10.14.06

Face Shooting

Posted in Gaming at 4:54 pm by Soabirw

Even though I was exhausted after my camping excursion, I wanted to try out some new games. Been very busy the last year or so and haven’t been able game like I used to. So I tried out Company of Heroes for while. That game is pretty amazing. I only got through the first mission, which was the beaches of Normandy. Follows the Battlefield series concept of flags, in a way. When you take over a capture point, you have control of that area and will get more resources. So you are constantly having a back and forth for these capture points.

Speaking of Battlefield, we also got the Battlefield 2142 demo. The three of us hoped on the same server (made God damn easy with their new Buddy List) and before we knew it, it was 3:00 a.m. Was still pretty pumped from the game, so I had to force myself to go to bed. You can do the usual flag maps, but they also introduced a new game type where each group has a massive Titan ship. You take over missle silos to take down the sheilds, then you can board it to do more damage. The first person to blow up the enemy ship wins.

So far my favorite thing about the game is vehicles. There is a good variety and they all have their strenghts and weaknesses. Unlike Battlefield 2, where it was more of an “armor is armor” and some things had a lot of it and others you could destroy with rocks. They also have more incentive to have other ride in your vehicles with you. Most of the really powerful and handy weapons aren’t accessible to the drivers. In Battlefied 2, nobody would wait for anybody else. We would always joke that they thought APC meant Armored Personal Carrier instead of Armored Personel Carrier. We are very clever, we know. But we can’t count the times one man has taken off in a vehicle that holds 6+ as his team mates run after him screaming, waving their hands, and even firing their weapons.

09.05.06

Soa Pro IV: Games

Posted in Gaming, Toys at 6:41 pm by Soabirw

I was working so hard to get Boot Camp working just so I could see how game performance would be. Trying to read reviews on the internet about this is a complete waste of time. If you don’t have a Core 2 Duo Extreme, quad SLI video, 8 gigs of RAM (even though Windows XP only detects 3 or 4gb) and killer nics then your PC is garbage and can’t handle any games period. My “old” PC is far from these requirements, yet I can play all my games with max graphics. Even new demos like Prey. Not perfectly, I’ll admit, but definitely well enough for me. So the Mac Pro needed to do at least that much.

My first tests were City of Heroes and Titan Quest since those are the two games I actually plan on playing. City of Heroes is on maximum graphics (%200 textures and such) and it runs like a dream. Incredibly smooth, even when running through crowded cities with Super Speed. Which on my old system would hiccup now and then. City of Heroes isn’t the most graphics heavy and gorgeous game, but it is fairly processor heavy because of the large world. Titan Quest also ran great with full graphics and that one is a pretty new and intensive game. I haven’t spent more then 10 minutes in the game so far though, so jury is still out. Next was the Prey demo and the new Flight Simulator X. Prey ran great at max graphics even on the multiplayer maps that had you jumping through all sorts of portals and switching you upside down like crazy. Never a single hiccup. When Intendant cranked Flight Simulator X to max it really put the hurt on his PC. He loves his flight sims, so this was a real good test for him. With everything on Ultra High our flight was smooth as silk. Water effects were amazing too.

And this is with the base video card and RAM. I eventually plan on either doing SLI or upgrading to a beefier video card. And I am definitely getting more RAM. I’ll wait until this thing starts to have problems with games before I stress about the video card, but the RAM will be in the near future.

While I was having fun in City of Heroes I decided to do a little recording of me and 8th (Sosacms) doing our usual encounters. Hopefully this will get a few of the resistant savages hooked. VirtualDub actually detected all 4 processors just fine, so it was encoding to Divx at 100 fps. That was pretty damn neat.

07.03.06

Diablo III

Posted in Rant, Gaming at 2:52 pm by Soabirw

Was going to post about this earlier, but didn’t get the chance. I’ve been playing Diablo III of and on since Friday night. The name of the game is actually Titan Quest, but don’t let that fool you. It really is Diablo III. We’ve been dieing for something like this for a very long time. I could not be happier.

Well, I could be a little bit happier, but not because of any game flaw. They use SecureRom copy protection and it causes the game to crash a lot. And whenever the game crashes it corrupts your character. You have to delete your saved data, like quests, just to load your character up again. Your character is fine, game just puts you back to the beginning and forgets all the quests you did. I’ve found a few tricks (save every 2 minutes and ALT+F4 to quit instead of menus) that have let me play for a very long time without a single crash though. They are also looking into the problem, but they say it is hard to troubleshoot since some people are using a cracked game and some are using Deamon Tools because the idea of swapping game discs like crazy in this day and age is a joke to some (myself included). And others are doing everything legitimately and still having the issue. I think it’s a great anti-piracy strategy though. Nothing will prevent people from pirating your game more then making it unplayable for everybody.

When it is working, it is a most fantabulous game though. And plan on playing it a lot more and really enjoying myself.