• 21Nov 09

  Time to upgrade my PC!

  Sadly my Graphics Card (ATI 2900xt) passed away today, aged 27 months.

  I was having crash problems in Modern Warfare 2. It would just go blank mid game. Anyway it started happening more and more. Then it would happen in all games after like 5 minutes. Finally it would instantly happen when I started a game. Eventually it went black and stayed black and would not display anything on restart. The warranty was 2 years so I'm out of luck on a replacement. I'm now running my onboard 6100 gpu, I will say having on board gpu as a backup is a wise choice even though I can't really play any games with it my pc is still very usuable!

  On the upside this greatly advances my plans for a computer upgrade and I have been going through some builds. I'll be going with an AMD system again! I've been looking at something like the following

  AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 3.2GHz 8MB Cache (AM3) - Black Edition
  XFX HD5850 1GB, DDR5, 256bit, PCIE, Dual DVI-DL, HDMI (HD-585A-ZNFC)
  Corsair TX-650 650W ATX Power Supply
  Gigabyte GA-MA790GPT-UD3H AMD Mainboard - 4x DDR3 / 6x Sata Raid / 1x IDE / Gigabit Lan / Onboard VGA/DVI/HDMI / AM3
  OCZ 4096MB 240-pin DDR3 Platinum 1333Mhz PC-10600 Twin Pack (2x 2048mb sticks) w/heat spreader, CAS7-7-7-20

  I will probaby get another hard drive. Western Digital 1TB to go along with my numerous drives already and install Windows 7 64 bit on there. The 5850 card comes with DiRT 2 coupon which is nice, you don't see many good game bundles anymore.

  I'm probably going to order these parts soon because I want to get back to some gaming (Risen and MW2 mp) and it's rapidly approaching christmas time which means holidays for me.

  

  I managed to get through the single player of MW2 and play a fair chunk of the mp. Overall I'd say it was a good game but the multiplayer on the PC is gimped in comparison to COD 4 and most other shooters. There is no denying this fact, even though it isn't horrible it could be better. I'll probably still play some more mp, it's mostly good fun and there isn't much else on the multiplayer table.

  Check out my review of MW2 here

  Game releases have slowed, at least on PC. Not much left for me this year but I'm interested in getting Dragon Age Origins at some point. DiRT 2 looks ok and from the ps3 demo I played it should be fairly fun.

  

  I've been playing some Little Big Planet on PS3. It's a pretty amazing game, I have gotten quite a few laughs out of it when playing with random folks online. It's a platformer where you collect these bubbles and do all this crazy bouncing, driving, hanging, destroying. What's more is it comes with a very very powerful level editor to create and amazing variety of things, the music is also really good.

  • Posted Nov 21, 2009 11:59 pm PT
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• 14Nov 09

  MW2 and Torchlight

  

  I just finished the campaign for MW2 on PC, it took roughly 5 hours to complete on mostly regular. I did some hardened to start with but felt I died too much for it to be fun. Even on regular I died quite a lot but that's mostly because I'm impatient and run out and attack everybody. This 5 hours also includes repeating the opening tutorial mission about 6 times and one mission about 3 times because crashes sent me to the start of missions. For some reason SP would just crash for me, reinstall + compatibility mode seems to have fixed it so I got most of the second half done fairly quickly

  Overall I'd say the sp campaign improved over COD 4 which I wasn't a huge fan of, main reason is the spawning of enemies. It seemed more natural compared to clown houses in COD 4, more rooftops, doors, alleys etc. The campaign jumped around a LOT. I think this was done to keep the interest up and it mostly worked. Without spoiling things there were a few things I didn't quite understand with the story. There were a couple of cool segments even if they were really short, again making sure there is enough variety.

  I have played some multiplayer on PC and I will say that the peer 2 peer system isn't anywhere near as bad as I was expecting, the netcode is ok. The problem with p2p is that it can be very inconsistent, hosts drop, gets laggy sometimes. But perhaps the major thing that bugs me is that you can't vote for maps, vote kick players, no team autobalance, no team swapping, no text chat in the lobby. I do like that I can get in a game very quickly, 5-10 seconds and usually it works well.

  I've played some spec ops, mostly short missions. They weren't bad but I not sure I'll be replaying them. I'll try them all once and play some more multiplayer.

  Some screens:

  

  Bigger Collection of Screenshots

  -------------

  

  Torchlight gets my seal of approval (click here for my review), Diablo fans can rejoice here is one of the better action rpg games in a long while. It doesn't quite have the same atmosphere as diablo but the combat is much more fun and the loot is great. $20 price tag is very appropriate, lots of replay value or over 10 hours for one playthrough on normal and I didn't do many side quests. In any case it's a good timesink and you can play for short or long sessions and still get rewarded.

  ----------

  It's getting close to the end of the year now, not many releases left even on the consoles. I guess it's time to start thinking about a GOTY. Have you guys decided on one yet? It might be a little early but most of the big releases are out if you picked them up that is. I haven't played Dragon Age but have heard good things.

  Start of next year looks pretty damn cramped for game releases because some games got pushed back into 2010. I guess it's better that way than to have them all crammed into the holiday season but a few more for 09 would have been nice.

  • Posted Nov 14, 2009 6:03 am PT
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• 31Oct 09

  Torchlands

  I picked up two games this week, both on Steam. Torchlight and Borderlands. Would you believe that my Steam Account has 85 games on it? How about believing that my Steam folder is currently 192GB in size and has over 140,000 files? I've had to delete a few games to make some room.

  I've played about 3 hours of Torchlight and about 2 hours of Borderlands so far so I can't really conclusively define either game. My initial impressions are quite different for both. I'm enjoying one and not really enjoying the other, I'm sure you can work out which based on my long impressions below! Keep in mind these are very early impressions, I'm curious about how either game changes after you put some serious hours into it.

  

  Borderlands:

  The Good:

  Shooting works pretty well, lots of random guns but they managed to make the mechanics work well for rifles, machine guns, shotguns and pistols. If you manage to get connected online the netcode seems pretty good. The art st-yle graphics are good, it is very similar to Prince of Persia 2008 but with perhaps more paper cartoon look.

  The Bad:

  I'm not enjoying it; the vehicle controls aren't very good. There are spawn nodes where the same type of enemy will spawn 5 minutes after you just killed the same group from that exact same location. There is no atmosphere at all in the world, the game relies on being generic and somehow trying to exploit how silly it is (this may be a turn on for some people). With some over the top characters / enemy types. I tried about 40 severs to get a coop game going and connected to just two. Apparently you need to forward ports which is ridiculous, needs a patch asap.

  Once connected I was with high level players and I gained 2 levels far away from the action just for being in the world for about 2 minutes. The second match I did lots of random quests at my level with higher level players who were nice enough to help out with good weapons. The quests were standard bore fest run here, get this, and kill this guy. I had to deal with many groups of dog like enemies over and over. The game relies on you to have fun by just killing generic baddies over and over doing so far nonsense quests in a bland world.

  There is no "save" the game saves when it wants, which is usually at quest turn in I think. But say you made a trek across the level you can't save there, you must restart from a node in town, this is obviously done to make it coop friendly you just hop in or out of games. Lots of ammo and money scattered around from enemies or in storage containers but you have to press "E" to pick it all up, for ammo and money this is annoyingly unnecessary.

  Screens:

  

  

  Torchlight

  The Good:

  Diablo st-yle music, it constantly saves so you can instantly leave the game and come back where you were exactly (preserving the entire world), dungeon crawling action, great loot system with constant upgrades and steady increase of items, pretty good art design great set of powers and skills, automatically pick up gold when you are near it, pet can sell your stuff while you bash monsters, good range of monsters. Treasure rooms, more action orientated with skill types. Some differences in weapons but allow you to play your own sty-le(dual weild, ranged, shield). Four spells to hold, might be things like summon skeleton or fireball.

  The Bad:

  Inventory is one item per slot no matter size, gems look tiny. Less character than Diablo games, npcs only have like "hello" then wall of text. Some samey looking levels even though they are meant to be random. Loot on ground has overlapping tags. Narrator can be annoying "you have triggered a trap" as flames come out of a barrel – thanks captain obvious.

  Screens:

  

  -----------

  So I'm really enjoying Torchlight on the whole, its simple fun and gets most of the action RPG basics right. I think there will be a patch soon to fix the loot on the ground where picking up rare stuff is sometimes very difficult.

  Borderlands is not doing much for me so far (I'm level 10), I think it's design motto was "hey let's just shoot stuff together" which honestly doesn't do it for me. I do not think it's a great example of combining the FPS and RPG genres. The most interesting story aspect is the Angel Lady that talks to you from time to time.

  While initially you might look at both games and say Torchlight is a casual, Borderlands is less so. I would disagree with that from what I've seen. Torchlight has far more depth in your equipment, skills, pet, attack combinations than Borderlands has had so far. Borderlands seems to be entirely casual, lets join coop and kill things with our guns+2. There are similarities between the two games, they both rely on a loot system to keep the player going I guess and both are doing a decent job with loot. Torchlight has a better story than Borderlands – and Torchlight hasn't got a great story believe me.

  Of course these are initial impressions; I've only played a few hours of both. Things could change and please don't take offense if you are really enjoying Borderlands , it's just an opinion. I'm hoping things get better and they patch the co-op so people don't need to forward ports.

  ---------------

  I finished Uncharted 2 again on hard, solidifying the game being among the best. The experience was actually better the 2nd time and difficulty wise it was fine because I knew what was coming. I don't think I will try on Crushing, no need to ruin my experience.

  I've tried online but it hasn't been a great experience, matchmaking keeps putting me in with American players and there is some noticeable lag doing things like punching (eg I press punch, I see myself die, then I see I punched some guy to death) I'm not really sure if this is how matchmaking functions on consoles (i.e. very poorly) or is just a quirk with Uncharted 2.

  -------------

  Has anybody used Xfire game store, or heard any good or bad news about it? I'm tempted to give it a try and see how it compares with others. It's always better to have lots of competition out there, gives consumers more options, lowers prices.

  • Posted Oct 31, 2009 8:41 pm PT
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