Work, sleep, and GTA

In that order.
by AC - permalink

So I haven't been able to put aside much time for the blog lately. Somehow all my conscious free time has been sucked into a black hole called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I knew it was supposed to be good on the PS2, but nothing, not even GTA Vice City, prepared me for how all-consuming the PC version of San Andreas would be. It just pulls in your entire life and leaves your brain with nothing but spinning maps of Los Santos and Red County and San Fierro, etc. I got my first GTA: SA girlfriend up to 100%, while my real-life girlfriend -- let's pretend for a moment that I have one -- is left wondering why doing drive-by's is such a great third-date activity.

That 30fps problem was caused by the Frame Limiter in-game setting. It sounds like a vsync setting, but it actually caps the game at 30fps. Which is fucking insane. It's 2006, and I have 256MB of vidram, and I absolutely refuse to play any game at 30fps. Uncapping that, and hardware-forcing 4xAA and 16xAF still gives me over 60fps, so suck on that, Rockstar North. I mean, they're Scots and my people by blood, but come on. I want to kick 'em all in the neck for that shit.

Anyway. A developer-release alpha of Firefox 2.0 was released last week. Don't install it unless you're serious about beta testing and know that this bears virtually no resemblance to what 2.0 final will be. Similarly, don't use Internet Explorer 7.0 beta for any reason at all. It's feature-incomplete as well, but also sports some major security vulnerabilities and can break explorer. I tried to use it once, and it broke my ISP's proprietary dialer software. The latest word is that it won't integrate itself into explorer and will function like any other stand-alone browser (like Firefox or Opera). Frankly, I think that's a load of bullshit. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I'm just going by Microsoft's track record.

I've dropped both Firefox and Opera on the POS box at work and started using Avant Browser. So far it's been flawless. Just to recap, it's an old IBM Pentium III rig with 64MB of RAM running Win98, and as far as I can tell, it's never been reformatted. Installing AB definitely helped extend it's useful life, and I mean that literally. Another couple weeks of forcing that fucking thing to run Firefox, or even IE, and I would have thrown it into the goddamn dumpster as hard as I could. You have no idea how close I've come to that, or how many times.

I don't really have any new DVD's or games on my radar at this point. Thinking about ordering System of a Down's Mezmerize and Hypnotize, but that's it. GTA III is just ten bucks, but I've got more than enough GTA than I can deal with as it is.

"Job satisfaction" is an oxymoron.

Wasting money I didn't have.
by AC - permalink

Don't you hate it when you deposit a paycheck, then a couple weeks later it shows up in your mailbox with "Insufficient Funds" stamped on it? What, that's never happened to you? Well, fuck you, because it happened to me this week, and it sucks. I got the money back in cash this morning, but somehow on my way from work to the bank I lost a hundred dollar bill, almost a fifth of that paycheck. So that was fun.

Took my mind off of it by buying a 12-pack of Steel Reserve and GTA: San Andreas. They should sell them bundled, because you need the beer as a distraction from the tedium of trying to get your rig to run San Andreas at anything like an acceptable framerate. I dunno what they did to the engine, but I can't get this thing to run over 30 fps no matter what I do. Quake IV runs faster. I mean, what the fuck, man?

Anyway. NIN's With Teeth is kicking ass. I'm going straight to it every time I launch musikCube. Then it's time to power up the bass amp to play along with American Idiot. The neighbors are probably wondering when I'll start improving.

I also dropped twenty bucks for Windowblinds 5 this week. I put it off forever, but I wanted those pretty shadows and alpha-blended transparencies, so I finally put up the cash. Now it looks like I'm running Vista, but I know I'm not because I don't have a pounding headache. Thanks, Stardock!

Too many ways to waste time.

I promise I won't bash Halo in this post.

by AC - permalink

For some reason I've had a strong urge for the last week or so to go back and play some Ghost Recon. I don't think I've run that game even once since installing my new vidcard. I have GR plus expansion packs Island Thunder and Desert Siege, and they're a great way to kill hours at a time. My rig can run them completely maxed out without even breaking a sweat. But other things keep coming up. First, I was trying desperately to like Halo. That wasn't working out so well, so I beat Call of Duty: United Offensive on a couple difficulty settings, which made me feel better. Went back to Halo and enjoyed the next couple of missions a little bit better, then got so pissed at it that I spent an entire morning playing Penguin Blocks on Club Pogo, just to spite that goddamn game. I hope it was watching. Either way, Penguin Blocks was more fun than Halo.

Then Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth and Green Day's American Idiot showed up in my mailbox several days early (via Amazon), so I immediately dumped them into GTA's mp3 folder and spent my next couple blocks of time with my computer driving around Vice City listening to them, looking for hidden packages and "unique" jumps. That was also more fun than Halo PC. And now Valve releases a relatively major Steam update that includes file-system optimization for Source Engine games. In other words, they may have finally fixed that goddamn stuttering. So I spent roughly half an hour downloading that and the next couple hours playing Half-Life 2.


And I think they might have done it this time. I started at the opening of Route Canal and played to roughly two-thirds of the way through Ravenholm. And it's definitely a lot smoother now. There's still a few moments of just-loaded-this-map stutter, but once it smooths out, it tends to stay that way. The sudden jolt at the start of a scripted sequence is now generally gone, unless three or more are initiated simultaneously. Between this and the other tweaks I've put in, HL2 and Counter-Strike: Source probably have the best performance-to-looks ratio of any game I've got right now.

So I haven't set aside any time for Ghost Recon yet. It takes so long to properly play any given mission that you really have to be dedicated and know that you're going to be doing this for at least an hour or two. It's sort of like a subtler, more realistic Far Cry in that way. Sure, you can blast through it, but you'll probably get your head blown off, and you'll definitely miss out on the fun of sneaking around and dropping grenades into people's laps. Then later you can fire up Quake III Arena, get two hundred frags in ten minutes, and go do something else. Something other than Halo, which is not as much fun.

Harry Potter movies still don't suck.

Digital video discs? What's next, hover cars?
by AC - permalink

I picked up my copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on blind faith this Tuesday, since I hadn't seen it yet, but it was a good buy. Go get it. I bought the slightly more expensive two-disc edition, but I haven't actually watched disc 2 yet. Anyway, it's not as atmospheric or original as the previous movie, Prisoner of Azkaban, but it stands apart from the previous movies as a solid action/adventure. It's fast-paced, but still easily works in a subplot or two. And it's nice to see Neville getting a bigger role.

Maybe it's just me, but all I want to see in the movie adaptation of Order of the Phoenix is the DA stuff, particularly when they storm the Ministry of Magic. I love it when incidental characters start kicking ass and taking up screen time. Which is why I'm hoping a good ten to fifteen minutes of Half Blood Prince is devoted to Quidditch.

Have I lost any casual 100hc readers yet? Every now and then I need a Harry Potter or Star Trek post to keep me grounded. By the way, the TNG episode "Relics" aired on G4 last night, and I loved every goddamned second of it. Who could have kept themselves alive in the transporter pattern buffer after eighty years? Captain Montgomery fucking Scott, that's who.

Halo is overrated.

Another console-to-PC port? Muy, muy idiota.

by AC - permalink

I finally got around to grabbing the last, battered copy of Call of Duty: United Offensive off the shelf from the Walmart up the street before it was packed off with the other overstock, and for no particular reason I went ahead and picked up Halo PC (also $20). So far I'm not particularly impressed. I beat United Offensive pretty much right away, not because it's so much shorter than Halo (which it is, of course), but because it's just so much faster-paced and more fun to play. Halo has been... underwhelming.

I'm not that far into it, and it's not bad. It's a decent PC shooter. Graphically it's not quite on par with, say, Quake III Arena, which, for the record, is eight years old. Gameplay reminds me of Quake IV, or a spacey, low-rent Half-Life. Art direction and design is original and looks cool, but the big outdoor environments feel artificially constricted. Nearly every metal surface seems to have a shader on it, which is good or bad, depending on how you look at it. There's supposedly a lot of bump-mapping at high detail levels, but I've yet to see any evidence of it. The game itself clearly has high production values and looks nice and polished. It's the presentation that sucks.

That's because everything about Halo PC feels like a console game, from the not-even-close default key bindings to the fact that the newly-printed retail copy I bought contained the original, unpatched version of the game. Virtually every legit review I read said the controls were translated perfectly, but really, there are a lot of issues: the x-axis mouse sensitivity drops when strafing; the FOV is severely limited, forcing my mouse speed up even higher; vehicle control is primitive and needlessly restrictive compared to newer shooters like Far Cry and Half-Life 2.

And it's not just the controls. I know this game is a notorious system hog, but seriously, I've got a Gig of RAM, a CPU rated at 3500 MHz, and a 256MB PCI-e vidcard with 16 pixel pipes, and the v-sync chugs down to 30 FPS when a fair amount of geometry has to be drawn, even with no special lighting or particle effects active. Granted, I've got everything turned up high, but at just 1280x960 and only 2xAA and 8xAF, I should get more from a three-year-old game. It's just a poor job of optimizing an existing game engine for a new platform, and that's especially disappointing coming from Gearbox, who handled the transition. These guys brought us Opposing Force and Blue Shift, expansion packs so good that they did the impossible and actually made the original Half-Life better.

I'm not saying Halo PC isn't playable. It still runs well enough -- if it runs at all. Microsoft's support database for Halo is huge. Not because they're being so thorough, but because the game has so many issues. Most of the fixes are so complicated that an average user probably couldn't even be talked through them. I personally couldn't even start the game out-of-the-box. I spent a few hours tracking down a fix before noticing the auto-update utility in Halo's program directory (no shortcut is created for it). The latest patch fixed the game for me, but if the support forums are any indication, not for a lot of other people.

So I don't know. I haven't actually decided if I'm going to keep this one or not (also $20 at Walmart: GTA San Andreas and Lego Star Wars). I'll play through another couple hours and see if it gets much better. I'm very aware that I've played virtually nothing but first-person PC shooters since about 1999, and the "problems" I'm having with the game can easily be considered "quirks" that I just need to get adjusted to. But for me, here's why Halo is disappointing: it was originally released for the Xbox in 2001 and was ported to the PC in 2003. I have a number of PC shooters that were released before or around the same time as Halo that are simply better games, at least in my opinion (Quake III, the original Half-Life series, Ghost Recon, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty). Halo has repeatedly been put into the pantheon of all-time great shooters by the gaming media, but I'm just not getting it.