Several extensive features which will not make it into this patch are already under development. Please have patience with us!

What to expect now?

First and foremost, the 1.3.x patch is bringing two more official truck brands into the game. Of course moders are doing fabulous job in this area already, but this is major news for us. We are proud to have official support from 6 of 7 biggest European truck brands. Down the line, this is going to have very important influence on the quality of our games, as well us perception of our games by the public and truck industry insiders alike. Far from all ETS2 players use mods, so having the real brands in the game "out of the box" is a welcome feature for the many thousands of players just using the standard game.

Second major development is addition of Product Key verification step to the activation process. It is no secret that in the recent weeks, a "key gen" has appeared which can fool the built-in Product Key check in many cases. On release, the game had no true "DRM" protection, it never contacted any database of valid keys to see if the Product Key is really issued and in good standing. All that the game did was check if the Key conformed to a complex mathematical formula. This protection step though was reverse-engineered, a key gen unleashed, and since then piracy is through the roof. It's not just casual piracy, it seems that several shady companies have made a business out of selling these fake product keys on the cheap, scamming customers by claims that these keys are valid. We had to do something about it, it was urgent as this was badly hurting both our pocket and our reputation. So instead of bringing you a new patch quickly, we had to concentrate on closing this hole and spend over a month of programmers' time implementing an extra Product Key verification step to the game. As of the new patch, everybody will be asked to re-enter their Product Key again, and this time the check will be more thorough, actually comparing the key with a database of valid keys. Any keys which are not genuine or are coming from stolen credit card purchases will be refused. We expect quite a storm of complaints as people will find out that the key they were using until now just fine was in fact invalid, but we simply must take this step to protect our business. Steam version of Euro Truck Simulator 2 can be activated by using genuine Product Keys issued for any other edition of the game, and seeing the activity on Steam it is already a clear indication of what to expect with so many people trying to use fake keys to register the game there.

The patch change-log has some 20 lines covering fixes and improvements not listed above, but we'll post this detailed list closer to release of the patch. For now, let us show you some of the visible changes and additions to the ETS2 truck fleet.

I played the demo a couple of times and have somewhat mixed feelings about it. If you watched the first video listed a few messages above you pretty much saw what was in the demo. As a tutorial mission it leads you through the mechanics of getting a hideout, raiding breweries and warehouses to get beer and liquor and then shows you how to sell it on the jobs screen, which is sort of a strategic level where opportunities to buy and sell beer, liquor and guns pop up somewhat randomly. There are several in-mission objectives that lead you through the process. Not too bad, and not all that complex: buy low (or steal it), sell high.

There were in my first playthrough of the demo three combat missions. The first one was the combat tutorial, then a sort of optional fight, then what was I guess intended to be the final fight where if you win it, you win the mission. I lost both times so I don't know if there is anything else to the demo, but I got the impression that this last combat mission was the end of it.

The tactical combat is... well, odd. There are attributes like defensive bonuses and offensive bonuses and health restorers you can get as perks when you level up, so that's nice. And apparently there are a mix of weapons. However, there is no opportunity fire mechanic. You can plop down behind furniture and end your turn and in the next turn an enemy (turns are per character, not per side) can run in through a door, run past you and kick you from behind or shoot you from behind, basically ignoring the cover you so carefully crouched behind. It's rather irritating. Maybe opportunity fire is introduced as a perk at a higher level, but right now I don't see it being available and that's a bummer.

So, not a glowing recommendation from me, but maybe there's more depth to the tactical combat than indicated in the demo. And maybe the main campaign has more bells and whistles. We'll see.

UPDATE: Apparently if you win that final tactical combat I mentioned above it unlocks another mission which expansions on the business gameplay. I've now played the demo three times and haven't been able to win that combat and go onto the second mission . In the full game you can just reload your autosave and try and try again, so I can't fault them for that, however, in the demo there is no autosave or saving at all, so if you blow the combat at the end of the first mission you have to replay the whole first mission again <sigh>.