I bought the Orange Box. I’m playing through Episode 2 because I’m too dumb for Portal. But then I hit a brick wall in the form of the driving shit in Episode 2. And again I’m apparently to fucking stupid to figure out what to do. Here is a visual history of what I’m doing. This is the wrong way obviously:

I won’t even get into Portal. I’m completely dead in my tracks. It’s fun enough. I have yet to try Team Fortress 2 online and with people. I played around with the commentary mode to look at the levels. Halo 3 has made me scared of playing online again with the young people.

Hellgate: London just went gold. Me and Gawain had been playing the beta. The nda has been lifted now that it’s gone gold. First let’s take a look at one of my favorite bugs from the beta. The goddamn portals. Jesus they were everywhere. They did eventually fix this one. But there are so many more.

Here is a movie of the portals. Keep in mind this is footage from a beta build. Also keep in mind supposedly the beta build players played was not the up to date build the developers had. Why one would have people test an old build of the game still baffles me.

[drain file 50 show]

And on top of retarded bugs like the above the performance is shit on my pc at times. You can find more screens shots from this old beta here. And then some newer old beta shots can be found here.

The best bug yet though has to be one Gawain has been suffering since we started playing this game. His chat window is fucking broken, patch after patch and new builds came and gone nothing ever fixing his problem.

He couldn’t even get one dev to reply about the problem. If you have beta access you can see his forum post right here. The game is a train wreck if you want to play over the net with a friend. The single player is supposedey in better shape. I don’t know myself because I saw that the just released demo has adware built in. And on top of everything else wrong with this game they finally announced what you get if you pay the ten bucks a month (cut and pasted from VE3D):

• Elite Mode – Tougher mobs, tougher all round
• Hardcore Mode – Perma-death mode for your character
• Themed events and items – First begins on day of release, Halloween
• Guild Creation – What it says on the tin!
• Achievements – Slay 6,000 zombies, get a pat on the back, and maybe a bonus item too
• Extra Character Slots – 24 for you, 3 for non-subscribers
• Larger Stash – Twice the space as non-subscribers
• Name Color – Get a colored name, wooo!
• Forum Icon – Makes you stand out on the official forums when bitching about the in-game ads

And that is it. What a great deal. Pass on the game and pass on the cheap ass shit you get for ten bucks a month. I’ll look at this one again in a years time. Just to see if it lasted and is finally playable.

Honestly I hadn’t planned on getting it. But I did. And I’m glad I did. With Halo 3 I had low expectations. With one feature in particular it has me really liking the game. That is the Theater mode. In theater mode you can replay saved films. In these saved films you can take screenshots. Screenshots that can be uploaded onto the net. It maybe a minor thing to some. But I happen to love taking screens of the games I’m playing. You can see a total of 33 screens here in my gallery.

Now if they would enhance these features. It’s a pain in the ass to use the file share to upload one picture at a time. I should be able to upload the entire lot. Or at the least flag shots I want to upload. Further negatives about all this, the default file share max is six slots. For replays, screenshots, game modes, etc, etc. You can pay 750 Microsoft Points to increase the file share to a total of 24 slots. That’s per month by the way. Hopefully this is something that more console games will enable players to do.

BioShock is a great game. With that out of the way let me explain why I own two copies of this game. It began with the Minimum System Requirements:

Operating Systems: Windows XP (with Service Pack 2) or Windows Vista
CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz Single Core processor
System RAM: 1GB
Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 128MB RAM (NVIDIA 6600 or better/ATI X1300 or better, excluding ATI X1550).
Sound Card: 100% direct X 9.0c compatible sound card
Hard disc space: 8GB free space

And then the Recommended System Requirements:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo processor
System RAM: 2GB
Video card:
DX9: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT or better)
DX10: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or better
Sound Card: Sound Blaster X-F series (Optimized for use with Creative Labs EAX ADVANCED HD 4.0 or EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 compatible sound cards)

So my pc is somewhere in between the Minimum and the Recommended. The game was released on the 21st. The pc demo for the game came out a day before release. The 360 demo came out on the 12th. So naturally I panicked and preordered a copy of the limited edition for the 360.

As it turned out I can run the game pretty good. Far better than I had honestly expected. On the demo my fps were at the lowest in the 20’s, the highest I saw was in the 70’s. So of course I was mad that I had preordered (and prepayed) the game for the 360. So I decided I would fire up Steam and preload the game, in case I decided (as I did) to buy the game twice.

When I did buy the game off Steam I was confident because I had preloaded it. All I had to do was wait for the designated time and I could play the game on the pc. As soon as the game unlocked I tried to fire it up, only to get the game to crash (the dreaded msvcr80.dll error) before even getting into the actual game.

My fix was to delete the local content for the game in Steam. Which meant I had to download the game again. I let it download while I was at work and when I got home I was happy to find out I could play. This is not a definite fix for the msver80.dll problem. It worked for me, but other claim no dice for it fixing the error.

Here is two screen shots followed by some more info important to anyone who either picked it up or is thinking about getting it. And don’t let these issues stop you from getting this great game.

Despite many positive reviews. There are a number of well documented issues. Including (but not limited to) issues with the widescreen support and the presence of SecuROM copy protection (even on Steam) which limits you to two installs at a time.

Someone recorded the 360 demo of BioShock. Embedded video below:

Video Died

You need the divx webplayer installed to view this video. You can get it here.

Teamspeak audio from me and my nephew playing eq2. The mp3 begins right after I tell the kid to tell uncle lumpy to go fuck himself after he had hassled my nephew about playing games to long.

ian-eq2.mp3 (837.2 KiB, 87 hits)

I often forget how the kids take my word like I know what I’m talking about. On the subject of lumpy I suppose I am. Fuck him. My favorite part is when my best friend gets on the mic to chastise me.

I’m playing Oblivion again. This time on the 360. With my newer computer dead I’ve got to get my fix on the 360 for rpg and such. The old computer can play EverQuest 2, I’m just really broke right now. So in a pinch Oblivion is a good choice. Well it’s the only choice for rpg’s on the 360.

Since it’s on the 360 I can’t use any unofficial plugins. I’m stuck with the official stuff only. And this time believe me I’ve skipped the goddamn horse armor. What I am playing with is listed below:

• Shivering Isles Expansion (2400 MS Points)
• Knights of the Nine (800 MS Points)
• Spell Tome Treasures (80 MS Points)
• Vile Lair (150 MS Points)
• Wizard’s Tower (150 MS Points)

Which in the end I spent about 45 bucks to purchase these on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Not including the 60 bucks for the actual game. All of which I hand the hindsight to purchase before my car died on me. Te last three in the list was just purchased for shits and giggles.

Knights of the Nine I’ve played before on the pc. In general it’s a fun little quest. Not sure it’s worth 800 MS Points. Shivering Isles on the other hand is an honest to god Expansion Pack and is well worth the money. It adds an almost Morrowind like landscape to the game. It’s quests so far are fun. I even got to push a guy off a ledge so he plummeted to his death. Until another real rpg comes out for the 360 Oblivion will have to do.