Recently in Gaming Category

OMG, the latest Zero Punctuation review is possibly the funniest yet.... ROFL, LAMO, etc.

So for the first time in ages I finished a proper, real game. I guess technically the last was Portal, but that wasn't a full First Person Shooter, more of a puzzle game. I have a bad habit of collecting single player first person shooter games, starting them, getting a bit in and then just falling to boredom, laziness, or the call of leveling up and getting that new shiny gun or achievement in an online FPS like Battlefield 2 or 2142 or Team Fortress 2. So I was pretty surprised when I completed CoD4.

I got Call of Duty 4 a while ago (not long after the beta was released) and was sucked in right away. The beta I wasn't impressed that much with, so imagine my surprise at how good I found the game. I'm sure there are a few spoilers about some of the niceties in there, and a couple of major spoilers I'll hide as best I can. So if you dare, here's a quick run down...

I was a bit bored today so I checked out Transformers, The Game. I played a grand total of about 3 minutes of it before I threw my hands up and uninstalled.

If you're going to buy this game, don't. If you're going to warez this game, don't.

Things that were wrong:

• An obvious conversion from a console game, meaning that all the menus had overlay text of "Press ENTER to select. Press backspace to go back.". They had to have this because there wasn't any mouse control in the menus. I haven't had a game without mouse control in the menus since the days of Doom.
  
• It would detect a joypad about every 10 seconds while I was in the menus (possibly my joystick) and ask me to hit a button on the device. Very annoying.
  
• Default mouselook was wrong... I'd assume you could go into the controls menu and change it, but when I went into the controls menu, my controls stopped working, and I had to alt-tab out of the game and end the process.
  
• Graphics were 'meh'.
  
• Gameplay was obvious in it's console heritage, with simplistic, small maps (the two I saw) and boring play.
  
• Game menus sucked due to aforementioned console heritage.
  
• This was the biggest for me... Every time the game was started you have to sit through the logos for activision, Travellers Tales, Hasbro, Paramount, then two pages of trademarks and copyright for helicopters and vehicles. Every time. I figure it was about a minute and a half of material, which is fine once, heck, I put up with the logos at the start of BF2142 and BF2 each time it starts up, but it's one, maybe two logos and maybe 20 seconds of time. It bugs me even more that the game doesn't seem to use this time to load the menus or game maps or anything because after you sit through them (no keypress will shortcut this it appears), then things still have to load up for the menus.
  

So to the Transformers franchise I say "great movie, keep at it, stay out of the bad game rip offs".

My buddy Shawn called up this lazy Sunday morning and wanted to hit the swap meet. Since I'm always one for the fun, excitement and danger of the swap meet, I agreed. Standard stuff, rows of bad DVDs, plants, crap, more crap, etc etc. My one golden find was a dingy looking copy of The Complete Battlefield Collection, which consisted of Battlefield 2 and the three booster packs: BF 2 Special Forces, BF2 Armored Fury and BF2 Euro Force. Big scratch on te DVD, but that didn't seem to matter for the install, and more importantly, the registration codes for the boosterpacks worked! Wh00t!

Of course, I've been playing the next iteration of the Battlefield series, Battlefield 2142, and coming back to this game (even though it's not that old), I'm realizing how much better 2142 is as far as speed to load, UI in the menus, etc etc.

Oh well, I got it for $15 (it was labeled as $35), so I'm happy. I didn't even think it'd install or register properly, so I'm way ahead now :)

I think it might be finally time to upgrade my windows box. Its main uses for me are a) Photoshop and image editing/cataloging/organizing and b) gaming, gaming and more gaming. Oh, and it runs my accounting software. Of those three applications, two of them are hardware intensive. I realized today that my current hardware is pretty old.... not as old as I thought originally, looking back it's only three years, however it's been a pretty busy three years. My single 2Ghz CPU machine doesn't know anything about "dual core" or "PCI-X", SATA.... heck, the best bang-for-buck hard drive at the time was 120G. Talking to some people today and found that the guy who has always shunned me for my upgrade lust (I'm talking to you Dana :) has a better machine than me! What's going on in this world! So anyway, I ordered myself a new system. I haven't been keeping up on hardware lately, so there are many many words on the quote that I don't understand, but the guy who spec'd it all out says it's a kick ass system. P4 dual core something or other, (my first foray into the Intel Pentium market since.... wow, the P2 era?), nVidia something or other (apparently a good gaming card but not the insane one that's got more cpu/ram/cost than the rest of your system) and other goodies. For people who have bought a computer in the last year or two probably old hat. Still, I'm happy and excited. Wonder if the hardware is all "Vista-Ready"?

What was the point of all of this? Oh right. After bitching about Battlefield 2142 and it's built in adware, I played Battlefield 2 again, and realized that the improvements in the BF2142 code were enough to have me completely annoyed with BF2, so I went and got it. No ads yet, lots of fun.... at least until I get into a small area with lots of people, at which point my computer throws up it's arms and screams for mercy. Same thing happens with Flight Simulator X, which screams any time I turn up the detail so that the ground is more than a muddy rendition with a box or two on it.

Update: Dana dug up the CPU specs and a PDF chart and a blog post on how to figure out if your chip is 64 bit compatible (which I had to rush around a bit to find out!).

Was talking with Dana this morning about games, flight sims, gaming today, and the up and downsides of console versus PC gaming. On a lark I went and looked up what I remembered being a really cool and advanced flight sim called Tornado, which came out in the Falcon 3.0 era around the early 90s. I even kept the box until recently because I remembered the game looking good and being really advanced.

Looking at the screenshots I obviously remembered it way different than it was, at least compared to games these days (especially the super pretty flight sims).

Why haven't a cool sim like Red Baron, Falcon 3.0 (my first PC game ever), or Strike Eagle come along lately? Where are the fun / realistic multiplayer flight sims, or the massive multiplayer flight sims? Have the number of game types just reduced?

Fun happy time I'm invited to a LAN tomorrow. Man, it's been ages since I've been able to go to one, and I'm really looking forward to it. Course, I have no idea if the q3/cod/etc installs actually work anymore, or heck, if I still even have them installed... probably a good thing to check eh? By the way, just for fun, here's a shot of the new UFies server.

Holy crap this looks cool. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a huge Battlestar Galactica fan.... hell, my conversations start with "Do you watch Battlestar Galactica?". Anyway, going through a list of upcoming games and saw Battlestar Galactica: Beyond the Red Line. Basically a BSG game. Nothing much in the website yet, but the forums seem to work. Want some drool material? Check out the BSG:BTRL Video Gallery. Very cool.

Wow... now this is some awesome hardware porn! Remember when I said I didn't know what I wanted for christmas? Well mortgage the car, I want one of these!

This really should be titled "How I Was Introduced to Levelling" or "How Battlefield 2 Stole My Life". I've never really played games that involved levelling or levelling up before. Basically levelling is the term for gaining experience in a role playing game, so as you do more and more of the same things, your power/strength/endurance/whatever increases. Since I play mostly first person shooters I've honestly never been exposed to this before. So needless to say I wasn't really sure what the heck the fuss about "ranked servers" in Battlefield 2. The idea basically is that the more stuff you do, the more points you get, the more points you get, the higher rank you get (following military ranks), and as you hit each rank you get weapon unlocks. I started out not really caring, and now I'm playing every night in hopes of hitting my next ranking. Currently my stats have me with 800+ points left to get to the next rank and next weapon unlock. The beauty of the ranking system in BF2 is that you get points not only for getting kills, but also for:

• healing teammates (playing as a medic)
• giving ammo (playing as support)
• being in a vehicle where the driver gets a kill

So last night I was able to get hooked up with a pretty decent chopper pilot and basically sat in the gunners seat and ran up close to a hundred points by pretty much doing nothing. Hint hint folks, getting points in BF2 has nothing to do with skill. So now I'm dreaing about this at night, playing as soon as I get home at night, and picking up random dropped gear (in the game) hoping to get someone who has an unlocked weapon to play with. Now I'm starting to understand some of the jokes around levelling, and have that deeper level of understanding about some of the conversations I've had with guys at work who have spent months building characters up and then selling them for considerable money in "Real Life". I can only imagine what will happen when BF2 fixes some of the huge UI problems they have and I don't feel like it's an epic just to get onto a server....