After dealing with such a colossal asshole yesterday morning I was in the mood to kill. So I went and bought Quake 4 to fulfill my thirst for blood. I was even able to score the Special DVD Edition of the game that comes with Quake 2 and both of it’s expansion packs. Since it’s using the Doom 3 engine the first thing I did after installing the game was find myself a good tweak page. I ended up just using the same site that made Doom 3 playable for me. UpsetChaps Quake4 Guide‘s Framerate and Visual Tweaks made the game really run better than I had hoped. And so far I think it’s a great game. Here are some screen shots:

As you can see from these shots it is a dark game. But it is no where near as dark as Doom 3. Quake 4 retains that futuristic metallic look of the second game. It’s a hell of a lot of fun killing Stroggs again. If you enjoyed Quake 2 I would say this is a must have.

Fuck I just can’t come up with a decent entry. I’ve made a few attempts. Nothing really ever felt right. I’ve also made a few attempts to write about some of the things going on at the hotel as well. But I get maybe three sentences in and I loose my steam. I just think that I’ve grown tired of the bullshit of that place. I feel no need to publicize the retarded goings on at the hotel anymore. I’m certainly not going to write about my new boss for a number of reasons.

So other than that I’ve been doing my usual. Which isn’t a lot. I’m still a non smoker. And I’m still wasting a lot of time playing games. Currently I’m playing a lot of Fable and a little of City of Heroes/Villains. Fable I never played on the Xbox for maybe more than 15 minutes so I never got to into it. On the pc it seems to have captured my attention no problem. Sure it’s short even with the “lost chapter”. It’s just the little things I like about Fable. Like how townsfolk keep certain hours. Don’t expect to go buying/selling loot late at night. They also move around in a manner that I’m sure is scripted, yet seems more natural than in other rpg’s.

City of Heroes is still fun for the moment. City of Villains I can’t really go into because of those pesky NDA’s that usually involve beta tests. I’m not all to sure how long my affair with City of Heroes will last. I’m pretty sure that as soon as the Dark Age of Camelot expansion is out I’ll jump back over to it to get my horse. And then maybe back to World of Warcraft. I’m starting to think I just may be burnt out on mmorpg’s in general.

I picked up Dungeon Siege II and I’m having a lot of fun with. I’m having so much fun I only had these two screen shots. Every time I go into the game to get some good shots I forget all about it.

The last time I talked about the game it was in the beta stage still. I mentioned then how it had borrowed the Diablo 2 skill system. Well after just getting to the third act of the game I’ve come to the conclusion that the game borrowed a lot more than that from Diablo 2. At times it almost feels like I’m playing Diablo 2. The way towns work is a great example. Each chapter has one central location where you can do your business. You won’t find any other cities while your out in the field. So if you want to sell all the loot you found you have to hoof it back. Or you could use the town portal spell, another one of obvious things borrowed from Diablo 2.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t think that borrowing these elements from Diablo 2 make the new Dungeon Siege a bad game. It certainly adds to the game. But at the same time I miss some of the things left out of the game that was in the first one. Take the way your party was handled in the first game. Each party member was like a unit in a rts game. You could give them orders on how they behaved in combat. You could assign a few different formations to your party. And if you wanted the party could almost seem to play the game themselves.

And even though the games has just been released and there are no tools available yet some folks have already figured out how to make mods. You can find a few of them right here on my server. Or you could go to the source which is a number of places including Guru Dungeon Siege 2 Mod and some at Siege-mods.com. It’s definitely worth picking up if you liked the first one.

So Fileplanet has a sign up for the Dungeon Siege II multiplayer beta (Fileplanet subscribers only), which you can sign up for right here. Below are some screen shots to make you want to be a subscriber to that damn Fileplanet:

Dungeon Siege II brings some new features to the this version of the game. Duel Wielding being one of the things I noticed first. They also have in place a Diablo 2 like skill tree that you can invest character points as you level. Spending points in the different paths gives you special abilities that you can use as they charge up as you fight monsters. And of course the graphics have been tweaked a little, as it does look better than the first game. Also the ability to save your game in the multiplayer game has been added. They also have a few different game types such as the ability to play just one character or the option to be able to play the multi portion with a limited party.

I’ve been playing Guild Wars since the 27th of April. I was able to get a pre order box so I could play starting at 12:01 am on the 27th. I’ve had my eye on this game since around this time last year. Guild Wars comes at an opportune time as my adventures in the World of Warcraft are being made very un-fun with the inclusion of the so called “honor” system and a contest to encourage this so called honor system of Blizzard’s.

Guild Wars at this moment in time feels like a fun game. The biggest selling points right now are no monthly fees to play and the fact that just about everything is a private instance means I don’t have to worry about getting ganked (farmed for honor) as I try to level. I can’t stress how antisocial I am at this time because of this bullshit going on in WoW. So it’s nice to be able to be all alone in an area in Guild Wars if I want to be.

Another huge selling point as it turns out is that I can play the game from work. There is only one port number that needs to be open for the game to work and that port number happens to be open on this isp the hotel uses. The ability to play at work is really amazing seeing how just about every other port number on the internet is closed here at work.

The ability to play at work has many downsides as the these six screen shots above can show. The Intel Extreme Graphics Technology powered 82845G Graphics Controller in the work computer just doesn’t have the muscle to run a game like Guild Wars. The horrible graphics really isn’t the problem. The problem is that about 20 minutes into playing the computer crashes to a bsod that points to one of the driver files for the onboard vid card.

Which is really frustrating. I’ve updated to the latest drivers provided by Intel. I’ve lowered every setting in the game that I can. The damn thing still keeps crashing. Granted this pitiful video card is not supported by the game. I was just hoping to have some luck and make it work via tweaks. And I’m contemplating buying a cheap ass pci video card to put into the work pc I use. It all depends on how things go at the hotel in the coming weeks.

Half-Life 2 has been getting my full attention ever since the game was unlocked at 12:07 am (Valve time) on the 16th. I played the game from the time I got off of work (around 7 am) until about 4:00 pm. I only took 6 screen shots and the only ones of note to show are these shots of Barney and Alyx:

A couple of things about this game. First off the graphics are amazing. I think it’s even more than just the graphics, it’s the environments and the way the story unfolds around you. You may have heard about this games physics in a preview or two. And it’s something that has to be seen, I can’t do it justice writing about it. More or less if you played and liked the first Half-Life this game will be a must have.

Multiplayer is handled by the Counter-Strike: Source, the juiced up version of CS. Personally I don’t like CS so it’s not an issue to me and I’m not big on the multiplayer part of the game. But some people would like to have just a plain old Half-Life 2 Death Match mode. And from what I hear it’s coming thanks to the mod community.

I wasn’t going to do it. I said to myself I’ll never play it if I buy it. I figured how would I have time for any game other than World of Warcraft. Well I went into Best Buy and it called to me. I couldn’t resist I had to have it. I’m happy to say that Doom 3 by id Software was worth the wait.

Doom 3 is an amazing first person shooter (fps) and id is of course the kings of this genre as they prove with this game. It has to be the first id game with a god honest story in the game and not one paragraph in the game manual. Sure they take some elements from other games. Such as the way your PDA plays audio files and gets emails obviously lifted from System Shock 2.

But overall it just is an all around great gaming experience. The visuals have been talked about for years and there is no need to go into that here other than saying holy shit! Man it’s just fucking amazing. And the game is dark. Not just dark as in the creepy demons and hell that you expect from a Doom game. It’s just a combination of both the graphics and the sound. This is the second game that has freaked me out just a little.

And these screen shots above don’t do the game justice. I’m running the game at 1024×768 and with medium graphic quality selected. I also have tweaked the shit out of the game. I unpacked the pak4’s, I got the un-official ATI fix, the ATI beta 4.9 drivers, and of course modified my autoexec.cfg just to be safe. And for shits and giggles you can take a look at how the leaked version looked on my old computer right here.