10 posts tagged “gaming”

I had one of those banging-my-head-against-the-wall type of moments. It went something like this:
Little Brother: uh, Nathaniel, I accidentally deleted everything on the Wii.
Me: You......What? Why did you do that?!?!?!?!?
Little Brother: I thought it would make it go faster.
Now, you must understand something. We've had this Wii for almost a year now. We've had like 5 games that each of us have been working on since Christmas. I was just getting into the Zora Temple in Zelda and my sister was 20 stars away from beating Super Mario Galaxy. So you can imagine how pissed I was when I heard this. I was especially pissed. It's probably going to take me another 6 months to get back to where I was in both Legend of Zelda: Twlight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy. It's pretty annoying, but, hey, if life gives you lemons, make Lemonade. 

More and more, I'm seeing that you might need 2 PSU's if your building a high end or even a mid-range gaming PC in the next year. The fact of the matter is that graphics cards keep on sucking more and more power and PSU's just can't keep up. The highest rated PSU that I've seen are 1000W. Considering that the new ATI card the 2900XT draws an appauling 215W at peak load. That's esssentially the load of my entire system onto one video card. and things can only good uphill from here. So now high end enthuiseits are proposing that 2 PSU's be put into a system. One for the main set of components, the CPU, the RAM, the Hard Drive and Optical Drive, but a second PSU for t

he GPU. I can see it happening I mean, for the amount of performance that your getting out a GPU core, the top end I think is somehere around 600 MHz (granted the memory is clocked much higher, mine's at 1.45 Ghz, the new nvidia cards go somewhere around 2 Ghz.) 215W is a lot to ask for a graphics card. So say hpyithetically that OEM's do decide to go ahead with the 2 PSU concept. Can you imagine if you wanted to run SLI or Crossfire? You might as well put another 500W power supply in they're. This could cause amajor shakeup in the hardware industry. Not only will Intel have to reexamine the ATX power standard (currently there is only one ATX power connector on most motherboard, server motherboards might have more.) If your going to put a second power connector on the motherboard, your probably going to need to revamp the entire architecture. Case makers will also have to do some redesign, unless they can manage to put the PSU into a 3.5" or a 5.25" bay, which is unlikely. Needless to say that both ATI and nvidia need to figure out what they're going to do with the graphics card business. With AMD/ATI trying to tie the GPU into the CPU, graphics may become a thing of the past very shorty. For know though, I'm sticking with my new 7600 GT.

    So I've been using Windows Vista for about a month now and i tried something that I had not tried: gaming. I had heard that many games that worked in XP would not work in Vista. First I tried one of my favorite games of all time: The Original Rise of Nations. It's an awesome game that I love playing. It installed fine but then it wouldn't run. Ah well, let's try again. I tried again with a more recent game Star Wars: Empire at War. This time it worked. They're a little backstory to this one. When you get most games these days, they come with a serial key that you must put in to activate the game. Well, I lost the manual that has the serial key on it. So I went out and got a key from Keygen.us. Is this wrong? I don't think so. I bought the game, I own it. I'm not uploading it to bittorrent. Anyway, the game works fine. I'm running the budget ATI card the X1300 Pro. I plan on upgrading to the X1650 Pro next month and that should boost game performance even more. I still want to try a few more of my games including Command & Conquer: Generals and C&C Generals: Zero Hour. So contrary to popular belief, gaming isn't that bad in Vista. At least on the games that are compatible.....  

    So now that I've got my copy of Vista up and running, I spend some of the day getting some of my stuff working. I've figured out that Democracy Player doesn't work, which is not a big problem, but I wish it would. I went over to Kevin's for a game day. That was a lot of fun. We had a grand 'ol time gaming and I enjoyed myself quite a bit. Came home and started to try and repartition my disk. I got rid of my Ubuntu partition as I wasn't using it a whole lot, so I wanted my 20 GB back. I spent the better part of 2 hours looking for a decent program to partition with. But then I realized it was all there anyway. Vista has it's own partitioning tools, which run quite well, thank you very much. After messing with it for a good 30 minutes I finally reclaimed my 20 GB of lost space. So now I'm all happy with my Vista install. No more dashing to the computer to scroll down a list of operating systems either. At least that's over with.
Back to school tomorrow :-( More work to do.

    With exams over, and life back to somewhat normality, I decided to once again fedd my moderate gaming addiction and pull out an old favorite of mine. It's not that old, only 4 years, but to me, it's a classic. Command & Conquer Generals, was a sequel to the highly successful Command & Conquer: Red Alert series. It's based on modern events. You have your high tech USA (my personal favorite.) Your middle tech/numbers-is-always-better Chinese side and your low tech, shadowy GLA (think Hamas/Islamic/Chechan terrorist types.) I got the original game in Christmas 2003 and the expansion in Febuary 2004. I've racked up dozens of victories against computer generated opponents. I haven't been as successful against my friends though.
    I'm an RTS gamer, I'm not really a fan of the FPS genre. I mean I've bought a few FPs's over the years, such as Stare Trek Elite Force and Star Trek Elite Force II. But that's about it. I'm a big fan of the RTS genre. I have a number of RTS's on my shelf. Rise of Nations, Star Trek Armada II, Command & Conquer Generals, C&C Generals: Zero Hour, and Battle For Middle Earth II. I'm not the kind of the person to run out and get the greatest games. I'm looking at getting Star Wars:Empire at War. It was released at the beginning of 2006. And here's the advantage: Price. When the game came out it was 50 bucks plus tax. Now it's down to 20 bucks plus tax. I mean, by the time that you get the game it's not the latest and greatest. But I don't care. So I'm going to get that game soon and play with some of my buddies online. Can't wait.
Tomorrow is the beginning of Semester II and No Math! Can't wait. Time for a posting frenzy. 

   

Today was fun. Went to the church to get the cleaning done,  got it done around 1130ish, went home, got cleaned up had lunch and went to Kevin's house for a afternoon/evening of gaming. It was lots of fun. About 2/3's of the way through we stopped gaming and played a game of Risk. Joel wooped Kevin's and I's butts. He took over Asia first and then I tried to get him to help me take down Kevin. He played Hitler to my Stalin and stabbed me in the back by taking Alaska. After that we decided game over as it was clear that Joel was unstoppable. So after that we played a few games of Battlefront II and manged to almost conquer the Galaxy before Joel had to leave. I stayed a bit longer as my parents didn't come back from the movie until later. So I just finally got home about 20 minutes ago and decided to post on update here. I'll try and get that end of the year post out to you guys before the end of tomorrow. After that post I might have one more on New Years, but that's it for 2006.I'll try and have that up for you guys tomorrow, if not, I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Or a happy Kawanza. Or a happy Hanukkah, whatever you celebrate, enjoy the holiday season.

    So things went okay tonight, I had to go down to the church and clean. Why may you ask, well I'll tell you. Basical

ly, my church is thinking about sending a mission team to Germany in 2008. So we basically have a two year time frame to fund raise a large amount of money to cover airfare, food and everything. So the Trustee's (the people who take care of the church building.) offered to give a part of the caretakers salary if we cleaned the church. So we set up a schedule and we normally clean part of the church on Saturday (by we I mean me and my sister) and we normally clean the sanctuary but we where instructed this time to clean the downstairs. I though I was instructed to mop the entire downstairs when we where only supposed to mop the gym. That would have cut about an hour off our time to clean, and besides, my sister thinks me completely in competent of cleaning and I really started to get fed up with all her complaining. It starts to drive you nuts after a while and I basically told her off, because I was sick of it. But whatever, we got it all done and don't have to do it for two more weeks. Bonus: We are having 2 long weekend in a row. We had a long weekend last week, another this week (Monday) and anther next week so I can sleep in on Monday morning. Bonus #2: I had my free last today which means I get to go home early. This means that I get to sleep in on Tuesday as well. So that's awesome. And I get the house to myself for tomorrow which means some actual sanity.
    I also went through my game pile tonight and pulled out Star Trek: Elite Force II which I have not played for years. I got it back in 2003 and it was an awesome game. It still it an awesome game, but my performance is off. In the 3 level I kept on getting burned by a Plasma fire and dieing. Now I jump and miss the landing and fall to my doom, so I've given up on it for a little while.
I'll post tomorrow.   

    I just read an article on Wired news that a over 800 sex offenders, have been caught by a Wred news reporter who wrrote a script that allows that found them from a few lines of code. One of these really bad people is a sex offender by the name of Andrew Lubrano. a registered sex offender who's now on the hook for talking lewdly to teenagers on MySpace. Why in the world can a Wired News reporter fined 800 pedophiles writing one measly script, why can't MySpace and the mighty resources of  Rupert Murdoch, not find them? Now I can sympathize with the fact that the userbase is in the millions, but you'd think that the mighty resources of New Corp, would be able to find a decent web programmer who can write a script. I guess not, because they couldn't seem to find them without the help of a reporter from Wired news. The reporter found 744 offenders, okay what the heck? Who did Murdock not find these perverts? They probably stick out like a store thumb. I mean there are probably more out there that are disguised as teenagers. This is just another reason why MySpace deserves to DIE!
      And apparently  E3 will be reborn in Sata Monica this August in a much more invitation-only format. Instead of being a large, bloated party it will be much more isolated events, instead of the huge multi-million event, it will be much more of a deal making event instead of all the glitter and shininess that it has consisted of for the past several years. Needless to say, I'm a bit disappointed. I would've liked to go to the giant party, but from what I can tell it was getting a bit out of hand with a lot of 14 year old kids getting in while legit reporters from publications where not getting in. I suppose it's good for the gaming industry in the long run, however it's kind of sad to not have a great big party to look forward too every May. 
    One final thing before I wrap this post up. Apparently McDonaldsJapan has distributed 10,000 mp3 players in a contest. However, a large number of them have a trojen on them. No word from McDonalds yet on what they're going to do to fix the problem, but they'll probably offer a year of Big Macs to the Japanese as compensation. I always thought if the horrible food didn't kill, you, they'd go after your computer next.

Anyways, that's my post for now.
   
   
   

*headdesk* Morons. Have you seen this? Apperently Dell wants to move into the gaming market. Michael Dell (the Founder) who is now chairman of the board says that he see's the video game industry going into the billions of dollars in the next few years.And Mr. Dell want's to position his company to become the premier supplier of gaming machines. Hehe.No. Just because Dell is the largest producer of computer systems in th world doesn't neccesarily mean that you're able to create a quality gaming rig.
    A Perfect example is the Dell XPS. The Dell XPS 700 was annonced earlier this year and was supposed to be ready for shipping. er...Right. It's now September and the first of the systems are just shipping now. So you want to become the premier supplier of video game computer systems in the world, but you can't even ship a single system on time? WTF? And besides. The really hardcore gamers won't go with a Dell system. They got with some of the other more well known (and more expensive) systems such as Alienware, Falcon and Voodoo. They use better quality componenets. I mean, yes the Dell system is better than what I'm typing on right now, however the hard-core game system makers do a better job because they don't have to worry about pleasing everyone. Dell has product lines for everyone from the student who just wants to type, to the professionals who want it for science experiments to the road warrior. With Alienware and Falcon, they're a specialty company and only a certain demographic come to them for the product they produce. They don't have to play a balancing act like Dell has too. Bottom Line: Just because your the biggest and that now you have Alienware, doesn't mean your the best. Michael Dell is essentially right, however he's wrong in thinking that everyone will turn to Dell for there every computing need.

Woot! The LAN party was awsome last night. We had a few technical hiccups getting everything connected, but everything ran smoothy after a while and it was a blast.

What's the nerdiest thing about you?

    Wow. That's a big question. Probably my first indication of "Nerdiness" is the fact that I started to watch Star Trek when I was about 12. I was obsessed with it to the point where I considered myself trilingual (Klingon being the third lanugage.) and constantly talking about Star Trek. That phase of my life has come and gone. But other things have taken it's place. I am now obsessed with the internet w hich is a switch for me, because at one point I was a serious gamer at one point. I used to spend a considerable amount of time playing games like Rise of Nations, Command & Conquer: Generals & Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour. Now's it reversed. I don't spend that much time gaming any more. Most of my time is spent browsing tech news sites like Neowin, BoingBoing, Slashdot and Digg. I also read several blogs including Bored, Cult of Mac and Scoblizer. I also read a few comics on alternating days. My favorite is Control-Alt-Delete by Tim Buckley. It's released every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I also read Joy of Tech from time to time and it's released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I also just discovered a new webcomic yesterday called Blaughl, which is a Blogger's comic. All three of the above mentioned comics make fun of pop culture and are very funny.
    Another thing about me is that I'm a Machead. I love the Macintosh, even though I don't own one (yet) I love the Mac. And Mac OS X is superior to Windows in so many ways. But that's a subject for another post. I don't own a top-of-the-line computer. I don't have many gagdets and gizmo's. Probably the only gimzo at this point that I own is my Ipod Nano. I plan on buying a Macbook in a few months, but until then I'm stuck with this Dell *pats the old Dell Tower* at a solid 1.59 Ghz and 512 RAM. It'll be nice to have a 2.0 Ghz Processor and 1 GB of RAM in the Macbook.  So I'm a techno-nerd I just don't own a whole lot of gadgets and stuff.